Repetition of moves shows that Trump does not oversee the Iran chessboard

The speech that any other president would probably have made before attacking another country will still come Wednesday evening. More than a month after the United States started the war against Iran, President Donald Trump addresses his country and the world for nineteen minutes. Anyone who followed the news during that period will be little wiser. Trump talks to journalists every day about the match. And shifts the goalposts just as often.

The question is whether his words from behind a lectern in the White House have a longer shelf life and more weight than the often contradictory ambitions that he reports off the cuff. For example, Trump promises in his speech that “the hard part is over” and “when this conflict is over, the Straits will [van Hormuz] will open on its own.” Oil will “come back on track quickly and gasoline prices will fall rapidly. Stock prices will rise rapidly.” Speedy recovery from the economic damage — more than the military targets, eliminating Iran’s nuclear bomb program or any regime change — is where American voters will hold him and his Republican Party in November’s congressional elections.

Trump repeats what he been saying since March 9that the military objectives are “soon to be completed”: to decimate Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missiles, defense industry and navy. “We will hit them extremely hard in the next two to three weeks. We will throw them back into the Stone Age — where they belong. In the meantime, discussions are ongoing.” He does not claim, as he has said in recent days, that Iran is “begging” him for an agreement “in extremely successful negotiations.” However, “if there is no deal, we will hit all their power stations very hard.” A threat he made on March 21 and has been putting off ever since.

Regime change abandoned

A real regime change in Iran, where the elderly, dictatorial Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been succeeded by his hardlinerson Mojtaba, is by no means Trump’s goal, he claims. “We never talked about one regime changebut there actually has one regime change occurred (…) the new group is less radical and much more reasonable.” At the start of the war, Trump called on Iranians to take their destiny into their own hands and overthrow the tyrannical regime. He apparently resigns himself to the fact that that won’t happen. Which makes it completely unclear whether the oppressed people of Iran will gain anything from this war.

It is also interesting what the American president does not say. He praises allies in the Middle East: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain, but does not say a word about NATO. In recent days he threatened to blow up the eighty-year-old alliance because European countries do not support him in his war. On Wednesday, he ordered only “countries of the world” that depend on the Strait of Hormuz for their fuel to “first, buy oil from the US” and “second, go to the strait and take it, protect it, use it.” Until his bombings, the waterway had not been closed by Iran.

Trump does not devote a second to the possible deployment of American ground troops. In recent weeks there has been a lot of speculation about taking Iranian territory north of Hormuz, occupying the Kharg oil island in the Persian Gulf and physically taking 400 kilos of highly enriched uranium that Iran is said to have hidden. Thousands of marines and airborne troops have been sent to the Middle East, but it remains unclear whether they will take action.

Little patience

With his speech, Trump mainly wants to dampen negative sentiment in his own country. Polls regarding his performance as president are dramatic. He mentions the duration of the two world wars, those in Vietnam and Iraq, to ​​put the battle that has now lasted more than a month into perspective. He praises the thirteen American victims so far “who have given their lives in this battle to prevent our children from ever being confronted with a nuclear Iran.” “This is a real investment in the future of your children and grandchildren.”

Just as Trump himself has never had the patience for a prolonged military battle, in Iraq, Afghanistan or Ukraine, it is unlikely that Americans will have the patience for his conflict with Iran.

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