White House Memo
No Longer Held Back by His Advisers, Trump Puts His Imprint on Foreign Policy
By Peter Baker
May 9, 2018

WASHINGTON — The relative caution that constrained President Trump for much of his first year in office has been cast aside, and an emboldened commander in chief is finally reshaping foreign policy to reflect the “America First” philosophy he promised during his campaign.

Having shed or sidelined some of the top advisers who held him back in the past, Mr. Trump gives the appearance of a leader liberated at last to follow the china-breaking instincts that have long animated his approach to the world even as they troubled diplomats and national security veterans of both parties.

The president’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal on Tuesday may be only the start of a period of several weeks in which he repositions the United States in the world in a way that could last for years. After breaking with European allies over the Iran agreement, Mr. Trump will break with Arab allies on Monday with the formal opening of an American Embassy in Jerusalem.

He has until the end of the month to decide whether to impose punishing steel tariffs on key American trading partners. He has said he hopes to forge a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada within weeks or blow up the North American Free Trade Agreement. Then he will test his theory that he can force the mercurial North Korea to surrender its nuclear arsenal through “maximum pressure” coupled with threats of military action followed by high-stakes one-on-one diplomacy.

The quick succession of deadlines and tests come as Mr. Trump steps out on the international stage more than he has in months.

In addition to meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, Mr. Trump plans to huddle with leaders of the Group of 7 powers in Quebec and NATO allies in Brussels, then make his first visit to Britain as president amid the prospect of mass protests. He is also talking about organizing a White House meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“I think we’re now entering ‘the full Trump’ period of the administration’s foreign policy — it’s high decibel, high tempo and high risk,” said Amy Zegart, a director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and an author, with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, of “Political Risk,” a new book on global insecurity.

Until recently, Mr. Trump had talked loudly about some of these goals while allowing himself to be talked out of following through on them by a coterie of advisers that included Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis; Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, his national security adviser; Gary D. Cohn, his chief economics adviser; and John F. Kelly, his White House chief of staff.

The president has since fired Mr. Tillerson and pushed out General McMaster. Mr. Cohn quit after losing a fight over tariffs. Mr. Trump has a strained relationship with Mr. Kelly, while Mr. Mattis has lost key allies. In their place have risen John R. Bolton, the president’s new national security adviser, and Mike Pompeo, his new secretary of state, both of whom take a harder-line approach to Iran and some other issues than their predecessors.

“Year 1 of the Trump administration was a series of tough tweets and statements, but very little or restrained action,” said Heather A. Conley, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and a former State Department official under President George W. Bush.

“Year 2,” she added, “is a significant transition to action as the president not only feels more comfortable in taking unilateral decisions but grows confident that the more the so-called experts tell him it is the wrong thing to do, the more he is encouraged to take that exact step.”

That is not to say that Mr. Trump did not take actions in his first year that upended convention. Most prominently, he announced that he would withdraw the United States from two major international agreements negotiated by his predecessor President Barack Obama: the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact and the Paris climate change accord.

Those moves sent a strong early signal of Mr. Trump’s rejection of multilateral diplomacy and the global integration favored for the most part by presidents of both parties in the generations since World War II. But neither had an immediate tangible effect. The trade pact had yet to be approved by Congress and, given opposition in both parties, might never have been. And the climate accord had yet to go into force and, under its cumbersome rules, the United States cannot technically withdraw until 2020.

Mr. Tillerson and other advisers were more concerned about the consequences of initiatives like moving the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the contested city of Jerusalem, which would alienate the Palestinians and undercut prospects for peace; ripping up Nafta, which has governed trade in North America for a quarter-century; or starting tariff wars, which could provoke retaliation and damage certain industries.

In many cases, Mr. Trump grudgingly acceded to their caution, delaying decisions while insisting he would not do so forever and demanding better options. But now he has grown impatient and more confident in his own judgment with a new team that reinforces rather than argues with his instincts.

“Bolton and Pompeo joining the team left Mattis isolated in arguing the Iran deal was working,” said James M. Goldgeier, a professor and former dean of international relations at American University.

