Bret Stephens, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, had a commentary, “The Other Bluffer”, in which he discussed President Obama’s and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s statements, respectively, on Syria and Iran; the former regarding a “red line” concerning the use of poison gas and the latter being Iran’s intention to make its own nuclear weapons.
The bluff is a game nations have been playing since there were nations. They seldom work against a nation with aggressive, bad intentions.
What is interesting about this is that dictators have been known to write books about those intentions. Adolf Hitler did with his book, Mein Kampf, in which he made clear what he would do, starting with tearing up the Versailles Treaty and later killing all of Germany’s and Europe’s Jews, though not necessarily in those words. Hitler first invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and when the great powers did nothing, he followed up with an invasion of Poland in September of that year. Perhaps he thought he could gobble up all of Europe, but what ensued was World War II.
In more recent times, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein thought he could pull off a bluff regarding weapons of mass destruction, perhaps assuming that no one would invade for fear of them. He had used poison gas against Iran during a long war and killed several thousand in an Iraqi city without more than expressions of international outrage, but the invasion of Kuwait was a serious mistake. George H.W. Bush’s decision to put an end to it. After 9/11, George W. Bush’s decision to invade deposed Saddam.