Hal Brands comments on Trump’s terrible decision to kill Soleimani:

President Donald Trump has gambled that an extraordinary escalation will allow it to reassert control of an intensifying U.S.-Iran confrontation. It may actually work. But weathering the diplomatic and military fallout will require far greater skill and competence than Trump’s team has displayed so far.

If the administration needs to display “far greater skill and competence” than they have shown to date, what reason would anyone have for believing that this could “work”? They aren’t going to become skillful and competent overnight, so what are we talking about? Brands acknowledges that the “administration’s showing to date is not reassuring,” so why are we entertaining the idea that they can somehow succeed at the greatest challenge they have faced when they have screwed up so many times before now?

The president and the Secretary of State have brought the U.S. to this point through a reckless Iran policy that created the current crisis. There is no evidence that they know how to manage such a crisis, and they have squandered every opportunity to reduce tensions. They have played into the Iranian government’s hands again and again, and they have strengthened hard-liners in Tehran with every move they make. They have failed repeatedly to anticipate how Iran would respond to each new provocation, and it is safe to assume that they have miscalculated very badly now. But the bigger problem with Brands’ formulation is that escalating the conflict as Trump just did cannot possibly give the U.S. more control.

There is no reason to think that a major escalation like this will “allow” the U.S. “to reassert control of an intensifying U.S.-Iran confrontation.” As Van Jackson pointed out recently, the Trump administration has given up its agency in this crisis by killing Soleimani:

Not only does that make it open season on U.S. officials…but on top of that, it is now up to Iran…the Trump administration has given the decision to Iran for whether war happens now. So we have boxed ourselves in, we have narrowed our own options, and that’s super-scary. That is the epitome of bad statecraft.

In other words, the U.S. is not about to “reassert control” of the crisis. The administration has just ceded whatever control it had and has left itself at the mercy of Iran’s willingness to retaliate. Jackson also noted that it makes no sense to think that this attack will have the effect of deterring Iran:

So you go on the offense, you use force, to deter an attack, to prevent a future attack. That’s really stupid, that’s not rational, that’s not logical. The idea that you would goad an adversary into retaliating as a way to prevent them from retaliating, to prevent them from using force in the first place…that doesn’t make any sense.

It is a given that committing an act of war against Iran like this will lead to retaliatory strikes. The only questions are when, where, and what form they will take. The president’s decision to start a war inevitably means that the other side gets to have a say in what that war will look like. The attack on Thursday set things in motion that the U.S. won’t be able to control, and it is pure folly to think that an escalation like this can be stabilizing.