We are one week into the 2020s and the last year of Donald Trump’s first term, which will see both the third-ever impeachment trial for an American president and an election that is already wracking the country with anxiety. Ominously, we were ushered into the new year on Friday with the assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, a move that prompted an Iranian counterattack on Tuesday evening. Briefly on Monday, it seemed Soleimani’s killing had also set in motion a true end to the war in Iraq—a letter notifying the Iraqi government that American troops would be withdrawn from the country materialized but was soon disavowed by American officials, who said it had been released by mistake. The shock of the past several days was captured by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that night:

A lot of truly horrible things have happened under Donald Trump as president. Nearly 3,000 of our fellow Americans died in Puerto Rico after the administration’s weak hurricane response. Thousands of immigrant children separated from their parents kept in cages; dozens of immigrants, including children, have died in ICE custody. But a brand-new war run by this corrupt, incurious president, that is the ultimate fear. A fear that looks very close right now to being a reality. In the wake of his ordering the airstrike of the number two figure in Iran, millions of people marching the streets in Iran, Trump is now tweeting the way he always tweets, making outrageous declarations and threats. But now the difference is this. The stakes are as high as they can possibly be.

The stakes are indeed high, but for all the anxieties and uncertainties of this moment in the Trump presidency, it should be said that we already know, or ought to know, where many of the situations we face came from and where they are likely to lead. The Senate’s impeachment trial, whenever and however it begins, will end with Trump’s acquittal, an outcome guaranteed by the Constitution’s supermajority requirement for conviction and Trump’s durable popularity within the Republican Party—which would imperil any Republican Senator voting against him, assuming, optimistically, there were a meaningful number willing to do so on the merits of the case to begin with.

The matters to which Hayes referred were, even if not fully predictable, certainly prefigured. The Trump administration’s shoddy response to Hurricane Maria parallels the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina as a reminder of what can befall nonwhite Americans who live at the periphery of our national attention. It was also a reminder, for those open to one, of Puerto Rico’s subjugated status, a legacy of colonial aspirations reinforced by policies like Promesa, the Obama administration’s attempt to force fiscal austerity on the territory at the hands of unelected administrators. Trump’s immigration policies immediately followed, and were partially informed by, the Obama administration’s efforts to deport millions of the undocumented, which also broke up untold numbers of families.

Trump’s assassination of Soleimani, of course, has its own antecedents. War with Iran has long been feared because it has long been plausible, an outcome that, even if it occurs at Trump’s direction, will have been set in motion by decades of American foreign policy. To the extent that Trump has discernible objectives with Iran, they are the very same goals that have guided our relations with the country for years—preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power and further challenging American interests. Hawks and most doves alike would like to see events in the region proceed in a direction maximally convenient for the United States, which makes economic, diplomatic, and military interventions inevitable.

It is notable that most mainstream criticisms of Soleimani’s assassination have been centered around questions of strategy—the wisdom of taking out a monster the way Trump did at the time he chose to do it. The questions of prerogative have been all but settled, the last administration having already established that the U.S. can summarily kill almost anyone abroad that the president considers sufficiently dangerous, up to and including American citizens. Similarly, while Trump’s threat to bomb cultural sites in Iran has been denounced widely, easily, and rightfully as a threat to commit war crimes prohibited by international law, that phrase has only ever been fitfully applied to our torture and abuse of military detainees or our efforts to materially aid Saudi Arabia’s ongoing slaughters of civilians in Yemen. There has long been bipartisan ambivalence, overall, about the legal limits of American military activity and aid, and the present tensions have been crafted not only by Trump but by members of the American political establishment. This is why it was unsurprising to hear, as The New York Times has reported, that the killing of Soleimani was pushed aggressively by Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—two men who were fairly ordinary Republicans before the Trump administration and will be ordinary Republicans again when it ends.