In Othello, the villain Iago gives varied and constantly shifting reasons for why he wants to destroy Othello. Shakespeare scholars have generally interpreted that to mean that although none of the individual explanations are all that convincing, the sentiment behind them is crushingly powerful. Iago's will to destroy has simply gathered so much momentum that it can no longer be stopped. No explanation alone quite adds up, except one: 'a new element of Trump's foreign-policy doctrine that we're seeing here, because he and the people around him are willing to take risks and they're willing to kind of go with their gut in a new way,' says Missy Ryan, an Atlantic staff writer who covers national security and has worked in the Middle East. The advantage of a gut-driven war decision is that it can yield sudden dramatic results. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been a brutal Iranian dictator for nearly four decades. Past American presidents have weighed taking him on, and then decided against...
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