No Adult in the Room?

Trump's Nest of Hawks

A couple of days ago Donald Trump told an interviewer that while he had ordered an airstrike on Iran he called it off with ten minutes to spare because he felt that the outcome would not be "commensurate." He had been advised that as many as 150 civilians might die and that seemed an inordinately high number of casualties in response to the downing of an American drone by the Iranians.

For the first time in his disastrous presidency I thought that Trump was being the "adult in the room," choosing prudence over a rash and excessive military response. Once that jarring thought sifted down I realized that this was a crisis of his own making in the first place. Trump and his hawks cancelled the international treaty with Iran which lifted some sanctions as a reward for not pursuing the development of nuclear weapons. And in recent weeks Trump's administration escalated tough talk with the Iranian regime, admittedly a hawkish group themselves. And after Trump's dove-like decision he returned to childish form, tweeting the end of Iran and total destruction.



Powerful empires have always thrived on displays of force, although never has there been such catastrophic potential in conflicts. While Trumps and his hawks sure seem like kids in a garage with matches and a gas can (what could possibly go wrong?) they could literally blow up the planet, and the US is still the only nation which has used a nuclear weapon.

Two thousand years ago the Romans were a fine-tuned military machine (we've all seen Gladiator) but they also exercised grisly control by executing insurrectionists. One of them was a Galilean peasant name Yeshua, or Jesus, whom Pilate decided was just not worth the risk of leaving alive. We acknowledge Jesus the peasant as Jesus the Christ, and many of Trump's followers claim to worship him. It's strange that they adore the Tough-Guy-in-Chief and ignore the Prince of Peace, despite their claims of allegiance.

We'll pray that cooler heads prevail in the current situation, and perhaps Trump and evangelical Christians will undergo a conversion.