It’s difficult to believe how misguided, counter-productive and dangerous American foreign policy has become under Trump. It’s even harder to believe it could get much worse. But it could – much, much worse.

While still unlikely, Trump has one more card to play, and it’s a big one. Given that Iran’s leadership and population seem immune to the sorts of conventional attacks formerly thought to induce shock and awe, perhaps Trump will finally follow through on his threat to bomb Iran back to the stone ages.

There’s one easy way to do this, which only the US has ever done before: use nuclear weapons. Thankfully, that still sounds unlikely, but if there’s one thing we know about Trump, it’s that he doesn’t like to be humiliated and he’s never been constrained by the norms of appropriate behaviour or polite society, even the international variety.

Despite Trump claiming that operation ‘Midnight Hammer’ had resulted in the ‘complete and total obliteration’ of Iran’s nuclear potential capabilities, clearly that is not the case. On the contrary, Trump’s threats to bomb Pickaxe Mountain, thought to be a key element of Iran’s remaining nuclear enrichment capacity,........

© Pearls and Irritations