Good luck to anyone trying to venture what’s going through the head of the president of the United States when making decisions or how their reasoning works. Not even his own words, which usually include contradictions, shed light that allows him to definitively define his arguments. That huge unknown It is the one that beats now, when after 38 days of war in Iran, and 10 hours and 26 minutes after launching on his social network the genocidal threat of making “a civilization die,” Trump also announced on Truth Social an agreement with Iran, and with Israel, for a two-week ceasefire, a truce announced only 88 minutes before the ultimatum that he himself had given and that this Wednesday has already proven extremely fragile.
To understand this shift the only thing that can be done, at least for the moment and given that the world is facing a leader who has broken all schemes and precedents of recent decades about how someone functions in the Oval Office, is to understand the political moment in the United States and also, to go through Trump’s history, identify trends and take into account his words, no matter how volatile they are, and those of the people in the circle of power that surrounds him.
Plenty of arguments for an exit ramp
Trump had abundant arguments for seeking an exit ramp from this war. In the United States the majority of the population was against the conflict and how the president was handling it, as one poll after another has made increasingly clear.
The cascade of consequences in the global economyl of Iran’s practical closure of the Strait of Hormuz It also reached the US. A recent Pew survey released Tuesday shows that the impact that Americans were most concerned about was the impact the war is having on the economy, and in particular the economy. gasoline pricewhich had risen above 4 dollars per gallon (about one euro per liter), a 33% compared to before February 28.
This is not good news for a president who plays in the November legislative elections that his party maintains the weak control it now has of the two Chambers of Congress, something essential if it wants to avoid a blocking your calendar or find himself mired again in investigations launched by Democrats.
In addition to the economic blow, the war, and the fundamental role that Israel and its prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, played in deciding to launch it, has deepened the gap between Trump and the MAGA base, or at least between some of its most prominent and influential public figures, such as the commentator Tucker Carlson or the former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Opposition to the military campaign has become ferozand makes a wound that was already open due to issues such as the case of the files of the pedophile and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein gushing blood.
A conflict in which Iran has shown its will and ability to maintain resistance despite the asymmetry of forces and the ccomplex logistics and the intense deployment of military personnel and resources that, for years, the US would be required to secure the Strait of Hormuzeven if control was taken, they also threatened the president with plunging him into one of those “eternal wars” who trapped and harmed predecessors and from whom, as a candidate, he promised to keep his country out.
Trump also faced concerns about sovereign funds located in Persian Gulf countrieswhich Iran has bombed in recent weeks. Those nations have become fundamental investors in the Artificial Intelligence revolution that is fueling the growth of the economy in the US and its technology sector and if they were forced to invest more in defense They would have less for that economic engine during this second term of the Republican.
The threat as a tool
Publicly, neither the president nor his secretaries and spokespersons assume any of those weaknesses that may have encouraged the turn. In fact, this Wednesday all of them were making an effort to portray the ‘Operation Epic Fury’ as a complete success and the ceasefire as a triumph of their strategy, including the genocidal rhetoric.
“What the president cares about most are the results, and in fact his very harsh rhetoric and tough negotiating style is what has led to the result what they see,” Karoline Leavitt, White House spokesperson, said this Wednesday in the press room.
In the 2024 campaign, Trump spoke privately in a meeting with donors from one of his favorite negotiation tactics. According to the account of those words that ‘The Washington Post’ has recovered, and that neither China nor Russia have confirmed, Trump boasted of being able to stop both countries by threatening to bomb Beijing or Moscow. The response of Xi Jinpingaccording to Trump, was thinking that “he was crazy.” “He didn’t believe me, except maybe 10%“, explained the Republican. “And 10% is all you need”.
That’s the approach Trump often takes, whether in his threats to NATOin the trade wars open with their tariffs, in the imperialist ambitions in Greenland or in many other political maneuvers: using what unpredictable and threaten with a catastrophic escalation to gain strength in the negotiation.
It is a policy that Stephen Walt, an academic at Harvard, has described in international relations as “predatory hegemony”“Its central objective is to use Washington’s privileged position to extract concessions, tributes and displays of deference from allies and adversaries, seeking short term profits in what he sees as a purely zero-sum world,” the expert described in an article in ‘Foreign Affairs’.
Those who surround and support the president assure that his methods, those of ignoring conventions and making maximalist demands that he learned during his time in the aggressive world of the real estate sector in New York, also work in geopolitics. And he himself has abundant self-confidence. This is confirmed by a conversation he had with Tucker Carlson a couple of weeks before the war, which has been reported by two journalists from ‘The New York Times’ who will publish a new book in June titled: “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” “I know you’re worried but it’s going to be okay,” he told the commentator. When he asked him how he knew, he replied: “Because “It always turns out well.”.
Observing results like fragile ceasefire in Iran, and especially the potential for Tehran to continue controlling Hormuz and ultimately emerge stronger from this conflict, critics and many analysts are much more inclined to talk about a failure. Walt, for example, wrote in his text that the case of Iran confirms “what empty why is approach“It will generate growing global resentment” and “create tempting opportunities for Washington’s main rivals,” he said.
UNCERTAINTY AND TACO
On Monday, according to information from ‘Axios’, the US and Israel learned that, for the first time since the war began, Mojtaba Jamenei, Iran’s new Supreme Leader, instructed his negotiators to move towards an agreement. Despite these movements, Trump redoubled his public threats and not even within his government some knew what he would do. ““We had no idea what was going to happen,” a Defense source told the portal.
The definitive turn and the end of uncertainty came on Tuesday after frenetic hours of contacts not only with members of the cabinet and political, military and justice advisors but also with business leaders. Trump had time to send messages on Truth supporting local political candidates or to call Budapest, where Vice President Vance was participating in an event with Viktor Orbán. But the decision on Iran came, with Vance’s intensified contacts with the Pakistanisday iChina involvement and conversations between Trump and his team with the Israelisaccording to ‘Axios’, increasingly aware that they were losing control.
This shift has led to the term being used again. TACO (English acronym for Trump always turns into a chicken). It is a concept that has been coined in this second term before his withdrawal of threats he himself has made and that it is not even necessary to dust due to its frequency, because the pattern repeats.
It has been seen with dutywith deadlines that have come and gone without anything being resolved in the negotiations with Russia and Ukraine to end that war, or regarding Greenland. And a term for which he seems to have a predilectionalthough it often ends up blown up, being extended, simply overcome by the lack of results or proven to be a mere purchase of time: two weeks.
Leavitt, in his press conference this Wednesday, insisted like Trump himself or the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, that the military objectives “have been met or exceeded”. And the spokesperson has remarked: “They are the Iranians those who capitulatednot President Trump.”
The press secretary dismissed or described as “insulting” the repeated questions, which were replicated in power centers around the world and in analyzes and columns, about whether with the threat he launched to destroy Iranian civilization, and not the government in Tehran, Trump has not destroyed the moral credibility that could be left for the US, something that Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recalled in his Substack this Wednesday that he did, “for all intents and purposes, with the permission of political and civil institutions.”
It was Trump himself who in an interview this year with ‘The New York Times’ said that His only limit is his “own morality.” And in January his advisor Stephen Miller He had also put the president’s philosophy on the table. “We live in a world where you can talk all you want about international formalities and everything else but it is a “world that is governed by force, by imposition, by power”he said on CNN. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
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