A striking graphic circulated on social media Tuesday night, illustrating the path of the Butler assassin’s bullet (for the definitive word on that story, consider Salena Zito’s new book). It shows two scenarios: one in which President Donald Trump’s head turns at the last second, captioned “Iran’s nuclear program obliterated,” and another in which the bullet hits his skull, captioned “Iran gets nuclear weapons.”
The Trump experience is like a Mission: Impossible movie, only more improbable and intense.
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But while Trump thrives in this chaos, others, such as Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), demand a more predictable script.
“It’s been nothing but mixed messages from these folks,” Kaine said Monday evening on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. “This backing and forthing, are we on or are we off, are we negotiating diplomatically or are we just doing this as a ruse to trick the Iranians into dropping their guard so we can drop bombs on them. We do not need to terrorize the American public with this.”
Later in the interview, Kaine expressed bewilderment over Trump thanking Iran for giving the United States a heads-up before its retaliatory strikes in Qatar, calling it one of Trump’s “most unusual tweets ever.”
“I mean, this thing is changing every second,” he said with exasperation.
Kaine, who was nearly elected vice president eight years ago, appears genuinely not to understand the significance of Iran’s advance warning over its strikes, issued to Qatar and relayed to the U.S., enabling Iran to save face without doing any actual damage.
Kaine’s expectation that our military strategy should be easily discernible — and worse, that it should protect the feelings of Americans — reveals a dangerous naivety toward the nature of the threats America faces. Last week, Obama adviser David Axelrod said much the same, posting, “Amazing that in a matter of days we’ve gone from ‘this is not our operation’ to ‘we own the skies over Iran. … What is the strategy here?” — as if military strategies get better the more they are spelled out for the benefit of our adversaries.
This mindset, pervasive among Democrats, at least partly explains why the last two Democratic presidents have been such profound foreign policy failures.
In 2021, then-President Joe Biden’s public announcement of his intention to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, in which he committed to a fixed deadline, handed the Taliban a strategic advantage they successfully exploited. Knowing the U.S. would not stay beyond August, they escalated attacks on Afghan forces, free from worry about repercussions. What followed, a chaotic withdrawal that saw 13 U.S. service members and over 170 Afghans killed, obliterated American credibility and deterrence for the remainder of Biden’s presidency. The weakness projected from the withdrawal triggered Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine months later, a move that would cost the U.S. hundreds of billions.
Telegraphing his intentions is a trick he learned from his old boss. During negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal, then-President Barack Obama repeatedly downplayed the possibility of preemptive strikes. This allowed Iran to execute a “run out the clock” strategy that prolonged talks while continuing to develop nuclear capabilities and build up proxies Hezbollah and Hamas — all without fear of military repercussions. The result was a strengthened Iran and a further destabilized Middle East, the effects of which linger to this day, though less so after last week’s strikes.
Trump’s ambiguity, on the contrary, is a feature of his program, not a bug. His misdirection keeps our adversaries off balance, allowing blows to land. His announcement that he would decide on whether to strike “within two weeks” was a ruse to lull Iran into a false sense of security, and his decision to send B-2 bombers to the Pacific as the main strike force headed toward Iran was classic military misdirection. Strategic ambiguity played a key role in the successful strikes last week, and it’s part of the reason his foreign policy has been so effective over two terms.
To be certain, if Kaine and the Democrats retained power, American influence would have continued to fall under the weight of a predictable foreign policy, and Iran would still possess a nuclear program today.
To his credit, Kaine, who recently filed a resolution to bar Trump from taking further military action without congressional approval, has been consistent regarding war powers across administrations, even publicly bucking Obama over his Libya strike. Whether or not a president should be able to launch an attack without congressional approval is a legitimate debate, and it’s good that we’re having it.
But the senator’s failure to grasp the strategic value of unpredictability underscores a broader Democratic blind spot that undermines American security in an increasingly volatile world.