On Thursday, 23 July, after weeks of escalating attacks between the US and Iran, Donald Trump told a reporter that Iran hadn’t received “enough pain yet”, and he leveled a threat. “I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before,” he warned. “I am close to making a decision.” Then, on Monday 27 July, he called it off.

A few days later, on Friday 31 July, Trump said: “We’ll be hitting them very hard. At some point, they’re going to say: ‘We just can’t take it any more.’” This time, it took him just one day to back down.

Here we go again. Ever since the US and Israel launched their latest war on Iran on 28 February, the people of the planet have been subjected to Donald Trump’s on-again off-again relationship with raining down catastrophic destruction on the nation. It started on 21 March, when Trump promised to hit Iranian power plants (a war crime, incidentally) unless Iran opened the strait of Hormuz. He delayed that plan for five days, and then another 10 days, before issuing his next threat.

That was on 7 April, when he wrote: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” A mere 10 hours later, he walked back that (genocidal) threat. On 17 May, he wrote: “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!” On 18 May, he wrote that he had been asked by Gulf leaders to “hold off on our planned Military attack of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was scheduled for tomorrow”.

The approach seems as tedious as it does childish, constantly threatening one thing only to back down in a cringey, face-saving effort shortly thereafter. Let’s call it what it is: kindergarten diplomacy. From appearances, it would seem that Trump considers this a strategy. One can only assume he holds out hope that it will achieve an end to this catastrophic conflagration........

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