When the President, in his first public remarks about the military campaign, appeared at the White House on Monday, he didn’t say a word about regime change, aspirational or otherwise, or even nod to the brave protesters whom he had so recently urged to rise up against their leaders. He also did not discuss the consequences—from oil-price spikes to possible terrorist reprisals in the U.S.—that Americans can expect as the war unfolds. Nor did he so much as mention America’s partner in the war, Israel, or the conflict’s rapid spread—Iran has already launched retaliatory strikes on Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, Israel, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, which have made this the widest-ranging war in the Middle East in decades.
But you wouldn’t have known that from Trump’s few sentences of bluster. He offered no evidence beyond bald assertion that Iran posed an “intolerable threat” to the region and the American people. Nor did he explain why he had initiated this war without permission from Congress or a more robust effort to seek the approval of the public, who, according to polls since the strikes began, are not in favor of Trump’s action. Perhaps most remarkably, as a politician who has spent years promising his followers “no new wars” and an end to the folly of endless U.S. military engagement in the quagmire of the Middle East, he did not even bother to address his epic flip-flop from war-hater to warmonger.
He did, however, promise to remain intensely focussed on defeating Iran for however long it takes, even if that turned out to be “far longer” than four to five weeks, which is how long he said he expected the war to last. “I don’t get bored,” he insisted. “There’s nothing boring about this.” Forty-six seconds later, he began waxing about the “very, very beautiful” new White House ballroom he’s building, which he thinks will be “the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.”
If there has ever been a more politically tone-deaf pivot from an American President, I can’t think of one. In fact, until Trump came along, I am pretty sure there has never been a White House speech that veered from sombre matters of war and peace to our Commander-in-Chief’s brilliant interior-design decisions. Six U.S. service members have so far died in this war, and Trump has acknowledged that there will “likely” be more. But what he really seems to care about is the color of the White House drapes.
There is a certain method to this madness, of course. As Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, observed to me on Monday, Trump, by presenting a “Chinese menu of possible objectives,” spanning “everything from total regime change to getting rid of the nuclear program and all variations in between,” is leaving open the possibility to claim victory no matter what happens. In the end, “it will be what Trump says in retrospect was the objective.”
The question of why Trump did this might be almost as hard to answer as what he hopes to achieve. During his first term, Trump repeatedly confronted the possibility of large-scale action against Iran, but pulled back, siding with military advisers who counselled caution, such as his first-term Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, over his more hawkish aides, including the national-security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who were longtime advocates of striking Iran. “His risk tolerance was lower then,” one of Trump’s senior national-security officials from his first term recalled. “More of his notion was to get out of things rather than to get into them.”
