Dealing with Iran is like working a 4 dimension chess game…
It’s stumping one Donald Trump a guy whose ‘dealing’ as President isn’t going good at all….
He has little to no comprehensive Foreign Policy….
But Trump has also eagerly courted a sit-down negotiation with the leader of Iran, called off a military strike earlier this year because it could have killed too many Iranians and flirted with a plan to offer Tehran a $15 billion lifeline to help it deal with the crushing U.S. sanctions.
On Monday in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters “we don’t want war with anybody” and then less than an hour later said he thinks a U.S. military strikeon an Iranian oil facility would be a proportional response.
The head-spinning contradictions hold a certain logic in Trump’s view, but also throw the imprecision and disarray of Trumpian foreign policy decision-making into high relief. Trump is caught between a political imperative to confront Iran — pleasing hawkish Republican supporters and allies Israel and Saudi Arabia — and his own political instincts against foreign intervention and toward cutting a deal….