Americans must be sick of U-turns from Donald Trump, President Flip-flop

To adapt the famous quotation attributed to the Duke of Wellington, I don’t know what effect Donald Trump has upon the enemy but, by God, he must frighten his commanders.

Every time I see General Dan “Razin’” Caine, the chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, I wonder how he copes with his biggest single strategic challenge – making sense of his boss. The president’s ever-shifting and sometimes contradictory war aims, threats, bombast and unilateral declarations are hardly the kind of direct, practical, consistent orders that any military needs to get the job done. How can they, if they don’t know what the “job” actually is from one day to the next, or even from one minute to the next?

Never mind making America great again, Trump is actively weakening America’s efforts to “win” this war, by any feasible definition. General Caine must be a very patient man.

Presumably, for example, a few days ago Razin’s USAF pilots, bombers and associated forces were all ready to “obliterate” – a favourite Trump term – Iran’s power plants, starting with the biggest one. It would be, quite arguably, a breach of the laws of war, being clearly civilian infrastructure, something tacitly admitted in past Trump statements. But it was at least a clear instruction to the military. A 48-hour deadline was set by Trump on his social media app Truth Social for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz.

No longer. The Iranians, nihilistic as ever, countered with a promise to mine the oil supply routes and destroy desalination plants across the Gulf, meaning an intensified global energy crisis, and no drinking water across the Arabian peninsular, with obviously dire humanitarian and economic consequences.

Does Trump still want to take the oil refinery on Kharg Island? It would be an incredibly difficult task for US forces. And at what cost in lives? Senator Lindsey Graham, an increasingly grotesque figure, suggests that if they could take Iwo Jima from the Japanese in the Second World War, this little bit of Iran would be a pushover, although Iwo Jima cost 6,800 Americans and 26,000 casualties in total. Trump seems to have backed off the plan.

So Trump has lived up to his “Taco” nickname and has now chickened out – again. Instead of “reigning” [sic] more “fire and fury” down on the evil regime in Tehran, the administration has been having “very good and productive conversations” with them, and the bombardments have been called off, for five days. After that – who knows?

We might also wonder why such strikes are needed anyway, given that three weeks ago Trump contradicted his defence secretary Pete Hegseth. The latter had just told the world that the 8 March attacks on missile sites were “only just the beginning”. Not so, said the president, who insisted a day later that, “I think the war is very complete, pretty much.” Yet later the same day Trump corrected himself again: “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough.” Asked if the war was beginning or complete, he said: “Well, I think you could say both.” On 11 March, he said again that America had won, but: “We’ve got to finish the job.”

And why is Trump negotiating, even indirectly, with the ayatollahs anyway? It is not so very long ago that he demanded, at various points: “unconditional surrender”; the Iranian people to rise up in a counterrevolution, because “help is on its way” and this was “probably your only chance for generations”; regime change; and personal approval of any new Iranian leader. We no longer hear about CIA plots to foment civil war by encouraging Kurdish and other groups to take arms against the Islamic Republic.

According to his latest set of aims, Trump would be perfectly happy to do a deal with Ayatollah Khamenei, the only real obstacle being the fact the Americans and the Israelis have killed most of his close family and friends. Trump wants a “total resolution of hostilities” through peaceful means – talks and one of his deals. It shouldn’t be any great surprise if Trump decides, on a whim, to fly into Tehran to sign the historic treaty with a previously intractable foe, as he tried to with Kim Jong Un in the first term. Yet only three days ago Trump rejected even a ceasefire.

Redoubtable figure as General Caine is, and routinely slathered with praise by the president as he may be, his life must be made just that little bit more difficult by a man who doesn’t even know whether his war is over, or what “victory” looks like, or what to target next. Sometimes Trump almost begs his allies for help in ending the Iranian blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, only to change his mind and scorn them as unnecessary. What is Caine supposed to do – talk to the French, the British, the Germans and the Japanese (no jokes about Pearl Harbor, please!), or ignore them?

US forces have been in the region for an unusually long time, mostly with little land support, and they cannot remain there indefinitely while Trump dithers and delays. Trump either needs to escalate this into an Iraq-style full-scale war of massive destruction with troops on the ground, which is what the Israelis want, or else cut his losses and get the hell out, which is what allies in the Gulf and the West need to avoid further catastrophe. But Trump cannot decide – a fatal flaw in a wartime leader.

The great irony is, of course, that this conflict will eventually have to end in a settlement, and one that will be very similar to the one brokered by Oman that America and Iran almost signed before Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Trump to go to war instead. Indeed, the restrictions and international oversight would be more or less the same as under the original Iran nuclear deal signed by Barack Obama but torn up by Trump because he thought he could do better than that.

As things stand (maybe not for long) all Trump now demands is the Iranian missile programme be frozen for five years, zero uranium enrichment, and decommissioning the Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow nuclear facilities (which the US and Israel bombed last summer). All of this was pretty much achieved before Trump launched his stupid, chaotic, counterproductive war a month ago. Maybe now more Americans will agree that this is no way to run a war, or their country.