No empathy.

"It was worse than a crime. It was a blunder."

Attributed to diplomat Charles Talleyrand, commenting on Napoleon's execution of a French aristocrat. 

We assassinated Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

Iranians closed ranks around their country and its leaders. 

No surprise there.

We watched the funeral this week. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians in the streets of Tehran, mourning a man we killed. 

This funeral and demonstration were even larger than the mass funeral for the 165 girls killed in the southern city of Minab.

Ayatollah Khamenei was 86 years old. He had run a repressive, corrupt, unpopular government for decades. Iranians, especially young ones, wanted him gone. Civic discontent was on the rise. The Iranian Revolution had worn out its welcome, and its leader was in poor health.

Did anyone in the Situation Room put themselves into the minds of Iranians? Did anyone think of our own history, how Americans reacted to assassinations and foreign attacks?

If President Trump died tomorrow of a heart attack, I would not be angry. I would probably feel some sense of relief, and then worry. What kind of government comes next? But a death from natural causes doesn't raise the specter of a national need to settle a score or take revenge. The death of a leader by assassination, however, creates a victim and maybe a martyr. Along with the funeral you get a moral structure. They attacked us.  Someone else interposed themselves into our home, our business. You get a funeral that becomes a referendum on the murderer. 

The grievance against Khamenei, real and earned over 40 years, got shoved aside by something bigger and simpler: We stole from them. We took something that was theirs. We insulted them. Abas Aslani, a senior research fellow at Tehran's Center for Middle East Strategic Studies, told Al Jazeera that the U.S. and Israel wanted regime change, but "what actually happened created a rally around the flag" — that "the government did not fall but became stronger." 

Well, of course. We know this mechanism from our own history. Abraham Lincoln morphed from controversial into a martyr. In my lifetime, and Trump's, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. They are named in monuments, airports, cultural centers, sports stadia, and national holidays. What irony. Trump seeks that kind of recognition for himself while giving a feeble and unpopular enemy a shortcut mechanism for martyrdom.

In late 1941, isolationist sentiment had kept our country out of a war for two years. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended that. The insult! The injury! Japan had no right! Public opinion coalesced behind our joining the war.

It happened again in 2001. President George W. Bush, drifting through his first year, elected by the thinnest of margins, saw his approval rating jump above 90 percent within days of the World Trade Center towers falling. That's what an attack does to a fractured public: It closes ranks. There was a stronger sense of "we." There was also a hardened sense of "they," Muslims weren't just unusual to most Americans. They became dangerous, an enemy. 

An assassination by the U.S. fit a well-learned template for Iranians. In 1953, the CIA helped topple Mohammad Mossadegh, a democratically elected prime minister, and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi the Shah. It bought us 26 years of a friendly autocrat, then delivered 1979 — the hostage crisis, the Islamic Republic, decades of enmity. Every Iranian schoolchild learns that story, the founding grievance of the regime. We just did it again.

This White House thinks in leverage, not empathy: Find the pressure point, apply it, expect compliance. It is happening again this morning as I write, with renewed bombing. Our tools are bombs and missiles, and from that we will change minds. That may be effective in forcing militaries to change. It is tone-deaf when it comes to persuading public opinion to align with us. Didn't we learn in Vietnam that we don't win the "hearts and minds" by bombing them? Apparently not.

Trump thinks like a predator. He knows what he wants: The target is prey to be eaten, not persuaded. He negotiates by force; it is zero sum. Their loss is our gain. 

Our tool is pain, and we deliver it: Double the tariff! No, triple it! Then maybe Canada will decide it wants to join the U.S. as the 51st state.

It hardened Canadian opinion against the U.S.

Talleyrand's line was about the execution of a duke, not an ayatollah, but it fits. Killing Khamenei was strategically self-defeating. We have watched this reflex in our own mirror, in the assassinations, in 1941, in Vietnam, and in 2001. The Iranian crowds are not chanting "thank God our monster is dead." They are chanting "Kill Trump."

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