Trump has lost control as his ‘little war’ gets a lot bigger

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It is an unintended feature of President Donald Trump’s Plan B for defeating Iran – economic strangulation – that the more successful the policy becomes, the more risk the men who run the Islamic Republic are willing to accept to fight it. Judged on that metric, the American blockade and sanctions are working, but they’re also raising the stakes beyond what the US is willing to pay.

This begs the question of how long and disruptive the showdown with Iran is going to be, now that the US president has said he expects it to continue through the November midterms. At that point, Trump believes it will stop quickly, because the Iranians will no longer have the elections as leverage, implying that they’d then be ready to make a deal. That’s optimistic.

According to a September 9 report in The Wall Street Journal, some of Trump’s most senior advisers (the same ones who advised against going to war in February) told him the conflict may outlast his presidency. They’re probably right, and I hope they went a step further, warning him that it’s also likely to expand. His “little war” aimed at regime change in Iran is fast becoming a struggle to determine the future of the wider Middle East and the US role in it.

In truth, everybody is guessing at many of the factors that will decide this issue. We don’t know, for example, how many missiles or launchers the Iranians still have, nor what capacity they have to build new ones or how many they might be able to get elsewhere. We can’t be certain what will happen in energy markets, what political pressure will be brought to bear on Trump........

© The Age