Pulling out of the Iran agreement is not a political winner for Mr. Trump beyond his base. Sixty-three percent of Americans surveyed by CNN said the United States should not scrap the deal, while only 29 percent said it should.

But Mr. Trump’s decision has strong support among select constituencies, particularly national security hawks and advocates of Israel. And it fits Mr. Trump’s worldview that the United States has been rolled by allies and adversaries alike in essentially every international agreement reached in recent decades.

Some veteran diplomats said Mr. Trump may yet find moments where he will scale back his more radical impulses at the urging of advisers. They point to his decision last year to send more troops to Afghanistan rather than pull out, as he had previously proposed. And he may yet avoid tearing up Nafta or imposing tariffs on European allies by the June 1 deadline he has set.

“I believe his foreign policy will continue to be a mix of the two,” said Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Bush. “His instinct and values are what he committed to during his campaign but will continue to selectively adapt to circumstances and transact based on both.”

That tension will be especially acute in coming weeks even as Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo are still putting together their teams and settling into their roles. Ms. Zegart noted that Mr. Trump is now engaged in complicated and dangerous nuclear standoffs with both Iran and North Korea, as well as a burgeoning trade war with China, the trade disputes with allies and a confrontation with Syria, all at the same time.

“With a list that long and a policy process that undisciplined, the odds of a policy breakdown are higher than a breakthrough,” she said.

Process, of course, has never been Mr. Trump’s top priority. And he may find himself on the opposite side even of his new empowering advisers. Mr. Bolton, for instance, has for years been a skeptic of the sort of diplomatic initiative that Mr. Trump is embarking on with North Korea and will most likely make the case that it is not a fruitful venture if it does not seem to be working.

Mr. Trump may then once again have to choose between his advisers and his instincts. “Trump is making unilateral decisions with long-term consequences for U.S. foreign policy with little grasp of the issues,” Mr. Goldgeier said. “But he’s delivering on his campaign promises and undoing Obama’s legacy, both of which are important to him.”

Follow Peter Baker on Twitter: @peterbakernyt.

News Analysis
Behind Trump’s Termination of Iran Deal Is a Risky Bet

By David E. Sanger and David D. Kirkpatrick
May 8, 2018

WASHINGTON — For President Trump and two of the allies he values most — Israel and Saudi Arabia — the problem of the Iranian nuclear accord was not, primarily, about nuclear weapons. It was that the deal legitimized and normalized Iran’s clerical government, reopening it to the world economy with oil revenue that financed its adventures in Syria and Iraq, its missile program and its support of terrorist groups.

Now, by announcing on Tuesday that he is exiting the nuclear deal and will reimpose economic sanctions on Iran and companies around the world that do business with the country, Mr. Trump is engaged in a grand, highly risky experiment.

Mr. Trump and his Middle East allies are betting they can cut Iran’s economic lifeline and thus “break the regime,” as one senior European official described the effort. In theory, America’s withdrawal could free Iran to produce as much nuclear material as it wants — as it was doing five years ago, when the world feared that it was headed toward a bomb.

But Mr. Trump’s team dismisses that risk: Iran does not have the economic strength to confront the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia. And Iran knows that any move to produce a weapon would only provide Israel and the United States with a rationale for taking military action.

It is a brutally realpolitik approach that America’s allies in Europe have warned is a historic mistake, one that could lead to confrontation, and perhaps to war.

And it is a clear example of Middle East brinkmanship that runs counter to what President Barack Obama intended when the nuclear deal was struck in July 2015.

Mr. Obama’s gamble in that deal — the signature foreign policy accord of his eight years in office — was straightforward. He regarded Iran as potentially a more natural ally of the United States than many of its Sunni-dominant neighbors, with a young, educated Western-oriented population that is tired of being ruled by an aging theocracy.

By taking the prospect of nuclear weapons off the table, the Obama administration had argued, the United States and Iran could chip away at three decades of hostility and work on common projects, starting with the defeat of the Islamic State.

