ON WAR, TARIFFS, AND TRUMP'S BRAIN

It looks as if President Trump is about to start a war with Iran, or at least launch a limited strike accompanied by a threat of more if Iran doesn't bend the knee, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

President Trump is weighing an initial limited military strike on Iran to force it to meet his demands for a nuclear deal, a first step that would be designed to pressure Tehran into an agreement but fall short of a full-scale attack that could inspire a major retaliation.

The opening assault, which if authorized could come within days, would target a few military or government sites, people familiar with the matter said. If Iran still refused to comply with Trump’s directive to end its nuclear enrichment, the U.S. would respond with a broad campaign against regime facilities—potentially aimed at toppling the Tehran regime.

As the Financial Times notes, this might not motivate Iran to make a deal:

The litmus test for Tehran is that talks and any subsequent deal must guarantee Iran will not be attacked; that the US will abide by the deal and lift sanctions...

(Imagine being stupid enough to think that Trump will abide by any deal. The Iranians have to be smarter than that.)

... and that it will not insist that Iran give up the right to civilian uranium enrichment. Yet none of these compromises seem to have been on offer in the last two rounds of talks. Instead, the US is demanding that Iran surrender not only its nuclear programme but also its missiles and regional proxies.

... There is an emerging consensus in Tehran that Iran will not win anything at the negotiating table. It will instead have to accept war, prepare to manage it, and hope that conflict eventually leads to the change it is seeking — by exhausting the US to the point that it abandons the pursuit of future aggression and agrees to a more favourable nuclear deal.

... even if the US launches a massive strike and succeeds in impeding Iran’s ability to retaliate against US forces or Israel, Tehran may still retain the ability to use its regional proxies, and target oil facilities and energy supply routes. It could even decide to launch much of its arsenal against the US and its allies before the US is able to destroy it, thus quickly escalating the war.

So this could get ugly.

Nick Catoggio of The Dispatch can't understand why this is happening now:

And so here we are, on the precipice of the largest war that the United States will have waged in nearly 25 years without any clear objective for the mission. “President Trump hasn’t decided ... whether the aim would be to halt Iran’s already-battered nuclear program, wipe out its missile force, or try to topple the regime,” the Journal noted surreally in its report on America’s military build-up. War as Mad Libs: We must attack Iran because [casus belli TBD].

Michelle Goldberg knows why:

... I assume Trump is driven by the same self-aggrandizing impulse that made him slap his name on the Kennedy Center. He wants to put his stamp on the world, to be the president who rid the globe of three regimes that bedeviled his predecessors: Venezuela, Iran and Cuba, which he’s subjecting to a devastating fuel blockade. “He is now enamored with the idea that he will be the president on whose watch a number of regimes that have been viscerally anti-American for a long time will no longer be,” said [Rob] Malley [President Biden’s special envoy for Iran].

That's an explanation for Trump's wars, his building spree, and even the tariffs -- which I don't believe are going away even though the Supreme Court struck them down today:

The Supreme Court blocked President Donald Trump’s signature economic and foreign policy Friday morning in a fractured 6-3 split decision.

Trump cannot use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to override Congress’s power of the purse, using the emergency declaration to levy widespread global tariffs, the majority held.

Trump believes he's right about tariffs and all sensible people are wrong. He wants to impose them as part of his legacy. They're the economic equivalent of his ballroom and his arch (and his wars).

That's why, as I've said many times, he'll just impose whatever tariffs he can through alternate pathways. As The New York Times notes today:

But even while battling in court, the president began to explore alternatives to the 1977 law. Mr. Trump’s top trade negotiator Jamieson Greer said last month that the administration would move quickly to replace any emergency tariffs invalidated by the court with other levies. The president has already used other statutes to set tariffs, including national security-related ones on some specific goods and industries.

In November, the Times listed a few of those statutes:

... the administration could use Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act to put in place a 15 percent global tariff for 150 days.... That law says a president can impose tariffs to deal with “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits....

In the meantime, the administration could start multiple trade investigations under a legal provision known as Section 301.... Section 301 allows the president to issue broad tariffs in response to unfair trading practices, after first conducting an investigation....

Another alternative is Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows the president to impose tariffs on national security grounds.

On that last one, we're told:

Those levies typically require investigations that can take several months to carry out, a period that would prevent the president from arbitrarily raising and lowering tariffs, as he has done with IEEPA.

LOL -- imagine Trump refraining from using this authority because a painstaking investigation hasn't been carried out.

As I've said a few times, I think all of this is happening not just because Trump is a megalomaniac, but because he had a health scare last year that led him to believe he could die soon. I wrote this last month:

After all of Trump's talk about "heaven" in 2025, and his recent Wall Street Journal interview about his health, I assume he's afraid of death (though that doesn't mean he's actually dying) and is trying to go out with a bang -- he wants to die knowing he was the most consequential person on earth, if not the most consequential person of all time. Hence the renaming and building and redecorating. He's trying to preen and bomb his way to a legacy.

He also wants to make sure he doesn't die before punishing all his enemies and hoovering up all the cash he possibly can -- Whoever dies with the most toys wins, amirite? And that's how policy is decided when you elect an ignorant, corrupt narcissist to the presidency and the other two branches of government defer to him 99% of the time.