The US president wanted an easy win, but the conflict is spiralling following Israel\u2019s attack on a gas field and Iranian retaliation across the region<\/p>\n
Shortly after the US and Israel began their illegal assault on Iran<\/a>, with the US president still preening himself over the kidnapping of Venezuela\u2019s Nicol\u00e1s Maduro the previous month, a state department official joked<\/a> that Donald Trump had a new foreign policy credo: \u201cDecapitate and delegate\u201d. It was a reversal of Colin Powell\u2019s invocation of the \u201cPottery Barn rule\u201d ahead of the invasion of Iraq: you break it, you own it.<\/p>\n Gen Powell, then secretary of state, was warning that wars can escalate beyond expectation and are harder to exit than enter. It remains unclear what precisely the Trump administration expected from this conflict \u2013 perhaps not least to the White House itself \u2013 but it is certain that the president was not paying heed when people described the likely consequences.<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The US president wanted an easy win, but the conflict is spiralling following Israel\u2019s attack on a gas field and Iranian retaliation across the region Shortly after the US and Israel began their illegal assault on Iran, with the US president still preening himself over the kidnapping of Venezuela\u2019s Nicol\u00e1s Maduro the previous month, a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}