SOn Saturday January 4, the penultimate day of his vacation in Florida, Donald Trump went back to golf. He had abstained the day before, the day after the assassination in Baghdad of Iranian general Ghassem Soleimani by an American armed drone. Returning to his luxury club Mar-a-Lago, he returned to the excess he used to face North Korea in 2017 before finding Kim Jong-un great.
The President of the United States thus suggested that he was ready to commit war crimes by assuring that fifty-two Iranian sites "Representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago" had already been selected, "Some at a very high level and important to Iran and Iranian culture". "These targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE VERY QUICKLY AND VERY HARD HIT" to Tehran's slightest response to the assassination of the general, said Donald Trump. A rich idea to unite the Iranians behind a regime yet hated by a number of them.
Re-election first, foreign policy second
The day after an undoubtedly major decision in his mandate, the billionaire had spent more time with his evangelical Christian electorate, gathered in a mega church in Miami, than with explaining to his fellow citizens how the elimination of a figure central of the Iranian regime, certainly as harmful as one can imagine, was part of the strategy of the United States.
This distribution of presidential time testified to the order of priorities of Donald Trump: re-election first, foreign policy then, subordinated to the first. Bombing the dreadful is enough to make the Republican voter thrill with glee, without the latter necessarily needing to know much about the pedigree of those who shout "Death to America! ". The president who loves the image of force so much appears to his advantage, like the one who dares when others get lost in guesswork.
The January 2 strike underscored one of the hallmarks of his presidency. The issue of removing the boss of the Al-Quds forces, the special forces of the Revolutionary Guards, was as old as his exploits in Washington. But the billionaire's predecessors had analyzed it according to conventional cost and benefit criteria, to conclude that the former far exceeded the latter. For Donald Trump, it suffices to take the opposite view from Democrat Barack Obama and Republican George W. Bush, to let speak of an unfortunate penchant for short-termism, the spectacular, and to hell with the consequences.
