Social Media Diplomacy?

Recognizing that surely he is doing this for his base (although it seems like he has always taken first Twitter and now Truth Social as official channels of communication), this is no way to conduct foreign policy.

First we got this yesterday before either Iran or Israel made official statements.

Then, after midnight this moring we got:

Then, this morning the following:

And then:

This is all just an absurd way to conduct the serious business at hand. It is more child-throws-tantrum thatn POTUS-does-diplomacy.

Then we get this.

Maybe he doesn’t know what he is doing. (Without any doubt, this is all more complicated than he thinks it is.)

Side note: NPR was unwilling to play Trump saying “they don’t know what the fuck they are doing” (although they noted he used an explicative). Quite frankly, it seems newsworthy that that was the language he used, and maybe we don’t need to be shielded from it? (Not that I couldn’t figure it out from context clues.)

Look, as James Joyner noted this morning, we may have gotten away with the bombing of Iran without significant blowback, although, granted, it is still early. I remain skeptical that this was worth it insofar as I do not believe that the nuclear program in Iran is “obliterated,” and, moreover, we have provided Iran with additional incentives to acquire a bomb. It will take time to know for sure, of course.

The one thing that I will say in favor of the bombings is that they gave Israel what it wanted, and so, maybe, Israel will now stand down.

As I noted at some point in various writings on the topic, there is a finite number of weapons to be used in a war like this.

At any rate, and even setting aside the social media posts, random quotation marks, and weird capitalizations, it is striking the degree to which Trump thinks he can just make people do what he wants and that his anger will be enough to move global actors the way he wants them to go. It is especially ironic because I think that Netanyahu played Trump to get him to drop those bombs, meaning that Trump is not the main driver of any of this, despite thinking he is the capo.

BTW, this is delusional (source):

In an exclusive phone interview with NBC News tonight, Trump called the ceasefire between Iran and Israel that he announced marked “a wonderful day for the world, in my opinion.”

“It’s a great day for America. It’s a great day for the Middle East. I’m very happy to have been able to get the job done,” he said. “A lot of people were dying, and it was only going to get worse. It would have brought the whole Middle East down.”

Asked how long the ceasefire would be, Trump said: “I think the ceasefire is unlimited. It’s going to go forever.”

He added that the war is completely over, saying he does not believe Israel and Iran “will ever be shooting at each other again.”