Historian Niall Ferguson has a new word for Trump's approach to Iran: "blinkmanship." The president went to the brink with escalating threats, but because the threats were not entirely convincing, he ended up blinking first.
Ferguson developed the argument in a Free Press interview, analyzing Trump's Truth Social posts in the final days before the ceasefire, "Hvylya" reports.
On Easter Sunday, Trump posted: "Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day. Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell." Twelve hours before his own deadline, he escalated further: "A whole civilization will die tonight." Ferguson's reaction was blunt. "I've always felt that when somebody uses the F-word, they're beginning to lose the argument," he said. "It smacked of desperation."
The problem, Ferguson explained, was that Trump's Truth Social feed served two audiences at once. Its primary target was oil traders - the ceasefire announcement triggered a massive decline in crude prices - but the secondary audience was Tehran. "If you're really signaling to oil traders primarily and only secondarily to your adversary, don't be surprised if the adversary detects the tone of weakness," Ferguson said.
Iran had already seized escalation dominance earlier in the conflict by targeting Gulf states' desalination plants and critical infrastructure - something the US had not foreseen. "They actually got escalation dominance by doing that," Ferguson said. This made Trump's threat to unleash B-52s less credible: Iran could retaliate against Gulf desalination plants, and "you could render Bahrain uninhabitable with one well-aimed strike."
Ferguson rejected the label "TACO" - Trump Always Chickens Out - as inaccurate. Trump takes risks on a scale unparalleled in modern presidential history but periodically overreaches and has to retreat. He blinked on tariffs in April last year; China retaliated with a threat to cut off rare earth exports. Iran, Ferguson argued, learned from the Chinese example and retaliated in ways Washington did not foresee - targeting Gulf neighbors rather than US or Israeli assets directly.