The Guardian view on the Iran war escalation: as Trump breaks things, who will pick up the pieces? | Editorial
Shortly after the US and Israel began their illegal assault on Iran, with the US president still preening himself over the kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro the previous month, a state department official joked that Donald Trump had a new foreign policy credo: “Decapitate and delegate”. It was a reversal of Colin Powell’s invocation of the “Pottery Barn rule” ahead of the invasion of Iraq: you break it, you own it. Gen Powell, then secretary of state, was warning that wars can escalate beyond expectation and are harder to exit than enter. It remains unclear what precisely the Trump administration









