Dr. Trita Parsi

I think, I mean, it's a great question.

And I want to say that, you know, I don't think I have the full answer in any way, shape or form.

But I think there's a couple of things we can point to.

First is the sugar high from Venezuela.

The fact that that operation went as smoothly as it did, at least from a military standpoint, not a single American casualty, seems to really have it.

cemented a view in Trump's mind that he is, you know, he's operating in a different dimension, that everyone who's told him, you can't move the embassy to Jerusalem, you can't give Golan to the Israelis, you can't kill Soleimani, you can't bomb Fordow, you can't do all of these things, that all of them have always been wrong.

that he has managed to do it and that has not been any real repercussions, which of course is not entirely true.

And that as a result, he's just gotten some sort of a superhuman view of himself in which he has again taken the advice by others about the dangers of this.

with a tremendous amount of salt and skepticism.

Because what we have in this situation is not one in which there were a lot of people in the White House pushing for this.

The main person pushing for this was Trump.

And the other people pushing for it were outside of the government, or at least of the administration.

They were in the Senate.

They were the pro-Israeli crowd.

It was the Israeli government.

But it was not a lot of people inside the government that was doing this.

All of these leaks...

It has come out almost on a daily basis in mainstream media with military personnel declaring all the kind of challenges that they're faced with this are all there to kind of push him back or at least win more time.

And I think it reflects again on the difficulty from their standpoint to actually do this in a successful way with a degree of expectation that Trump now seems to have based on a couple of operations that went much better than most people had expected.

I think that's one element of it.