It did not turn out that way. While the deal succeeded in getting 97 percent of Iran’s nuclear material out of the country, Iran’s conservatives and its military recoiled at the idea of cooperating on any projects with the West.

Months before it became clear that Mr. Trump had a decent shot at being elected, the Iranian military increased support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria; it expanded its influence in Iraq and accelerated its support for terrorist groups. And it doubled down on deploying cyberattacks against targets in the West and in Saudi Arabia, embracing a weapon that was not covered by the nuclear accord.

Then came Mr. Trump, with his declaration that the deal was a “disaster” and his vow to dismantle it. That is exactly what he has now done, but at a huge cost.

Moments after he delivered his statement — in which he made it sound as if Iran was cheating on the accord, even though his intelligence chiefs have testified otherwise — Mr. Trump received a stinging rebuke from Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

The three leaders, America’s closest European allies, essentially rejected his logic. They noted that the United Nations Security Council resolution that embraced the Iran deal in 2016 “remains the binding international legal framework for the resolution of the dispute about the Iranian nuclear program.”

That was polite diplomatic language for the stark conclusion that it is the United States — not Iran — that first violated the accord.

And now, suddenly, the world may well be headed back to where it was in 2012: on a road to uncertain confrontation, with “very little evidence of a Plan B,” as Boris Johnson, the British foreign minister, said on a visit to Washington.

Exiting the deal, with or without a plan, is fine with the Saudis. They see the accord as a dangerous distraction from the real problem of confronting Iran around the region — a problem that Saudi Arabia believes will be solved only by leadership change in Iran.

The Saudis have an ally in John R. Bolton, the president’s new national security adviser, who had made clear before taking office that he shared their view. Mr. Obama’s deal, Mr. Bolton said on Tuesday afternoon, featured “an utterly inadequate treatment of the military dimension of Iran’s aspirations.”

The Saudi case against Iran has been bolstered in recent months by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has repeatedly referred to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as “the new Hitler.”

“Many countries around the world and in Europe did not realize how dangerous Hitler was until what happened, happened,” Prince Mohammed said in a recent interview with the CBS News program “60 Minutes.” “I don’t want to see the same events happening in the Middle East.”

In a speech in March at the Brookings Institution, Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, asserted that Iran was “the biggest problem we face in our region.” He blamed Iran for interfering in neighboring countries, backing allied armed groups in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere, and supplying Yemeni rebels with ballistic missiles they fired at his country.

Even if its restrictions on nuclear weapons were tightened and extended, “the agreement by itself does not solve the problem of Iran,” Mr. Jubeir said. “Iran must be held accountable.”

Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a State Department official during the Obama administration, argued that the nuclear deal’s opposition from Saudi Arabia, Israel and other regional players was primarily about its effects on American politics and policy.

“They believe they are in this existential conflict with the Iranian regime, and nuclear weapons are a small part of that conflict” — but the one that most influences public opinion in the United States, Mr. Shapiro said.

“If the deal opened an avenue for better relations between the United States and Iran, that would be a disaster for the Saudis,” he said. “They need to ensure a motivation for American pressure against Iran that will last even after this administration.”

Israel is a more complicated case.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pressed Mr. Trump to abandon an arrangement that the Israeli leader has always detested. But Mr. Netanyahu’s own military and intelligence advisers say Israel is far safer with an Iran whose pathway to a bomb is blocked, rather than one that is once again pursuing the ultimate weapon.

“The individuals who shoulder responsibility for Israel’s survival and security have been crystal clear,” Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who has spent his career examining cases of nuclear proliferation.

“This will most likely lead to an outcome that is much worse not only for the U.S., but for Israel,’’ Mr. Allison said, because the current agreement rolled Iran’s nuclear program back a decade “and imposed on Iran the most intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated.”

But Mr. Netanyahu holds Israel’s bullhorn, and he used it last week to persuade Mr. Trump to pull the plug on the Iran deal. By releasing Iranian documents, stolen from Tehran in January, Mr. Netanyahu proved what Western intelligence agencies long knew: A decade ago or even longer, the Iranians were working hard to design a nuclear warhead.

To Mr. Netanyahu, this was proof that Iran could never be trusted and that it had reached the nuclear deal under false pretenses by pretending it never had a weapons program. To Mr. Trump and his allies, the Israeli discovery said less about Iranian nuclear capability than it did about Iranian perfidy.

Given evidence that Iran was preserving its bomb designs as a hedge for the future, the discovery suggested it has not given up its ambitions. As Dennis Ross, a former Middle East negotiator, put it, someone needed to address the Israeli discovery “lest they give the Iranians the ability to pick up quickly where they left off on weaponizing.”

Still, at the core of Mr. Trump’s announcement on Tuesday is a conviction that Mr. Obama made a critical mistake in agreeing to a deal that contains an expiration date. Mr. Trump’s argument is that Iran can never be allowed to accumulate enough material to assemble a bomb.

So when the Europeans said that would require reopening the negotiations, Mr. Trump balked, and decided instead to scrap the entire deal.

It was a classic Trumpian move, akin to the days when he would knock down New York buildings to make way for visions of grander, more glorious edifices. But in this case, it is about upsetting a global power balance and weakening a government that Mr. Trump has argued, since he began campaigning, must go.

Trump’s Iran strategy: Telling fibs and sowing fear
Op-ed: The US president has hinted that if missiles hit Israeli cities or American targets in the region, he will launch a fire and fury operation against Tehran. He can prevent this nightmare if he stops lying to himself and to us.
Orly Azoulay|Published: 05.08.18 , 09:55

WASHINGTON—There has been so much noise surrounding Iran and the nuclear agreement, that we haven’t been able to listen to the most important thing in the past few days—the signs.
Since signing the nuclear deal, Iran hasn’t violated a single article of the agreement. This is being said not only by IAEA inspectors, but by Israeli security officials as well. This is the only fact President Donald Trump should have considered when deciding whether the United States should walk away from the deal, a move the Iranians say will immediately free Iran of its obligations to shelve its nuclear weapon programs.

Clearly, we would have been better off with a more extensive agreement, forcing Iran to halt its ballistic missile program and stop arming and inciting terror. But that’s not the issue: The agreement was signed to stop Iran from having military nuclear ability. And this goal has so far been achieved by the agreement.

Trump has spread several lies in recent days, in an attempt to create a proper setting for a withdrawal from the agreement.
He said, for example, that the US had sent Iran billions of dollars in cash in briefcases. That’s a lie. The US transferred money that belonged to Iran and had been frozen under the sanctions. Since the West wouldn’t let Iran create a banking system or credit card companies, the money could only be transferred to Iran in cash.

Another fib: Trump stated that in seven years from now, once the agreement expired, Iran would be able to produce a nuclear weapon. The agreement actually binds Iran under a strict supervision regime for decades, and this is understood by anyone who read all 150 pages of the agreement—like I did.

Trump paved his way to the top through lies. The Washington Post appointed a special team to look into all the president’s lies and discovered that he lies six times a day on average. A total of 3,001 lies and deceptions in 466 days. Nevertheless, he is thriving among his fans. A poll conducted by scientists from two leading universities, MIT and Carnegie Mellon, reveals that his voters don’t mind that he lies. On the contrary, they find that it even increases his charm and makes him “authentic.”

Telling the truth is a norm. Trump has broken this norm just like he has broken other norms, and that’s what they like about him: A leader who is breaking the systems they wanted to kick. They don’t care about the truth. They want the opposite of everything that existed. And it’s not just his base that isn’t fleeing the ship—most Americans see no problem with the fact that the president lies and see it as something they can live with.


And when the leader lives in an imaginary reality comprised of all his lies, he is unable to see the important signs. He applauded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after his presentation not because of the details it included (which didn’t expose an Iranian violation of the agreement either), but because he saw the show as a boost to his ego. “See, I’ve been 100 percent right,” he responded. And Trump enjoys being right, just like he enjoys flattery.

