What is happening between the US and Iran is a consequence of what I describe in Winter Is Coming: an aggressive dictatorship's sense of impunity leading to the crossing of one line too far.
Deterrence is based on standing up against small aggressions in order to prevent big ones, when the price will be much higher. Many years of success led Iran & Soleimani to feel invincible, to attack a US embassy, when of course a US president had to respond.
This is how appeasement kills. This is why inaction can be a deadly choice. It raises the stakes, postpones the inevitable, and encourages aggressors to assume they can act with impunity until the eventual response is massive and destabilizing.
Action has clear costs because it is the reality of the road taken, making it politically unattractive. Inaction hopes to pass the dire consequences and blame to a successor, as has happened with Syria and Iran.
I wish Trump had a competent team capable of strategic planning and of inspiring the trust of allies and the fear of enemies. That is far from the case. But I can't criticize the killing of a mass-murdering terrorist mastermind & reminding his ilk that they are not safe.
We'll never know how many more innocents Qasem Soleimani would have murdered or how many hundreds of thousands more refugees he'd have helped create. But don't pretend you know that what is to come is worse than the world with such a person in it.
