MacLean Gander is retired from a long career as a professor and administrator at Landmark College. A former member of the board of directors of Vermont Independent Media, he was a longtime volunteer investigative reporter and columnist for this newspaper. This piece is adapted from his Substack site, Escape Velocity, where he posts essays about society, culture, and politics.
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL, JUNE 22-On Oct. 25, 1983, Ronald Reagan sent 70,000 troops to invade the small island nation of Grenada in the Caribbean. There had just been a coup, with a Marxist leader replaced by a more hard-line Marxist leader, and the pretext for the invasion was concern for the safety of several hundred American students on the island, most of them at St. George's University School of Medicine.
The war lasted just a week, with low American casualties. The students were rescued and a pro-Western government was installed.
Just two days before, the airport barracks in which U.S. Marine forces were stationed as peacekeepers in Beirut had been hit by a suicide bomber, killing 241 U.S. service members and wounding 128, some of whom later died from their wounds. It was the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since World War II.
Reagan, whose approval ratings had just started to improve after hitting a low of 38% earlier that year, vowed that U.S. forces would stay in Lebanon and that the terrorists would be tracked down and punished. Two days later, Beirut was wiped from the front pages by Grenada.
A few months later Reagan quietly withdrew his troops. He won the 1984 election in one of the biggest landslides in American history.
When I read last night that Trump had bombed Iran, all I could think about was Grenada, and the uses of war in shaping public opinion. Both George Bushes received steep jumps in their approval ratings because of victories in Iraq, and the bump for the second Bush lasted long enough for him to win a narrow victory over John Kerry in 2004, with national security concerns the major factor behind his re-election.
Grenada is a forgotten war. Its rationale at the time was thin and largely invented, and in retrospect it is clear that its sole purpose was to deflect attention from the tragic disaster in Beirut.
And it worked. It is easy to forget what a vulnerable president Reagan seemed in 1983. By the end of 1984 he was unbeatable.
In trying to make sense of Trump's attack on Iran, remembering Grenada is a good place to start.
* * *
There is no immediate rationale for the U.S. strike on Iran. Iran does not represent a direct threat to the United States. When Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress in March that U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon, she was telling the truth. Even if Iran were capable of building a nuclear weapon in just a few weeks, as Trump claimed, it still would be far from having the capacity to strike us - unlike North Korea, which has 50 to 60 nuclear warheads and has successfully tested ICBM delivery systems capable of reaching the continental United States.
There is potentially a long-term rationale, a sort of best-hope scenario in which the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran causes a popular uprising against the theocracy, overthrowing it and offering peace in exchange for financial support in rebuilding the economy and establishing Iran as a secular democracy.
Iran has 90 million citizens, and more than half of them are under the age of 30. I've read reports in various newsletters of Iranians welcoming the news of the assassination of hated leaders or the destruction of the headquarters of the NAJA and Basji Resistance Force, the secret police force and paramilitary group charged with suppressing dissent and enforcing the regime's control over society.
It's a nice scenario, but improbable at best, and almost certainly not what the Israelis have planned for Iran. Clearly, they would like to see the fall of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme leader, and they're ready to take him out if Trump gives the green light. Israel controls the skies and can bomb at will. Although they claim they'll stop when Iran's nuclear program is destroyed, their war is open-ended so far.
In any case, the idea of going to war in order to change a regime and build a new nation was fairly well discredited in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it certainly is not a rationale that Trump would claim. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, was careful to point out how limited the goals were of the U.S. strike.
* * *
So why did Trump do it?
The most obvious answer is that he liked the script that Netanyahu showed to him and decided to play the wartime president role that had been written for him. Israel had already done the heavy lifting, and the world was struck with awe at the surgical devastation the nation's war machine had wrought so quickly. It was a good time to jump on a winning horse.
Every world leader knows that the only approach to Trump is to manipulate him as well as one can. Vladimir Putin has played him like a fiddle, and the fact that Trump doesn't seem to mind gives rise to the theory that the Russians hold kompromat on the U.S. president. In China, Xi Jinping has let Trump save face, but it's obvious who's winning that trade war.
