During an Oval Office event with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Tuesday, Donald Trump did something he hadn’t done since launching the war in Iran a few days earlier: The president fielded some questions from reporters in public.
The first line of inquiry was a notable one: “Mr. President, what’s the worst-case scenario that you have planned for in Iran?” a reporter asked.
By all appearances, it wasn’t a question he’d previously considered in any meaningful detail.
The Republican’s response meandered for a while, though Trump ultimately arrived at an answer: “I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen. We don’t want that to happen. That would probably be the worst. You go through this and then in five years, you realize you put somebody in who is no better. … I would say that would be about the worst.”
Part of what made the president’s comments notable was the fact that he publicly acknowledged, for the first time, that failure is a distinct possibility. In fact, just days into the deadly military conflict, Trump can apparently envision a near future in which the entire operation is in vain, and from the United States’ perspective, we’re no better off in five years than we were last week.
But there’s another element to this that’s even more important: If the American president believes the “worst-case scenario” is that awful Iranian leaders are soon replaced by similarly awful Iranian leaders, then Trump is suffering from a woeful lack of imagination.
The Atlantic published a report on Saturday that noted, “A prolonged campaign could also produce a failed state with enriched uranium, destabilize crucial oil routes, threaten Gulf allies, trigger a refugee crisis, and disrupt the global economy.”
The same report quoted Dana Stroul, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, who said, “The worst-case outcome is complete chaos” throughout the region.
The question for the White House is simple: Has no one told Trump about the actual worst-case scenarios, or does the president simply not understand the potentially catastrophic circumstances that could result from the war he launched for reasons he’s struggled to explain?
