Trump turned the traditional celebration of Independence Day in Washington, DC, into a spectacle starring himself. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the evening of July 4, 2019—where more than half a century earlier Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered one of the most influential speeches in American history—Trump gave a speech recounting the heroism of the five branches of the American military from the Revolutionary era to the post-9/11 wars. It was a roll call of America’s greatest military hits: George Washington’s Continental Army, American “flyboys” during World War I, the Battle of Midway, the marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, and the SEALs who killed bin Laden.
Confounding his critics, who feared that Trump would turn his July 4 speech into a MAGA rally, the president didn’t attack the news media, Democrats, the Mueller “witch hunt,” or any other of his familiar targets. Nor did Trump trumpet his own achievements. Instead, Trump played the role of the nonpartisan, patriotic commander in chief advancing what was for him a rare message of national unity when he declared, “As we gather this evening in the joy of freedom, we remember that we all share a truly extraordinary heritage. Together, we are part of one of the greatest stories ever told—the story of America.”
Trump had a schoolboy fascination with military hardware, and he reveled in the ceremonial aspects of being the commander in chief. Trump was deeply impressed by the French display of military might that he had seen at the Bastille Day celebration in Paris two years earlier when he was visiting the French president Emmanuel Macron. Macron had made Trump the guest of honor at the celebration that commemorated the beginning of the French Revolution. Trump watched as dozens of French tanks rolled by and Mirage fighter jets roared overhead. Trump loved the display, telling aides afterward that it was “awesome” and that they should mount a similar parade back in Washington. Trump said such a parade could “show off our military and help to educate Americans about it.” Trump told his advisers, “We can’t be outshone by the French.”
Initially, Trump planned a major military parade for Veterans Day, November 11, 2018, in Washington, DC, but the Pentagon quietly killed the plan, partly because of concerns about costs, which were estimated to be up to $50 million.
Months later Trump ordered the Pentagon to put on a spectacular show for his July 4 speech, and this time the generals came through. As a light rain fell on Independence Day, Trump, standing behind a bulletproof screen on the Lincoln Memorial, narrated a flyby of some of the most advanced aircraft in the air force, saying, “You will soon see beautiful brand new F-22 Raptors” and “one magnificent B-2 stealth bomber.” Trump ended his speech by introducing a show by the navy’s “famous, incredible, talented” Blue Angels flight team.
Beyond his love of the showmanship of his role as commander in chief, how has Trump performed substantively in his duties, as the commander of the US military, to keep Americans safe? One of the few institutions that Trump didn’t attack as president was the military. Instead, Trump presided over substantial increases in defense spending, targeting $750 billion for fiscal 2020, while Obama’s defense budgets were in the $600 billion range. Trump may have soured on the generals who worked for him, but his romance with the military writ large was one of the constants of his presidency.
Once you got past their rhetorically quite different styles, there was an important commonality between Presidents Obama and Trump as commanders in chief. Both presidents saw themselves as elected to get the United States out of the seemingly endless, expensive post-9/11 wars. The Trump administration continued the Obama doctrine of avoiding big, conventional wars and kept in place much of the “small footprint” counterterrorism architecture that Obama had developed, including his overall approach to the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and his reliance on special operations forces and drones to hunt and kill jihadist terrorists. In Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, Trump continued the drone campaigns that were a signature of Obama’s administration.
Trump, like Obama, did not send any additional prisoners to Guantanamo, instead relying on federal courts to try alleged terrorists, nor did he push for the coercive interrogations of suspected terrorists to resume despite comments he had made on the campaign trail that he was in favor of torture for terrorists.
Trump could change his mind about any given issue, which made it hard for the United States to have a coherent America First strategy, as demonstrated by his abrupt decisions to pull US forces out of both Afghanistan and Syria. Trump then changed his mind again on Syria, opting to leave the residual force there, and he also reversed himself on Afghanistan when he scrapped the talks with the Taliban. Trump whipsawed between offering talks with the Iranian regime and authorizing a military strike against Iranian military targets, which he then called off. Trump went from threatening North Korea with “fire and fury” to declaring his “love” for Kim within the space of a little over a year.