Netanyahu has now proven to be the most skillful manipulator of all, since he has persuaded Trump to make the United States a junior partner in Israel's wars in the Middle East, enticing him to share in the glory of Israel's military prowess and even paving the way, quite literally, for last night's risk-free B-2 attacks. Israel cleared the skies for Trump and then let him take the bow for administering the coup de grâce. It all worked perfectly.
Israel has never favored negotiations with Iran, and it was the only nation to support Trump when he pulled out of the 2015 nuclear accord in 2018. That accord was actually working, but Trump claimed he could do better.
This is where we wound up.
* * *
What happens next is unknowable, and I won't speculate. It may take months, or even years, to know what the actual outcomes of the U.S. entry into a new Middle East war will be.
Israel's aims in Iran go beyond simply destroying its nuclear program. Netanyahu has talked openly about regime change, and the Israeli military's focus on assassinations, along with its attack on NAJA headquarters and energy infrastructure, demonstrate that its war aims are broad.
Whether Trump understands it or not, he has attached U.S. strategic interests to Israel in a way no other American president has done in recent administrations. The fact that Israel's driving motivation is national survival, while the main motivating factor for the U.S. has traditionally been stability, doesn't matter. We're on Israel's war horse now.
The question of whether any of this serves American interests can be argued, but it can't be resolved. Maybe the outcome of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iraq will be increased stability and a reduction of armed conflict in the Middle East. Certainly Iran has been gravely weakened. Perhaps it will be content with a minimal response, calibrated to avoid American and Israeli escalation.
It is also possible that it will do the opposite: waging war in asymmetrical ways that turn American involvement into the same kind of quagmire it experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decapitation of Iran's leadership could bring an even more hard-line successor, with widespread crackdown on internal dissent and the sponsorship of widespread terrorist attacks, including within the U.S. itself.
It's possible that U.S. involvement will turn out to be as short-term and incidental as Trump and Hegseth claim. It is clearly what they hope for, since any sort of drawn-out engagement will start to look like Iraq very quickly.
Trump had his "mission accomplished" moment last night. Surely he learned from George W. Bush how quickly claims of victory can devolve into irony.
The main thing is that we're entangled with Israel now in a way that Trump seemed to actively resist just a few weeks ago. Netanyahu demonstrated that he wasn't going to listen to Trump, so now Trump's listening to him instead. How long that will last is anyone's guess. It may turn out that being a wartime president feels good to Trump.
* * *
Netanyahu's influence on Trump answers the question of how we got here. For the question of why - why Trump acted now as he did - I have to say again that the best way to understand anything Trump does is to see him as a showrunner in an ongoing drama starring himself.
Trump is an improvisational president. He is not planful, and his understanding of the world is limited and confused. The three things that seem to matter most to him are money, public attention, and the exercise of power. His worldview is incoherent and often contradictory, and while he does seem to have a few fixed beliefs, his value system is morally bankrupt.
For Trump, demonstrations of empathy or a nod to ethical considerations are merely performative. In the end, he cares only about himself. All of his improvisations have the main goals of self-protection and projection of a huge, massively insecure ego.
I don't make these points to criticize Trump. They are meant as an objective analytical framework, rooted in more than four decades of copious evidence and almost no counter-evidence.
His vaunted unpredictability comes from these basic elements of his character. It's hard to know what Trump will do, because he himself doesn't know. His mode is reaction, which is why his actions often include abrupt reversals, most obviously with his quick rollback of tariffs when the markets tanked.
Trump summed up his own approach to decision-making succinctly when asked about whether the U.S. would join the Israeli attack on Iran.
"I may do it," he said. "I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do."
"Nobody" in that sentence evidently included Trump himself, who later told reporters in the Oval Office that he had "ideas as to what to do but I haven't made a final - I like to make the final decision one second before it's due, because things change, especially with war."
This is not the calculus of someone who is weighing risks and outcomes, considering past history and the evolution of American strategy, or taking advice from wise counselors. It's a man reviewing a plotline and deciding where the story should go next.
