President Loser
So far, Trump’s second term can only be judged a success if his intent has been to weaken and humiliate the United States of America
If you want to understand how the United States ended up in the center of the farcical mess that is/was the Iran War, you need to understand two things:
First, that Donald Trump believes in nothing beyond himself. He will sell out any idea, principle, objective, nation, or person in order to get a deal that he’s convinced will benefit him personally.
Second, that Trump administration 2.0 is utterly lacking in consensus over what the aims of American foreign policy should be. There are reflexive hawks, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who supported going to war against Iran by Israel’s side. But there are other people, like Vice President JD Vance, who have attached themselves to the idea that the United States should be pursuing a foreign policy of “restraint” and therefore thought the war was a mistake that needed to be brought to a conclusion as quickly as possible. Then there are all the people between those contrary positions, and many on each side of the dispute. It’s up to Trump to decide between them—and he does so entirely on the basis of point #1 above.
