Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Fourth Estate With Iran, Trump Wants to Be Arsonist and Firefighter The president loves to intensify a crisis and then declare victory by ending it.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Proving his excellence once again at serving as an arsonist and the leader of the fire brigade at the same time, President Donald Trump, who has been publicly spoiling for a military scrap with Iran, took credit this morning for both ordering a military strike on three of the country’s military installations and then canceling the mission 10 minutes before go time. Crisis averted!

This is far from the first time Trump has run this play. As David A. Graham of the Atlantic and others have noted, he delights in conjuring and intensifying crises—a lawless border, a national crime wave, threats of a government shutdown, threats of new tariffs, threats to oust the special counsel, the North Korea situation in which he promised “fire and fury,” et al.—and then riding in on a white golf cart at the last moment to head off the approaching calamity.


Trump’s usual shtick is to paper over the problem of his creation and then declare victory, but this week he added a biblical dimension to the drama-making. First, he assumed the persona of the vengeful god, commanding an attack on Iran in retaliation for its shoot-down of a $200 million Navy surveillance drone. Then he ducked into the wardrobe for a costume change to emerge in the cloak of the Prince of Peace and called off the strike. Why the 180-degree mood change? Because as he told Chuck Todd of NBC News, he learned it would kill 150 Iranians and he didn’t think the death toll was “proportionate” to the Iranian action. Or perhaps Trump just enjoys the sensation of changing his mind. Citing a source close to the president, the New York Times reported Friday that Trump “was pleased with Thursday night’s events because he liked the ‘command’ of approving the strike, but also the decisiveness of calling it off.”

Anyone who doesn’t want to see war with Iran would shout “halleluiah” to Trump’s last-minute stand-down—except, like many of his hasty rationalizations, the Iranian one seems crafted from pick-up sticks and collapses at first touch. It’s impossible to believe he didn’t know beforehand that taking out Iranian military targets would result in the loss of life. Did he think—until his generals gave him the bloody news—that the installations were drone-operated, too, and that no Iranians would die when the bombs landed?

No, the more likely case is that Trump’s bluff got called and he lost his nerve. Of course, that’s a good thing. It’s a much better thing for Trump to lose face this week than the scorching of scores or hundreds or thousands of Americans and Iranians. But the encounter—like many of the other instances in which he bailed—bled from Trump a couple of pints of his presidential power. Presidential threats have a greater chance of making adversaries take notice and change their ways if they’re not empty. But by making a practice of making threats and abandoning them, Trump voluntarily drains his own reservoirs of power by exposing himself as a wild bluffer.

Trump’s bluffing didn’t end with the on-again-off-again military strike. In a Friday morning tweet, he claimed to have punished Iran with new economic sanctions. But as it turns out, the president was firing blanks at the Iranians. Several hours after the Trump tweet, Washington Post’s Damian Paletta reported that “no such sanctions were imposed” against Iran. This wasn’t the first time Trump wielded phantom sanctions in a confrontation with an adversary. In March, Paletta writes, Trump tweeted that he was withdrawing additional sanctions against North Korea when the Treasury Department had not announced any new ones.

Like the “red line“ debacle in which President Barack Obama failed to deliver on a threat of military retaliation against Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime if it used chemical weapons, Trump’s Iranian backdown makes him look like a pitiful, helpless giant to the nation’s potential foes. When Trump goes all Dirty Harry, squinting his eyes and grimacing to say, “Make my day” to foreign powers, they have excellent reason to assume he’s just acting.

Making threats and then chaotically vacating them at the last moment might be a winning move in the world of real estate when the losses are tabulated in dollars. But in potential war zones like the Straits of Hormuz, where the currency is lives, liberty and peace, it is a loser’s strategy.

As bad as this week has been for American power, we should be prepared for added fallout from Trump’s actions. He could easily learn the wrong lesson from his Iranian retreat and decide that the best way to restore his lost military vigor is to drop a few choice bombs.

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Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger cooked up the “Madman Theory“ during the later stages of the Vietnam War, actively encouraging Moscow and Hanoi to think they were crazy enough to go nuclear. What could go wrong? Send your apocalypse via email to [email protected]. My email alerts bombed in New Haven. My Twitter feed is the bomb. My RSS feed invented the dirty bomb.