The President Should Not Be Posting

Thoughts on crisis stability and U.S. posture towards Iran.

This will be a short one. I just want to commit to print some thoughts I have about how the U.S. president is choosing to engage in public communications during a major war between Israel and Iran. The impetus for this was a thread I did over on BlueSky last night, reacting to Trump’s post on Truth Social calling for a total evacuation of Tehran. You can read that here.

Today (June 17), Trump has followed up with the following two posts:

The first:

The second:

As you probably know if you’re reading this Substack, we’re now several days into a tactically lopsided conflict, where Israel has achieved air superiority, substantially degraded Iran’s organizational and technical military command, control, and communications (C3), and caused attrition to missile launchers.

If you’re Iran’s supreme leader or his military advisor, the biggest strategic question you’re trying to resolve as you muddle through tactically in trying to inflict pain against Israel is the question of whether the United States will enter the war. The United States has ground and sea-based military assets not too far from Iran. If you conclude that the probability of U.S. involvement is high, it starts looking far more advantageous to you to take the first shot. Why? Because your life is about to get a lot worse no matter what if the United States joins the war, but shooting to attrite CENTCOM ground forces and forward-deployed naval assets (if in range of anti-ship missiles) improves your odds than not doing so.

What is the basis on which Iranian priors will be set when it comes to these questions? Well, I’d think the Iranians are engaged in what we’d call in other contexts all-source analysis: to maintain strategic situational awareness, they’re likely pulling in information from all sources that may bear utility, to include the U.S. president’s Truth Social account and the broader U.S. press reporting.

As an American analyst in Washington, D.C., miles from the White House, following this crisis, I have no idea whether Trump’s posts printed above mean that he was watching Fox News and sharing his views on the conflict, or if he really did mean that the United States was entering the war. The first of the two posts strongly implies that U.S. stealth aircraft could already be above Iran.

This leads to a basic state of crisis instability either way, I think. Iran has a choice on whether or not to escalate, and the basis of that choice is its information environment. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his advisors, seeking to maximize their tactical chances in an already very bad scenario and under already considerable psychological stress, may choose to shoot first.

In the scenario where the Iranians are right that Trump is entering the war, their decision to escalate may bear some benefit: it would make life slightly harder for the United States and inflict costs for entering the war. They will likely still suffer at the hands of U.S. airpower, however.

In the scenario where the Iranians are wrong, and Trump is actually choosing to stay out of the war, their strikes will likely beget U.S. participation in the conflict because they’ll have hit U.S. forces and crossed a key redline.

This is not a situation that benefits any player: not Trump (as distinct from the United States), not the United States, and certainly not Iran. The sole beneficiary, if any, is likely Benjamin Netanyahu, who has sought to maximize the odds that the United States is pulled in to deliver a few GBU-57s to the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant.

That’s it for today. I’ll continue to watch events in Iran closely.