Donald Trump has spent his career railing against elite presidents who did not have the courage to act the way he claims he does.
But judging by Trump’s announcement today that he would extend the deadline for his strikes within Iran by two weeks, one has to wonder what the president’s words mean anymore. He makes big threats, but quickly becomes the boy who cries wolf and doesn’t follow through. While nobody wanted to see him end a “civilization,” his latest retreat is just more evidence that his big threats mean little and will now carry political consequences.
Trump’s decision to back out – commonly referred to as “TACO” or “Trump Always Chickens Out” – this time demonstrates a measure of strategic weakness that far outmeasures any previous humiliation that Trump used to criticize from past presidents.
And it means that no world leader ever needs to take Trump’s threats seriously.
Trump knows what happens when presidents make empty threats because he criticized it. In 2013, Trump lambasted Barack Obama for walking back from his self-imposed “red line” that if then-Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad would use chemical weapons, the United States would respond.
“The only reason President Obama wants to attack Syria is to save face over his very dumb RED LINE statement. Do NOT attack Syria, fix U.S.A.” Trump said at the time.
But if Obama refused to impose his artificial red line, Trump did his best matador impression and waved waved gigantic red banner in front of the bull that is Iran. He did so over the weekend when he declared Tuesday “Power Plant Day” and “Bridge Day” for U.S. armed forces unless Iran would “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy b*****ds,” lest they be “living in Hell.”
Trump escalated his threats when he said “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” There is no other way to describe what Trump threatened: war crimes and genocide. Trump brought the world to the brink of disaster and with Congress out of town, had nobody to rein him in, although the Republican-controlled House and Senate refused to do so.
Then, he backed off.
Maybe Trump heard pleas from Pakistan’s prime minister to extend the deadline for two weeks. Perhaps he got the yips about the idea of engaging in a scorched-earth campaign against another country that would inevitably cost thousands of American lives, thereby turning him into another cog in the war machine against which he railed.
Maybe a phone call from House Speaker Mike Johnson said such a move would cost him the majority in the House and a text from Senate Majority Leader John Thune warned the Senate would go to the Democrats.
Whatever the rationale, Trump backed off the ledge.
But the world cannot breathe easily after this. Opening the option to attack civilian infrastructure cannot be undone. Now, the world will live in constant fear that Trump will carry through with his threats.
This opens the door for any malign actor to escalate. This is not a hypothetical: just months after Obama backed off his red line, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea. Putin, to say nothing of China’s Xi Jinping will look at Trump as weak to find license to do whatever they want, to borrow a Trumpism.
The opposite is also true: Now, every country will see Trump as the Sword of Damocles swinging its way across the globe. Again, this does not require imagination: Canada took Trump’s repeated threats to annex it seriously and adopted a more confrontational posture. The rest of the world have to adjust accordingly to a world where the United States can be hostile to international values.
In addition, Trump seems to have forgotten an adage from his first Defense Secretary James Mattis: The enemy gets a vote. Even if Trump backed down, Iran cannot be seen as taking these threats lying down. It will respond in kind either toward Arab allies of the United States or Israel. Iran will do so to make such a threat as painful as possible and warn the U.S. or other nations not to do so again.
So while, yes, Trump ultimately did not unleash the fury and cause incalculable loss of life, he has forever shifted how the United States relates to the rest of the world and initiated a new phase of the Iran war.
A common refrain when Trump ran for president in 2016 was to take him seriously, not literally. However, today the world can’t afford to decipher when he is bluffing – which he is most of the time.
