Unease is growing over Trump's tactics with Iran
The President's tactics might work in North Korea, but diplomats fear the same approach to Tehran won't work, writes Mark Austin.
Wednesday 9 May 2018 23:05, UK
Donald Trump is an atypical president who conducts atypical diplomacy - if you can call it diplomacy.
His style is a combination of threat, intimidation and bluster, often followed up - when he thinks he's getting what he wants - with his own very particular type of charm.
More traditional diplomats are watching on with bewilderment, wonderment and fear. You have seen it played out with North Korea and Kim Jong Un.
The regime openly taunted the US with rhetoric, missile tests and direct threats against the US mainland.
Mr Trump responded, as only he knows how, with even bigger threats to use his even bigger military.
He would "obliterate" North Korea (what message does that send to the oppressed people there?), and he would bring "fire and fury" to bear like the "world has never seen".
And so on.
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At the same time he would slap on tough sanctions intended, he would say, to bring about the economic collapse of the regime.
He would then sit back and wait for his nemesis to cave in. There would be no alternative strategy.
It is Plan A or nothing. With North Korea, it is working... for now.
Kim Jong Un has jumped at the chance of a summit realising, in classic North Korean fashion, that the thing is to play for time and delay and obfuscate.
But for traditional diplomats, it is all the wrong way round.
It is the officials who go in, do the hard yards and the hard talking and then, maybe months later, there is the reward of a leaders' summit.
This time, Mr Trump has rushed to the table himself and it will be the officials who will have to clear up or take forward whatever he happens to come up with.
It is a strange way of doing things but it may just work.
I have yet to meet a diplomat who has said that Mr Trump definitely won't get anywhere. He just may - and so in a sense his tactics may be justified.
The thing about North Korea is that Mr Kim would never, when it came to it, start a war he knows he would lose. In North Korea's regime, survival is everything.
But now Mr Trump is trying precisely the same thing with Iran. The same threats, the same rhetoric and the same sanctions.
But this time I detect far greater unease among diplomats. They believe there is far greater danger of war over Iran than over North Korea.
The Iranian regime is utterly different. The Ayatollahs are prepared to face down the Great Satan and it is more complex and much more combustible.
And the questions the diplomats are asking is - what happens now? What is the strategy?
A columnist for The New York Times has described Trump's move as "more temper tantrum than strategy".
He fears that there is no sensible alternative to a nuclear agreement. And many diplomats worry that hawks like national security adviser John Bolton may seriously think that the best solution is military strikes on Iran's nuclear sites.
It's pretty clear Israel considers it a viable option. Time will be the test on Iran.
Trump's tactics are clear for all to see; what is not are the consequences. And that is what worries people most.