The nuclear agreement’s architects saw the danger: They realized that if they failed to stop Iran through diplomacy, it would make huge steps towards a nuclear weapon. They also realized, based on intelligence reports, that a military attack on Iran would entail many victims. A moment before the entire region deteriorated into chaos and a nuclear arms race, former US President Barack Obama led to the agreement. And that’s precisely why Trump wants to cancel it now: His obsession to cancel all his predecessor’s achievements.

If missiles hit Israel’s cities or American targets in the region, Trump hinted last week, he will launch a fire and fury operation against Tehran. He can prevent this nightmare if he stops lying to himself and to us, and if he stops using an Iran strategy which is a dangerous mixture of telling fibs and sowing fear.

First published: 05.08.18, 09:55

Merkel erhebt schwere Vorwürfe gegen Trump
Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel positioniert sich deutlich zum Ausstieg der USA aus dem Iran-Abkommen: Die Entscheidung von US-Präsident Trump verletze das Vertrauen in die internationale Ordnung.
Freitag, 11.05.2018

Für Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel (CDU) ist die Aufkündigung des Iran-Abkommens durch US-Präsident Donald Trump "ein Grund großer Sorge, auch ein Grund von Bedauern". Sicherlich sei das Abkommen "alles andere als ideal", sagte Merkel beim Katholikentag in Münster.
Und dennoch sei es "nicht richtig, dass man ein solches Abkommen einseitig aufkündigt". Der Schritt "verletzt das Vertrauen in die internationale Ordnung".

Sie sehe "mit Sorge, dass der Multilateralismus in einer wirklichen Krise ist", sagte Merkel. "Wenn jeder macht, worauf er Lust hat, ist das eine schlechte Nachricht für die Welt", sagte sie und versicherte zugleich: "Ich werde mich weiter für die transatlantische Partnerschaft einsetzen."
.....

The Challenge of Reinstating Sanctions Against Iran
Friday, May 4, 2018 - 12:00am
It’s Not as Simple as Withdrawing From the JCPOA
Peter Harrell


PETER HARRELL is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a lawyer who advises on sanctions compliance.
He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Counter Threat Finance and Sanctions from 2012 to 2014.

U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be on the brink of withdrawing the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the landmark 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. He faces a May 12 deadline to renew waivers of key U.S. sanctions on Iran, and despite pressure from French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to do so, Trump seems set to deliver on his January threat to stop waiving sanctions and to kill the deal.

JCPOA critics inside and outside the administration assume that the simple act of letting U.S. sanctions waivers lapse will result in crippling economic pressure on Iran. This pressure, they argue, will give Washington leverage to renegotiate the deal’s limits on Iran’s nuclear program and to press Tehran to curb its support for Syrian Hezbollah and other malign activities throughout the Middle East.

The reality of how sanctions work, however, is far more complicated. It took the combined efforts of Congress and two U.S. presidents—George W. Bush and Barack Obama—nearly a decade to cripple Iran’s economy. Rebuilding economic pressure after Washington pulls out from the JCPOA would be an even greater challenge, given international opposition to the U.S. withdrawal and scant international support for renewed sanctions. The result could be a “win-win” situation for Iran, in which it is both freed from the JCPOA’s constraints on its nuclear activity and able to retain at least part of the sanctions relief for which it bargained.

A RECIPE FOR CHAOS?

Trump would face formidable challenges after withdrawing from the JCPOA. The first would be to establish a legal structure to reinstate sanctions against Iran. Sanctions imposed by the United States on Iran prior to the JCPOA were one of the most complex sets in U.S. history, comprising multiple statutes, roughly a dozen executive orders, and hundreds of pages of federal regulations. In implementing the JCPOA, the Obama administration rewrote federal regulations, removed more than 400 Iranian

Copyright © 2018 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All rights reserved.
Source URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iran/2018-05-04/challenge-reinstating-sanctions-against-iran

И кво осмисли бе, камарад?

Ей го и рекиджа, win-win game. Няма такава игра, чоджум

Is Washington Too Focused on Iran's Nuclear Program?
Michael Singh

Published by the Council on Foreign Relations
Why It's Time for the U.S. to Prioritize Rolling Back Tehran's Regional Gains

In announcing the United States’ withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement, U.S. President Donald Trump made clear his disapproval of the accord and outlined a laundry list of complaints about Iranian policies. But he left perhaps the most critical question unaddressed: What, precisely, is U.S. policy toward Iran?