Trump avoided making major unforced foreign policy errors, such as George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq, a war of choice that helped create Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which later evolved into ISIS and which also helped to spread sectarianism around the Middle East. Trump also avoided getting sucked into a larger war in Syria and avoided a military confrontation with North Korea.
When it came to the actual use of force, Commander in Chief Trump was rather cautious about sending more US troops to Afghanistan in 2017, doing so only with great hesitancy. Trump also surprised his advisers by announcing a total pullout from Syria at the end of 2018 after much of ISIS was defeated. The following year, Trump canceled a military operation against the Iranians, and he also avoided making any moves that might provoke a conflict with the regime of Kim Jong Un.
It’s also true that Trump didn’t score any major foreign policy triumphs, such as expelling Saddam from Kuwait (George H. W. Bush); engineering a peaceful end to the Cold War (Reagan and George H. W. Bush); or authorizing the raid that killed bin Laden (Obama).
That said, Trump did have some foreign policy wins. During 2017, Trump oversaw an effective campaign against ISIS; he made a long-term military commitment to Afghanistan, where the Taliban had been steadily seizing territory; he drew a clear “red line” when he responded robustly to Assad’s use of nerve agents in Syria by launching cruise missile attacks against Syrian military targets; and he made his first overseas trip as president to Saudi Arabia, where he spoke to the leaders of more than fifty Muslim countries, a trip that was generally seen as a success because of his effective outreach to Arab states.
In 2018, Trump could point to fewer foreign policy wins. Trump once again responded robustly to the Assad regime’s repeated use of chemical weapons, but by moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Trump torpedoed any possibility of the United States brokering a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. Trump feuded publicly with major Western allies at summits in Brussels and Quebec while kowtowing to Russian president Vladimir Putin at a subsequent summit in Helsinki. Trump then defended the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman after his minions had murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a murder that underlined both the crown prince’s impetuousness and the Trump administration’s wishful thinking about him.
And in 2019, there were even fewer foreign policy wins. By the end of 2018, the “axis of adults”—Cohn, Kelly, Mattis, McMaster, and Tillerson—had all departed, so the world got to see Trump increasingly unplugged. Meetings between Trump and Kim Jong Un in Hanoi and at the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea yielded no tangible results. Meanwhile, the newly imposed sanctions on the Iranians certainly began to bite, but Iran also restarted a modest uranium enrichment program.
Also, in February 2020, the Trump administration signed an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan, in exchange for which the Taliban would break ties with al-Qaeda and negotiate a peace settlement with the Afghan government. The Taliban failed to observe those conditions, yet Trump tweeted that all US troops would leave Afghanistan by Christmas 2020. That benchmark came and went, and Trump left 2,500 troops in the country. It was left to Trump’s successor, President Joe Biden, to end America’s longest war.
Trump’s shadow secretary of state, Jared Kushner, had a sole diplomatic achievement, grandiosely termed the “Abraham Accords,” which were signed at the White House on September 15, 2020, and normalized relations between Israel and two Arab monarchies, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The fantasy of the accords was that the Palestinians would forget about their legitimate grievances with Israel because of large-scale investments that Kushner would help secure for them, while the Arab states would put pressure on the Palestinians to make peace with the Israelis. The Arab nations would then have more leverage on Israel to moderate its stance on the Palestinian issue. In the end, none of this happened, which was underlined by the May 2021 conflict in Gaza where 12 Israelis died and more than 240 Palestinians were killed.
Trump’s warm embrace of Kim, MBS, and Putin underlined how Trump favored dictators over longtime democratic allies such as Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, all of whose leaders he dissed at one point or another. It also emphasized how he tended to undermine the NATO alliance, the most successful alliance the United States had entered into since World War II as it helped to contribute to the peaceful implosion of the Soviet Union. And despite all of Trump’s badgering and bluster, when he came into office only six of the twenty-nine NATO countries were spending the 2 percent of their GDP on defense that they had all agreed to spend by 2024. By the fall of 2019, only one more country had reached that target, Latvia.
