Rich Lowry; NY Post How can we be more deadly than the Israelis have been?
"The president-elect doesn’t like foreign conflict, but he bombed ISIS to smithereens as promised in the 2016 election and killed the top Iranian intelligence official, Qasem Soleimani, without hesitation in 2020."
"If they have any instinct for self-preservation, Iran and Hamas should be monitoring President-elect Donald Trump’s communications very closely these days.
"A couple of weeks ago, there was the Truth Social post promising “ALL HELL TO PAY” if Hamas didn’t release its hostages by Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
“ 'Those responsible,” Trump noted, “will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America.”
"He followed up during a press conference Monday.
"When asked what he meant by his prior threat, Trump left it menacingly vague. “Well,” he said, referring to our adversaries, “they’re going to have to determine what that means, but it means it won’t be pleasant. It’s not going to be pleasant.”
"What does that mean? Does Trump have something in particular in mind, or is he making it up as he goes along? . . .
"The famous line is that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton; in the same sense, every successful Trump negotiation as president has been won on the playing fields of Manhattan real estate, where Trump first learned his distinctive means of gaining leverage and psychological advantage.
"His willingness to escalate and follow through means no threat can be completely discounted, while his sheer unpredictability adds to the difficulty of any foreign actor trying to calculate his next move.
"To the famous Machiavellian axiom, “It’s better to be feared than to be loved,” Trump adds the proviso, “and it’s best to keep them guessing, either way.”
"This couldn’t be in starker contrast to Joe Biden, who always fears escalation and is predictably conventional to the point of being sodden and dull." . . .
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