Europe Should Not Help Trump In Iran

Thomas Friedman is a dope.

The US mainstream media produces many articles very critical of Donald Trump. But reporters and editors are reluctant to inform their readers of certain core truths. For example: Trump lies all the time, he has no idea what he’s doing, he is motivated, not by care for Americans or American interests, but by hate, blind ego, and self-aggrandizement. Trump is generally portrayed as a more-or-less normal president who tweets too much and makes many strategic errors, rather than as an ignorant mass-murdering authoritarian psychopath.

Many critics have pointed out that when media misrepresents the president, they misinform the public and average voters, who then make poor decisions at the ballot box. Those critics are correct.

But I think another, perhaps less discussed downside is that the elites who misrepresent Trump end up believing their own bullshit. This is dangerous because elites are…well, elites. They’re influential. Their opinions matter, and can affect policy outcomes and choices—especially, perhaps, in foreign policy, where (as Elizabeth Saunders has pointed out) elites are able to make decisions with little public input, since the public mostly doesn’t care that much about what happens overseas.

This problem of elite self-bamboozlement is well-illustrated in a recent opinion piece by perpetual New York Time columnist, tireless Dubai shill, and billionaire-by-marriage Thomas Friedman.

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Save Trump, save the world!

Friedman argues earnestly that Europe should sweep in, open the Strait of Hormuz and save Donald Trump from himself. He opens his column by admitting that Trump and Netanyahu are “reckless egomaniacs”—but he insists that this is a problem mainly because it alienates Europeans and makes them unwilling to do the right thing.

Dear NATO Members: I get it. You despise President Trump for all the right reasons. He has walked away from Ukraine. He has threatened to seize Greenland and annex Canada. He has coddled Vladimir Putin. He is eroding America’s democratic institutions and norms. He insulted each of you so much that the German chancellor recently barked back that Trump’s America was being “humiliated” by Iran. I get it.

Now get over it.

The bulk of the rest of the column is about how the Iranian regime is evil (it is!) and how the United Arab Emirates is a model for an enlightened Arab future (it is not!) Friedman worries that if Iran keeps control of the Strait, it will gain more power and more wealth and can advance despotism across the region. “It is difficult to see how this war ends in a peace deal that doesn’t give a new lease on life to Iran’s Islamic regime,” Friedman worries.

Again, the despotic Iranian regime is cruel and violent. It is an active sponsor of terror proxy groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis; it brutally represses internal dissent; it is grotesquely misogynist. In stupidly losing his stupid war, Trump has given Iran a massive strategic victory. This is, as Friedman says, bad.

Friedman concludes that Europe must help Trump snatch victory from the jaws of rank incompetence. But the pundit doesn’t ever seriously consider the possible dangers of aiding Trump, much less the possible downsides of rewarding him.

Save Trump, get kicked in the face

Trump has shown over and over that he is completely untrustworthy. He’s also made it very clear that he loves Putin, despises NATO, and wants to invade Europe and take its territory.

This is, to put it mildly, a poor basis for military collaboration. Friedman writes as if Trump’s betrayals and belligerence are in the past, and Europe just has to ignore them and move forward into a high-stakes shared military operation where they rely on Trump not to betray them.

But how can Europe trust Trump? He’s still issuing daily threats to Iran as he first promotes the cease fire, claims he has a deal, claims he will destroy Iran, backs down, pivots, and generally is an irresponsible firehose of nonsense and spittle. If you were France or Germany, would you want to send your troops and equipment into a volatile situation where you can’t be sure from day to day whether your supposed ally is going to drop bombs or unilaterally ignite a shooting war? If your troops get in trouble, could Trump be counted on to help them out? Can you be sure his “help” wouldn’t make things worse?

That’s hardly the only concern. A joint military operation with the US would presumably involve sharing ship movements, force strength, and other sensitive information with your supposed ally. But we know that Trump treats classified intelligence as a business opportunity, and that he can be persuaded to do almost anything by Putin, Netanyahu, or any other strongman who says, “I am strong! Be strong like me!” or the equivalent.

