Who Blinks First Trump or Xi Jinping ?

It is becoming clearer by the day that the main beneficiaries of the war with Iran are Xi Jinping’s China. Inscrutable and, like the Iranian supporters of the Persian regime, impossible for the Americans to understand. They believe fundamentally that all people think as they do. This is a mistake that will cost the West in blood and treasure if President Donald Trump opts for ending the war before achieving its stated goals. Leaving the Islamic Republic of Iran to claim victory, a victory that has a very oriental flavour.

If Trump does decide that the cost of continuing the war is no longer viable, he will be guilty of self-deception and hypocrisy as he constructs moral pretensions for his actions while spruiking universal values and ideals, attempting to capture the American people’s emotions, knowing that the current conflict can be resolved only by deception.

Tragically, this will serve Chinese interests and encourage more bellicose noises from Beijing. China, unlike America, plays the long game; another consequence of an early resolution of the war would be that Taiwan would take centre stage in Chinese calculations.

As for Iran, it would be left free to harass the Jewish State with its remaining stockpile of Ballistic Missiles while Israel would be constrained by its less-than-solid American ally from defending itself. The bottom line is ‘War, War, War!’

In the end, Trump would have blinked and not for the first time.