,
6 tweets,
1 min read
Read on Twitter
I see a lot of smart people and esp my fellow political scientists are in search of strategy & reason behind this latest attack/detract Iran story. I feel your pain. But for the love of all that is holy, please stop trying to find sense where none exists. 1/
These are not strategically sophisticated people. They don’t understand or care about how signaling to foreign powers works, if they did, we’d see consistency, minimal uniformity of msg, resolve, and/or directionality of some kind. 2/
Instead, the only constant is the President’s fragile ego. This means decisions are made in line w/ who/what Trump likes/dislikes at any given moment, which shifts depending on who he last spoke with or watched on TV, and who was very nice or very unfair to him. 3/
Again. Very nice or very unfair TO HIM. Not the country, not the people, not his supporters, not his party, not his cabinet. HIM or anything he sees as an extension of himself, such as his brand, financial interests, business acumen, ratings and maybe sometimes his children. 4/
I understand the almost existential need to surface or surmise some sort of an informed IR strategy here. But the reality does not align w/ our assumptions of rationality and cost-benefit analysis as the foundation of decision consensus at the nation state level. 5/
We have to see this administration and President for what they are, not for what our theories say they should be. 6/6
