Donald Trump is trying to wriggle out of his self imposed Strait-jacket. After a renewed round of bombing Iran and bluster about seizing Kharg Island, he has now announced that is all over, including a planned attack tonight: “Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening.”
Is it back to the future again? Or are hostilities really about to cease? Any cessation will incense the war hawks in Washington who helped propel Trump into this misbegotten conflict in the first place. If only Trump would prosecute the war to a finish, they argue, then Iran would collapse and the Middle East transform itself into a mecca of democracy and freedom and peace.
The mounting complaints of the oil majors, however, have presumably helped dispel this mirage, at least for Trump. He knows that inflation has ticked up to 4.2 percent, that the strategic oil reserve will soon be tapped out and that Republican electoral fortunes are sagging. States like Ohio and North Carolina are being rated as toss-ups and the last thing that Trump wants to endure post-2026 is a fresh round of impeachment trials.
Instead, he wants, like Ronald Reagan, to go down in the history books as a great foreign policy president – the liberator of Venezuela and Cuba. He’ll claim victory in Iran, whether it is one or not. And with a NATO summit scheduled for early July in Ankara, Turkey, he can pose as the great peacemaker.
The key to the Nobel Prize he craves so ardently rests in Ukraine, where even minimal support for President Volodymyr Zelensky would have a salubrious effect, helping to prompt an embattled Vladimir Putin to confront the reality that even Trump has lost confidence in him.
Will Trump usher in a new era of foreign policy realism? Whether Trump will actually terminate the battle in Iran remains an open question. He has made similar declarations before. But with his 80th birthday party looming on Sunday, he might want to give himself a present – and the only fight he really seems intent on these days is the upcoming UFC one on Sunday at the White House.
Comments