One of the great weaknesses of American foreign policy has been our predictability. Our opponents have been able to pinpoint what we would and would not do.

While one President Trump’s greatest strengths has been his unpredictability. And on the Iran strikes, he not only kept everyone guessing until the last minute, but used sophisticated means to draw everyone off. Tucker Carlson’s pal Dan Caldwell was booted from the Pentagon over allegations of leaking. So were a number of others. When the strikes were actually launched, there were zero leaks despite claims by some in the media that they were getting information from anonymous “officials”. Everyone had learned to stay quiet on the big issue.

The media and social media analysts were misled about our staging prep for an attack which proceeded quite differently.

President Trump’s “two week” deadline may have been sincere but fell apart when Iran refused to engage in high-level negotiations, but it may have been another level of the feint.

Either way everyone was caught by surprise. Including yours truly. And that’s a good thing.

It’s also a message to China. The CCP believes that it can anticipate and predict us. When it can’t, it gets nervous. Any CCP plan for Taiwan just became a lot shakier because there is no way that Xi and top officials can look at what happened with Iran and believe that they can gauge America’s response with any degree of certainity.

The Israeli response after Oct 7 against Hezbollah and now Iran already showed how war plans by their allies could go awry through misdirection and sophisticated planning. The Iran strikes are a more direct warning to China that America’s moves cannot be predicted and that, like the Israelis, we might be capable of something more sophisticated than our actions in the last generaton would suggest.

China’s allies in the Middle East are losing. And America just became unpredictable. That might buy us the time we need in the Pacific.

It now seems likelier that Xi will push back whatever he was planning for after 2028.