OPINION:
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” President Trump posted on social media Tuesday morning, warning Iran for the umpteenth time to come to the negotiating table by his 8 p.m. EDT deadline.
After a full day of pundits clutching their pearls over the president’s word choice, Democrats speculating he was about to commit war crimes and media outlets bracing for around-the-clock coverage of Iranian bridges and utilities being decimated, nothing happened.
The Iranians, after pressure from China and Pakistan, approached the White House with a good enough offer for the president to agree to a two-week ceasefire. Predictably, on Wednesday, the stock market surged, oil prices plunged, and the president’s critics, who the day before were predicting World War III, called the president a chicken for backing down.
The Trump administration’s demand for maintaining the ceasefire was crystal clear: for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As of this writing, Iran had tightened its grip on the strait, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps limiting ship traffic and charging tolls.
Mr. Trump operates in chaos and uncertainty, with bold and inflammatory rhetoric, escalation and then de-escalation to keep America’s enemies guessing. To understand Mr. Trump, however, you need to keep track of his consistencies rather than focus on his fluctuations.
When it comes to Iran, the president has remained remarkably steady throughout the decades: The U.S. cannot and should not be bullied by the rogue regime.
“That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror,” Mr. Trump said in 1980 amid the Iran hostage crisis. He said he “absolutely” felt that the U.S. military should intervene to free our citizens.
“We’re going to have a war by being weak,” Mr. Trump told Barbara Walters in 1987. “The next time Iran attacks this country, go in and grab one of their big oil installations, and I mean grab it and keep it and get back your losses, because this country has lost plenty because of Iran.”
A year later, Mr. Trump remarked, “I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look like a bunch of fools. One bullet shot at one of our men or one of our ships, and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I would go in and take it.”
In 2011, Mr. Trump declared, “Iran can be taken. I would never take the military card off the table. And it’s possible that it will have to be used because Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
While he was campaigning for president in 2015, he pledged: “Nobody, and I mean nobody, will be pushing us around. I will stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”
Later on the campaign trail, he said: “We will totally dismantle Iran’s global terror network.” He vowed to dismantle President Obama’s nuclear agreement and did so during his first year in office.
Has Iran blinked, and is there a real possibility for meaningful change within the regime?
Perhaps. No other president has been able to hold talks with the IRGC with as much leverage as Mr. Trump has amassed through his military campaign. The White House seems to believe peace talks are worth it, based on information that isn’t available to the general public.
Still, disappointment is a possibility. Iran may be using the ceasefire as a way to buy time to rebuild and has no plans of opening the strait or giving up its nuclear program.
If that’s the case, then it should be bombs away until the strait is cleared and all of Iran’s enriched uranium is seized. Notably, the administration has kept its military force in the region and has openly called the negotiations “fragile.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly sworn to the American public that he wouldn’t be bullied by the rogue regime and that it would never be able to obtain a nuclear weapon.
If he accepts anything less, then he will join the ranks of the feckless and fooled presidents that came before him, of which he has so sharply criticized.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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