Historians are likely to find that Trump got one really big foreign policy issue at least in part right, which was China. While the US was distracted by its post-9/11 wars, China made great advances economically and militarily. China did so, in part, by stealing American secrets through cyber espionage, such as the theft of the plans for the most advanced US fighter jet, the F-35, which was almost identical to China’s J-31 stealth fighter. China also engaged in large-scale intellectual property theft through “forced transfer,” in which American companies doing business in China had to partner with Chinese companies—which were really extensions of the Chinese government—and then had to transfer their intellectual property and processes to those Chinese companies. Intellectual property theft by the Chinese was estimated to cost the US economy between $200 billion to $600 billion annually.[*]
A few days after taking office, Trump made a rash decision to pull the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was a trade deal between a dozen Pacific countries, including the United States, that was, in part, designed to contain the rise of China. During the campaign, Trump had misunderstood what the TPP actually did, claiming, “It’s a deal that was designed for China to come in, as they always do, through the back door and totally take advantage of everyone.” In fact, China was not part of the deal and, if anything, the deal disadvantaged the Chinese. Peremptorily pulling out of the TPP seemed more like an effort to kill a deal that was negotiated by Obama rather than because any serious consideration was given to what the partnership aimed to accomplish in terms of containing the Chinese.
It was striking, then, that both the national security strategy review overseen by National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and the defense strategy review overseen by Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis prioritized “great power” competition with China and Russia over the long-running wars with jihadist militants. And clearly, given the relatively small size of the Russian economy, it was China—the world’s second largest economy—rather than Russia that posed the greatest potential threat to American interests.
The national security strategy called out China in a number of areas, accusing the Chinese of stealing US intellectual property every year valued at “hundreds of billions of dollars,” and it pointed out that China was “building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, after our own,” including a “diversifying” nuclear arsenal.
Some in the Trump administration even saw the emerging contest with China in stark “Clash of Civilizations” terms. Speaking at a conference in Washington in 2018, Kiron Skinner, the head of policy planning at the State Department, said that the conflict was “a fight with a different civilization and a different ideology.” Skinner added that this was “the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”
As a trade war between the United States and China intensified in September 2018, Trump slapped tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods. Trump told advisers that he was imposing these costs on the Chinese economy because the Chinese military budget was around $200 billion. For Trump, the military aspirations of the Chinese could be combated with higher tariffs, which he seemed to believe were somehow paid by the Chinese government rather than by American companies and consumers.
A year later Trump imposed additional tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese exports to the United States. This move spooked the markets, and it wasn’t clear if the Chinese would respond by significantly opening up to American imports, in particular agricultural products, as Trump was demanding. Trump’s brinkmanship with the Chinese also ran the real risk of precipitating a global economic slowdown or even a recession. The Trump administration then announced that the new tariffs would only be applied just before Christmas 2019, a tacit admission that the tariffs penalized Americans, who ended up paying higher prices for Chinese goods such as cell phones, computers, games, and toys.
Trump seemed to have skipped his Trade 101 class when he attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, as he had a mercantilist conception of trade where there could only be “winners” and “losers,” which was contrary to the views of almost every modern economist, who believed that free trade tended to lift all economic boats in the long term. This was why the Republicans were overwhelmingly the party of free trade until Trump came along.
This mercantilism meshed with Trump’s overall conception of life, which he cast in bleak nineteenth-century social Darwinian terms as a zero sum competition of winners and losers and the survival of the fittest. In fact, as our understanding of evolution has deepened, we know that society functions not because of some Darwinian struggle but because of “reciprocal altruism”—I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine—a concept that Trump didn’t seem to understand.
Identifying China as a strategic rival of the United States was an important conceptual shift for the United States, because previous administrations had emphasized engagement with the Chinese, believing that as they started to play by the rules of the international system and liberalized their economy they would prosper and then they would liberalize their authoritarian form of governance. That, of course, didn’t happen. The Trump administration demanded fair and reciprocal trade and economic practices from the Chinese, but as of the fall of 2019 that effort seemed to have stalled.
