But the ardor for a second war raised suspicion. As the saber-rattling got louder in spring 2002, The Nation warned that “Bush’s preoccupation with Iraq has permitted the tail to wag the dog.” In the fall, some Democrats warned that Bush would launch a wag-the-dog attack ahead of the midterm election. He didn’t, and as it turned out, he didn’t need to; the GOP bucked historical precedent and gained seats.

The war went forward anyway the following spring. And indeed, when the attacks began, and the U.S. military easily folded up Iraq’s armed forces, Bush’s approval spiked. The invaders didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, though. By May, Paul Krugman was writing, “the administration has just derived considerable political advantage from a war waged on false premises. At best, that sets a very bad precedent. At worst. . . . ‘You want to win this election, you better change the subject. You wanna change this subject, you better have a war,’ explains Robert DeNiro’s political operative in ‘Wag the Dog.’ ‘It’s show business.’” Needless to say, the war didn’t turn out well for Bush, or the United States.

There’s one case of a dog-wagging that might never have actually happened. Four days after the Saturday Night Massacre, in which Nixon’s attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned rather than fire the Watergate special prosecutor, the Nixon administration suddenly put the U.S. armed forces on Defcon III, the highest level of readiness, in response to a Soviet message saying Moscow was considering military moves in the Middle East. “[Nixon’s] ordering of a global military alert on the night of October 24-25, 1973, reportedly in response to Soviet military movements further threatening the already unstable conditions in the Middle East, was viewed by many as self serving,” Stephen Stathis wrote a decade later.

Later scholarship has suggested that Nixon actually had nothing to do with the decision. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made the call after conferring with other Cabinet secretaries, because White House Chief of Staff Al Haig refused to rouse Nixon—perhaps because the president was drunk.

Trump is a teetotaler, so that’s no danger here, but the risk of misjudgment still seems high in the Jerusalem case. Consider the three criteria above: Does it come at a time of trouble for the president? Yes. He’s notched a couple of victories in the last week—the Supreme Court allowed his travel ban to go into effect, and the GOP tax bill to advance—but there is great peril, too. A government shutdown threatens, and the Flynn plea-deal is the biggest blow in a major investigation that threatens to paralyze or even end his presidency. Second, is it overseas? Yes. Third, does it offer a great political benefit? That’s where things get trickier.

Domestically, the benefits of Trump’s move are hazy. In Trump’s defense, the timing of this decision was not entirely his own. Congress passed a law in 1995 mandating moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, but presidents have successively waived the transfer, because most of the world does not recognize its status as settled, and sees it as a matter to be decided in Israeli-Palestinian peace talk. Trump faced (and in fact had passed) the latest deadline when he made the decision. Yet by placing the embassy move on an indeterminate timeline, Trump could incur political costs while also raising doubts among those who see his choice as too fainthearted. Many others may react with indifference to general positivity. A substantial segment of the population will react furiously simply because they detest Trump.