It's not useful to spend time criticizing this approach to leadership and governance. It's simply a fact of our lives, and it won't change. The key is to see the motivating factors of self-protection and self-aggrandizement as underlying Trump's actions and decisions, and to recognize that he literally is improvising all the time now that all the initial plans are in process.
* * *
Here's where the Grenada story comes in.
Before last week, Trump had been having a hard time controlling the narrative, and his ratings were dropping. The dismal showing at his birthday parade contrasted perfectly with as many as four million people protesting peacefully in cities and towns across the nation. He even started to flinch on the ICE story for a moment before Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, stiffened his resolve.
Whenever Trump starts talking about his approval ratings on Truth Social, you can tell he's getting worried, and there really weren't any good news stories for him to deflect attention, since even approval for his policies on immigration had dropped into negative territory, joining similar disapproval rankings in areas like tariffs and the economy.
Pushing the button on Iran made perfect psychic sense - how better to salve the ego wound of a bad parade than by bombing the shit out of a hated enemy? It also served its purpose, erasing other news stories or pushing them far down the page.
As I write this on Sunday evening, Iran is the only news that anyone can really pay attention to, and that will probably be the case for the week to come. In fact, Trump will probably run with the story as long as it works for him, and then try to declare victory and walk away - if Iran lets him, that is. It's certainly in their interest to follow that script, rather than escalate things by trying to hit back with major strikes.
The problem with all of this is that until last week, Iran really wasn't very important compared to almost any other major story. Ukraine, China, tariffs, ICE, DOGE, the economy, you name it - all of these had more important and higher stakes than negotiations with Iran, which could have dragged on for months without Iran presenting any perceivable short-term threat to the U.S.
Now it's a major crisis and the focus of global attention. And Trump did that all by himself. He was basically alone in his own mind when he made the call, not thinking about risks and outcomes or long-range strategic interests - just how it felt to him right then, with Netanyahu's offer on the table and the chance to turn the news cycle entirely on its head.
* * *
The great fear in all of this is that Trump's strike on Iran fits into the unfolding narrative of his militarization of the United States, a scenario in which he ultimately invokes emergency powers and suspends civil liberties.
Scenarios like this one depend on violent protests and police crackdowns in an escalating cycle of disorder that provides justification for military rule. The failure of the birthday-parade weekend to foment that sort of crisis does not mean that the underlying plan has gone away.
It's unlikely that it's Trump's plan, exactly, since he doesn't think in plans. His mind can't handle the focus required to work through various steps and the outcome probabilities.
We do know that Trump wants to rule without any check on his power. So far, he has indicated that he will abide by Supreme Court rulings, but that could change. We also don't know how the court may rule if Trump is able to foment a sufficient level of disorder. The country is a powder keg right now.
* * *
Trump may not have a plan, but the people around him do. Calling the attack on Iran a distraction may seem like it underestimates potential consequences, but it serves that focus right now, while ICE continues its stepped-up raids and Putin prepares his summer offensive in Ukraine.
Trump began by "flooding the zone," and now it's literally impossible to keep track of everything that is going on. The outcome of his first months in the presidency is a level of chaos and instability of the sort that usually is driven by external factors, but in Trump's case is entirely his own doing.
Whether he can ride the storm he's made and come out unscathed is not entirely up to him. Nations like Iran and China have a voice, too, as do the American people, who generally prefer order to chaos.
Trump got his Granada last week, an easy win that left him much stronger than he had been the week before. Will that strength last? It's hard to know, but the fundamentals of his presidency are weak, and a sideshow conflict can mask that for only so long.
If it turns out to be a short war, Trump will need something else, soon. A long war is unlikely to meet with much popular approval, including from Trump's own base.
In the meantime, we're left with uncertainty - a kind of dangerous uncertainty like nothing I have known in my lifetime. If you want to know what Trump is planning next, just listen to his own words: "Nobody knows what I'm going to do."
This Voices Viewpoint by MacLean Gander was written for The Commons.
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