Trump presided over a far larger number of “freedom of navigation” exercises in the South China Sea, which was critical to global trade because at least $3 trillion of goods transited it every year. China was trying to turn the vast South China Sea into a Chinese lake by building a string of artificial, militarized islands across it, which was part of China’s “winning without fighting” strategy that avoided direct conflict with the United States yet allowed the Chinese to keep expanding their spheres of influence. During Obama’s two terms in office, there were only four freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea. By the summer of 2019, Trump had presided over eleven such exercises.
Trump also pressed for the creation of a new Space Force that would take charge of US military operations in space in part because China was moving aggressively to militarize its operations in space, such as developing missiles capable of taking out American satellites critical to so many of the Pentagon’s communications and operations.
If Trump got the measure of China largely right, historians will not treat Trump kindly on the other great issue of the twenty-first century: climate change. For years, the Pentagon had considered climate change an important national security issue that would influence the kind of conflicts that the United States might fight and also the disposition of American bases and forces around the world. Yet, on June 1, 2017, Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement that was ratified by 185 countries and aimed to reduce the carbon emissions that contributed to climate change. Trump justified leaving the agreement by saying, “I was elected by voters of Pittsburgh, not Paris. I promised I would exit or renegotiate any deal which fails to serve US interests.”
Trump seemed to have doubts that climate change was even happening. It was one thing to reject the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change was caused by human activity, but it took a particular kind of determined Know Nothingism for Trump to ignore the fact that the earth was warming significantly. Trump had denied this basic truth in 2012, describing climate change as an “expensive hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese, tweeting that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Six years later when he was president, Trump told 60 Minutes confusingly, “I’m not denying climate change. But it could very well go back. You know, we’re talking about over . . . millions of years.”
A year later, Trump seemed to conflate routine shifts in the weather with systematic climate change when he tweeted, “Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” In July 2019, Trump mystifyingly opined in an interview, “I believe that there is a change in weather and I think it changes both ways.”
Trump’s fuzziness about whether climate change was even happening had policy repercussions that went beyond leaving the Paris climate agreement. Rising sea levels caused by climate change meant that two places close to Trump’s heart, Manhattan and the Atlantic coast of southern Florida, would face serious problems by 2060. By then, a third of Lower Manhattan would be at risk from storm surges, while sea levels around Palm Beach would rise by two feet. Trump could have taken the position that while he didn’t believe the science that climate change was caused by human activity, he did believe climate change was a real problem and as a result he was going to instigate major infrastructure projects to mitigate its consequences in places such as Manhattan and southern Florida. That didn’t happen. Instead, Trump fiddled while the world burned.
Trump spent much of his presidency undermining the institutions that undergird and defend American democracy. It used to be leftists who tended to decry the CIA, the FBI, and Department of Justice. Now it was Trump and his supporters. A key element of the United States’ unwritten constitution has been that the president wouldn’t attack key organs of his own government. That notion now seems quaint. A veteran CIA official lamented, “Of all the institutions that have been attacked, it has been the jugulars of the CIA and the FBI that Trump has slashed at the most and the most frequently. The two organizations that are charged with speaking truth to power and identifying and punishing the ‘liars,’ no matter where the truth comes from or its consequences.”
Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community intensified in August 2019 when he accepted the resignation of Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence. Coats’s departure was utterly predictable because he had performed his job, which was to tell the truth. Unfortunately, his boss didn’t like the truths he was telling. On some of the key national security issues of the Trump administration—Iran, North Korea, and Russia—the director of national intelligence and the president fundamentally disagreed about the facts.
Trump’s animus against Coats began in earnest when he testified about the findings of the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community to the Senate Intelligence Committee on January 29, 2019. The assessment generally attracted scant political controversy because it was an annual account of the threats that the United States faced. The 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment would be different. Coats testified that North Korea was unlikely “to completely give up its nuclear weapons.” Experts on North Korea almost universally shared the view that it was quite doubtful that Kim Jong Un would give up all his nukes, yet Trump was angered by the coverage of Coats’s testimony, which undercut his claims that North Korea no longer posed a nuclear threat.
Coats also testified that the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement was working: “We continue to assess that Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities we judge necessary to produce a nuclear device.” If that was the case, why was Trump constantly claiming that Iran was a big threat and the Iran nuclear agreement was a terrible deal?
