There have been many momentous weeks in the course of the presidency of Donald J Trump. The one just ended – as if consciously vying to outdo the year, even the three years, which preceded it – will ultimately prove just one more in this surreal political story. As Susan Glasser wrote in the New Yorker, “there is no language to fully capture the madness of all this.” And that was before what happened last week.

For the US and the rest of the world, this week will be remarkable – and remarkably uncertain, only to the extent that it will almost certainly be bad. In Washington, Congress reconvenes at a moment of almost unprecedented partisan division, focused on the future of the nation’s impeached president; while in the Iranian capital Tehran, the funeral was held of Qassem Suleimani, whose death in a drone strike early on Friday had been ordered by that same US president, precipitating the latest potential global crisis.

Since the attack, Iran has signaled its intent to retaliate for the killing of its top general and formally abandoned any limits imposed on it by the 2015 nuclear deal; the Iraqi parliament voted for the expulsion of the US military presence from that country (a move the US attempted to stop), and all US-led activities against ISIS have been suspended. Three Americans were killed in a terror attack on an airfield in Kenya, and there has already been a low-level cyber incursion against a US government website by purported Iranian hackers. With the region in turmoil, global markets for oil and gold have spiked and stock has risen in arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman and Raytheon.

Donald Trump himself, meanwhile, briefly emerged from the pro shop at his Mar-a-Lago resort to talk about how his action had been designed to “stop a war, not start a war” before warning that the US was planning to target 52 Iranian sites – one for each of the American hostages taken in 1979 – in the event of any Iranian response, doubling down on the statement during his flight back from Florida to the White House.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, announced that thousands of additional troops were being deployed to a region where many more thousands are already potentially in harm’s way. All this, of course, despite Trump’s previous statements about limiting the US presence in the Middle East – something that now plays into his general problem with credibility beyond his core supporters.

Peter Nicholas, writing in The Atlantic, says: “Trump’s handling of the crisis will test the reflexive loyalty Americans show in such fraught times. It’s not at all clear that, outside of Trump’s base, people will trust his motivations, especially when he’s under serious political pressure.”

While there were no such worries on Friday as the president took a victory lap with evangelical Christian supporters at a church rally in Florida, some conflicting explanations were emerging of the rationale behind the strike, and as a result there was growing skepticism as to the trustworthiness of any official statement in the immediate aftermath – a position hardly  helped by the transcript of the official State Department briefing on the event. Some senior military officials were even reported to have been “flabbergasted” that the president had chosen the most extreme measure from the range of options he had been given.

One of those responsible for presenting Trump with those options, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – now apparently the voice of the administration on the subject  – did the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows to reiterate the “self-defence” argument and stress the  “imminent” nature of a potential threat, characterizing any likely Iranian retaliation as “a little noise.”

In a complex diplomatic relationship, something as simple as a word can take things in a totally different direction at the drop of a hat, as Dexter Filkins wrote in a 2013 profile of Suleimani for the New Yorker, about then President Bush’s use of the “Axis of Evil” phrase.  This probably only makes it all the more believable, as the Washington Post reported, that part of the context for last week’s strike had been that the Iranian had posted memes on social media antagonizing the president.

Even with White House strategy seemingly being conducted exclusively by tweet these days (which of course raises the issue of how do we know when it is actually Trump tweeting, or heaven forbid, that his Twitter has been hacked?) the media landscape will be increasingly important as the Iran story unfolds in the coming days and weeks and the administration presses Americans to “rally round the flag.”

Trump’s traditional political cheerleaders at Fox News appear to have already reported for duty, with network stalwarts like Pete Hegseth and Lou Dobbs enthusiastically advocating for the president and his approach – the latter’s comments leading The Hill’s Niall Stanage to tweet: “Even now, I’m not sure we have fully grasped the impact of systematic, all-out propaganda like this.”

Interestingly, though, one of Fox’s big names, Tucker Carlson, showed an initial measure of dissent, asking: “Is Iran really the greatest threat we face? Who’s actually benefiting from this? Why are we continuing to ignore the decline of our own country in favor of jumping into another quagmire from which there is no obvious exit?”

At least Russian media seems convinced the move was to distract from Trump’s impeachment problem and in preparation for the election campaign. The Daily Beast reports that “Russian state television reporter Valentin Bogdanov of Rossiya-24 blamed Soleimani’s killing on Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic party, stating that “without being hounded by the impeachment, Trump would not have attempted to solve his domestic political problems at the expense of foreign policy.”

Talking of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker announced as lawmakers return to Capitol Hill that the House soon would vote on a War Powers Resolution designed to limit Trump’s ability to act militarily without congressional oversight. The president, meanwhile, clearly seems to be gearing up to claim that what’s happening overseas should render the ongoing impeachment process redundant.

As for the Democrats vying to take the president’s job, the next Democratic debate will be on Jan 14th and there’s a month to go until the first electoral contest, the Iowa caucuses, on Feb 3rd. So while the 2020 campaign is undoubtedly heating up, one thing we can probably all agree on is that’s way too early to be talking about 2024, as Politico tried doing this week. The reaction on Twitter probably tells you everything you need to know. But then, in a world where everything is about the clicks, maybe that was the whole point.

 

The world waits

It has become a cliché by now to say that in this presidency, anything can happen, but as the world waits for whatever comes next, the domestic backdrop to the Trump presidency, dominated by his impeachment and the accompanying political rancor has been replaced by one of overseas uncertainty and apparent diplomatic chaos.

Richard Haass, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the FT that, “if it comes to war, then we need to understand this will not be a traditional conflict fought by uniformed soldiers on clearly defined battlefields. The arena will be the entire region and possibly the world. It is unlikely to have either a clear start or a clear end.”

After the onslaught of the past three years, it has to be asked whether America’s politics and its civic institutions are strong enough to withstand another controversial and divisive war of choice. And on that, the jury is probably still out.

When Trump was impeached the week before Christmas – a day that seems so very long ago now – the AP’s Jonathan Lemire wrote that the process “rewrites the first line of his obituary.” 

We can only hope that the same does not turn out to be true for anyone the president has now placed in harm’s way.