The US president wanted an easy win, but the conflict is spiralling following Israel’s attack on a gas field and Iranian retaliation across the region
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hortly after the US and Israel began their illegal assault on Iran, with the US president still preening himself over the kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro the previous month, a state department official joked that Donald Trump had a new foreign policy credo: “Decapitate and delegate”. It was a reversal of Colin Powell’s invocation of the “Pottery Barn rule” ahead of the invasion of Iraq: you break it, you own it.
Gen Powell, then secretary of state, was warning that wars can escalate beyond expectation and are harder to exit than enter. It remains unclear what precisely the Trump administration expected from this conflict – perhaps not least to the White House itself – but it is certain that the president was not paying heed when people described the likely consequences.
On Wednesday, a reckless war saw another dramatic escalation when Israel bombed the South Pars gasfield, which Iran shares with Qatar. Mr Trump denied that the US knew about the plan. His own officials disagree, and Israeli sources say that the US helped to coordinate the attack. Reportedly, Washington hoped it would put pressure on Iran to reopen the strait of Hormuz; instead, and predictably, it has further intensified the conflict.
