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I'm inclining towards TACO. Trump is at heart a businessman, why would he want to blow up all this energy infrastructure? He wants to somehow secure the oil, not wreck it. He's been badly misinformed by his 'advisers' but a man who constantly times announcements to game the markets should be relied upon to try and sustain markets.
Also, why are we treating random proclamations on Truth Social like they mean anything? He's declared victory several times, he's made vague nuclear threats, he's just making up nonsense.
But the whole thing has been one unforced error after another, so who can say what will happen?
It sounds like a negotiating tactic to put someone under pressure via a deadline.
I'm sure he wrote something similar in 'Art of the Deal'. Not sure if you can transfer the intended effect over a social media post in the context of a deadly civilizational conflict.
Trump wrote a book on the tactic and has spent 50 years living by the motto of "Make an insane starting demand and then allow them to talk you back to merely what you originally wanted". Unfortunately, that doesn't scratch the Orange man dumb dumb poopy head itch for people who can't model other minds.
Hence, the idiotic TACO meme.
Well he just chickened out, didn't he? He said 'oh we're having productive discussions, deadline is pushed back 5 days' while Iran denies any such negotiations and sticks to their position.
Orange man does seem to be dumb. He's been signalling weakness the whole time with these bizarre market-manipulation/weekend proclamations. Inconstancy and incoherence weakens your position in war of choice where Iran's strategy is to damage the world economy and outlast the enemy.
Perhaps Iran has activated a mosaic diplomatic as well as a mosaic defense strategy.
(Link)
If the straits actually open, then logically the Iranians have chickened out. If Trump says he'll bomb power plants unless the straits are opened and then doesn't, doesn't it follow that he chickened out?
Doesn't seem like much cause for hope, the Israelis will presumably try their hardest to wreck the whole thing. Negotiations at this point seem to be both sides issuing maximalist demands at eachother.
Sure, but if he wanted Iran to be a bit more flexible in negotiations and he threatened to blow up their power plants and they were a bit more flexible in negotiations, doesn't it follow that Iconochasm is correct? You can label his behavior whatever you want - Iconochasm is suggesting there's a pattern to it, and you are suggesting that Trump is dumb. A lot of this stuff is pretty opaque to me because it's fundamentally nonpublic (I don't really trust either Iran or Trump to honestly characterize their negotiations), so it can be hard to tell what's correct.
But I do think that Iconochasm is correct that opening with insane bargaining demands can be a smart bargaining position. I like his model of Trump's behavior because I think it's more interesting than the TACO meme, although they both offer predictive insight/an observation of repeated patterns. If Trump actually wrote 50 years ago "open by making insane demands and letting them twist your arm into giving you what you want" (I haven't read the Art of the Deal, so I guess I will have to take his word for it?) then that seems like decent evidence that explains his pattern of behavior. Note that this does not mean that Trump Always Wins, it just suggests that Trump does have a strategy. (Having a strategy does not mean that your strategy is always or even sometimes good.)
I also think "Trump is dumb" by itself is...kinda boring (we have ample evidence he's not; he's creamed other smart people in a presidential debate, for instance) and yields little insight, unless it's coupled with an explanation that explains why we should update our priors (e.g. "Trump is suffering from TIAs that impair his judgment.")
Maybe the Iranians read Art of the Deal too!
Trump can be highly charismatic and adept at manipulating the media without being strategically intelligent as a President, without being a wise leader, without knowing or caring about details, without being able to gauge the competence of advisers and officials, without mastering the institutions he nominally runs.
I think people have an excessively Manichean view of intelligence. It's not that smart people are always better leaders. You can have an intelligent and hard working man fully committed to nation-wrecking ideologies who devotes his intellect to gaslight people to further his wrecking of the country... A stupid leader could run rings around him. Trump has done this at times.
But while you don't have to be smart to do a good job it certainly helps. Intelligence and good judgement is vital for making critical decisions and achieving good outcomes.
Would an intelligent president launch a shambolic tariff campaign against US allies, allies who at times are needed to provide the capital goods for American reindustrialization? Or even start this war that all the other presidents have shied away from? Even at the heights of US power in the 2000s they were unwilling to attack Iran for reasons that the administration is now discovering.
Or back in 2020, if Trump was smart he would've discovered or produced evidence of vote-rigging, not been found trying to produce evidence of vote-rigging.
If Trump were smart he'd organize a clear justification for the war, not have different officials give different adhoc explanations. Certainly not have Rubio out there saying that it was because Israel was about to attack, which may well be true but shouldn't be admitted. He'd explain what the goal is and how the campaign will achieve it. The campaign would be planned out in advance so the necessary forces were there, not bringing in Marines belatedly. He'd be consistent and coherent, not idly proposing that the US and the Ayatollah jointly control the straits of Hormuz, threatening to blow up power plants, walking back threats, saying the war is simultaneously over and needs to continue.
It's dumb. The approach we're observing is a show of weakness, it gives the Iranians hope that if they cause enough pain Trump will chicken out. TACO is just an observation of this inconstancy, it's one of many obvious flaws in the pattern Trump has shown - sensitivity to markets. Even if Trump had been consistent, without the intelligence to formulate good strategies they still wouldn't work. Tariffs alone cannot industrialize America, you'd need judicious and well-executed industrial policy. Air war with Iran isn't going to produce regime change and will have huge costs, this should've been known at the start but wasn't. He needed a rigorous understanding of what can and cannot be done with various forces, considering the balance of power.
I agree that Trump has a strategy but it's dumb, based on false premises.
I do agree with all of this, but this is a much more subtle and interesting observation than "Trump dumb."
Haven't most US presidents in recent history, going back at least to Clinton, slapped tariffs on EU countries?
I think the reality is a bit more nuanced than that; the US attacked Iran in the 1980s (apparently...not at the height of their powers?) and during the 2000s the US avoided a direct attack, but acted against Iran via covert means and on one occasion raided an Iranian consulate.
Anyway, I've been critical of the administration's messaging on here, and pointed out failure modes of pursuing this military course of action. I'm not convinced it's the best! It could be really bad! There are a lot of questions I have and the answers to them are fundamentally non-public, so I have to wait and see.
But if you go through my recent comments, you'll see me defending things the Iranians have done as being intelligent - even though the Iranian government does stuff like "get caught with evidence of uranium enrichment and suggest that they've been framed" (which, idk, I suppose is not impossible).
That's in part because I don't think modeling people (particularly people with more resources and information than you) as dumb is a good first course of action. I tend to think it's overly reductive, unless there's very specific reasons to think that is what is at play. This isn't to say I think it's wrong to be critical but I think those are two different things.
See, "asking for insane things up front is a repeated Trump strategy, but one that doesn't pay off" is a very interesting theory, and I would AAQC a top-level post that made that case persuasively through data and/or comparative successes by other US presidents.
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