\n<\/p>\n
Alone in the dead of night, a man can fall into bleak thoughts. In the wee, small hours of the morning, he might think about lost loves, mull over great regrets, or wrestle with the inevitability of his own mortality. But Donald Trump, awake and restless in the Florida darkness, apparently consoles himself by imagining a war of liberation in a Middle Eastern nation of 92 million people.<\/p>\n
At 2:58 a.m. EST (according to the time stamp on his Truth Social post), the president of the United States wrote: \u201cIf Iran shots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.\u201d And then, of course: \u201cThank you for your attention to this matter!\u201d<\/p>\n
A man pushing 80, fighting sleeplessness as older people sometimes do, should be expected now and then to send some weird messages on his Jitterbug. He is also entitled to make some typos, as we all do. But this particular senior citizen is the leader of the most powerful country in the world, and he\u2019s implying he\u2019ll use force against a country he has attacked once already. At the least, Americans might expect that when threatening military action, the commander in chief would give his post a quick proofread. (True to sycophantic form, the official White House account transcribed Trump\u2019s warning while also repeating the typo\u2014as if his mistake was intentional.)<\/p>\n
For an America Firster, Trump seems to have quite a global military agenda: In the first year of his second term, he has used force in South America, Africa, and the Middle East. Congress used to debate authorizing such things, but with the GOP House and Senate now reduced to glorified White House staff offices, Trump need not trifle with such annoyances. Only in Europe and the Pacific does he seem shy about flexing American muscle; after all, those places have genuinely tough customers\u2014China and Russia\u2014that scare him. Fishing boats in the Caribbean and small villages in Nigeria are easier pickings. Now, however, he\u2019s threatening something a lot bigger than lobbing a few cruise missiles.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s going on here? The answer is probably: Not much<\/em>. Trump might be considering another showy round of B-2 strikes, which wouldn\u2019t be much help to people demonstrating in the streets of Tehran. Or he might have just outed some sort of intelligence operation in Iran. Or maybe he just couldn\u2019t sleep. Trump claims \u201cwe\u201d are locked and loaded, but America is not ready for a war of national liberation in Iran.<\/p>\n One possibility is that Trump is mulling over his meeting last Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After that meeting, Trump said Iran \u201cmay be behaving badly\u201d and warned that if \u201cit\u201d is confirmed\u2014presumably, he means evidence that Iran is rebuilding its nuclear program\u2014the \u201cconsequences will be very powerful, maybe more powerful than last time.\u201d Although Netanyahu recently insisted that political transformation in Iran must \u201ccome from within\u201d and is \u201cup to the Iranian people,\u201d he has in the past pushed for regime change in Tehran. Perhaps he was selling Trump on being remembered as a great liberator, a world-historical role that would be catnip to a narcissist like the president.<\/p>\n One painful irony here is that Iran needs regime change, and nothing would be better for that nation than its people driving the mullahs from power. Another is that the United States used to support the Iranians with efforts such as the Voice of America Persian service, a low-cost program that brought real news and information to them. But Trump, along with his pick to run VOA, Kari Lake, shut down VOA\u2019s Persian broadcasts last March, an idiotic decision that led to the panicky rehiring of Persian speakers just before the U.S. strikes on Iran last June. (Mass firings since then have effectively shut down VOA.)<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s nocturnal ravings are dangerous. The world may be more or less accustomed to Trump\u2019s bizarre threats, but it is still a big deal when the president of the United States menaces another nation. Intelligence analysts, friend and enemy alike, do not have the luxury to presume that the American commander in chief is just having a bad night. They will ask, as they should, whether something is happening behind the scenes, and whether Trump has blurted out something that might be classified.<\/p>\n The United States and Israel are unlikely to be planning some misbegotten war of liberation in Iran, even if Netanyahu and Trump make ruling out such an adventure impossible. Another danger, however, is that ordinary Iranian citizens might see the president\u2019s message and take it seriously. People protesting for their freedom in various parts of the world, especially during the Cold War, have made the deadly mistake of believing that the American cavalry was just about to come over the top of the hill and save them\u2014in Budapest and Prague, and later in Georgia and Ukraine\u2014and faith in Trump\u2019s faithless promises could lead to serious miscalculations by desperate people.<\/p>\n One of the most powerful statements about the dangers of such false promises and the risks of military intervention came not so long ago from an American leader who resolutely objected to both feckless red lines and the use of force abroad: the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. On October 23, 2019, Trump announced a cease-fire in Syria that he argued averted the need for more comprehensive American military involvement in the region. \u201cWe\u2019ve saved a lot of lives,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n And then he took a potshot at his predecessor, Barack Obama, for making a promise that America, in Trump\u2019s view, could never have kept.<\/p>\n Most importantly, we have avoided another costly military intervention that could\u2019ve led to disastrous, far-reaching consequences. Many thousands of people could\u2019ve been killed. The last administration said, \u201cAssad must go.\u201d They could\u2019ve easily produced that outcome, but they didn\u2019t. In fact, they drew a very powerful red line in the sand\u2014you all remember, the red line in the sand\u2014when children were gassed and killed, but then did not honor their commitment as other children died in the same horrible manner.<\/p>\n Gassing children in Syria? A poorly drawn red line that did not merit U.S. action and could lead only to a messy war. Killing peaceful protesters in Tehran? \u201cLocked and loaded!\u201d (The president had few such compunctions in 2020 about hurting peaceful protesters in America<\/em>, whom he wanted to shoot in the legs.)<\/p>\n A lot of places on this planet\u2014hellscapes where people are warring, starving, and living under terrifying repression\u2014might benefit from forceful intervention. Few of them will get it, because Americans know that military action, especially to overthrow a regime, is a risky business, and certainly not something to ruminate about in the middle of the night.<\/p>\n In a better time, the leaders of Trump\u2019s own party would do their constitutional duty and constrain the president from speaking\u2014and acting\u2014so recklessly. But the one truth in Trump\u2019s unhinged messages, as in so many of his statements, is that the United States is now led by someone who cannot contain his thoughts or emotions, and who still thinks of the men and women of the U.S. military as little more than his own toy soldiers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alone in the dead of night, a man can fall into bleak thoughts. In the wee, small hours of the morning, he might think about lost loves, mull over great regrets, or wrestle with the inevitability of his own mortality. But Donald Trump, awake and restless in the Florida darkness, apparently consoles himself by imagining<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40074,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[5874,1836,3164,6185,899,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-40073","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-freedom","9":"tag-iranian","10":"tag-launch","11":"tag-operation","12":"tag-threatens","13":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}