U.S. President Donald Trump arrives for a Medal of Honor ceremony in the East Room of the White House, June 18.KEN CEDENO/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump has always borne the marks of the classic political “strongman.” An arrogant, vindictive egotist, who showers favours on his relatives and cronies while trying to squash anyone who dares to question him, he is a caricature of the type.
With his disastrous deal to end his disastrous war with Iran, Mr. Trump has shown he has another of the common characteristics of that unfortunate breed. He is a serial bungler.
Asked to weigh the respective advantages of democratic and authoritarian government, many people would say that the authoritarian kind is nastier, but more efficient. Yes, strongmen throw their rivals in jail, fill their pockets with stolen money and hold on to power long past their time – but, darn it, they get things done. Didn’t Mussolini make the trains run on time?
The reality is quite different. Undemocratic regimes are, in most cases, horribly inefficient. Decades of Soviet rule in Russia and Eastern Europe left broken economies, crumbling roads and a devastated natural environment. Oil-rich Venezuela’s strongmen reduced Latin America’s richest nation to one of its poorest.
Analysis: U.S. conservatives and Tehran agree: The peace deal is a big win for Iran
Worse, authoritarian rulers tend to make calamitous mistakes. Surrounded by yes-men, shielded from reality, fawned over by a complaisant media, certain of their infallibility, they stumble blindly into error.
Even as Hitler marshalled division upon division on Soviet borders, Stalin simply refused to believe he would break their non-aggression pact. The German attack was only turned back after millions of Russians lay dead. Japan’s ruling clique made war on the world’s richest and most dynamic nation when it attacked Pearl Harbor. The outcome was inevitable.
Mao inflicted a deadly famine on the struggling Chinese people when he launched the Great Leap Forward. Herding peasants into giant communes, he ordered them to bang pots and pans together to make grain-stealing sparrows drop from exhaustion. The most recent of many examples is that archetypal strong man, Vladimir Putin, the bare-chested horseman, who plunged Russia into a pointless war with Ukraine that has made his nation an international pariah.
Despite this record of deadly ineptitude, we still tend to think of strongmen as sharp, if brutal, operators. How many times has Putin or Xi or Erdogan or Modi been described as “wily”? In fact, many turn out to be pretty dumb.
Opinion: Trump’s Iran-war disgrace cripples the U.S. and elevates China
Take Mr. Trump (please). This self-described master of the deal blew negotiations with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in his first term and Russia’s Mr. Putin at the start of his second. Now comes the pièce de résistance.
The agreement he just made to end hostilities with Iran is the most embarrassing diplomatic climbdown by an American administration in decades. The main aims of this enormously costly and destructive war were to end Iran’s nuclear program; make it stop supporting militant proxies in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq and Yemen; destroy its ballistic missile force and, ideally, end the Iranian regime altogether. At the peak of his belligerence, Mr. Trump demanded nothing less than its “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”
He has achieved not a single one of those objectives. Iran has agreed to talk about its nuclear program and dilute its stockpile of enriched uranium, but not hand it over, as Washington had insisted it must. Its pledge never to produce a nuclear weapon is the same cross-my-heart promise it has been making for years. There is nothing at all in Mr. Trump’s humiliating Instrument of Surrender (sorry, Memorandum of Understanding) about Iran’s theocratic rulers giving up their proxies or missiles. Instead, Mr. Trump now says that if places such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia have missiles, “it’s a little bit unfair” for Iran not to have at least some.
Read the transcript of the U.S. draft of the agreement with Iran
The Strait of Hormuz will once more be open to traffic – as, of course, it was before the war – but Iran is now talking openly about charging ships a fee to get through. In the memorandum, it generously agrees to allow the “safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days.” Afterward, who knows.
The war has made it clear that Iran can close that vital waterway at any time and hold the world’s economy to ransom. Rather than being curbed, much less overthrown, the regime has been handed a potent new weapon.
To further sweeten the deal for the clear victors, Washington agrees to unfreeze billions in Iranian assets, help put together a US$300-billion plan to reconstruct what has been destroyed in Iran, and allow Tehran to export oil on far more favourable terms than it did before the war. Some of that money is bound to flow into rebuilding its attack forces and rearming its battered proxies.
If Israel doesn’t like that, it can lump it. In response to Israeli complaints that he folded like a cheap suit, Mr. Trump has been hurling insults at his closest Middle Eastern ally, painting its leader, Benjamin Netayahu, as a trigger-happy zealot.
The millions of ordinary Iranians who rose up against the regime last winter have been utterly abandoned. The man who told them “help is on its way” has left them at the mercy of the mullahs and their henchmen.
The one and only thing Mr. Trump has accomplished here is to destroy one of the most enduring ideas in world affairs: the myth of the crafty strongman.