What's in a tweet?
Trump is notoriously capable of changing his mind on many things, and even pretending he never thought differently before, regardless of any video evidence. He's notoriously capable of making apocalyptic threats that he may or may not deliver on. He's very good at constantly staying in the headlines, one way or another.
There are different ways the current situation vis-a-vis Iran vs. Israel and the US might develop, various potential "off-ramps," as the pundits say, regardless of the rhetoric from the various players.
But the potential for the world to see the third use of a nuclear weapon against an urban population seems higher now than ever in my lifetime.
The president might be the most unpredictable element of the whole equation, among the many elements giving any reading of the geopolitical tea leaves a low likelihood of accuracy. But with some of his most prominent advisors regarding what some are calling the Israel-Iran war being Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, it all gets much more worrying.
These men in particular positions of influence and power all have long histories of being obsessed with regime change in Iran. Much like a previous Trump cabinet member, John Bolton, who thankfully failed in convincing his boss to invade Iran, that time around. This time seems very different, with the war Israel recently initiated with Iran causing serious destruction in both countries.
That they are threatening to nuke Tehran is obvious. If they followed through with all their threats in the past, the planet would have been destroyed by now. Recommending the evacuation of Tehran, and sharing Huckabee's message about how Trump is in a position of decision-making unlike any faced by an American president since Truman in 1945, are both easy to interpret as threats to use nuclear weapons, whether we call them veiled threats or naked ones.
But there are also particular reasons to take note of the reference to Truman in 1945, when it's coming from a self-described Christian Zionist with an obsession with regime change in Iran, like Mike Huckabee.
At the time of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was said that the use of these most destructive of weapons -- where one bomb can completely destroy an entire city and kill everyone in it -- was necessary, because it saved hundreds of thousands of lives of American soldiers who would otherwise have died in the process of occupying Japan. Japan's virtually unconditional surrender was supposedly a direct consequence of the use of nuclear weapons.
This wasn't actually true -- the Japanese Empire had already been trying to surrender in the days prior to the bombing of Hiroshima. But the point is, in the popular imagination of much of America, and certainly in the popular imagination of Mike Huckabee, Pete Hegseth, and Netanyahu, the fiction about using nuclear weapons saving American lives is taken as a given, an historical truth -- among many other fake truths that form their worldview.
Another of those truths these people all believe is that the United States military fought with one hand tied behind its back in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, hampered by concerns about human rights and things like that.
It's hard to judge how much people in the public eye really believe any of the things they profess to believe. But if these men all really do adhere to the worldview that says using nuclear weapons on Japan saved American lives and the Vietnam War was lost because the US fought with one hand tied behind its back, and if they are also convinced that American "boots on the ground" in a war these days is to be avoided, then if they do have any kind of game plan with regards to Iran, what might it be?
Regardless of any evidence, these men profess to believe that Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon, and that Iran developing a nuclear weapon poses an existential threat to Israel, which is unacceptable to the United States. Depending on which day you catch them, they generally tout the line that the talks around nuclear issues failed, and Iran has to be stopped somehow. Sanctions haven't stopped them, so the military option seems to them like the best way to save Israel from this completely hypothetical future Iranian nuclear attack.
If they are indeed actually convinced of the things they profess to believe, then they need to overthrow the Iranian government. They've wanted to do this for decades, and now Israel has helpfully started the process for them.
They don't want to put American boots on the ground, but they want to overthrow the Iranian government. In their mythological reality, however, air power alone could perhaps cause an otherwise proud nation to surrender unconditionally, if the bombs used are big enough. According to their worldview, as long as the war is fought without concern for human rights or public opinion, victory is possible.
Their take on history informs us that according to precedent, if they nuke Tehran, Iran will surrender unconditionally the way Japan did, and the Iranian government can become a docile puppet government afterwards, run by the Shah's grandson. Their understanding of the past tells us that even though the US dropped far more bombs on Vietnam as well as on Iraq than all sides of World War 2 combined, these wars didn't go well because insufficient force was used.
Whatever happens next, we can be sure that Trump will be getting very little good advice from his closest advisors, and a lot of bad advice.
We can also be sure that all of the dramatic news out of Iran and Israel will cause the deaths of more than two million starving Palestinians in Gaza to occur unnoticed.
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