The morning after Coats’s testimony, Trump let loose a tweet storm, writing, “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!” The president also tweeted, “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!”
All this came around six months after Coats had publicly rebuked Trump when the president had met with Putin in Helsinki and sided with the Russian president over his own intelligence agencies’ findings about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Trump nominated an obscure Texas Republican to replace Coats, Representative John Ratcliffe, whose principal qualification for the job appeared to be his unquestioning fealty to Trump. Ratcliffe, a three-term House member and former US attorney, was previously the mayor of Heath, Texas, population just under nine thousand. By contrast, Coats had served in the Senate and House for two and a half decades and also was US ambassador to Germany for four years.
When he put forward Ratcliffe, Trump claimed, “I think we need somebody like that in there. We need somebody strong that can rein it in. Because, as I think you’ve all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok. They have run amok.”
Ratcliffe had publicly made inflated claims about his role in prosecuting terrorism cases. That, together with his scant qualifications to oversee the intelligence community, ensured that his nomination was quickly withdrawn.
When Coats was a senator, he served with another senator who famously observed that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Trump seemed to want to reverse Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s well-known dictum so it would now be “I’m entitled to my own facts, which will match my opinions.”
Trump’s desire to adjust the facts so they would fit his opinions could also be seen in his treatment of the press, which he routinely referred to as fake news and enemies of the people, except for those on Fox News who were his slavish supporters or close advisers. It was almost as if the greenroom at Fox News had taken over the West Wing. Three of Trump’s most influential advisers—Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Lou Dobbs—were anchors on Fox. A key Trump military adviser, retired general Jack Keane, was a Fox analyst. Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton; deputy national security adviser, K. T. McFarland; communications directors, Bill Shine and Mercedes Schlapp; deputy to the chief strategist, Sebastian Gorka; and State Department spokespersons, Heather Nauert and Morgan Ortagus were all former Fox News executives, anchors, or talking heads.
There was simply no precedent in American history for this large-scale integration of a media institution and a presidential administration. It was often hard to discern if it was Fox News that was driving the national security agenda of the White House, or if it was the White House that was driving the agenda of Fox News. Often it was both. Tucker Carlson helped to talk Trump out of the Iran strike that was slated for the evening of June 20, 2019. The following week, Carlson went on Trump’s trip to the Demilitarized Zone between North Korea and South Korea and publicly defended the president’s embrace of the despotic Kim by saying, “You’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country. It means killing people. Not on the scale the North Koreans do, but a lot of countries commit atrocities, including a number that we are closely allied with.”
Jack Keane talked Trump out of pulling all US troops from Syria in early 2019, and he also defended Trump’s diplomacy with Kim on Fox News following the president’s trip to the DMZ.
Trump was a bully who treated even the most senior members of his cabinet with contempt. Trump publicly said that departed secretary of state Rex Tillerson was “as dumb as a rock.” After Mattis resigned, Trump said, “What’s he done for me? How has he done in Afghanistan? Not too good. As you know, President Obama fired him, and essentially so did I.” And Trump so berated Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in front of his cabinet in May 2018 about the flow of migrants crossing the southern border that she considered resigning—and ultimately she did a year later.
Trump also played on America’s racial divisions, promoted baseless conspiracy theories, lied or made false claims thousands of times when he was president, and made most matters of state about himself. A classic example of this was when Trump floated the idea in August 2019 that he was interested in buying the massive and strategic island of Greenland, which is an autonomous region of Denmark. When the Danish prime minister called the offer “absurd,” Trump promptly canceled a long-planned trip to Denmark. This was the action of a five-year-old boy who didn’t get a toy he wanted.
Was Trump an outlier or a harbinger? One way to answer that question is to do the thought experiment about what the world would have looked like if Hillary Clinton had won the American presidential election. The United States would be abiding by the Iran nuclear deal along with its key European allies. America’s NATO partners would not feel insulted when they dealt with the president, and Vladimir Putin would not be embraced. Trump certainly brought his own special brand of America First policies that wouldn’t necessarily be the policies of another president.
