Let's Acknowledge That Trump Is A Smart Guy

I ran into an interesting take on Trump at the G7:

A G7 assembly with a final day invitation list that brought Australia, Mexico, Ukraine, South Korea, South Africa, India, the United Nations and the World Bank into it. Why? Because President Trump, that’s why.

U.S. President Donald Trump smartly exited the G7 assembly a day early, he departed just before the crowd of interests arrived. If we drop the pretending we all know why Canada invited them and these nations came running – Tariff$!

He was supposed to have sideline meetings with Ukraine's Zelensky and Mexico's Sheinbaum. We know he was able to avoid meeting Zelensky by leaving early; whether he met with Sheinbaum is uncertain, but he would have had little to say to her in any case -- the Mexicans who are leaving the US voluntarily far outnumber those formally deported, and this will diminish remittances to folks back in Mexico no matter what.

This all says to me that Trump is playing a bigger game than the news cycle recognizes. He left the G7 ostensibly to follow pressing developments in Israel and Iran, but we shouldn't be too sure of that. He may not have been thinking about Iran at all when he left the G7. When he said, “The Wall Street Journal has No Idea what my thoughts are concerning Iran!” I think he meant more than he was explicitly saying.

Consider that over the past several days, his remarks on Iran have been all over the landscape. On Tuesday, he posted UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, which gave Edward Feser the vapors:

When a country tells an enemy’s government and citizens that it will settle for nothing less than their surrender with no conditions at all – thereby putting themselves entirely at their foes’ mercy – they are obviously bound to fight more tenaciously and brutally, which will tempt the threatening country to similarly brutal methods of warfare in response.

. . . As they routinely do, Trump’s defenders may suggest that his words should not be taken at face value, but interpreted as mere “trash talk” or perhaps as exercises in “thinking out loud” rather than as final policy decisions. But this helps their case not at all. War is, needless to say, an enterprise of enormous gravity, calling for maximum prudence and moral seriousness. Even speaking about the possibility must be done with great caution. (Think of the chaos that could follow upon trying quickly to evacuate a city of nearly ten million people, even if there were no actual plan to bomb it.) A president who is instead prone to woolly thinking and flippant speech about matters of war is a president whose judgment about them cannot be trusted. (And as I have argued elsewhere, he has already in other ways proven himself to have unsound judgment about such things.)

Yet by yesterday, he extended Iran's deadline for negotiations, which he'd earlier strongly implied had expired after 60 days when Israel attacked Iran on June 13, by another two weeks (or maybe not):

“Based on the fact that there is a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place in the near future, I will make my decision of whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday, reading a statement from the president to reporters.

Reuters has finally figured out that Trump's strategy is to keep everyone guessing:

President Donald Trump kept the world guessing about whether the United States will join Israel's bombardment of Iranian nuclear sites as the Israel-Iran conflict entered its seventh day on Thursday. Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Trump declined to say if he had made any decision on whether to join Israel's campaign. "I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do," he said.

Trump in later remarks said Iranian officials wanted to come to Washington for a meeting and that "we may do that." But he added, "It's a little late" for such talks.

. . . Asked if he thought the Iranian government could fall as a result of the Israeli campaign, Trump said: "Sure, anything could happen."

Referring to the destruction or dismantling of Iran's Fordow nuclear enrichment center, Trump said: "We're the only ones that have the capability to do it. But that doesn't mean I'm going to do it - at all."

This reminds me again of Henry Kissinger's negotiating strategy with the Soviets: warn them that Nixon is unstable and could fly off the handle at any time, and Kissinger is the only one who can control him -- but if the Soviets do something Nixon thinks is extreme, it could set Nixon off even beyond Kissinger's ability to reason with him. This appears to have succeeded.

I'm not sure who Edward Feser thinks has sound enough judgment to negotiate with the Iranians, unlike Trump. Biden? He might not necessarily remember Khamenei's name. Obama? He sent pallets of cash to Iran that financed their nuclear program. The only alternative that comes to mind is Mitt Romney, whose demeanor would be calm, stable, and deliberative, but I have a feeling the ayatollahs would interpret that as namby-pamby.

I saw a comment on YouTube that wondered why everyone is focused on the deeply dug nuclear facility at Fordow. Why would Israel or the US be going to such trouble to telegraph their intentions, letting the Iranians focus on the idea of a bomber strike there with bunker busters? Doesn't this sound like strategic deception? They must actually be planning something else.

In any case, there are several lessons to be learned from Truman's strategy that led to Japan's surrender in 1945. The Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945, issued two days after the successful testing of the atomic bomb, renewed a call for Japan's "unconditional surrender", but it mentioned the term only once, and contrary to prior statements, it made no mention of the emperor's status.

The short-lived interim Secretary of State Joseph Grew had advocated for retaining the emperor as a constitutional monarch. He hoped that preserving Hirohito's central role could facilitate an orderly capitulation of all Japanese troops in the Pacific theatre. Without it, securing a surrender could be difficult. Navy Secretary James Forrestal and other officials shared the view.  Allied intentions on issues of utmost importance to the Japanese, including whether Hirohito was to be regarded as one of those who had "misled the people of Japan" or even a war criminal, or alternatively, whether the Emperor might become part of a "peacefully inclined and responsible government" were thus left unstated.

The Japanese were fully aware of the apparent movement in the Allied terms reflected in the declaration, and some in the government interpreted this as meaning a military surrender without the removal of the emperor. However, it was the atomic bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki that drove both the emperor and a cabinet majority to the view that, provided the Allies agreed to retain the emperor, Japan would surrender.

Thus a careful carrot-and-stick approach, including the actual detonation of atomic bombs, tempered by the tacit application of a few actual conditions to the term "unconditional surrender", brought an end to the war, something hard line just war theorists like Edward Feser apparently don't acknowledge.

It seems to me that Trump is acting very much in the spirit of both Truman and Nixon-Kissinger, allowing hmself a great deal of leeway to deal with circumstances as they arise, while on the other hand leaving the level of his actual cooperation with Israel unstated and uncertain from both a domestic and foreign policy point of view.