What was Trump's real tweet in Iran?

The next move was as predictable as Trump's golf in one of his resorts: he tried to change the subject . His first attempt on Friday was to tweet about his favorite controversy: National Football League players kneeling during the national anthem. His harsh request – "First time kneeling, for the game. Second time kneeling, off season / no pay!" – did not generate the titles that he was hoping so clearly. Maybe he should have suggested guillotining for a third offense.

Try, try again. Hence his Sunday night threat against Iran. Coming from any other president, this ultimatum of ALL CAPS, unannounced, would have led to suggestions that he would touch the bottle. But for Trump the teetotaler, it's just as usual. This time he has attracted the attention of the whole world. I was planning to write Monday on Trump and Russia. Instead, I write about Trump and Iran. Much more important from Trump's point of view, the discourse on cable news has gone from Russia to Iran. Mission accomplished

The problem for Trump is that the credibility of his threats diminishes. Of course, it scared the world in the summer of 2017 threatening to rain "fire and fury" on North Korea. But in the space of a year, he yielded to "Little Rocket Man" – legitimizing and lavishing his praise on the world stage while ending joint US-South Korean military exercises in exchange for vague promises denuclearization at an indefinite time. to come up. Even Trump acknowledges that North Korea does not keep its promises, even though it publicly claims that the negotiations are "very good". (Good to know that it's misleading but not delusional.)

The president loves to bluff, but, like many bullies, he's actually a coward who's afraid of the real conflict. When Trump chose John Bolton as National Security Advisor in March, Kaitlan Collins of CNN reported that he made the ultra-hawk promise that he "would not start a war." I heard something similar from my own sources. Bolton denied, but the feelings sound true, because Trump has turned out to be less bellicose than expected.

Trump started commercial wars but, fortunately, did not shoot wars. Aside from some raids by special operations forces and the continuation of existing conflicts against the Islamic State and the Taliban, Trump has used force twice – his ineffective cruise missile attacks against Syria in 2017 and 2018 to punish Bashar al-Assad for his use of chemical weapons. These are precisely the kinds of "incredibly small" strikes that President Barack Obama envisioned in 2013 – and that Trump criticized at the time.

It is, of course, a good thing that Trump does not turn out to be the warmonger many feared it would be. But there is a real danger in having the president revealed as an artist BS: His threats have less weight. Ironically, it is harder for him to reach his goals without resorting to force.

Trump could have, at one point, applied Richard Nixon's "madmen's theory" to international relations and made other states more effective acquiescence. that Nixon had done. But Trump's approach has failed with North Korea, and there is no reason to think that it will work with Iran. If the past is prologue, maybe next year, Trump will claim the merit of avoiding the war and greet Iranian President Hbadan Rouhani as a talented, funny, intelligent and strong leader who loves his people . But what scares me is that after so much bluster and bluster, for his threats to be credible, Trump may have to start executing them.

Washington Post