Rather than self-defence, the Soleimani killing seems like the dreadful result of several intersecting dynamics. There's the influence of rapture-mad Iran hawks like Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence. Defence officials who might have stood up to Trump have all left the administration. According to Peter Bergen's book Trump and His Generals, James Mattis, Trump's former secretary of defence, instructed his subordinates not to provide the president with options for a military showdown with Iran. But with Mattis gone, military officials, The Times reported, presented Trump with the possibility of killing Soleimani as the "most extreme" option on a menu of choices, and were "flabbergasted" when he picked it.
Trump likely had mixed motives. He was reportedly upset over TV images of militia supporters storming the US Embassy in Iraq. According to The Post, he also was frustrated by "negative coverage" of his decision last year to order and then call off strikes on Iran.
Beyond that, Trump, now impeached and facing trial in the Senate, has laid out his rationale over years of tweets. The president is a master of projection, and his accusations against others are a decent guide to how he himself will behave. He told us, over and over again, that he believed Barack Obama would start a war with Iran to "save face" and because his "poll numbers are in a tailspin" and he needed to "get reelected." To Trump, a wag-the-dog war with Iran evidently seemed like a natural move for a president in trouble.
It's hard to see how this ends without disaster. Defenders of Trump's move have suggested that he might have reestablished deterrence against Iran, frightening its leadership into restraint. But Vali Nasr, a Middle East scholar at Johns Hopkins University and former senior adviser to Obama's State Department, tells me that Iran likely believes that it has to reestablish deterrence against the United States.
"If they don't do anything, or if they don't do enough, then Trump will get comfortable with this kind of behaviour, and that worries them," said Nasr. To Iranians, after all, America is the aggressor, scrapping a nuclear agreement that they were abiding by and imposing a punishing "maximum pressure" sanctions campaign. Just like militarists in the United States, they're likely to assume that weakness invites attacks. "I don't think they want to provoke war, but they do want to send a signal that they're prepared for it," said Nasr.
Even if Iran were to somehow decide not to strike back at the United States, it's still ramping up its nuclear program, and Trump has obliterated the possibility of a return to negotiations. "His maximum pressure policy has failed," Nasr said of Trump. "He has only produced a more dangerous Iran."
Meanwhile, Isis benefits from the breach between Iraq and America. "Isis suicide and vehicle bombings have nearly stopped entirely," said Brett McGurk, who until 2018 was special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting ISIS. "Only a few years ago, there were 50 per month, killing scores of Iraqis. That's because of what we have done and continue to do. These networks will regenerate rapidly if we are forced to leave, and they will again turn their attention on the West."
Unlike with North Korea, it's difficult to imagine any photo op or exchange of love letters defusing the crisis the president has created. Most of this country has never accepted Trump, but over the past three years, many have gotten used to him, lulled into uneasy complacency by an establishment that has too often failed to treat him as a walking national emergency. Now the nightmare phase of the Trump presidency is here. The biggest surprise is that it took so long.
Written by: Michelle Goldberg
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES
