Updated:2024-12-11 01:47 Views:159
In his first term as presidentking game slot, Donald Trump’s approach to Iran crossed almost every red line imaginable.
In May 2018, despite the desperate pleas of allies, he pulled the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the landmark Obama-era deal designed to limit the Islamic republic’s nuclear program. He authorized the January 2020 assassination of Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani, in a brazen act that came close to dragging the United States into yet another catastrophic conflict in the Middle East. And in the last two years of his term, he imposed more than 1,500 sanctions on Iran as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign aimed at destroying the country’s economy and bringing the government to its knees. By any measure, it was the boldest and most outlandish Iran policy of any American president in decades.
Today, we have every indication that Mr. Trump’s second term will be less restrained than ever, on the domestic and international fronts. His pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has called Iran an “evil regime” and urged Mr. Trump to bomb economic and cultural sites in the country. His presumptive nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has adopted a slightly mellower tone, but not by much. Mr. Rubio has complained that the Biden administration treated Iranian officials like “Belgian diplomats at the United Nations,” and recently argued that the “only” way to deal with Tehran was by “threatening the survival of the regime.”
Indeed, it is hard to imagine what more the United States could possibly throw at Iran next short of all-out war. Moreover, Mr. Trump’s good friend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel seems intent on escalating the conflict with the Jewish state’s archrival. There is now genuine concern among some longtime Middle East observers that under Mr. Trump’s watch, events in the region could spiral out of control — and into war. As the former C.I.A. director and defense secretary Leon Panetta recently put it, “I think he’s basically going to give Mr. Netanyahu a blank check.”
I’m not so sure that’s where we’re headed. What I do believe is that over the next four years, the toxic and seemingly unending psychodrama between the United States and Iran — now in its fifth decade — may very well see its final act. That could mean war, but there is no inevitable reason it has to. For Mr. Trump, who sees himself as the ultimate deal maker and has a fondness for the theatrical and unpredictable, it could just as easily take the form of a historic reconciliation. Mr. Trump could, under the right circumstances, be the American president who finally brings an end to the standoff between the United States and Iran that has destabilized the Middle East and served as a constant thorn in the side of American presidents since 1979.
The first Trump administration pursued a policy of economic warfare against Iran, in the belief that the Islamic republic was a house of cards ready to collapse under the weight of its own unpopularity. It didn’t. If Mr. Trump and his advisers choose to continue this approach in his second term, there is a limit to how far they can go. There is, for a start, not much left in Iran to sanction: The country’s banks, shipping fleets, oil industry, military and so much else have already been subjected to crushing U.S. and international sanctions. And still Iran’s leaders have found ways to survive. The idea that ever more intense economic pressure will finally break this regime has proved wrong again and again.
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