Everybody now knows that his threat displays are toothless and that they are the only tool in his box. The Chinese tariff retaliation coming on the heels of North Korea’s nuke tests and Iranian sanctions topped off with the article about his hostile takeover pump-and-dump schemes seems like all the plot points coming together for an epic tale of utter humiliaton on the world stage. Too bad about all us ancillary characters. Am I reading this wrong?
Remember how Trump promised to repeal and replace Obamacare? And make it cheaper? Look how successful he was with that! I expect similar results with his foreign policy. The health care thing is just one example, by the way. Gaze upon his marvelous wall for another.
What nuke tests?
I don’t think this is a viewpoint shared by Iran. If it is, they’re extremely foolish for doing so.
Whoops, meant missile.
It’s not that he won’t sanction - he already has. It’s that they won’t cave and will probably counter. I think everyone smells blood in the water and there’s gonna be a feeding frenzy. Iran will antagonize and Trump won’t be able to respond for fear of being called out for foreign adventurism by his base.
There are worse things than sanctions that can happen to Iran.
You forgot to include Venezuela, where after his administration issued strong threats against the Mauro regime only to have Trump back down once Putin told him to.
As I have said before, we have no foreign policy. Just random whims of a president who believes that last person he heard and changes policy via twitter before bothering to inform his secretary of state.
Never underestimate the ability of the Orange Menace to change the subject: “Has anyone noticed that there have been more sunny days since I became president? Twice as many compared with the last administration. Mine has been the sunniest presidency in history! The Dems won’t admit it. You’re welcome!”
Who the hell knows? It’s impossible to predict what an inherently irrational and entirely incompetent actor like Trump will do. He might start a dumb war and get Americans killed for nothing; he may do absolutely nothing at all except poop-tweet.
Of course there are. One hopes that Trump isn’t that stupid.
The Iranians also get to have some input on whether we have a war or not.
Whoops, I had it in but deleted to put in NK first and then forgot to add it back. Yup, it’s another grenade for sure.
As long as this administration does nothing provocative with regard to our delicate relationship with Iran, the ball is totally in Iran’s court! Relax, we’re in… good… hands. :eek:
In any semblance of a sane foreign policy, that was capable of learning lessons from the last 20 years, the only chance of a war with Iran would be if Iran attacked us or invaded a neighbor.
But Trump is incapable both of learning and of rational decision making. So it will be a roll of the dice to see if he gets young American men and women who have volunteered killed for no reason. Of course, the vast majority of Trump supporters haven’t and don’t intend to volunteer for the military, so many of them won’t have any qualms about this.
Well, Iran refused to unconditionally cease to exist, so our strike against them during Mueller’s testimony in front of Congress was entirely their fault.
Both sides are currently doing things that could be perceived as provocative by the other.
The impression I have of the Trump base is that he can fail all day long on the foreign stage and it will not matter one bit. Surely they’ll hand-wave it away like any other bad (sorry “fake”) news. But how high does foreign policy rank on the radar of the nationalist, protectionist, 'Merica-first Trump voter? They like him because he won’t play with all those foreign types! This is the guy who tanked the Paris Accords, backs out of trade deals, regularly denigrates the UN and NATO. If he does well with anything they’ll say “Look what a deal-maker he is!” But if we end up in, say, a trade war with China it’s because, “He’s a tough negotiator and won’t take any crap!” The myth of Trump as the mighty negotiator persists and explains all the successes and all the failures…
And speaking as a human on the planet: Iranian men, women and children, too.
Of course. Historically, many more of them would die than American volunteers, should the Trump administration choose such a colossally stupid path.