56 DANIEL BENJAMIN is Director of the John
Sloan Dickey Center for International Under-
standing at Dartmouth College. He served as
Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the U.S.
State Department from 2009 to 2012.
STEVEN SIMON is Professor of International
Relations at Colby College and served on the
National Security Council in the Clinton and
Obama administrations.and adopted a policy o¡ “maximum
pressure” to strangle the Iranian econ-
omy. Iran, meanwhile, has responded by
heightening tensions, attacking several
oil tankers traversing the Persian Gulf,
shooting down a U.S. drone, and striking
an oil facility in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia.
No U.S. president has been as capri-
cious as Trump, and there is a possibility
that, after ¥irting with escalation, he
will pivot toward an accommodation with
Iran. (His recent dismissal o ́ National
Security Adviser John Bolton, an extreme
Iran hawk, suggests that this process
could already be underway.) But Trump’s
approach during his ̄rst three years in
o¼ce did not emerge from a void. It was
an extension o¡ the deep animus toward
Iran that has plagued U.S. policymaking
for the last 40 years. Previous administra-
tions had balanced this hostility with
pragmatism and periodic attempts at
outreach, often cloaked in the language
o¡ confrontation; now, driven by greater
political incentives and intensi ̄ed
lobbying by Israel and Saudi Arabia,
Trump has in¥ated this animus to
cartoonish proportions. In doing so, he
runs the r¾sk o¡ a ser¾ous m¾scalculat¾on.
Iran is not an existential threat to the
United States, but a serious con¥ict
with it—at a time when Washington is
threatened by great-power rivals and
committed to drawing down its presence
in the Middle East—would be costly
and counterproductive.
Faced with the real prospect o¡ a war
that would bene ̄t no one, it is time for
the United States to rethink some o¡ the
assumptions that have led to the current
impasse. It is time to relegate Iran’s
remarkable grip on U.S. strategic think-
ing—call it “the Persian captivity”—to
the dustbin.America’s Great
Satan
The 40 -Year Obsession
With IranDaniel Benjamin and Steven
SimonI
magine historians a century from now
trying to decide which foreign power
the United States feared most in the
decades from the late Cold War through- Sifting through the national security
strategies o¡ successive administrations,
they would see Russia ̄rst as an arch enemy
o¡ the United States, then as a friend, and
̄nally as a challenging nuisance. They
would see China transform from a
sometime partner to a great-power rival.
North Korea would appear as a sideshow.
Only one country would be depicted
as a persistent and implacable foe: Iran.
In its o¼cial rhetoric and strategic
documents, Washington has, since Iran’s
Islamic Revolution in 1979, consistently
portrayed the country as a purely hostile
and dangerous actor. In recent months,
the United States and Iran have once
again, as they have many times in the past,
approached the brink o¡ con¥ict: U.S.
President Donald Trump has ripped up
his predecessor’s nuclear deal with Iran
TRUMP’S MIDDLE EAST