Trump: 'Nothing off the table' in how we might respond to Iran missile test

You tend to think Iran's mad mullahs understand U.S. politics well enough to know that Trump is a very different animal from his predecessor. But do they really understand the lay of the land? Or do they understand it through the prism of radical Islam tinted by the filter of the U.S. news media? A provocative move like a ballistic missile test seems awfully foolhardy if you believe the caricature of Trump as an erratic lunatic who just might punch in the nuclear codes and laugh while doing it. Then again, the mullahs knew they could poke at Obama all they wanted without paying a price. Obama was so invested in his nuclear deal that it was impossible for him to ever publicly acknowledge Iran was acting up, lest he undercut the credibility of his own judgment in negotiating the deal and in trusting the Iranians to live up to their end of it.

Trump? Who knows what he'll do? Maybe a little missile test will serve as a useful test of the new president's limits and inclinations. Then again, maybe one provocation could prove to be one too many:

Congressional aides said Trump's administration had already begun looking at actions it could take without waiting for Congress. For example, Trump could impose sanctions authorized by laws passed but not put into effect by the Obama administration, which reached the agreement between Iran, the United States and other world powers. Corker said he had discussed Iran at the White House with Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, on Wednesday, just before Flynn issued a warning that Washington was putting Iran on notice for its "destabilizing activity." Corker said the Trump administration would take a stronger stance against Iran, although he did not expect its actions would bring an end to the international nuclear deal. "The administration, thankfully, is going to follow through on appropriately holding Iran accountable for the violations that are taking place," he told Reuters.

---

Highlighting the Trump administration's more aggressive tone against Iran, Trump sent messages on Twitter on Wednesday and Thursday targeting the Islamic republic and criticizing the nuclear pact. On Thursday, Trump told reporters "nothing is off the table" in dealing with Iran. Another senior Republican foreign policy voice, Senator Lindsey Graham, told CNN he thought Trump should go to Congress to request additional sanctions for a range of activities in the Middle East, including a ballistic missile test last weekend, which he said were not in U.S. interests.

If you haven't already picked this up and gotten used to it, you can expect this to be a Trump pattern when it comes to signalling his intentions on any matter. He won't really tell you what he will or won't do, but he'll leave open the most extreme possibility and sound just comfortable enough with it that you get the jitters wondering if he would actually do it. He wouldn't. Would he? Would he? Gulp. Trump talked during the campaign about tearing up the Iran nuclear deal on his first day in office, and he can. It is not a Senate-ratified treaty, so it has no force of U.S. law behind it. Where it's complicated is that five of our allies have ended economic sanctions in accordance with the deal, and we would only have so much effect if we tried to re-impose sanctions unilaterally.

---

Support Canada Free Press

---

But I wonder if Trump is finding it's more useful for him - at least for now - to keep the deal nominally in place and tweak the Iranians within the deal's parameters. Obama intentionally negotiated the enforcement mechanisms to make them so weak as to be virtually useless. What if Trump and company have come up with ways to push beyond the boundaries of those protocols, putting heat on Iran while insisting plausibly that they're still honoring the deal? That's the point, though, of declaring that all options are on the table. Obama would pre-emptively take the toughest actions off the table as an opening gesture to get his counterpart to the table. They might come to the table, but they rarely if ever offered anything of value in return. That's because they knew the U.S. was desperate for a deal and willing to give more. This is why we got nothing from Cuba on human rights, and got nothing meaningful from Iran on uranium enrichment. They didn't have to give those things, because Obama and Kerry would give them what they wanted without them. If Obama's behavior was consistently predictable, Trump is consistently unpredictable. Some fret about that because they think it brings about instability. But when the status quo is a crap sandwich, stability is of no serious value. And when you're Trump's counterpart, and you have no earthly idea just how he might change the status quo, who has the advantage? You or Trump? Now you're starting to understand why Trump operates the way he does. Dan's new novel, BACKSTOP, is a story of spiritual warfare and baseball. Download it from Amazon here