Have you heard the good word about the new U.S. strategy in Iran? The Wall Street Journal’s Shelby Holliday and Alexander Ward provided some details last week:
Trump has sent mixed signals on what might happen next. Trump has embraced an economic pressure campaign in recent weeks in the hopes of forcing Iran to the negotiating table. Tehran has shown no sign of backing down, however, and the U.S. and Iran continue to exchange fire as both nations assert control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Privately, Trump is having discussions with senior aides about whether to declare the Iran war over, U.S. officials said, noting Trump has said he favors the idea. Trump also tells aides that he believes sticking with economic pressure will eventually force the regime either to dismantle its nuclear program or collapse, they said.
“I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing,” he wrote on social media. “They are just playing out the inevitable. When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?”….
As Trump waits to see if his strategy will work, the U.S. military is maintaining a presence of 50,000 troops in the region in part to give the president flexibility on next steps. Current missions include intercepting Iranian missiles, providing cover for commercial ships in the strait and blockading Iranian ports and coastal areas. U.S. forces also stand ready to launch larger offensive attacks should Trump choose to escalate the war.
Now, if this feels a bit like déjà vu, that’s because we have been down this road multiple times — and yet Trump repeatedly fails to stick to this strategy for any appreciable amount of time. As I wrote back in May: “there are multiple reasons to be skeptical that ‘blockade and wait’ will work. The two most obvious problems have to do with Trump’s decision-making pathologies. As previously noted, Trump is lousy at playing a waiting game, and that’s what this strategy entails….. A second pathology is the administration’s wishcasting that Iran is just days away from collapsing.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s approach towards its galactically stupid trade war with Canada appears to be to amp up the insults and the trolling. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer added their own analyses last week, claiming that Carney had escalated the dispute for “political purposes”:
“It was manufactured,” said Lutnick, during a press conference in Washington on Thursday. “So there’s the sovereignty party trying to run, and they’re in the lead in Quebec and so this was Mark Carney manufacturing something that would try to keep them from winning, and then you have Alberta has an independence resolution.”….
Greer previously told CNBC on Monday that Carney’s claims that the U.S. was trying to curtail French protections was a “funny fake story.”
In that interview, Greer said Canada came back after a tentative deal was announced on Tuesday, wanting more than what the U.S. was prepared to give.
“I don’t know if it was political for them,” he said. “It certainly doesn’t make economic sense, but perhaps for political reasons, they have some byelections coming up.”
This appears to be part of a larger attempt to sow domestic division within Canada.
Now as I have noted previously in this space, the Trump administration’s foreign policymakers are so lazy that they keep self-sabotaging. And in the cases of both Iran and Canada, that self-sabotage is bearing some bitter fruit. ...
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