USA TODAY International Edition
Trump’s wobbly signals on Iran
Impulsive, indecisive — and correct
I don’t know why President Donald Trump backed out of a strike on Iran at the last minute, but we should be glad that he did.
As usual, however, even when this administration manages to do something right, it does so in the most damaging way possible. While we have for now averted another military conflict in the Middle East, the United States looks weak, muddled and indecisive. The president himself looks as if he’s been cowed by both the Iranians and the Russians.
The genesis of both the attack and the decision to countermand it is a mystery, maybe even to Trump himself. The day after he canceled the strike, the president took to Twitter to explain that his primary concern was proportionality. “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate (Thursday) night on 3 different sights (sic),” the president said. (He probably meant sites and locked and loaded, but it’s Twitter.)
Trump claims he then asked how many people would die in the strike, and “a general” told him U.S. actions might kill 150 Iranians. According to the president, this was too high a price for the destruction of an unmanned drone.
This is a reasonable position. Proportionality is important, and Trump seems to have had similar concerns when he tried to tailor his two attacks on Syria carefully — so carefully that the eventual strikes on Bashar Assad’s forces did very little damage at all. Nonetheless, if the U.S. president is concerned about the proportionality of military action, it’s good news.
Unfortunately, it seems more likely that Trump was using proportionality as a rationalization for losing his nerve, and in particular as a fig leaf to cover his unwillingness to antagonize leaders who scare him. If Trump really cared about proportionality, he would have scotched the whole business when he was briefed on the plan. Even the most cursory operational brief would have included casualty estimates; the president would have known of such risks hours earlier when he gave the order to proceed, not after the operation began.
Pause and deep breath
We know that Russian President Vladimir Putin weighed in against the attacks earlier on Thursday. There is no evidence, as yet, of formal or informal consultation between the White House and the Kremlin, but The Associated Press reported Putin’s comments on Russian television 1 p.m. ET. Trump called off the strike in the early evening.
A recap of this mess shows why the United States, and the world, is for now better off with a pause and a deep breath. The president may be right that the Iran deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) was poorly negotiated and in general a bad idea. I agree with that evaluation and said so at the time. Nevertheless, the manner in which Trump ditched the JCPOA almost ensured that Iran would feel free to take aggressive action while the other participants in the pact, including our own allies, along with Russia and China, would say nothing.
The Iranians were cagey but predictable in their move to shoot down a drone in international waters, causing no deaths but giving the United States a black eye. This was a calibrated attack guaranteed to flummox Trump and a national security team that is riven by political infighting and policy incoherence, has not had a confirmed Defense secretary for six months, and was transitioning from one acting secretary to another as the Iran drama played out.
Bowing to growls, bared teeth
A marginally competent administration would have kept its own counsel instead of flying off the handle and putting itself in a box. A better administration, however, would not have blundered into this situation at all.
The lesson for the Iranians and everyone else is that the president of the United States is impulsive and indecisive, that the U.S. national security establishment is a disorganized mess, and that when the Iranians bare their teeth and the the Russians growl quietly, we call our planes back.
In the classic film “The Untouchables,” Sean Connery’s veteran cop Jim Malone warns the young and inexperienced Eliot Ness that there is no such thing as a halfway measure with brutal gangsters. “If you open the ball on these people, Mr. Ness, you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they won't give up the fight until one of you is dead.”
We should be grateful that the president did not open the ball on the thugs in Iran. More conflicts with Tehran — and Pyongyang and Moscow — lie ahead, and we are storing up trouble for the future. But Trump is not the person to lead us into these confrontations. If the president realized at the last minute that he did not have the stomach for the risks he was taking, we should be glad for it and support his reconsideration, no matter what caused it.
Tom Nichols is a national security professor at the Naval War College, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and author of “The Death of Expertise.” The views expressed here are solely his own.