That said, roughly half of American voters voted for Trump, and his America Firstism appealed to many of those hurt by the 2008 financial crash who felt that “the elites,” whether Democrats or Republicans, didn’t operate in their interests. Many Trump voters also felt that recent immigrants were “jumping the queue” and were “line cutters” grabbing an unfair share of the economic pie. This was a common view across much of the West, and as a result ultranationalist, nativist parties moved from the margins to become central political players in much of Europe. Some politicians in Western countries, including the United States, would continue to try to unmoor themselves from “the international order,” whether through Brexit-like maneuvers or through anti-immigrant nativism. Polls also routinely showed that a solid bipartisan majority of Americans wanted the United States to play a smaller role in the world. Their views were unlikely to change after Trump had left office.
Trump ended his July 4 speech with a message of national unity, saying, “We all share the same heroes, the same home, the same heart, and we are all made by the same Almighty God.”
Dr. King had declared in exactly the same spot where Trump gave his Independence Day speech, “And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.”
Trump mimicked King, saying, “And from the banks of the Chesapeake to the cliffs of California, from the humming shores of the Great Lakes to the sand dunes of the Carolinas, from the fields of the heartland to the everglades of Florida, the spirit of American independence will never fade, never fail, but will reign forever and ever and ever.”
It was, of course, always a perennial question if Trump could really ever summon the better angels of his nature and act as a commander in chief who was a uniter rather than a divider. On July 4, 2019, he showed a glimpse of that possibility.
Ten days later, no such glimpse was in evidence when Trump tweeted of four progressive Democratic congresswomen of color known as “the Squad,” “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
Three of the four representatives were born in the United States, so it was hard to figure out which countries they could “go back” to. The tweet was widely condemned as racist, yet only four Republicans supported a House vote abjuring it. The party of Lincoln was now the party of Trump. The 2020 election would be fought by a president who continued to use the white identity politics that had launched his political career. This was a commander in chief who would not represent all Americans, only those who supported him.
During his presidential campaign, Trump had advanced two seemingly contradictory big ideas about the kind of commander in chief he would be. He had called for a greatly expanded military and an unconstrained war against terrorists. At the same time, he had also railed against America’s seemingly endless wars in the Middle East. Two and a half years into his term, Trump had largely achieved his goals: the Pentagon was considerably better resourced while ISIS was largely defeated. At the same time, Trump was also drawing down from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
Now the generals who had guided his national security policies were all long gone from his administration. They were troubled by the cavalier way in which Trump treated institutions such as NATO that were sacred to them, as well as by his routine denigrations of US allies and his fellow Americans. What remained was Trump himself, a veteran only of the New York Military Academy, a military-style boarding school, who thrilled to the ceremonial aspects of being commander in chief but was generally reluctant to send American forces into harm’s way. What wasn’t clear was how the mercurial president might react to a genuine crisis. That test came on September 14, 2019, when a barrage of missiles and drones targeted two of the world’s most important oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, knocking out about half of the country’s oil capacity and immediately spiking oil prices almost 15 percent. The Trump administration blamed Iran for the attacks, as did the Saudis, which raised the specter of a war between them.
Three months earlier Trump had ordered up the military strikes against Iran and then called them off at the last minute. Trump then said that he would sit down with the Iranian leadership without preconditions. Trump’s posturing back and forth between aggression and conciliation might have worked for a Manhattan real estate deal, but the stakes are much higher when you are dealing with the complex calculations of a regional power such as Iran, which has long regarded the US as a foe.
A day after the attacks in Saudi Arabia, President Trump tweeted that the United States was “locked and loaded depending on verification” of who was behind the attacks. The Trump administration blamed Iran for the attacks, which posed a quandary for Trump: Despite his close alliance with MBS, he didn’t want to get embroiled in another war in the Middle East. In the end, Trump chose restraint.
Following the killing of a US contractor in Iraq in December 2019, likely by an Iran-backed Shia militia, Trump showed no such restraint. He authorized the killing of Qasem Soleimani, who ran Iran’s military operations in the Middle East. Soleimani was killed by missiles hitting his vehicle near Baghdad’s airport on January 3, 2020. The teenager who had reveled in his time at a military-style boarding school in New York was now finally his own general.