What Did You Expect?

From The Atlantic, an article discussing why the outcome in Iran was almost inevitable with Donald Trump in charge.

"To those at home and abroad whose necks are snapping and whose heads are spinning, I have to ask an obvious but uncomfortable question: What did you expect?

This debacle is, at the end of the day, classic Donald Trump.

In multiple ways, we are seeing Trump’s essential characteristics playing out on a national-security matter of the highest stakes.

First, he is utterly assured that he can do anything, that he can will any reality into being, despite all evidence and expertise to the contrary. Seduced by the overnight success of the removal of President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, he convinced himself that he could bring about the rapid collapse of the Iranian regime. His own intelligence experts and Cabinet officials counseled otherwise. Yet he pressed ahead.

Second, he deepened his self-deception through his childish belief in the invincibility of U.S. military power. A testosterone-infused operation name—Epic Fury—and a daily video diet of buildings going boom reinforced his delusion. The members of the United States military are fearsome and highly professional, and they carried out their assigned tasks with precision and effectiveness, degrading various Iranian capabilities. But Trump was incapable of aligning those operations with achievable strategic objectives. His mind doesn’t work that way.

Third, when the going got tough, Trump started to flail. One day he threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization, the next (and the next and the next) he promised that a deal was just around the corner. Never a detail man (for policy, anyway; he goes deep on architectural trimmings), he confessed to being bored with the war. And as when his business ventures veered toward bankruptcy, with better off-ramps in the rearview mirror, he grasped for any way out, damn the costs to U.S. credibility, alliances, and influence.

Fourth, he was susceptible to flattery, especially from strongmen. Remember his fruitless exchange of love letters with Kim Jong Un? They produced no breakthrough in nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. Somehow, without even an 80th-birthday card from Iran, Trump flattered himself into believing that he was the leader who could recognize, and cultivate, a new spirit of cooperation coming from the “very rational” and “not radicalized” leaders now in charge in Tehran.

Fifth, as always, Trump is out for Trump. He stumbled by entering a war that Americans broadly opposed, and their opposition increased as they felt it in their pocketbooks at the pump and the grocery store. But it soon became clear, with a midterm-election disaster looming, that Trump would pull the plug. Again, ending the war was necessary; giving away the store while doing so was panic-induced self-preservation.

Finally, Trump swaggered into the war, and will skulk out of it, with total confidence in the slavish support of his political base. His faith will probably be justified. Remember their discovery of the absolutely essential national-security imperative that we grab Greenland? (Wait for it: Cuba is next.) The hurrahs for Trump the conqueror will soon transform into oohs and aahs toasting Donald the diplomat. A few lonely, honest critics of the JCPOA—a flawed but workable deal that verifiably set back Iran’s nuclear program—will resist the demand to tie themselves into pretzels, and instead acknowledge that Trump’s deal makes the JCPOA look ironclad."