(CNN) — Monday should be a very scary day for the small Middle Eastern country of Oman. President Donald Trump warned it against interfering with US efforts in the Strait of Hormuz, telling Fox News, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the sh*t out of them.”
But one could forgive Oman for not getting too hot and bothered.
That’s because Trump, a president who once warned repeatedly about the dangers of presidents failing to follow through on their threats, has made lots of empty ones in recent months.
Indeed, Trump seems to have embraced a policy in the Iran war centered on firing off threats that he doesn’t seem terribly inclined to enforce — if he ever actually meant them.
The problem with that, as a former version of Trump would have pointed out, is it makes countries like Oman less likely to comply with his demands, because they don’t necessarily think Trump is willing to make good on them.
Iran has certainly adopted that posture.
Trump’s track record of bluffs in the Iran war is undeniable at this point. Nearly four months ago, I wrote about how Trump, even at that early juncture less than two months into the war, had already made five threats against Iran that he failed to follow through on.
All of them involved a specific demand and a specific deadline. Each time, Trump called off the threatened attack.
But it wasn’t because Iran actually gave him what he wanted; it was instead often because Trump said there was some other reason for optimism about a deal being right around the corner.
Of course, that optimism proved unwarranted each time.
It wound up looking a whole lot like Trump simply wanted an off-ramp from his threats, which have included ending Iran’s civilization or striking at its infrastructure (a potential war crime).
And the apparent bluffs have continued to mount since then.
For example, Trump on July 22 said that for every Iranian attack on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, “the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT.”
The United Arab Emirates has since then blamed Iran for repeated attacks on Abu Dhabi National Oil Company vessels. But there’s no indication that Trump has targeted Iranian infrastructure in retaliation.
Trump has also repeatedly teased massive attacks on Iran without making specific demands. But those attacks have yet to materialize. And there are questions about whether the United States can even afford to launch them, given the shortfalls in its munitions stockpile.
And there’s a strategic aspect worth considering: While Americans aren’t privy to all the behind-the-scenes negotiations, Iran will know plenty about just how much Trump has truly caved on these threats. There has been little evidence that Iran was actually that close to agreeing to anything when Trump backed down from his threats, but Iran would know how much Trump was embellishing about the supposed progress.
Even if they did give Trump some reason for optimism about a deal, the fact it never actually led to a sustainable one would seem instructive. At some point it’d be logical to think the US president would insist on something tangible before he backed down.
(Trump has occasionally referenced the idea that Iran might be leading him on and that its word simply can’t be trusted. But he hasn’t given up on negotiations.)
The effectiveness of Trump’s threats also suffer from another simple fact: He simply makes a lot of them, even outside the context of the Iran war.
Trump has shown he’s plenty willing to throw US military might around in his second term — launching strikes in seven countries so far, with Iran being the most recent.
That could certainly give Oman concern about what might happen if it failed to comply with his recent demand. But most of these strikes weren’t against the government in power, but rather terrorist groups.
And Trump has actually threatened or left open the possibility of striking even more countries than that. Oman is the seventh country he’s threatened without actually striking, at least not yet, along with Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland (which is part of Denmark), Mexico and Panama.
Combined, that means Trump has attacked or threatened one out of every 13 countries in his second term.
And Oman was in that category even before Monday. Back in May, Trump said something very similar to what he said Monday.
“Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow ‘em up,” Trump said at the time.
It seems that threat hasn’t had the intended effect. So Trump just tossed another one on top of it.
Though neither one was tied to a specific Omani action, so it will be hard to judge whether Oman truly gave him what he wanted.
But there is one US president who might advise Trump that, when he makes such threats, he had better mean them. That would be the Trump of yesteryear.
He regularly pilloried former President Barack Obama for setting a red line — that Syria couldn’t use chemical weapons on its own people — and then failing to act when Syria breached that line.
In his 2016 Republican National Convention speech, Trump labeled it a “humiliation,” because “the whole world knew it meant absolutely nothing.”
He in 2017 called it a “blank threat” that cost us “in many other parts of the world.”
And by 2018, Trump defiantly rang in a new era in American foreign policy.
“Today’s action sends a critical message: The United States no longer makes empty threats,” Trump said. “When I make promises, I keep them.”
Trump made that comment when he pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. Since then, he’s not only made a bunch of empty threats, but he’s made them a cornerstone of his Iran policy.
The-CNN-Wire
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