TRUMP'`S NIXON MOMENT / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL OP EDITORIAL

Trump’s Nixon Moment May Be Coming

Unnoticed, the language of nuclear intimidation is again a currency in international conflict.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

President Trump on the South Lawn of the White House March 11. Yuri Gripas - Pool Via Cnp/Yuri Gripas/Pool/Cnp/ZUMA Press

Circumstances were different but the last time an ideologically motivated aspiring hegemon threatened the world’s oil supply was 1973, when the Soviet Union was observed making preparations to intervene in the Arab-Israeli war.

The episode is also remembered as the last time a U.S. president resorted to an unvarnished nuclear threat, when Richard Nixon warned Moscow off by raising the U.S. military alert status to Defcon 3.

Thereupon nuclear bluster permanently vanished from the U.S. presidential vocabulary, experts in diplomacy tell us, for reasons that boil down to a loss of credibility once Moscow could match the U.S. in nuclear firepower. 

Oddly, though, this now-standard narrative hasn’t been updated for Donald Trump’s first term, much less his second.

Mr. Trump in 2017 famously threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” 

Importantly, Vladimir Putin then adopted the same motif when he invaded Ukraine in 2022: “Whoever tries to interfere . . . should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences that you have never experienced in your history.”

Worth noting, Mr. Putin’s words were taken seriously by the Biden administration, especially when coupled with other demonstrative signaling.

Now the code was set, plus or minus caps. 

Mr. Trump in 2018 tweeted for the benefit of today’s antagonist: “To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.”

On Tuesday, in a sequel perhaps underreported given the now-established verbal conventions, Mr. Trump warned against interrupting the flow of oil in the Strait of Hormuz: “If for any reason mines were placed, and they are not removed forthwith, the Military consequences to Iran will be at a level never seen before.”

OK, a nuclear attack isn’t in the immediate offing. 

Iran’s surviving leaders need an exit incentive too. 

And the U.S. military has other options for clearing the strait—though they aren’t great, especially given that Iran may secretly possess sophisticated Russian or Chinese antiship missiles. 

There’s also the alternative that seemed to appeal to Mr. Trump in his first term: The U.S. could choose to wait out a prolonged closure of the Persian Gulf, to which its economy would adapt more easily than most of the world’s.

But the ride is getting bumpier. 

This will be the fourth column in a row arguing that his Iran war, in fact, is Mr. Trump at his Trumpiest. 

For 40 years, starting as an overconfident young New York property deal maker, he’s been telling anyone who would listen how U.S. presidents were getting it wrong, and he didn’t mean taxes and immigration.

Now he’s in full Nixon mode—his model of a president who, despite the ankle-biting press of Watergate, wielded his commander-in-chief powers boldly even as his political base eroded from under him. 

Mr. Trump’s personalist approach has him particularly enamored of the U.S. military’s ability to modify the incentives of foreign counterparties with precision munitions.

He can be wrong about much but Mr. Trump is right about two things. 

One, given changes in technology, is the growing intolerability of regimes like Iran’s or North Korea’s, with elites who stay in power by cultivating incurable grievances against global society.

He’s partly right about what motivates such leaders. 

Iran’s are greedy, but they’re also a millenarian sect whose tenuous legitimacy rests on idealizing martyrdom. 

Russia is said by U.S. military sources to be aiding Iran’s strikes on U.S. targets. 

This starts to matter if the U.S. Navy will be sailing into the straits in a tussle over who controls the world’s vital oil passage.

Pete Hegseth on Friday expressed breezy confidence that the U.S. military has a Hormuz solution. 

If not troops on the ground, what is it? 

A column here last week reminded readers that the U.S. faced a similar dilemma in 1945: how to convince a battered and irretrievably weakened Japan that the war was over.

Perhaps this is why China’s government has been at pains to signal its desire for this month’s Trump summit in Beijing to go ahead, even as China professes uncertainty about what Mr. Trump will be seeking. 

Other interceders are also working to put a cap on the war. 

All concerned have good reason. 

The U.S., even under a less flamboyant president, would be prepared to risk a great deal to defend its prestige. 

Unless Iran gives Mr. Trump the “win” he needs to end the violence, the American president’s path is likely to be one of escalation.

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.