Iran’s Cold War against the U. S. never stopped. President Trump’s cancellation of the Iran deal gets America back in to fight our side of it.
The Cold War with Iran is back. I don’t say this as a criticism of President Trump’s decision to cancel the Iran deal. That decision did not restart the conflict. Iran’s Cold War against the U. S. never stopped. This decision just recognizes that fact and gets America back in to fight our side of it.
To be more exact, it discards Barack Obama’s fantasy that appeasing Iran would end its hostility toward the U. S. and its interests. The idea that America could make all of its enemies go away just by being nicer to them was President Obama’s personal fixation, and the Iran deal was his personal commitment. That’s why it could be suspended unilaterally. To those hyperventilating over Trump’s decision, Republican Sen. Ben Sasse gives the rejoinder I was planning on:
Foreign policy also works best when it’s not a bunch of disconnected decisions — an air strike here, canceling a diplomatic deal there — but is part of a long-term effort bringing multiple tools to bear to achieve a clear strategic goal. In that regard, there are several promising signs in the president’s announcement, particularly the way he broadened his rationale by looking, not just at Iran’s cheating on its nuclear weapons program, but at its role as the source of multiple threats to US interests and allies:
Donald Trump is not the sort of guy to use phrases like “malign behavior” on his own accord. He clearly got it from the aides who wrote the official memo about the decision, which includes in its title, “Taking Additional Action to Counter Iran’s Malign Influence,” which is exactly what we need to do.
More:
You know who is the kind of guy to use phrases like “malign influence,” particularly in reference to Iran? John Bolton, Trump’s new national security advisor. He’s also the kind of guy to adopt and prosecute the kind of broad strategy against Iran that is implied here.
A Cold War really is the right model for thinking about how to deal with Iran, because the parallels to the Soviet Union are extensive. Iran is a regime based on a revolutionary ideology that it seeks to export across the world and particularly in the Greater Middle East. It does this sometimes through direct military involvement but also through proxy wars and subversion and through support for political parties, revolutionary movements, and terrorist groups — all pages from the Soviet playbook. In this regard, Iran is and always has been a larger threat than ISIS. That group aspired to become a state but never quite managed it. Iran has a virtually identical ideology, despite superficial sectarian differences, and it already is a state, complete with a nuclear weapons program.
Like the Soviet Union, Iran is an engine of global conflict, though on a smaller scale, since Iran’s resources are more limited and its ideology, a fanatical re-interpretation of Shiite Islam, is less universal in its appeal than Communism.
Also like the Soviet Union, Iran is weak internally. Behind its propaganda and revolutionary bluster, it has a failing economy and a corrupt and oppressive political elite who have alienated their own people. The Iranian regime has spent the past few decades suppressing student rebellions and massive street demonstrations demanding greater freedom — as recently as January and most famously during the Green Revolution of 2009, which the Obama administration studiously ignored in their single-minded devotion to the fantasy of a nuclear weapons deal.
That is the real opportunity opened by President Trump’s decision. If Iran is an engine of chaos, we should use this as an opportunity to disable that engine. As expected, The New York Times got the vapors over Trump’s decision to cancel the Iran deal, but at the same time they published an article clearly describing the potential impact of that decision:
Changing Iran’s fate is the whole idea, though we can hope there are enough Iranians who are willing to take that fate into their own hands.
Our Cold War with Iran never stopped. We just stopped fighting it. If President Trump follows up on this decision, he has an opportunity not just to revive the American effort against Iran, but to win this Cold War in the same way as the one we fought against the Soviets — and with similar dividends in terms of global peace, prosperity, and freedom.
