Trump's Fire-Ready-Aim Brings Predictable Results
This Time Another Trump Failure Erodes Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Trump's clumsy but effective assault on Nuclear Non-Proliferation was turned up to 11 this month.
Trump Patterns
Trump tore up the verifiable JCPOA in 2017, effectively eliminating any tangible drag on Iran's nuclear program. Instead of slowing Iran, Trump’s actions freed Iran to pursue a nuclear weapon.
Trump failed to replace the JCPOA with anything tangible - demonstrating a capacity for fecklessness and a preference for his own opinion, which is a passable definition of weakness.
When leadership failures are minimal, patterns of weakness and failure fail to emerge. With Trump, the patterns a well-defined and easy to follow:
Trump abandoned the "two-state solution" at no cost to Israel.
Trump moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, at no cost to Israel.
Trump handed the Abraham Accords to Israel, at no cost to Israel.
Trump tore up the JCPOA, an agreement Israel condemned, at no cost to Israel
The pattern represents a clumsy overindulgence of an ally. Such manufactures carelessness. The results of carelessness emerged on October 7, culminating years of Netanyahu's failure to properly measure threats.
Actions or Words?
Like Trump, Netanyahu is content to hype. Netanyahu satisfied his "level of effort" with harping on the non-fact, but eventual likelihood, that Iran was within weeks of having a bomb. He has been repeating the same lines for 34 years; since 1992. This is the '“broken watch” policy: it’s got to be right at least once a day, year, or decade. Again, Netanyahu’s inadequate capacity to measure threats, persisted.
What Netanyahu lacked in accuracy he acquired in audience, specifically an audience of one, Trump. Pouring an autocrat’s main outputs, self-regard, into Trump's open ears, proved enough to cause Trump to see Iran's nuclear program as a "shiny object". Opportunism, not conspiracy.
Misunderstanding his own limitations (a violation of the Eastwood Doctrine), Trump bombed the shiny object named Fordow, and failed to destroy the target named the shop floor at Fordow. No one could say or knew exactly where the target was. The depth of the shop floor of Fordow has yet to be identified, still. It's not possible to hit a target you cannot identify. Trump essentially bombed a mountain and hoped for the best.
Like so much of Trump's actions: Fire-Ready-Aim continues to be his process.
The Nuclear Club
There is, or ought to be, no doubt that Iran is trying to join the nuclear club. Today, any nation with the capacity to pay attention, and with this technical potential is likely doing the same thing. They (South Korea, Japan, Poland, Australia, Brazil, EU members) are likely proceeding with greater urgency as they watch and measure what US "assurances" are worth; as they watch Trump coddle Putin, and watch Trump allow Ukraine to continue to endure the unnecessary.
Ukraine once had nuclear weapons. Ukraine is the first nation to actually forego possession of nuclear weapons. Ukraine gave them up in return for assurances from the US, and others, that Ukraine’s sovereignty would be inviolate, and the US, UK, would come to Ukraine's aid should it be attacked.
Trump, he who whimsically tore up his own agreement with Canada and Mexico - USMCA - has been coddling Ukraine's attacker. This action provides a careful explanation to wanna be Club members: having nuclear weapons provides more assurance of sovereignty than "US assurances". It’s a straightforward assessment.
Iran is aligned with Putin, and therefore with Kim of North Korea. So Iran has a workaround should it be forced to make a decision between remaining without a nuclear capacity and having one. Trump's impulsive fecklessness, on display when he abandoned the JCPOA in 2017, and again this month with the bombing, has helped clarify Iran's options.
Membership has its privileges. Attaining that membership in The Club means never having to say “surrender” much less '“unconditional surrender”. Iran may believe it’s “close” to getting its membership card. Having an overindulged Israel snapping at its heels inspires greater speed. Potential US Assurances hover like a wispy cloud.
Theocrats in Iran turn their hopeful faces to the autocrats in Russia and North Korea. There, welcome lies. (Literally.)
The question Trump is essentially posing to Iran is not about Trump, so Trump, logically, is confused. The question for Iran is "how soon?". If Iran can "go it alone" they will. If Iran has to accept "aid" from Putin and Kim, it will. Trump’s overindulgence of Israel, specifically of Netanyahu, plus Trump's impulsiveness and Israeli overreach, have placed this question in Iran's "more urgent" pile.
Worse, but only potentially, is Iran may have learned that “Trump can be manipulated simply by telling him stuff” - call it playing the “Netanyahu Card”. This opens a possibility for Iran: tell Trump that Fordow was “totally destroyed” - feeding Trump his own hopes - prompting Trump to enter a predictable, self-congratulatory, loop, allowing Iran time to leverage its fellow autocrats and Iran’s remaining nuclear capacity. [This paragraph would be absurd if it applied to any other President.]
The more prominent “odd thing” about this entire episode is that the “dealmaker”, the “negotiator”, punted on what he claims is his most essential quality: negotiating and dealmaking.
Odd.
Potentially, Americans’ greatest horror may come to pass should all the assertions about Trump’s feckless be both true, and realized, with a context of actual “existential risk”.
Trump: Fire, Ready, Aim
Trump’s choice to bomb where no target had been effectively identified reflects impulsiveness and carelessness. His ongoing assertions of success, in an exercise where success had not been clearly identified, and which are looking more and more like desperation, merely highlight his, er, quality. At best he has abused our military by saddling them with an unachievable mission. Though, to the credit of the military, and to the surprise of no one, the mission was executed with precision and professionalism. Fire-aim-ready is no one’s friend.
Errors Gather
Trump may be compounding errors. Compounding errors, when adorned with power, erode national resilience. Resilience is composed of the vibrancy of civil society, the viability of a national economy, the discipline found in a nation’s use of military power, and the reliability of its political leadership upon objective facts.
Trump’s record is not good: Trump first tried to erode US civil society by losing an incompetent Musk upon it. Then attacked the rule of law by suborning lawyers and law firms. Undermined science (aka: America’s future) by defunding research and development. Then, swiped at the economy again with unplanned, impulsively implemented economic tariffs. As this magnificent error blossomed, he asserted “90-deals-in-90-days” would remedy failure. TACO emerged into the Oval office’s ambience. As his 90-day failure emerged, he sent the military to Los Angeles, dovetailing impossible, poorly conceived, deportation goals with a corrosive, applied liberally to US law, and its citizens and aspirational citizens.
And now comes Fordow. Followed by Trump’s gleeful embrace of regime change in Iran.
Trump has demonstrated an impulsive incompetence across all measures of power: political, economic, military and environmental.
At some point feckless flailing will generate provocation. Autocrats are watching.
Israelis, like Americans, are in possession of a harmony of actions. These peoples can move towards solving this uncontrolled slide into, as Netanyahu puts it, “the most existential threat ever faced”, by electing a different leadership. After Trump and Netanyahu, surely the bottom of the barrel has been reached? Hope, apparently, still exists.
The value of kinetics, when the salient issue can only be addressed by negotiation has been demonstrated.
And we find, what we always knew, Trump is terrible at both.