Taco Trump: Iran strikes suggest US president is not in control - or just plain mad
It is extremely difficult be a fan of US President Donald Trump, whose erratic style of governance has sent shockwaves around the world, unless you are among those - and their number is high - who blindly follow his jumble of loose ideologies and primal instincts.
The plausible green light he gave to the Israeli strike to Iran last night further proof this point.
Still, some of these feelings and intuitions deserve fair scrutiny, including his criticism of the military industrial complex’s nefarious influence on US foreign policy, which has led the country into endless wars and emptied its coffers.
There’s also his view on the massive outsourcing of manufacturing, triggered by globalisation, which has de-industrialised the country in recent decades, making it highly dependent on overseas labour - while simultaneously creating millions of people who former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton contemptuously called “deplorables”.
Then there is Trump’s involvement in a fight to the death against a deep state represented by an increasingly aristocratic Democratic Party, and the big lobbies engaged in steering the country - and the world - towards an increasingly less sustainable neoliberal economic model.
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In essence, Trump does not necessarily lack the right instincts, but he is a consummate bungler, executing his vision in a way that is often counterproductive.
At the heart of the problem is his diminished credibility, alongside his nonchalance and lack of empathy when he conceives and implements policies that devastate the poorest segments of the population, both inside and outside of the US. The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development is a case in point: the cost savings from this move, which is having massive repercussions on economic and social development programmes around the world, are a tiny fraction of the funds wasted annually on the military industrial complex.
Thus far, Trump has acted with absolute unpredictability, in a manner apparently designed to confuse and disorient friends and foes alike - echoing the madman theory attributed to former President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s (although the roots of this theory go back to far more authoritative thinkers, like Niccolo Machiavelli in the 16th century.)
Innumerable contradictions
Trump’s contradictions are now innumerable. Among the biggest and most impactful was his pledge, after returning to office by presenting himself as a “man of peace”, to pump a record $1 trillion into the defence budget.
Amid such conditions, it is practically impossible to make sense of Trump’s approach. And that’s not even to mention the ongoing drama between Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, which makes it tremendously difficult to take the US seriously at this hectic juncture in history. It is not a leap to imagine Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin scratching their heads while bringing out the popcorn.
If there is one thing that drives markets crazy, it is precisely this type of incoherent policymaking by the world's top leader
How can anyone take seriously the US president’s warnings about the dangers of his country’s skyrocketing $36 trillion debt after watching the advancement of his Big Beautiful Bill, which includes, besides the unprecedented defence budget, further corporate tax cuts (enabled by cutting social spending) and other provisions estimated to add $2.4 trillion to the debt?
Ratings agencies are downgrading the country, while US Treasury bonds are increasingly less attractive. In other words, Washington’s strongest soft power tool, the financial one, seems to be cracking. The CEO of JPMorgan Chase recently warned that Trump’s tariffs would “likely increase inflation and are causing many to consider a greater probability of a recession”.
If there is one thing that drives markets crazy, it is precisely this type of incoherent policymaking by the world’s top leader.
Trump’s rollercoaster decisions, and his tendency to hurriedly backtrack when they trigger adverse effects, have earned him the mocking acronym Taco (which stands for “Trump always chickens out”) - particularly stinging for someone as vain as him.
Foreign policy blunders
Moving to the foreign policy realm, Trump’s clumsiness is equally burdensome. On Ukraine, after boasting that he could secure a deal in 24 hours, he has since threatened to abandon mediation efforts entirely, while making veiled threats to Russia to reach a peace agreement. Just days after Trump issued a vague ultimatum, Russia suffered a major attack, as dozens of Ukrainian drones struck air bases inside the country, targeting nuclear-capable long-range bombers - an onslaught that surely came with western blessing and intelligence help.
On the Gaza war, Trump has similarly failed to achieve a ceasefire, with his special envoy trying to make Hamas accept a deal that would provide for a temporary truce and the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, without any solid guarantees of a permanent end to the conflict.
This would be similar to the deal mediated in January, and then violated by Israel amid Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desperate frenzy to stay in power.
On nuclear negotiations with Iran, if Trump thinks he can reach an agreement with Tehran that includes zero enrichment, he is dreaming. Iran has not endured decades of sanctions to maintain its right to nuclear enrichment just to sell it off to the man who, among many other things, gave the order to kill General Qassem Soleimani.
Trump might also believes that by facilitating and defending Israeli strikes on Iran he may increase his leverage in the nuclear talks with Tehran, but this choice could turn into a serious miscalculation, not to mention that Iran has already cancelled this weekend's planned talks.
In this fragile context, the masterclass on how to deal with a western leader - one who increasingly resembles a teenager in a hormonal storm - has been provided by the Chinese leadership, as it responded calmly to Trump’s provocative tariff declarations, which soared to 145 percent in April. Then, as the US military industrial complex highlighted the need for rare earth minerals, Taco Trump did what he always does: chickened out. On Wednesday, he announced a rare-earth deal with China that would see tariffs slashed.
With all of that being said, Trump should still be supported in his quest to remove the highly dangerous neocon and neoliberal weeds suffocating the US establishment, which make the deep state incredibly resilient.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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