President Donald Trump’s cavalier approach to the Iran war is built on pure fantasy,
That’s the contention of Lydia Polgreen, who writes in a NY Times op-ed how Trump seems surprised by what the combat has wrought so far, starting with his admitted “biggest surprise” (as told to CNN) that Iran would attack its neighbors.
The Times notes he was warned by “just about every country in the region” that would be the result of attacking Iran.
Such thoughtlessness is part of a pattern, Polgreen contends, starting with the lack of an explanation for the war.
Trump “appears strangely uncertain about where the war is heading," and sometimes “affects astonishing indifference, as though the most powerful man in the world were merely a spectator to events he himself has set in motion — and who in any case has little investment in the outcome.”
That masks what Polgreen calls a darker truth: “Trump seems to believe that he, like his fantasy America, exists on a different plane, utterly untouchable by the swirl of global events. The devastating consequences of his actions are not just someone else’s fault. They are someone else’s problem, too.”
Polgreen claims that attitude is puzzling, given his family’s large real estate holdings in the Gulf.
She concludes that the lesson to be gleaned by the administration is that U.S.agenda can’t exist on its own.
“Other places and other people are real, possessing their own agendas and agency — and America’s actions have consequences it cannot control. Anything else is pure fantasy," she writes.


