As much as he is able, Donald Trump has attempted to reassure Americans that he has this whole Iran situation under control, even after Tehran retaliated Tuesday night by targeting U.S. troops in Iraq. And yet the defining characteristic of his administration’s response has been confusion. Not only does the strike against Qasem Soleimani seem to contradict Trump’s purported views on the Middle East—mere months ago he abruptly abandoned the U.S.-allied Kurds in Syria with a promise to draw down America’s presence there—but his and Mike Pompeo’s justification has wavered from an “imminent” attack on American forces to Soleimani’s past offenses, and the Pentagon quickly backtracked on a letter announcing a withdrawal from Iraq, causing international head-scratching.
Behind the scenes, even some of Trump’s own aides are acknowledging that his so-called strategy is a mess—if it exists at all. “The messaging has been just horrible,” former Trump Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan told the New York Times on Tuesday. “It’s just been all over the map.” Meanwhile, two current administration officials told the Washington Post, on the condition of anonymity, that Trump’s threat to target 52 Iranian cultural sites—later contradicted by the Pentagon—was “unhelpful.” One senior administration official told the outlet that the Pentagon was caught off guard by the president’s tweet, and the president reportedly surprised his own aides with his threat to sanction Iraq.
Another Middle East conflict was bound to be viewed skeptically given the disastrous Iraq War, but the Trump administration’s sloppiness has exacerbated the issue. “At a time when you have something so serious, you need clear communication,” Lapan told the Times. “Instead what we got was contradictory, confusing communication from an administration that already has a trust deficit.”
Even Republicans have been left in the dark. As the Times noted Wednesday, allies who’d encouraged Trump’s Iran offensive “expressed uncertainty about what is to come,” especially given the back-and-forth messaging out of the White House. A Republican staffer told the outlet they’d spent “an afternoon” phoning the Defense Department to get more information about the supposed withdrawal letter. The eventual reply? “That Pentagon officials had only seen it on Twitter.”
Trump, who has previously touted his unpredictability as a foreign policy asset, may see the chaos as a plus. But his failure to articulate a clear plan could put both the U.S. and its allies at risk. “Everyone is scrambling now to decipher Trump’s intentions,” Shalom Lipner, a former adviser to seven Israeli prime ministers, told the Times, noting that Benjamin Netanyahu was left with “whiplash” after the Soleimani killing. There’s a fear, he added, that “this may have been [Trump’s] parting shot before exiting the region completely and leaving U.S. allies to fend for themselves.”
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