Trump’s Choice To Attack Iran Creating Worldwide Chaos Just Days In

When Donald Trump posted a brief video early on Saturday about the war he had just started with Iran, he neglected to mention the predictable consequences.

Like a plunging stock market. Or spiking oil prices worldwide and gasoline prices at home. Or tens of thousands of American citizens stranded in the Middle East. Or Iran striking out at its neighbours and whipping up a metastasising regional war.

Not four days later, all of these have come to pass, which is likely to make Trump’s massive attack on Iran at the behest of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu even less popular among Americans than it already is.

“It’s not clear to me what Trump’s main objective is, or how long it will last before something else takes its place,” said John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in his first term and a decades-long proponent of taking a hard line against Iran.

“There’s a compelling case for regime change in Iran, but he hasn’t made it yet.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Tuesday closed 1,000 points lower than it was on Friday afternoon, hours before Trump’s attack began. Oil prices are up 13% since Friday, and gasoline prices jumped 11 cents overnight and now average $3.11 nationally.

In his first question-and-answer session with the press since starting the war — apart from brief phone interviews with selected reporters — Trump defended his decision to attack Iran and minimised the chaos it has already generated.

He even contradicted the explanation by his own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, that the US had to act because Israel was about to attack Iran on its own, which would have dragged the United States into the conflict regardless.

Trump said he decided that Iran, not Israel, was about to strike first — an assertion contradicted by his own intelligence community.

“It was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack if we didn’t do it, they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that,” Trump said in an Oval Office photo opportunity with visiting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Trump, who had been planning the attack on Iran for months and had deployed two entire carrier strike groups to the area, claimed that his decision had come too rapidly to permit the timely evacuation of American citizens from the region.

“Because it happened all very quickly. We thought, and I thought maybe more so than most, I could ask Marco ― but I thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked. They were getting ready to attack Israel, they were getting ready to attack others, you’re seeing that right now,” he said, before going off on a rambling, 800-word tangent about high-end ammunition and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and how it would never have happened if he been president and some insults of his predecessor, Joe Biden.

Asked about the petroleum price increases, Trump said those would go away when the war was over. “So, if we have a little high oil prices for a little while, but as soon as this ends, those prices are going to drop, I believe, lower than even before,” he said.

Trump’s claim of it all happening so quickly will likely provide little comfort to Americans, both expats and visitors, stuck in the region.

While the State Department urged US citizens in a list of 14 countries and the Palestinian territories to leave at once, the US embassy in Israel told Americans hoping to do precisely that that because the main airport was closed, they should take a bus to Egypt, and try to find a flight from there.

“If you choose to avail yourself of this option to depart, the US government cannot guarantee your safety,” the advisory stated.

Trump later in the afternoon announced in a social media post that the US government would assume the financial liability risk of all shipping, regardless of nationality, in the Persian Gulf, including the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point at the southeastern end that Iran is trying to close off.

“Effective IMMEDIATELY, I have ordered the United States Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to provide, at a very reasonable price, political risk insurance and guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade, especially Energy, traveling through the Gulf. This will be available to all Shipping Lines. If necessary, the United States Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, as soon as possible,” Trump wrote. “No matter what, the United States will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD. The United States’ ECONOMIC and MILITARY MIGHT is the GREATEST ON EARTH — More actions to come. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

In his meeting with Merz, Trump also acknowledged the lack of a plan for after Iran’s Islamic regime loses control of the country.

He told reporters in previous days that his “template” had been his assault on Venezuela early in January, when US special forces troops were able to find and abduct that country’s dictator, with his second-in-command taking over after agreeing to Trump’s demands for a cut of Venezuela’s oil revenue.

That model, Trump agreed, seemed implausible in Iran, where the bombing campaign has killed lower-echelon leaders whom Trump had hoped to install to run the country.

“Most of the people we had in mind are dead. So, you know, we had some in mind from that group that is dead, and now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So, I guess you have a third wave coming and pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody,” he said.

While Trump told the New York Post on Monday that he was not ruling out deploying American troops in Iran, he was also trying to persuade armed Kurdish groups in Iraq to seize control of Iran, effectively serving as his proxy army, according to another report.

When asked about that possibility, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded: “President Trump has been in contact with many allies and partners in the region throughout the past several days.”

In American diplomatic parlance, however, “allies” and “partners” have specific definitions, neither of which appears to apply to the Kurdish groups in either Iraq or Iran, so it is unclear what Leavitt meant.