The single most important fact to remember, as you read this piece, is that John Bolton is an idiot.
“I would advise Iran not to start their nuclear program,” Mr. Trump told reporters in a vague warning at the White House, a day after he withdrew the United States from the accord that was brokered between Iran and world powers.
Beyond betting that Iran’s leaders will return to the negotiating table, and seek a better deal, once they feel the sanctions’ bite, the president appeared to acknowledge that he has no Plan B for dealing with Tehran.
There is in fact no Plan B. Europe is not following Donald Trump's lead, because Donald Trump's actions are manifestly ridiculous; Iran had, according to inspectors, been complying with the agreement. They had halted their nuclear program. The U.S. decision to arbitrarily claim otherwise—presenting absolutely no credible evidence in the process—makes Trump look like the rogue actor, and is uncannily similar to Bush-era efforts to fabricate a pretext for an Iraq invasion that White House actors were devoted to undertaking as ideological crusade. The United States no longer has sufficient credibility on the world stage to pull such a move off again; we have played that hand already. There will be no other nations itching to assist the U.S. in a new round of violent regime change; efforts at one-off bombing of Iranian facilities, the fanciful cure-all of policy hawks for decades, will once again not be the triviality their proponents imagine them to be.
In a world of conservative foreign policy "experts" who proved themselves wrong, incompetent, and ignorant during previous days, John Bolton sat near the top of the pile, a mustached bag of world-altering stupidity of the sort that got hundreds of thousands murdered and whose net effect for John Bolton, in the conservative movement, was that he had to lie low for a while until he found benefactors who had either forgotten his whole role in the process or simply did not care. Now he is back, pushing the exact same lines with the exact same conviction, devoted once again to selling his policy wisdom to buffoons and amnesiacs.
We need not look far back for an example of how this new Bolton-plotted, Trump-shouted Iran plan will work out. Boltonites demanded the same in North Korea; George W. Bush pulled out of an existing agreement with North Korea halting their nuclear program; North Korea immediately set to work building both nuclear weapons and the intercontinental missiles required to use them against even America; as a result, the North Korean dictatorship is for the first time being recognized by the United States government, meaning Donald Trump, as a fully legitimate negotiating partner. Bolton still wants to bomb them, by the way. There's not a crisis in the world John Bolton cannot, in his pudding brain, make worse.
The twit has even publicly declared that he is using the "Libya Model" in engaging with North Korea; the lesson of Libya, to North Koreans, is likely that even if your government gives up nuclear ambitions in exchange for a promise of nonaggression from the U.S., the U.S. will still do its best to ensure you are strung up by your own citizens one way or the other. Bolton is apparently unconcerned that a North Korean government that has already experienced the U.S. withdrawal of a previous nuclear pact and is currently watching the very, very loud unilateral U.S. withdrawal from another will see malevolence in his words.
The lesson here for Iran, as well as for Saudi Arabia and every other nation looking to defend themselves from international aggression (or international policing) is that you will be treated as a pariah for attempting to build a nuclear weapon—but once you have built one, your nation's security is assured. Iranian hardliners have every reason to follow North Korea's lead; if they do not, it will be only due to European signers of the nuclear compact working to salvage the deal and render new Trump-ordered sanctions toothless. They have two good options; Trump has none. There will be no international backing for a Boltonite first strike on Iran. There will be no new round of crippling sanctions—unless Iran decides that risking those sanctions for a new sprint to the bomb is a price worth paying for the near-guarantee that none of their hostile neighbors will again threaten their sovereignty in the future.
Again, the problem with the modern conservative movement is that it is staffed by idiots at, apparently, all levels. There is no brain trust or expertise beyond undoing whatever the last group did and calling it genius; there is no repercussions for being wrong in world-destabilizing ways. You will still make good money; you will still be called back to serve in the next Republican White House.
And when voters of the party throw up their hands and finally, at long last, elect Mencken's anticipated downright moron, the morons will have full run of the place.