With Bolton, Netanyahu and the Saudis driving his Iran policy, Trump has few sensible options.
Donald Trump threatened to wipe Iran off the map in a moment of yet-to-be-explained Twitter-rage Sunday night. “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!” he wrote. After a few days of apparent de-escalation between the US and Iran, Trump managed to once again fuel fears of an impending war. Yet, Trump’s tweet is likely more a reflection of his frustration over the failure of his pressure and coercion strategy than a carefully thought-through plan for war.
Trump is not the first U. S. official to threaten Iran with genocide. Back in 2008, then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton threatened to “obliterate” Iran. John McCain liked to sing songs about bombing Iran. George W. Bush never missed an opportunity to remind Iran that “all options are on the table.” In fact, this is not even Trump’s own first transgression into genocidal territory. Last July, he warned — in an all-caps tweet — that Iran “WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.”
But Trump’s Sunday night tweet came as a surprise because it had been preceded by a few days of apparent de-escalation from both sides. Trump had insisted that he “hopes” there won’t be a war with Iran. The Saudi Foreign Ministry issued a statement insisting it doesn’t want war but will be ready to defend itself against Iran if Tehran attacks it. A senior Iranian commander had issued a similar statement, insisting Iran wasn’t “looking for war.”
So, was Trump’s Twitter meltdown a reaction to an Iranian threat or was it, as some have suggested, a reaction to a Fox News story on the showdown with Iran? Based on Trump’s other tweets Sunday afternoon, much indicates that he was watching TV that day and reacted to a threat-inflated segment on Fox that presented Iranian warnings of retaliation as Iranian threats against the US.
But if, on the other hand, there is a logic behind Trump’s erratic oscillation between escalation and de-escalation, then the most plausible explanation is as follows.
This is what we know: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who recently took credit for convincing Trump to leave the Iran nuclear deal — the Saudi Crown Prince, John Bolton and the other proponents of war with Iran have convinced Trump that Barack Obama’s big mistake with Iran was that he opted for diplomacy too quickly, arguing that Iran would have caved and capitulated had he only continued with his sanctions for another six months.
