As America slid deeper into Vietnam, Lyndon B. Johnson’s adviser George Ball warned: “Once on the tiger’s back, we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.”
Trump mounted the tiger in February with Operation Epic Fury. The memorandum of understanding was his attempt to dismount slowly. The tiger had other plans.
For now, neither side wants full-scale war. Trump appears to be playing for time until after the midterm elections. Iran, for its part, is content to assert its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and knows that any new round of escalation would deposit its energy infrastructure in the U.S. target bank. Tehran has been happy to walk right up to the line without crossing it.
On Friday, it crossed it—whether by design or miscalculation is still unclear. Two U.S. servicemen were killed in an Iranian missile attack on a U.S. base in Jordan, the first American deaths in the conflict since April. Manned and unmanned aircraft on the ground were also hit, another break from the pattern of recent exchanges. The base has been struck before—an Iranian drone damaged a radar component of the THAAD antimissile system defending it in March, forcing the U.S. to replace it—but until Friday, no one stationed at the base had been killed.
