Donald Trump enjoys waging war and doesn’t take it very seriously. Hours before his primetime speech at 9pm last night, for which CBS interrupted its Survivor television show, the President told a lunch that later he would “basically tell everyone how great I am”. So it proved. We learnt little about how this is all going to end. He flipped between a promise that the war would be over soon and finished with a threat to send Iran back to the “Stone Ages – where they belong”.
Trump has spent the war flinging out contradictory motivations for what he described as his “little journey to Iran”. The Speaker Mike Johnson says that this is not a war – a description the president constantly overrules. Marco Rubio even made a piece-to-camera video yesterday in an attempt to impose some order on the wayward communications that have been emanating from the White House over the past four weeks.
In his address, Trump essentially said that there won’t be any bad consequences from the war but if there are, which there won’t be, then his voters will be fine because the US produces so much oil and gas – and those unreliable allies, who are stupidly annoyed about the war but should’ve helped from the start, can send their own aircraft carriers, which are in fact useless, to open the Strait of Hormuz, which he doesn’t actually care about, anyway.
With the midterms beckoning, this is all bad politics: he is pumping up gas prices when he promised to deal with the cost of living. He is threatening a core plank of the stock market boom, the AI revolution, which is dependent on cheap energy. He has taken the US into yet another war in the Middle East when he promised to keep his use of force short and sharp. He could have been boasting about how for first time since the Apollo missions Nasa had launched a manned rocket to the moon. Here was something that symbolised the Golden Age he has long promised, but instead he spent an evening trying to justify a war he struggles to muster much interest in.
We simply do not know what Trump intends to do. Recent reports suggest he might deploy troops inside Iran. Trump has either ordered special forces, marines and paratroopers to the Persian Gulf in order to merely intimidate the regime into agreeing a fresh deal. Or he actually plans to send them in to seize Iran’s nuclear material, which the Washington Post reports could take weeks and require the US military to build their own airstrip under heavy fire.
He did not mention ground troops in his speech. But he did threaten to destroy Iran’s oil and electric generation facilities. He is happily stuck between winning a war he isn’t sure how to win and being able to claim victory before his coalition unravels even further. As he said hours before his speech: “I’d prefer just to take the oil… but people in [America] sort of say ‘just win, you’re winning so big, just win, come home’”.
[Further reading: After the Iran war, the electrostate will rise]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment