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Journalists at The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Donald Trump is not happy with aides who he feels are rushing the United States into a military confrontation with Iran. This applies particularly to ultrahawk national security adviser John Bolton, who, for many years before he got his dream job, has called for bombing Iran, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, another adviser who has in the past urged military assaults on the Islamic Republic. One of Trump’s campaign pledges was not to get involved in any new wars and to get the U.S. out of the ones it’s already engaged in. According to mostly unnamed sources, he apparently believes it’s the jingoistic talk of these men, not his own, that undermines this objective:
“They are getting way out ahead of themselves, and Trump is annoyed,” the official said. “There was a scramble for Bolton and Pompeo and others to get on the same page.”
Bolton, who advocated regime change in Iran before joining the White House last year, is “just in a different place” from Trump, although the president has been a fierce critic of Iran since long before he hired Bolton. Trump “wants to talk to the Iranians; he wants a deal” and is open to negotiation with the Iranian government, the official said.
For the record, “advocated regime change” sugarcoats Bolton’s long-standing bombing-is-the-answer advice.
Trump has denied that there is any “in-fighting,” accompanying the denial with his usual fake-news slam:
Trump’s alleged frustration may be real. But it has to be laid against the standard approach he takes to get his way in any negotiation: exerting maximum pressure in an effort to beat down or at least soften the resolve of those with whom he seeks to make one of his supposedly great deals. That’s precisely the technique he’s applied to Iran, and it’s failed spectacularly.
Former Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Jake Sullivan, a Carnegie senior fellow, were both directly involved in preliminary negotiations to get Iran, the U.S., and six other nations around the table to come up with the nuclear accord that was signed in 2015. Trump withdrew from that multilateral pact last May, to thunderous Republican applause and dismay from almost everyone else except Israel and Saudi Arabia. At The Atlantic, Burns and Sullivan write:
He’s tried to brand this strategy as a kind of coercive diplomacy, purportedly aimed at an elusive “better deal.” But so far, his strategy is all coercion and no diplomacy. His aggressive escalation of sanctions, the blustery rhetoric of his senior officials, and his administration’s lack of direct engagement with Tehran betray a fundamentally different goal: the capitulation or implosion of the Iranian regime.
Painful experience has shown that neither of those objectives is realistic. In the meantime, two sets of risks loom large.
Instead of his squeeze-hard approach, Trump could have come into office and used the relaxed tensions delivered by the Obama administration’s nuclear accord as a bridge to additional agreements with Iran on missile deployment, support of proxy wars, and related matters. And if those deals could be made, then perhaps work could begin on fixing what he thinks are flaws in the nuclear accord. In his corner he would have had U.S. allies, most of whom also have concerns about some of Iran’s behavior but see the accord as a step in the right direction for everybody.
Instead, he launched economic war against Iran, reimposing old sanctions and adding new ones, threatening allies and rivals alike with financial damage if they refused to see things his way. Those allies don’t see this his way, have sought to stay in the nuclear agreement, and have worked—unsuccessfully so far—to come up with a workaround on the sanctions. Meanwhile, the Iranian economy suffers. Hyperinflation is threatening, and expert observers say the nation’s oil exports have fallen from their peak of 2.7 million barrels a day last May to less than a million barrels today. Exports could fall as low as 300,000 barrels a day by year’s end. A devastating blow.
Against this background, Trump has reportedly provided Swiss intermediaries with phone numbers to give to Iranian leaders so they can ring him up to talk. Iran President Hassan Rouhani has responded by saying that Tehran has all the numbers it needs and is uninterested in negotiating anything with Trump.
That’s not all Iran is doing, according to White House officials. They say or imply that Tehran is making credible threats against U.S. and allied targets in the Middle East. These include loading small ships with missiles that could be used against American Navy deployments in the Persian Gulf, where the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln will soon arrive as part of a carrier group. But critics, and not just newspaper pundits and bloggers, question whether what Iran is doing is anything major.
Pompeo skipped a scheduled trip to Moscow earlier this week to go to Brussels instead to meet with European diplomats for discussion of the Iran situation. He reportedly shared intelligence about Iran’s alleged actions to persuade them that U.S. saber-rattling and military maneuvering is just self-defense.
But European leaders, who have been watching the febrile atmosphere in Washington with alarm, have not been convinced, according to conversations with 10 European diplomats and officials from seven countries, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive assessments of Washington and Tehran.
Pompeo “didn’t show us any evidence” about his reasons Washington is so concerned about potential Iranian aggression, said one senior European official who took part in one of Pompeo’s meetings. The official’s delegation left the meeting unconvinced of the American case and puzzled about why Pompeo had come at all.
Bolton and Pompeo are currently the slavering attack dogs, the face of U.S.-Iran policy. But it’s Donald Trump’s bombast and thumbscrew “negotiating” tactics that have brought us to the point of having to flinch at every new headline in this fraught matter. A return to sanity, presuming that it happens before outright fighting breaks out, will be one of the tougher tasks for the next person who occupies the Oval Office. That day cannot come soon enough.