Martin Indyk12 missile program, and it did not address
Iran’s aggressive eorts at regional
destabilization. Still, the agreement took
the nuclear le o the table and set a
pattern for how to resolve contentious
disputes. So the obvious next step for
any incoming administration would have
been to build on the
and tackle
the other issues on the docket. Instead, in
May 2018, overruling then Secretary o
State Rex Tillerson and Secretary o
Defense James Mattis and blatantly lying
about Iran’s compliance, Trump shred-
ded the agreement.
This was partly due to Trump’s
personal obsession with Barack Obama.
Anything his predecessor had done
had to be undone, and the Iran deal was
Obama’s signature accomplishment. But
there was more to it than pique. In a
speech soon after the U.S. withdrawal
from the deal, Trump’s new secretary o
state, Mike Pompeo, unveiled the
administration’s “maximum pressure”
campaign o reimposed sanctions to cut
o Iran’s oil exports, an eort that was
designed to prevent the country from
having “carte blanche to dominate the
Middle East.” Pompeo issued a list o
demands that together amounted to
Iranian capitulation: no uranium enrich-
ment, ever; no interference with the
International Atomic Energy Agency’s
inspections, anywhere; no development
o nuclear-capable missiles; no support
for Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian
Islamic Jihad, Iraqi Shiite militias, the
Taliban, or Yemen’s Houthis; no Iranian-
commanded forces in any part o Syria;
and no threatening behavior toward
Israel, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab
Emirates. In case there was any doubt,
Pompeo was explicit: there would be no
renegotiation o the
.The Trump administration likes to see
itsel as clear-eyed and tough-minded, a
confronter o the hard truths others
refuse to acknowledge. In fact, it under-
stands so little about how the Middle East
actually works that its bungling eorts
have been a failure across the board.
As so often in the past, the cynical locals
are manipulating a clueless outsider,
advancing their personal agendas at the
naive Americans’ expense.
The Trump administration’s Middle
East policies cannot possibly create a new,
more stable regional order. But they will
certainly do a good job o continuing the
destruction o the old one, and risking all
that it had gained. And this will t neatly
into Trump’s overall campaign to do
away with the liberal international order
in favor o the law o the jungle.O JERUSALEM
Each aspect o the Trump administration’s
supposed new strategic triangle is miscon-
ceived, starting with Iran, a hostile would-
be regional hegemon with a well-ad-
vanced nuclear program that Washington
has been trying to contain for decades. In
2015, U.S. and European diplomats made
a major breakthrough by negotiating the
Joint Comprehensive Plan o Action
(
), a classic multilateral arms
control agreement that nally brought
Iran’s nuclear program under extensive
international supervision. By the time
Trump entered o©ce, the agreement was
functioning well in practice, and its
inspections provided a high degree o
condence that Iran was not actively
pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
The deal was hardly perfect. Its
terms enabled Iran to resume parts o its
nuclear program after ten years, it did
not deal adequately with Iran’s ballistic04_Indyk_Blues.indd 12 9/23/19 3:12 PM