The world is asking itself that question over and over as it watches Donald Trump double down in the Middle East.
Cynics are convinced he is chasing a prominent spot in the pages of history.
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American presidents have a lot to live up to when it comes to the fight against the various isms that have blotted humanity’s copybook over the past few decades.
Franklin D. Roosevelt ended nazism and fascism.
Harry S. Truman oversaw the final conquer of Japanese imperialism.
Ronald W. Reagan defeated communism.
And now Donald J. Trump is vanquishing militarised Islamism.
To that end, the President has made it clear he’s in it for the long haul.
“Some people say ‘he’ll get bored’,” he told us a few days ago. “I don’t get bored, nothing boring about it.”
His rationale for taking the fight to Iran is likely personal as well as pragmatic.
On the latter motivation, there are five incontrovertible facts informing the American agenda.
First, the Iranian regime is a bad actor. And not in an Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls kind of way; this is a “let’s destabilise the entire world just because we can” thing.
Even George W. Bush understood the gravity of the threat (he called Iran out in his 2002 State of the Union speech as a prominent part of the so-called axis of evil) and Dubya makes Donald look intellectually enlightened.
Second, the recently deceased Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, like his predecessor Ruhollah Khomeini, was a real-life Bond villain.
Both men had the EQ of Darth Vader and despite their public stance that the nuclear bomb was immoral, seemed pretty relaxed about their scientists enriching uranium.
Third, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is a modern-day gestapo, which enforces sharia law in a way that makes life in Gilead look like a day at Woodstock.
It does this by terrorising the Iranian people internally and spreading the religious caliphate externally through the three Hs of terror: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza.
Those death cult street gangs could not exist without Iranian money. Drones and rockets are expensive and the people who fly and fire them don’t fight for free, because even martyrs have to feed their families.
Fourth, Iran will always hold international law and the United Nations in contempt because the supreme leaders think they answer to a power that’s higher than the Hague or the Security Council.
Like the Blues Brothers, they’re on a mission from God.
After the dust settles on this, the world will be a better place. But first, there’s going be a lot of dust. And, yes, it will probably get worse before it gets better.
But what’s the alternative?
Do we go back to an Obama-style policy of peace in our time through yet another unenforceable international undertaking by Iran’s leaders?
Yes, we can, Obama liked to tell us. Can get walked over.
Fifth, fundamentally Trump’s still a real estate guy. He’s about to spend $US10 billion on the reconstruction of Gaza.
Why would you build shiny new condominiums in a suburb if you know the local street gangs are just going to burn them down?
That’s the pragmatic rationale. To throw light on the personal reasons Trump is throwing down so emphatically, we need to go back to November 4, 1979.
On that day, 66 Americans were taken hostage in Tehran after the US embassy was stormed by university students.
It was one of the most embarrassing moments in America’s history.
“That they hold our hostages is absolutely and totally ridiculous,” a 30-something Trump said at the time.
“That this country sits back and allows Iran to hold hostages to my way of thinking is a horror.”
The hostage drama came barely four years after the fall of Saigon.
By the time Trump saw Jimmy Carter get pounded by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, the US was an international joke.
It wasn’t long before the rest of the world stopped laughing. Despots thought long and hard about bringing harm to an American in the 1980s, such was the fear of the country’s vengeance.
Former US President Ronald Reagan. Credit: Getty/METHODE
Reagan threw it down and dared any country to pick it up.
Trump watched a celebrity politician (Reagan was an actor, remember) who people knew from the screen (Trump was on The Apprentice, remember) take his place in history as one of the greatest American presidents of all time, courtesy of the uncompromising use of hard power mixed with a sprinkle of show business.
What’s Trump’s end game? That.
