In a room full of Diplomats concerned with growing anti-government protests, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warned President Trump not to “play with the lion’s tail” this weekend, stating that “war with Iran is the mother of all wars,” and that the U.S. “is not in a position to incite the Iranian nation against Iran’s security and interests.”
Trump, not one to take a veiled threat from a nuclear armed nation lightly, tweeted out in all-caps:
To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018
Immediately upon its publication, Trump’s tweet received attention for being written in all-caps, prompting the left to attempt to meme the tweet, with several other publications telling you that the left is memeing the tweet, and assuming you live under a rock and don’t know what typing in all-caps means. Playing it up as an attempt to change the subject from his private two-hour meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and the investigation into their interference in the 2016 elections, these same publications (including an opinion piece in NPR by Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky) accuse the administration of having no coherent policy towards Iran, and taking an anti-regime change stance familiar to most Libertarians and Conservatives alike. Any which way the story can be spun, the central message from the MSM still remains the same: anything Trump does is bad.
However, as with their central message, their tactic of carefully separating related events is in full swing.
We begin with the Iran deal, a deal so terrible that all of the economic relief and pallets of cash Obama gave them stayed with those who received it: The Iranian government and its leaders, never making its way to those it was intended to benefit: the Iranian people. At least twice during his term, the Iranian people protested and openly oppossed their government on all fronts and we ignored them, failing to seize the momentum and oust supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, instead choosing to spit in their people’s face and negotiate a deal that benefited the average Iranian citizen as much as doing nothing would have.
Cut to Trump pulling out of that deal, many would have you believe that the current protests in Iran are a result of that move, but they’ve been going off and on for a variety of reasons since late December, 2017, long before that move was ever made. Since then, more protests have occurred in Iran this year alone than the previous Administration’s, many of which have not been backed by any major political group, party, or figure within that nation, meaning that these are protests being orchestrated and carried out by the Iranian people themselves.
With all of these protests on their mind, the anger of the people directed rightly at their government, said government has chosen instead to attempt to deflect the anger away from themselves and towards the United States and President Trump. Their statements follow Trump’s summit with Putin, where a private two hour meeting occurred in which nobody but the participants themselves actually know what was said. On the 23rd of July, Al-Monitor published an article purporting that Russia had agreed to invest $50 billion in Iran’s petroleum sector as part of an oil-for-goods scheme, in which Russia receives oil from Iran and Iran receives Russian goods; what kind of goods, they are not so sure of.
Russia has been attempting to gain control of the global energy market for quite some time, (recall the Uranium One deal); Russia has also been a major ally to Iran, both acting as allies to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad throughout the Syrian Civil War, supporting Iran’s military involvement in the region and the Syrian regime with airstrikes. With the fall of ISIS, the decrease of U.S. reliance on Middle Eastern oil, the advance of pro-government-backed forces in Syria, Iran’s threat to the U.S. and Trump’s response via all-caps tweet, the question to what was discussed in the two hour private Helsinki meeting becomes apparent: Iran is an unstable nuclear power that has become an existential threat to Russia and their people via their apparent alliance, unacceptable nuclear proliferation, and aggression towards the U.S. and Israel, let their people retake control of their country and Russia gets first dibs on oil exports once a stable government has been established. The alternative being Mutually Assured Destruction over a commodity that private industry and entrepreneurship could easily replace.
Being over three days since that tweet, the Al-Monitor article being published the same day the MSM lost their minds for the seven-hundred and eighty-sixth time this week, Russia has yet to comment on the exchange, something which may have left the Iranian government feeling backed into a corner, alone and afraid as the President of the world’s top nuclear power tweets at them angrily in all caps, and their own people are banging down their doors and demanding change.
