The Improvisational Trump
His greatest asset, his flexibility, may prove his undoing if he lets Iran off the hook.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
With the press starting to call Donald Trump a “war president,” a bell went off for me.
I used the phrase in a forgotten 2019 column titled “Why Trump Is Winning on Iran.”
The column came after the first-term President Trump, amid much recrimination from the region, declined Saudi pleas to respond militarily to an Iranian drone strike on a Saudi oil facility.
Mr. Trump’s “peculiar” politics, I said, meant he couldn’t count on the rally-round effect that “sometimes makes war an attractive domestic political proposition.”
Check.
Being a “war president” also wouldn’t suit his “episodic and wandering leadership style.”
Check.
I’m struck by what else I said back then.
The Saudis & Co. were rich enough to defend themselves against Iranian drone and missile attacks without the U.S. having to be at their beck and call.
The U.S. Navy doesn’t exist only to keep oil lanes open for China.
It also exists to close them (or not care if they are closed) when it suits U.S. interests.
At the time, Mr. Trump’s nonresponse didn’t strike me as an American retreat.
Instead he was handing off regional duties to regional allies while the U.S. pursued bigger game.
On paper, he might now be reacting as any president would, seeing the locals as not up to the job, seeing an opportunity to guarantee that a drone-, missile- and nuclear-armed rogue state won’t edge out the U.S. Navy as controller of the world’s vital energy choke point.
The Trump outcome depends now on securing this U.S. strategic interest.
If he gives the impression of being deterred by Iran’s threatened closure of the Strait of Hormuz, it will be a geopolitical earthquake he didn’t bargain for.
Among other results, China might reconsider its relatively hands-off attitude toward the U.S.-dominated Persian Gulf.
But Mr. Trump is running far ahead of his political support.
It wasn’t long ago Democrats were trying to stir up U.S. military personnel to disobey his orders.
If we learned anything from Joe Biden, a president fighting to keep his head above water cognitively is a president who has a hard time keeping his administration adhering to his priorities.
The concern with the 79-year-old Mr. Trump, of course, has usually been the opposite: his going overboard in creating chaos to keep his opponents off balance and allow himself to dominate the battleground he most seems to care about, the media (textbook example: after losing the 2020 presidential race).
On the 11th day of this war, Mr. Trump is redefining a history-laden term from the U.S military past, “unconditional surrender.”
He will be unconditioned in what he chooses to interpret as Iranian surrender.
If Mr. Trump is ready to call it quits, he needs only an unreconstructed Iranian regime to call it quits too.
What perhaps started when Mr. Trump ad libbed “help is on the way” to Iranian protesters could come down to an aerial hunt for Mojtaba Khamenei, the new tin-pot, with the message “Make a deal now before a bomb finds you.”
Deterrence—it’s a core Trump principle, but only one aspect of his glaringly tit-for-tat personal political strategy, which also, glaringly, he will turn off the moment you say something nice about him or sue for peace.
Events may yet pan out but Mr. Trump is becoming captive to decisions made elsewhere.
The Iranian regime is apparently choosing whether to bet big on its ability to hold the world’s oil consumers hostage and dare Mr. Trump to do something about it.
Then it becomes a different ballgame.
Inevitably 1973 comes to mind, when a president reached deep into his commander-in-chief bag even as his political approval rating plummeted into the 20s.
Yet Richard Nixon, unlike Mr. Trump, also inspired broad respect as a geopolitician, even among his enemies.
Nixon, with the dregs of his Watergate-damaged authority, put the U.S. military on global nuclear alert to stop the Soviets from involving themselves in that year’s Mideast war and global energy panic.
Those who think Mr. Trump didn’t have anything larger in mind when he struck Iran are likely wrong—U.S. presidents usually have one eye on their superpower rival.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall when Mr. Trump meets later this month with Xi Jinping, who possibly will get a clearer explanation of what Mr. Trump is up to than the American people have gotten.
Which brings us to the strangest words of the war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying on day four that the U.S. would “unleash Chiang” on the Iranians.
Was he channeling Roy Cohn, the Trump mentor-fixer and veteran of the GOP’s “who lost China” wars of the late 1940s and early ’50s?
Was he sending a message to Beijing?
Or was it simply an odd leakage from the ironies of Republican history, a GOP that during Nixon’s generation went from wanting to overthrow communist China to cozying up with it?
Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. He writes the twice-weekly “Business World” column that appears on the paper's op-ed page on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
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