Yesterday’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani, an illegal and reckless escalation of the US-Iran tensions Trump has deliberately stoked throughout his term, is a bit like Trump’s victory in 2016: nothing that came before should make us the least bit surprised it happened, yet the outcome is so alarming that you can’t help but feel shaken.

As experts have already pointed out, Soleimani’s killing has the potential to spark something very dangerous. Soleimani was one of the country’s most powerful military figures, the head of its elite Quds Force who essentially ran Iranian military and foreign policy in the region. A war hero labeled “a living martyr of the revolution” by Iran’s Supreme Leader, he was a hugely popular figure who was the subject of rhapsodizing state propaganda, and who had future political leadership possibly in his sights.

So there’s a high likelihood his death will prompt reprisals against, for example, the numerous US bases, embassies, and troops surrounding Iran, with many of the latter deployed in the middle of Trump’s attempts to incite a conflict with Iran in earnest last year. And those reprisals will prompt their own reprisal from Trump, and perhaps even serve as a pretext for the war the president’s been fumbling toward. The administration seems to have been trying all of last year to goad Iran into doing something, anything, that would justify a US attack on the country; this is their best chance yet. It’s not for nothing one expert called the idea of his assassination “a real act of war” in 2018.