Against a background of continued intense bombardment of Iran and Lebanon by the US and Israel and an escalating world energy crisis, the last week has seen a flurry of mixed messages about US war intentions. No one can intuit the plans of US president Donald Trump. He may well have none.
Threats to obliterate Iran’s oil plants in the face of its entirely predictable willingness to choke off the Strait of Hormuz brought immediate pleas from Trump’s Gulf allies not to provoke the retaliation against them that Tehran promised. The markets wobbled.
So Trump reversed course. One moment, he was threatening “an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before”. Then, less than two days later, he declared the US and Iran had been having “very good and productive conversations”.
Using the excuse that an unnamed, “key” Iranian leader, probably conservative parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, was now engaged in fruitful “negotiations”, was keen to accept US terms, and that a deal was close, Trump twice extended his deadline on bombing its power plants. In truth, it appears clear that contacts via Pakistan have resulted not in negotiations but simply an exchange of papers reflecting each side’s maximalist positions, containing impossible concessions for the other side.
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Tellingly, the question of who should run Iran does not feature on the Trump agenda. A preoccupation with oil and the strait, not even issues until the US began its war, now takes precedence over regime change, an apparent Israeli goal.
When Trump purported to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine his playbook was simple – he drew up a list of Russian-inspired concessions that Kyiv would have to make and berated the latter when it balked at what it saw as complete surrender.
This week the US president was at it again. The likelihood is he is as close now to a settlement as he earlier claimed to be in the Ukraine “talks”, and is also contemplating, reports suggest, a declaration of victory and a pull-out of US forces.
He desperately wants to get out of the mess he created, and just in case anyone should think he is having second thoughts about his “excursion”, thousands of paratroopers and marines are on their way to the Gulf and there remains a real prospect of “boots on the ground”. The speculation is that the target would likely be a couple of islands key to control of the strait.
Is the confusion a worked-out strategy, a brilliant tactic to wrongfoot an already-defeated enemy, or a manifestation of uncertainty and drift, as his allies believe? The evidence points to the latter. There is no Plan B and Iran did not, as Trump expected, simply throw in the towel. De-escalation will now not be achieved by demands for unconditional surrender.
