Trump’s Declaration of War

The U.S. president has made his most significant foreign policy decision so far. By killing Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, he has taken an uncontrollable risk.

A new era began in the Middle East last Friday. With a single missile attack, the U.S. has destroyed the whole architecture of uncertainty in the region, and opened the doors to a dreadful period of unpredictability, violence and disintegration.

The killing of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani advances the simmering conflict between the U.S. and Iran to pre-war levels. What comes next is difficult to predict: terror, missile attacks, destabilization, civil war in Iraq and an actual military conflict between Iranian puppets and the U.S. on battlefields from Libya to Afghanistan – anything is possible. The rivalry between Tehran and Washington has stopped following the rules that both sides had silently imposed on themselves. Now, new laws are being written.

There are many reasons that might have driven Donald Trump to order this killing. But these do not even add up to a plausible strategy. Trump has chosen ultimate escalation and left out several steps along the way. For three years, he has been turning his aversion to military strikes into the silent maxim of American foreign policy. The withdrawal of the U.S. as a military power from the Middle East has massively shifted the weight in the balance of global power, and fueled Iranian supremacy fantasies, no less. Now suddenly, the American president is using the military in a way he usually only uses his Twitter account: impulsively, unpredictably and without restraint. The circle of reasonable people around him has collapsed; Trump is beginning his election year with a highly dosed military declaration of war – a decision that is also risky for his reelection.

Gen. Soleimani was the incarnation of unpredictability on the Iranian side; a national hero, a great strategist, probably the most powerful figure with regard to the military and secret service in the entire country, ennobled and protected through his close ties to the religious leader, and treated as his successor. Soleimani devised and managed Iran’s system of injustice and its brutal ambitions from Yemen across Lebanon and into its immediate neighbor, Iraq. In Syria, dictator Bashar Assad would not still be in power without him. Unlike Osama bin Laden, militia leaders of the Islamic State or other terrorist leaders, Soleimani carried out the business of destabilization and terror under state protection.

From Tehran’s perspective, Soleimani was a vital representative of the Iranian state, a representative now murdered by the archenemy which trespassed an invisible line and struck at the heart of the regime. From the perspective of the United States, Soleimani was the commander and brain of a widely ramified system of vassals and terror, which plunged wide areas of the world into uncertainty. And Washington will probably devise a United Nations resolution for the fight against terror that justifies such a targeted killing.

However, with regard to politics as well as the military, the legal interpretation of the killing is secondary. Trump has made the most significant decision concerning foreign policy during his presidency. The path of reason has long been abandoned by both sides. Now, there are no barriers anymore.