How Trump’s 'delusional faith in himself' drove his foreign policy blunder: journalist

The reason the first few days of President Donald Trump‘s war against Iran were “a bravura display of American power” is that for decades the United States has studied going to war against Iran. Those same studies predicted the current state of affairs that Trump now faces there.

So says The Atlantic‘s Franklin Foer, who writes, “almost no other foreign-policy question has been studied harder over the past 20 years or so than the likely effect of U.S. military strikes on Iran.”

Those studies also pointed out the risk: “spiking oil prices, the spread of violence throughout the Middle East, civilian casualties of the sort now evidenced by an apparent U.S. missile strike near an Iranian elementary school.”

Past presidents “weren’t just dodging a hard choice; they were deterred by all of the obvious reasons a conflict could perilously spiral. Nobody should be shocked that the expected is now coming to pass.”

Why did Trump decide to attack Iran?

“In the least charitable—and probably accurate—view, President Trump went to war with Iran out of a delusional faith in himself,” writes Foer. “He believed that the worst-case scenarios that have deterred past presidents from attacking Iran wouldn’t come true for him, because he is Donald Trump.”

Asking, “How does this end?” Foer notes, “The lesson that the Trump administration seemed to learn from the failed planning for postwar Iraq is that planning isn’t worth the effort at all. When asked what comes next, Trump can manage only several contradictory answers, sometimes in the course of a single sentence.”

Foer points to Trump’s “trumpeting” of “unachievable objectives—unconditional surrender, regime change—as his war aims.”

“Trump has given his enemies the opportunity to claim survival as victory. He’s left himself with no evident end point to what he recently called a ‘short-term excursion.'”

But, concludes Foer, “Trump ignored the obvious and went to war. Now the obvious is seeking its revenge.”

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