Who says the world is impossible to predict these days?
Two things have just happened that we could have seen a mile off.
Events in the Middle East have followed the exact script for “what happens if you attack Iran”, a scenario analysts have been predicting for decades.
If you take on the ayatollahs and threaten their future, they will take the gloves off and attack just about everybody. Check.
They will also make it effectively impossible to send shipping through the Strait of Hormuz by sinking tankers and forcing up the price of insurance to intolerable levels. Check.
The price of oil will soar. Gulf allies will warn of an apocalyptic collapse in energy supplies. Economists will predict the sky falling on our heads and a global economic calamity. Check, check, check.
And the pain for an American president facing midterm elections, if he allows them to happen, will just become too great. Check.
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Experts have sat in TV studios predicting just that for years with maps and warnings about shutting off the world’s jugular.
The second predictable outcome has become a constant of our time. Trump Always Chickens Out.
Robert Armstrong, the man who coined the term the TACO president, wrote in the Financial Times today: “It is, of course, utterly unclear whether the president’s comments have anything to do with a change in balance of the war on the ground.
“What they did communicate clearly, to the delight of markets, was that Trump is looking for an exit.”
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Which is all the Iranian leadership needs to hear.
Trump wants out.
Whether it’s this week or next or a bit longer, Iran’s government just needs to hang in there.
America and Israel wanted regime change. If it is not changed, they will have failed and Iran’s leadership will, rightly or wrongly, declare victory.
They may have lost every warplane and naval ship in their inventory. But they will remain in power, despite the yearning for change among so many of their people who had been promised help was ‘on its way’ by the US president.
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As for the Iranian nuclear programme, Trump will declare it obliterated. Again.
But as long as Iran has the scientists to rebuild it and the leadership committed to doing so, it can still rise from the ashes like a Persian phoenix.
What do future adversaries learn from all this?
In Beijing, they have been closely watching as they plan to seize Taiwan at some point during Xi Jinping’s presidency.
They have a better gauge now of Donald Trump’s tolerance for economic pain, a crucial factor as they game the invasion of their neighbour.
A president they always feared as unpredictable and mercurial has arguably become a little less so after what he called his recent ‘short-term excursion’ in the Middle East.
