The fog of war has nothing on the fog of a Trump press conference. Yesterday, the President of the United States stood before a bank of microphones and declared, with the solemnity of a man announcing a new flavour of crisps, that a ‘deal’ with Iran was imminent. Peace in our time! The champagne corks popped from Foggy Bottom to the Foreign Office. But wait. By the time the hangover kicks in, the White House has already walked it back. A ‘misunderstanding,’ they say. A ‘clarification.’ My dear reader, when a man changes his mind faster than a promiscuous mayfly, it is not confusion. It is strategy. The strategy of Chaos, as my trembling, gin-soaked sources in Whitehall whisper.
Let us examine the evidence. The man who claimed he could end the war in Afghanistan in a weekend, who promised a healthcare plan that was ‘beautiful’ and always two weeks away, now dangles a peace deal with the Ayatollahs. The very same Ayatollahs he threatened with ‘obliteration’ forty-eight hours earlier. Is this the erratic behaviour of a senile plutocrat? Or is it, horrors of horrors, the new normal? I put this to a senior civil servant, a man whose stoicism is carved from decades of form-filling and lukewarm tea. He adjusted his spectacles, his eyes flickering with the terror of a rabbit caught in the headlights of a clown car. ‘It’s deliberate,’ he hissed. ‘They want us off-balance. They want the Iranians off-balance. They want the entire bloody world to feel like they’re standing on a rug about to be whipped away. It’s the art of the deal as performed by a very drunk, very rich man on a bouncy castle.’
This, then, is the Grand Strategy of the Orange One. Never mind the long game. Forget the chessboard. This is a game of whack-a-mole played with nuclear launch codes. Every tweet, every off-the-cuff remark, every statement that contradicts the previous statement is a deliberate act of psychological warfare. The adversary, whether it be Tehran, Beijing, or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, cannot plan a response because there is no consistent position to respond to. History is rewritten at the whim of a man whose attention span is shorter than a goldfish’s memory of breakfast.
Consider the consequences. Our European allies, those poor saps who still believe in treaties and norms, are left gasping. One minute they are preparing sanctions, the next they are drafting trade agreements. The Iranian mullahs, masters of duplicity for centuries, are looking at their American counterparts with a mixture of confusion and grudging admiration. No wonder the price of oil is now determined by dartboard. No wonder the stock market has the stability of a soap opera plot.
But what of the British position, you ask? Ah, Whitehall, that hallowed bastion of muddling through. Our diplomats, trained to spot nuance over a finger sandwich, are now trying to decipher the Delphic pronouncements of a man who communicates in emojis and all-caps. The official line, you will no doubt hear, is that Her Majesty’s Government supports a peaceful resolution to the Iran crisis. The unofficial line, the one whispered in the gents next to a dispenser of cheap cologne, is simply: ‘We’re all completely bewildered and hoping the next cable contains a map of the exits.’
So here we sit, on the edge of peace and war, watching a master of chaos turn the international order into a game of existential three-card monte. The deal is on. The deal is off. The deal is a ruse. The deal is a trap. The truth is that in this White House, chaos is not a bug, it is the only feature. And we, poor punters, are just here for the ride, clutching our gins and hoping the spinning wheels don’t land on ‘Armageddon.’