If Trump didn’t pass on classified intelligence to other bad actors, he might just use it as a bad actor himself. He has threatened to invade Greenland, and has been bullying that nation again literally this week. Can Europe be sure that Trump wouldn’t use knowledge of European military activity in negotiations? Can it be sure Trump wouldn’t use such knowledge to mount an invasion?

These aren’t implausible or impossible scenarios. We are in this mess in Iran because Trump launched an incredibly foolish war of aggression with no planning or preparation. He is erratic, impulsive, violent, and dangerous. If Europe sends troops to Iran, they are to some degree putting themselves in Trump’s hands. Only fucking fools (like the US electorate) would do that.

To save Trump is to encourage Trump

Friedman talks extensively about the dangers of empowering Iran. And those dangers are real. Again, Iran’s regime is a bad regime and they do bad things in the world and to their own people. Handing them more power is dangerous and will make the world less safe.

But you know who else is a bad regime doing bad things in the world and to its own people? As a hint, it is the regime that joined with Israel to launch a war of aggression in Iran! It’s also the regime that is threatening to invade Greenland, that has threatened to annex Canada, that is still murdering fisherman in the waters around Venezuela, that launched a horrific genocide by shutting off aid to nations in Africa and Asia, that is providing diplomatic cover for Israel’s ongoing wars and atrocities, that is maybe possibly planning an attack on Cuba, that has launched a bizarre string of insults at the Pope.

The US has engaged in imperial brutality and ugly covert operations for many years. But Trump has doubled and tripled down on treating the world as a big target for the US to bomb, invade, and defile. And when one of his hair-brained exercises in cruelty and belligerence seems to be effective—as when he kidnapped Venezuela’s leader—he is encouraged and empowered to escalate other hair-brained exercises in cruelty and belligerence.

As a result, if Europe did manage to open the Strait and reduce Iranian influence, it would not be a win—because it would make Trump feel cool and powerful and special, and when Trump feels cool and powerful and special, he runs off and drops bombs on random countries, threatens allies, sows chaos, and sends gestapo militias into American cities. (It’s not an accident that there have not been further ICE surge during the Iran fiasco.)

A win for Iran is very bad. There’s every reason to believe that a win for Trump could be significantly worse.

We’re the baddies

This is not difficult to understand; Trump has provided ample evidence that he is untrustworthy, reckless, cruel, and evil. And Friedman and his ilk will, if pressed, admit that Trump is all of those things.

But they refuse to take the next step, which is to acknowledge that a reckless fascist in charge of America means that America is a reckless fascist nation, and that other nations need to treat it as such. It would be irresponsible for European leaders to act as if the US under Trump is a force for good, or that it has even vaguely good intentions. If Europeans are worried about unpredictable and violent authoritarian theocracies, then they should certainly be worried about Iran. But they should be even more worried about the US, whose leader commands exponentially more firepower, and whose behavior is much more erratic than that of the mullahs.

“We will all reap the whirlwind if Iran comes out of this stronger,” Friedman intones. And that’s not wrong. But there are whirlwinds and whirlwinds, and there are some pretty clear advantages to the world and to America to have Trump bogged down and humiliated in a stalemate he can’t win and can’t extricate himself from. Trump is a vile fascist and warmonger, and that means his victories are losses for the world and losses for America. They are losses for Europe too, which is why European leaders are unlikely to join Thomas Friedman in the comforting self-delusion that Iran is currently the most dangerous threat to world peace and stability.

It’s good that Europe has figured out that Trump is a flaming garbage fire and that they want to stay away from the rancid and poisonous fumes. It’s less good that Thomas Friedman—who is in fact influential, and whose views and approach are fairly representative of the media—cannot figure out that a fascist in control of the largest armory on earth is in fact dangerous on his own merits, not just because he lost a war to Iran. The oh-so-serious foreign policy knowers have spent so long priding themselves on the nuance of their parsing that they are unable to recognize a generational threat to global security when it takes a giant shit in the Oval Office.

And you know what? That kind of sweeping ignorance, and that inability to see or say the obvious, makes Thomas Friedman, in his own small way, a threat to global security too.