For nearly a decade, the nuclear question has crowded out serious deliberations over a broader policy toward Iran. Yet Iran’s nuclear program is inseparable from its overall national security strategy, which focuses on the projection of nonconventional power far from Iran’s borders. Similarly, U.S. concerns about Iran’s nuclear endeavors are rooted not just in a principled stand against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction but in deep unease about the Iranian regime’s broader actions and intentions. And it is easy now to forget that prior to the conclusion of the nuclear deal—also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—U.S. allies in the Middle East other than Israel were more concerned about Iran’s regional policies than its nuclear pursuits.

One of the chief criticisms leveled against former U.S. President Barack Obama by critics of the JCPOA was that he focused on the nuclear issue to the exclusion of all others and that the agreement itself institutionalized this focus by trading comprehensive sanctions relief for Tehran’s restraint solely in the nuclear realm.
Ironically, first by emphasizing the need to fix the agreement, and now in insisting that a new deal be negotiated, Trump risks repeating the error.

While the United States has debated the JCPOA, Iran has advanced in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere with little resistance, and prospects for war between Iran and Israel, or Iran and Saudi Arabia, have increased significantly.
What Washington really needs is a new Iran policy, not just a nuclear policy—and the will to roll up its sleeves and carry it out.

WASHINGTON'S BROADER SHIFT IN POLICY

Despite the polarized debates among outside analysts pitting regime change against rapprochement with Iran, U.S. officials have been less sharply divided. Successive presidents have employed some combination of carrots and sticks, engagement and pressure, with Iran.
The George W. Bush administration employed sharper pressure than most but never went so far as to adopt regime change as a policy; and the Obama administration was further leaning in its outreach to Iranian leaders but never seriously adopted the policy of rapprochement or offshore balancing that Obama sometimes intimated he would prefer.

When U.S. policy toward Iran has shifted, it has been less the result of presidential ideology and more a reflection of Washington’s changing perceptions of the threats it has faced and its own capacity to confront them. From the middle of the last decade to the present, the United States has slowly shifted from regarding terrorism and its state sponsors as its chief threat to regarding large, nuclear-armed states such as Russia and China as more worrisome and prolonged counterinsurgencies as a distraction from this priority. The United States has also come to view with greater skepticism its own ability to take on tasks such as regime change, nation building, and counterinsurgency, even as worries have grown about rival states’ erosion of the United States’ advantage at the cutting edge of military technology.

Given the outsize role the United States has long played in the Middle East, it is unsurprising that the U.S. shift has had broader reverberations. As the United States has engaged in a form of strategic retrenchment, there has been no other entity—whether an organization endogenous to the region or another external power—ready or able to step forward to exercise leadership. The result has been the replacement of one ad hoc security architecture with Washington at its center with another that features competing informal blocs of regional powers jockeying against one another with often devastating results.

The challenge faced by the United States in recent years has been to square its own reluctance to increase its involvement in the Middle East with the desire to confront an increasingly aggressive Iran.

This chaos in the Middle East has proven a boon for Iran. Since 2011, Iran has expanded its influence and its footprint in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, often filling vacuums that ultimately result from the weakness of many of the region’s states, in which Iranian authorities are themselves often complicit, and U.S. disengagement. The turbulence has suited Iran’s long-standing national security strategy, which has long focused on cultivating proxies within states and using asymmetric tactics to keep adversaries preoccupied and off balance. In Syria, Iran has found a ready partner in Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself looking to expand Moscow’s influence and capitalize on U.S. diffidence. The result is an Iran that has expanded its regional power even as it has reportedly complied with the JCPOA.

The challenge faced by the United States in recent years has been to square its own reluctance to increase its involvement in the Middle East with the desire to confront an increasingly aggressive Iran. This is not simply a political or ideological imperative, as U.S. allies in Europe and Asia sometimes suspect, but one rooted in national interests. In the American view, Iran’s actions threaten not only the stability of the Middle East, such as it is, but freedom of commerce and navigation in the region’s waterways and the security of U.S. allies.

