Zelen Tzu is a joke on Volodymyr Zelensky, as if the actor knows the art of war. One Zelen Tzu saying is, “the enemy cannot know your plan, if you do not know your plan.” This is the plan Trump follows, and always has. Trump got this far winging it and he operates the US Air Wing the same way. By the seat of his pants. Thus we cannot know when/if Trump will bomb Iran because Trump himself doesn't know. He has no master plan.

Nobody knows who Trump's going to bomb least of all Trump. The US military is always bombing somebody, but even the garrulous generals are shocked at how trigger-happy Trump is. He's just flinging carrier groups across the oceans without a care in the world. Make no mistake, American Presidents are all war criminals and America is always hitting somebody, but Trump is hitting them all at once. Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, fucking Greenland, everybody can get some. Every US President is violent, but Trump's velocity is different. Trump needs constant attention, so that means constant aggression, in every direction.

As Trump said in Art of the Deal (which he didn't write and may not have read), “I NEVER had a master plan. I just got fed up one day and decided to do something about it. On the morning of May 22, 1986, there was a story on the front page.” This was about rebuilding an ice rink. Now he bombs Iran. But it's the same modus operandi from the same modaya. In the morning, Trump reads the papers and wonders why he's not in them. Then he does something crazy to get attention.

Now as US President, he does the same thing. That's why he had Twitter open in the ‘command-room’ (really just some drapes). Trump has no great need for security because he's an open book. He doesn't really need to hide his war plans cause he doesn't have any. American Presidents are always at war, this is nothing new, but there used to be more gaps in between. Now Trump is flipping between war zones like he's literally doom scrolling.

Trump has become a historical figure by not thinking about history, he just thinks about the news and makes history inadvertently. Trump is not even motivated by money per se, as a trust-fund kid Trump would have made more money passively investing than he did speculating. But for Trump, money is just a proxy for Daddy's attention, and Daddy's dead, so he has to kill people to get a rush. As Trump said in the opening lines of Art of the Deal, which he must have at least read,

I don't do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.

So now Trump making a big deal on the global stage. It's no different from New York. Demolishing poor neighborhoods and giving them to rich people, that's the business model from Manhattan to Gaza? This is why (and how) Trump bullshits his way through foreign affairs, it's all just real estate to him, which is sold through as much fakery as possible. As Trump said via Schwartz,

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.

I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.

Trump has no ideological attachment to Iran or Venezuela or Greenland, they're just real estate projects to him. Trump sees politics in the same transactional war, and he's not entirely wrong about American politics. In Art of the Deal he said,

I think of Jimmy Carter. After he lost the election to Ronald Reagan, Carter came to see me in my office. He told me he was seeking contributions to the Jimmy Carter Library. I asked how much he had in mind. And he said, “Donald, I would be very appreciative if you contributed five million dollars.

I was dumbfounded. I didn’t even answer him.

But that experience also taught me something. Until then, I’d never understood how Jimmy Carter became president. The answer is that as poorly qualified as he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls, to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president.

Trump seamlessly transitioned into American politics cause he realized it's all bullshit. Trump is who he always was—a bullshitting charlatan—and now he's been given the whole china shop to bully. In this context, you can't guess when Trump will hit Iran because Trump doesn't know. His advisors can't really guide his thought because even they can't keep his attention long enough. There is no long-term strategy and, if there was, he wouldn't read it. Bro flies by the seat of his pants and shits on everybody. At some level you can predict that America will hit Iran but no one knows when because America has a mad king doing mad tings.

The strategic calculus is that Iran can clapback at the US base Qatar across the thin Persian Gulf, tank oil markets, and hit Trump where it hurts, in the stock market. But Trump isn't doing calculus, it really depends what side of the bed he wakes up in the morning. He doesn't trust committees, he doesn't trust consultants, he doesn't read reports. Trump just goes by his gut, which sometimes just surprises him, and thus us. Trump is a cipher even onto himself. As Zelen Tzu said, “the enemy cannot know your plan, if you do not know your plan.” Ain't it so with Donald Trump?