Whether or not the Iranians have done something that needs to be punished or not is really irrelevant–I’m certainly not arguing those crazy ass ragheads are nice guys. But the point is, when you talk badass tough publicly and then meekly back down privately, it sends a
clear message, as Obama found out the hard way.

The screw up is a classic Trump opportunity squander: He has allowed the Iranians to take the initiative so that now anything Trump does will accomplish nothing. If he strikes at the Iranians, it looks like he’s beating up on a poor, helpless victim and kowtowing to the Saudis; not to mention the possibility his raid will either accomplish nothing, or even turn out badly. Military aggression is, after all, inherently risky. Planes get shot down, pilots get paraded before TV cameras, tankers (and destroyers!) get torpedoed, collateral damage happens, you know the drill. And no matter what, the mullahs will have plenty of time to plan a counter of their own, at a time and place of their own choosing. And no matter what happens, recent rising tensions provoked by Washington make it look like the US is picking on yet another helpless, third world innocent.

If you talk tough, you need to do it diplomatically,through back channels, so you, (and your opponent!) have the opportunity to save face later on. And you should never fail to follow up on a public threat. Already, Mr Trump has a reputation for blustering solely for the benefit of his base, it no longer seems to have much effect on his opponents.

Mr Trump has repeatedly broadcast to the world he is indecisive, cowardly, and a liar. For a while there, he had built up a reputation as a madman who had to be humored lest he do something really stupid, now he’s coming across as a wimp with a big mouth and no balls.

“Prices go up for holidays and up for weekends, where the prices should only fluctuate about as much as for a loaf of bread. Why do holidays and weekends come as such a surprise to the oil companies? Yeah, they still don’t know how to sell gasoline.”

Gotta keep ‘em guessin’.

Prices are already climbing for this latest catastrophe, but it’s quite survivable. The president seems to be the only one in a panic. Makes me wonder how many millions he has invested in Saudi Futures…

Trump himself used to frequently rail against American support for the kingdom. He expressed the same disdain for Saudi Arabia as he did for all American allies — they were a bunch of leeches getting rich off American generosity:

Saudi Arabia should fight their own wars, which they won’t, or pay us an absolute fortune to protect them and their great wealth-$ trillion!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2014
But now Trump has come around to a different line of thinking. The Saudis don’t owe America for defending them. Americans owes the Saudis for the privilege of selling them advanced weaponry. “They’ve been a great ally,” gushed the president,

They spend $400 billion in our country over the last number of years. Four hundred billion dollars. That’s a million and a half jobs. And they’re not ones that, unlike some countries, where they want terms; they want terms and conditions. They want to say, “Can we borrow the money at zero percent for the next 400 years?” No. No. Saudi Arabia pays cash.

It’s true that Saudi Arabia purchases weaponry from the United States, though the actual amount is nowhere near $400 billion (which would be more than half the Pentagon’s annual budget). But this transaction is not an act of generosity for hard-pressed American arms manufacturers. The Saudis are being given access to advanced arms that many countries would love to have.

The Saudis have been purchasing American weapons — with cash — for decades. That’s the nature of the relationship. It’s not clear why Trump has decided to stop seeing U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia as a favor to the Saudis and start seeing them as a favor to the U.S.

What makes Trump’s logic so peculiar is that it turns the mechanism through which the alliance works into its rationale. We used to sell weapons to Saudia Arabia because we needed to secure their oil. Now we supposedly need to defend them because they buy our weapons.

Earlier this summer, according to a staffer, a group of Saudi royals stayed at the resort for about a week at the tail end of extended travel, bringing a party of 25 people and more than a hundred pieces of luggage.

Saudi-funded lobbyist paid for 500 rooms at Trump’s hotel after 2016 election

Lobbyists representing the Saudi government reserved blocks of rooms at President Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel within a month of Trump’s election in 2016 — paying for an estimated 500 nights at the luxury hotel in just three months, according to organizers of the trips and documents obtained by The Washington Post.

At the time, these lobbyists were reserving large numbers of D.C.-area hotel rooms as part of an unorthodox campaign that offered U.S. military veterans a free trip to Washington — then sent them to Capitol Hill to lobby against a law the Saudis opposed, according to veterans and organizers.

At first, lobbyists for the Saudis put the veterans up in Northern Virginia. Then, in December 2016, they switched most of their business to the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington. In all, the lobbyists spent more than $270,000 to house six groups of visiting veterans at the Trump hotel, which Trump still owns.

Those bookings have fueled a pair of federal lawsuits alleging Trump violated the Constitution by taking improper payments from foreign governments.

During this period, records show, the average nightly rate at the hotel was $768. The lobbyists who ran the trips say they chose Trump’s hotel strictly because it offered a discount from that rate and had rooms available, not to curry favor with Trump.

Trump hotel in New York got a huge revenue boost from Saudi crown prince’s entourage

President Donald Trump’s hotel in New York City earlier this year reversed a two-year trend of declining rental revenue after travelers with crown prince of Saudi Arabia booked rooms there, a new report said Friday.

The Trump International Hotel saw a 13-percent increase in rental revenue in the first three months of this year after several people accompanying Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stayed for five days in March, according to The Washington Post.

The article cited a letter from the hotel’s general manager, Prince Sanders, who noted that the Saudi prince himself had not stayed in the hotel because its suites were not large enough to accommodate him or other members of the royal family. But the bookings from people traveling with him were enough to increase the hotel’s revenue for the first financial quarter.