No two human beings, let alone US presidents, could be less alike than Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter. One was a frugal “citizen servant”; the other is Trump. But they have Iran in common. Carter’s presidency was hijacked by the Iran hostage crisis — a disaster he could never escape. Operation Epic Fury is a trap Trump entered blithely. Iran’s theocrats are thus also defining his presidency.Both share an allergy to US body bags. Carter was conscience-stricken after losing eight Americans in his aborted hostage rescue attempt. So far Trump has lost 13 US service members in the Gulf. He fears a public backlash to more US deaths. “There was a time at the very beginning when we thought about doing that,” Trump said last week when asked if he planned to seize Iran’s stash of highly enriched uranium. “I didn’t want to be Jimmy Carter.”
Yet that is who Trump is becoming. Once the idea forms that a US president is prisoner to what others decide, the scent of impotence is hard to shake. That invites danger. Carter’s inability to free the hostages fed into the Soviet Union’s decision to invade Afghanistan a few weeks after the US embassy in Tehran was stormed. But for the actions of Pope John Paul II and Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Soviets would probably have invaded Poland.
Trump is the hostage at the heart of today’s Middle Eastern maze. This weekend the president told me: “I call the shots. I call all the shots.” That seems doubtful.