Trump is still Trump, even when faced with the question of war

Washington Post

18-06-2025

Does he want to be a wartime president, or the broker of peace? Can he convince his MAGA base that going to war with Iran isn't the kind of Middle Eastern entanglement he has spent more than a decade warning against? Is the moment for diplomacy over, or are the Iranians coming to the White House?
He himself doesn't seem to yet know.
'You don't seriously think I'm going to answer that question,' President Donald Trump said, when asked Wednesday morning if he had made a decision on U.S. strikes in Iran. 'You don't know that I'm going to even do it. You know, I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do."
It was the unpredictable president, once again, being unpredictable. It is still unclear whether his vague but muscular warnings are laying the groundwork for a military attack or something more strategically complex, part of a diplomatic gambit to steer a foreign adversary into a deal favorable to him and not to them.
He said that Iran had gotten itself into trouble, and that they now want to negotiate, and had even offered to come meet him at the White House.
'Why didn't you negotiate with me two weeks ago? You could have done fine," he said. 'You would have had a country. It's very sad to watch this. I mean, I've never — I've never seen anything like it.'
Later in the day, he said that the Iranian regime could fall ('Anything could happen') and he said that he would be holding a meeting in the War Room ('Situation Room, as some people call it'). But asked to clarify his thinking, he refused to be pinned down.
'I have ideas as to what to do,' he said. 'But I haven't made a final — I like to make the final decision one second before it's due, you know, because things change. I mean, especially with war, things change with war. It can go from one extreme to the other. War is very bad.'
The past week has been a dizzying display as Trump has navigated how to handle what could be one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency. For months he had urged Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to avoid doing anything to disrupt the as they tried diplomacy with Iran. But Trump grew frustrated with the pace of negotiations — and Netanyahu moved forward last week with military strikes that Trump quickly praised for their effectiveness.
'His handling of this crisis is the same as his presidency: This really is a presidency more than an administration. It's dominated by the president, and policy comes from the top down rather than percolate up from the bottom,' said Richard Haass, a veteran diplomat and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
'And this reinforces the sense of an extraordinarily forceful and powerful president,' he added. 'But with one odd caveat, that it's also an inconsistent one....the policies change constantly. There's an improvisational quality, and that is part of the difficulty of being an adversary, an ally, a journalist — to be a citizen.'
White House officials have largely declined to elaborate on Trump's decision-making process. He decided to return early from the G-7 summit in Canada to monitor the situation and hold meetings in person -- although some have also suggested that he had accomplished what he wanted to at the summit and had, as he has previously, grown tired of the meetings and felt his time was better spent elsewhere.
Administration officials have said that his ultimate goal has remained to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon — and they have pointed to his long history of making such claims — but it has not been certain whether he views the best coarse as a military one or a diplomatic one.
Still, the president has made it increasingly clear in public comments Wednesday that he is weighing potential action.
Any American military engagement in Iran would be a departure from Trump's campaign rhetoric and his actions during the first few months of his administration, when he repeatedly talked about being a peacemaker.
'We will quickly restore stability in the Middle East, and we will return the world to peace," he said during a campaign event in September.
His advisers now emphasize that ensuring that Iran does not have access to a nuclear weapon is the only pathway toward long-term stability in the region. But the lesson from many past presidents has been that involvement in conflicts in the Middle East can become like kudzu, quickly growing into an all-consuming problem.
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump often invoked the Middle East as a lesson of misadventures in American foreign policy.
He called the original deal with Iran on curbing its nuclear ambitions "a disgrace and an embarrassment.'
And he frequently spoke out about military involvement in Iraq as a way to ridicule his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton (even though he had previously supported the war efforts).
'I said it, and I said it loud and clear, 'You'll destabilize the Middle East,'" he said in a Republican primary debate in 2016. "That's exactly what happened.'
Another lesson that has been front and center for Trump is a 2012 threat that Barack Obama made toward Syria, saying that if the country used chemical weapons it would be crossing a 'red line' that would trigger an American military response. When, a year later, Bashar al-Assad used sarin gas to kill more than 1,400 people, Obama struggled with a swift response before Syria said it would give up its chemical weapons program.
That decision was criticized even by close Obama allies, and Trump has pointed toward the empty threat as having a broader impact, emboldening other countries and diminishing the power of threats from the United States.
'That red line in the sand from President Obama, that was just absolutely, it just didn't matter. It was just words,' he said during a rally in August 2021.
Trump has also pointed toward his own decision to authorize strikes in Syria in 2017 in an operation that launched 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian military airfield in retaliation for a chemical attack that killed Syrian citizens.
'Everyone in the world knew not to mess around with America. They knew that,' he said. 'They understood our power and that I would not hesitate to use it in defense of our citizens.'
That could make it harder for him to come down from the escalating threats about Iran. His social media feed – where on Tuesday he demanded 'UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER' from Tehran, without detailing what that would mean. He has also described the supreme leader as an 'easy target.'
'If he wants a diplomatic outcome, I don't think his posting on social media is helping,' Haass said. 'The call for unconditional surrender makes it more difficult for them to accept any proposal we would put forward.'
'I would basically let the Israeli military actions and all this talk about a US military move speak for themselves,' he added. 'And then I would have a serious effort putting forward a very demanding proposal to the Iranians, essentially to denuclearize them.'
Trump on Wednesday still seemed to be toying with the idea of a deal, complimenting Iranians for their 'courageous' offer to come meet him at the White House. Asked if he had given them an ultimatum, he said, 'You could say so. Maybe you could call it the ultimate ultimatum.'
'Nothing's finished until it's finished. You know, war is very complex," he added. 'A lot of bad things can happen. A lot of turns are made. So I don't know. I wouldn't say that we won anything yet. I would say that we sure as hell made a lot of progress. We'll see.'
'And the next week is going to be very big, maybe less than a week, maybe less.'