For Obama, the JCPOA was a way to square this circle. Although his critics have described the agreement as having opened the path to U.S. disengagement from the Middle East, Obama himself likely saw it as paving the way for decreasing the U.S. military commitment to the region while limiting the fallout of such a step by curbing Iran’s most dangerous activities and providing an alternate means, through diplomatic engagement, of addressing others over time.

Trump, for his part, has made clear his disdain for the JCPOA and skepticism toward the notion of rapprochement with Iran. Initially, he considered a compromise—strengthening the JCPOA without renegotiating it, by concluding a protocol with like-minded parties to the deal regarding how it would be implemented and how destabilizing Iranian activities not covered by the agreement would be addressed. Eventually, however, the Trump administration set aside that effort and announced that it would instead abandon the nuclear accord and reinstate U.S. sanctions.

Although this approach is a repudiation of the JCPOA, it does not mark a return of deep U.S. involvement in the Middle East. By emphasizing sanctions and capitalizing on the United States’ preponderant role in the international financial system, it represents a continuation of Washington’s arm’s-length approach to Iran policy. Even as the United States under Trump has threatened the return of harsh sanctions against Iran and those who do business with it, it has not taken substantial new steps in the past 18 months to counter Iran’s regional ambitions. Indeed, U.S. Central Command chief General Joseph Votel told Congress that he had no orders to counter Iran in Syria.

THE END AND THE BEGINNING

Reversing this state of affairs will require a deeper reconsideration of U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Washington will need to dispense with the black-and-white, all-or-nothing policy debates that have prevailed since the Iraq war and more seriously consider middle courses that entail greater U.S. engagement in the region’s crises without overcommitment. Moreover, Washington should view its Middle East policy as essential to its strategic future in Asia and Europe, where U.S. allies are often dependent on energy imports from the Persian Gulf and preoccupied with terrorist threats arising from the region.

More effectively countering Iran will require that the United States reach more deeply into its policy tool kit, beyond economic sanctions alone. They should be buttressed both by the low-level use of military force—for example, retaining a small American presence in Syria, empowering local allies, and using the threat of U.S. airpower to prevent entrenchment in Syria by Iran and its proxies—and by continued U.S.-Iranian engagement. The former is often regarded as escalatory and the latter as appeasement or legitimation of the Iranian regime, but in reality both are essential elements of a strategy of deterrence. Diplomacy is necessary to convey redlines, explain the U.S. agenda in the region, and understand Iran’s intentions; a willingness to use limited force is necessary to lend credibility to that engagement.

In addition, the United States should not only impose costs on Iran for threatening U.S. interests but erect obstacles to Iran’s doing so in the first place. This calls for ensuring that there are no further easy opportunities for Iranian intervention around the region, by promoting the resilience of regional states in the face of the sort of political and economic meddling that features heavily in the Iranian playbook. Success would also be aided by the development of more functional regional security organizations—one need only look at the current rift within the region’s most coherent multilateral group, the Gulf Cooperation Council, to understand that Iran hardly faces a united regional opposition.

All of these actions—strengthening allies, promoting regional integration, and utilizing diplomacy and force—would be made more effective if done in concert with international partners. This was one of the primary arguments in favor of “fixing” rather than abandoning the JCPOA and should motivate the Trump administration to move quickly to repair international relations damaged by the U.S. withdrawal. This will be an uphill struggle, but the alternatives—tackling the Middle East’s problems alone or neglecting them altogether—are worse.

Leaving the JCPOA marks the end of a road, in one sense. In another, it is just the latest twist, albeit a momentous one, in a decades-long confrontation with Iran that has offered little satisfaction to U.S. policymakers. Success will require not just a plan for reinstating sanctions in hopes of one day bringing Iran back to the negotiating table but a strategy that tackles with urgency the broad and growing set of challenges in the Middle East in which Iran plays a role.