Donald Trump has played this hand before during the 5-month-old Iran war.
It starts with a grim warning to Tehran that he’s on the cusp of ordering U.S. forces to “obliterate” its power plants or seize key parts of its oil industry if its leaders don’t quickly agree to U.S. terms to end the war. It ends with him edging away with a last-minute declaration, sometimes at the behest of Gulf allies, that he’s going to give diplomacy more time.
The hardball strategy — one that Trump honed during his years competing in New York’s real estate scene and has employed in politics — aims to create movement in negotiation through pressure and chaos. But the tactic is facing a challenge with an Iranian theocracy that believes it holds a higher threshold for strategic pain than Washington.
The thing is trump got some stuff because the countries he pulled bulltrump on before were all heavily intertwined with the dollar economy. Heavily sanctioned places like iran don’t have that leverage. I bet europe and china are jelly with their ability to tell him to go hang.
Europa is just ignoring his shouting at the moment. No statements, no retaliation, just back to their usual slow bureaucratic movement and untangling of those interdependencies.