Opinion
“It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you.”
That’s the opening of the classic O. Henry short story The Ransom of Red Chief.
The tale, written in 1907, is the ultimate parable about the perils of trying to seize and control a troublemaker so devious, so maniacal, so awful that the captors become the captives.
The story is about two small-time crooks who think they can make some easy money by kidnapping a 10-year-old boy, the son of an affluent landowner in a sleepy Alabama town.
They underestimate badly. When they go to abduct the red-haired, freckle-faced boy, he is throwing rocks at a kitten and hurls a brick at one of his kidnappers.
“Red Chief, the terror of the plains,” as the boy calls himself, runs his captors ragged. He relishes tormenting the men and doesn’t want to go home. In the end, they have to drop their demand for a $2000 ransom, pay the boy’s father $250 to take the demonic child off their hands and run for the hills.
US President Donald Trump went along with Bibi Netanyahu’s Panglossian case for slamming Iran. It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you.
After nearly two months of tangling with the demonic Iranian leadership and its allies, Trump looks desperate to run for the hills. He constantly says he has defeated the mullahs and that he has “obliterated” their military power, and yet Iran refuses to be subdued.
Trump says there’s a new regime that’s easier to deal with, but actually, it’s the same regime only worse — run by hardened, fanatical generals. Iran has not turned over its enriched uranium, and negotiations are touch and go. The Strait of Hormuz, which Trump keeps saying is open, is closed. Trump is blockading the Iranian blockade.
“Iran has proven to be far more resilient and resourceful than he was prepared for,” Richard Haass, a foreign policy adviser for former president George W. Bush, wrote in his newsletter, Home & Away. “Almost all the administration’s assumptions have been proven wrong.”
Aside from the weakening of Iran’s conventional military capability, Haass said, “virtually every other metric shows the United States, the region and the world to be worse off”.
The Iranians are tormenting Trump — even as they out-troll the master troller, viciously mocking the president as a “L.O.S.E.R.” and as a Bibi puppet who wants to distract from the Epstein files.
One viral Iranian rap addressing Trump calls the conflict “a trap you couldn’t see. Welcome to the graveyard of your vanity”.
Conceding that Iran is winning the meme war, the Daily Show correspondent Ronny Chieng keened about Trump, “What’s the point of electing a cyberbully if he sucks at cyberbullying?”
Now that Iran has flexed power in the strait, Trump has to bargain with it to get back to where things were before.
He is pinioned in a weird nook and cranny of the planet that seems almost medieval, sitting next to a backward, villainous theocracy. And yet ships carrying over 20 per cent of the world’s oil must traverse the narrow passage to get to the Arabian Sea.
Trump, who grew overconfident after his adventurism in Venezuela, is being driven to distraction.
He got so rattled when the two US airmen were shot down, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey reported in The Wall Street Journal, that he “screamed at aides for hours”. Last month, Trump talked about the danger of becoming another Jimmy Carter, spiralling amid the hostages and a failed rescue with eight helicopters lost.
One of my first big stories as a reporter was covering those hostage families for a year and then going to West Point to see the hostages come home in 1981. So I had a front-row seat to the Iranians’ jujitsu tactics, using 52 Americans in the US embassy to gain leverage over Carter’s presidency, reputation and re-election.
Trump tried to scare the Iranians with a profane post at Easter and a wild threat to destroy their civilisation. But Iran is not Afghanistan or Iraq. The Iranian mullahs and generals are the terrors of the strait.
Trump has forsaken the one good Middle East policy he had: avoiding the mirage of quick wins while getting sucked once more into “blood and sand”, as he dismissively called it during his first term.
When he was running in 2016, Trump deemed the invasion of Iraq “a big, fat mistake” that destabilised the Middle East and cost too much, in money and lives.
But, seduced by the detestable Bibi, he got suckered into the blood and sand. Unlike W., who had the good grace to trump up a case for war, Trump let Bibi lead him by the nose into this one, blowing off Congress, US allies and many furious MAGA acolytes.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reveal in their forthcoming book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, that the president brushed aside General Dan Caine’s warnings that a war with Iran would drastically deplete US weapons stockpiles and jeopardise the traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.
As The New York Times reported on Thursday, the US has burned through half — about 1100 — of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China.
The president with the attention span of a gnat posted on Truth Social that “I have all the Time in the World, but Iran doesn’t — The clock is ticking!” But he is the one who has lost control of the timeline, and himself.
As a developer, Trump said, he employed “truthful hyperbole”. But now, in frantic Truth Social posts, in calls with reporters and in interviews, he employs hyperbolic wishful thinking. His staff is resigned to a midterm electoral disaster brought on by higher petrol prices and a lack of focus on the economy.
And he keeps returning to his gargantuan ballroom. According to a Washington Post analysis, “Trump has invoked the ballroom on about a third of the days this year.” It’s a pleasant mental escape, now that he has tied himself into a Gordian knot with Iran.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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