Trump’s Iran policy in the second term is set to be just as awful as it was in the first. Reuters reports:
U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sign a presidential memorandum on Tuesday to restore his “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran to stop the country getting a nuclear weapon and drive down its oil exports to zero, a U.S. official said.
Trump and his allies have been talking about a “return to maximum pressure” for many months, and now it is here. Nothing good will come from this, and the U.S. will become even more deeply entangled in Middle Eastern conflicts and rivalries as a result. Ramping up economic warfare against Iran is exactly the wrong thing to do, and Trump is squandering a major opportunity to reach a negotiated compromise on the nuclear issue.
“Maximum pressure” has failed everywhere it has been tried. It inflicted enormous hardship and suffering on the the people of Iran, and it backfired and hurt U.S. interests as well. Trying it again with Iran will just ratchet up tensions and give the Iranian government incentives to expand their nuclear program further. It risks bringing the U.S. closer to direct conflict with Iran for no good reason.
Iran hawks have been worried recently that the Trump administration might be inclined to bargain with the Iranian government, but they had no reason to be concerned. Judging from the latest reporting, Trump is still fully on board with the braindead collective punishment approach that led to the expansion of Iran’s nuclear program. It seems that rumors of Trump’s openness to serious negotiations have been greatly exaggerated.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
