"It Can Only Good Happen" [sic]
Diplo D'oh! Volume 1, Issue 27
We wouldn't have believed it if we hadn't read it: President Trump issued a social media update on talks with Iran, complaining about the “‘chirping’” from domestic critics and asserting “it will all work out in the end.”
It’s not half bad—it’s all bad: At this point, it’s safer to bet that Charlie Brown will finally kick that football than to “sit back and relax” and believe Trump’s fantasies that a deal to end his foolish war in Iran is just around the corner.
To be fair to Trump (not that anyone should), things have had a tendency to work out well in the end—at least for him personally. But the power of positive thinking isn’t enough to deliver him from the predicament he’s created for himself in Iran. The Iranian regime has no interest in bailing Trump out of his mess; indeed, quite the opposite given its ideological preoccupations and willingness to force ordinary Iranians to pay for them.
After having made the disastrous decision to go to war against Iran while offering the American public little in the way of explanation for his actions, Trump now expects the country to simply trust him that things “will all work out well in the end.” If nothing else, it’s a remarkably tone-deaf message to send a nation that overwhelmingly disapproves of both the decision to launch the war as well as the war itself—and also doubts that the supposed benefits of the war will outweigh its costs.
It’s the latest in a long series of bad ideas from Trump and his boosters since the start of the war, from his eagerness to strike a deal favorable to Tehran—which may or may not include a joint tollbooth venture on the Strait of Hormuz—to his repeated, inept, and increasingly empty threats to restart the war before backing down at the last possible moment.
The food is terrible—and such small portions!: American and Iranian forces traded blows over the weekend, with American strikes hitting a communications facility in southern Iran and Iranian missiles targeting a U.S. base in Kuwait.
A better alternative: The belief that “nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen,” as Trump once put it in a different context, amounts to magical thinking in the extreme—not the foundation for effective diplomacy of any sort. And what may “all work out in the end” for Trump himself may not work out all too well for the country or the world.
Instead of blaming his critics and telling a deeply skeptical public to “just sit back and relax” in the delusory hope that the war will somehow resolve itself, Trump ought to level with the American public about the difficulties involved and lay out a credible, realistic path forward. Even George W. Bush had the sense to try and do that when his war in Iraq went sideways in 2005.
Trump being Trump, of course, he’ll do no such thing—as we saw in his flailing public response to the COVID-19 pandemic and his general inability to take responsibility for his actions.