25
Scoring legiTimaTe
foreign-policy wins
has not been easy for
U.S. President Donald
Trump, Twitter proc-
lamations notwith-
standing. But he’s just
notched his biggest one yet against Iran.
Since Trump decided to pull out of
the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
(JCPOA), Iran has been careful to take
only incremental steps away from the
hard-fought nuclear deal in hopes that
the other signatories would
salvage it, but to no avail.
Since then, Iran has spent the
better part of a year testing
U.S. limits. Cyberattacks.
Harassing tankers. Shooting
U.S. drones. Hitting Saudi
oil facilities.
The U.S. response to all
these has been notably re-
strained, at times infuriat-
ingly so from the perspec-
tive of allies. When the U.S.
finally did respond with the
shock escalation and assas-
sination of Qasem Soleimani,
the head of the Quds Force, it sent a clear
message to Iran that the U.S. was done
being cautious.
Trump has argued in the past that
his at-times erratic approach is to his
advantage: “I don’t want people to know
exactly what I’m doing—or thinking.
I like being unpredictable. It keeps
them off balance.” In a world as chaotic
as ours, it’s a questionable strategy
(especially when it comes to dealing
with our allies) but one that has paid
dividends in this case.
Had Iran not shot down Ukraine
International Airlines flight 752, it’s
possible the rest of the world would
be applauding Iran for its attempt
to de-escalate tensions by shooting
missiles into two U.S. military bases
in Iraq and giving enough warning to
ensure zero fatalities (though a few U.S.
troops were wounded). But as it is, the
Iranians’ misfire cost them any goodwill
that the world was willing to spare
Tehran’s regime.
iran is now under massive pressure,
from within and without. The Iranian
people are suffering under tightening
sanctions that have brought the country’s
teetering economy to its knees. The Euro-
pean signatories to the deal, while still
hoping it can be salvaged in some way, are
increasingly reluctant to spend their own
political capital for an Iranian leadership
that seems just as determined as the U.S.
to force the world to choose
sides, even at the cost of ci-
vilian lives. Germany, France
and the U.K. have now trig-
gered the dispute- resolution
mechanism written into the
JCPOA, a clear signal to Iran
that they are no longer will-
ing to let Tehran inch closer to
a nuclear weapon while they
wait for the 2020 election and
hope the American people
vote Trump out of office.
At this point, waiting out
Trump is the only hope Teh-
ran has left. If Trump wins
another term, it will be near impossible
for Tehran to avoid renegotiating the
nuclear deal if it wishes to escape sanc-
tions. But given just how large the divide
between the country’s hard-liners and re-
formists has become, that’s a tall order.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s
becoming clear that the biggest mistake
Iran’s reformists made wasn’t signing the
JCPOA, but overselling the benefits of
that deal to the public (a criticism that
can also be lodged against the Obama
Administration, if we’re being honest).
A diplomatic breakthrough never came
for Tehran, nor the economic revitaliza-
tion that was promised them.
Achieving foreign-policy break-
throughs is hard enough. Overprom-
ising and underdelivering on those
breakthroughs can be a tragic mistake—
a lesson that Iran’s leadership, America’s
and the rest of the world’s leaders would
do well to heed. □
THE RISK REPORT
Iran is left with few strategic
options after Trump’s bold move
By Ian Bremmer
If Trump wins
another term,
it will be near
impossible
for Tehran
to avoid
renegotiating
the nuclear
deal if it
wishes to
escape
sanctions
L ANGUAG E
How they won
It is a well-known truth
among linguists that the
grammatical “mistakes”
of one era often have a way
of being proved perfectly
correct by the next. In a new
book, linguistics scholar
Dennis Baron argues that
the tide has turned for the
most controversial pronoun
around: the singular they.
For centuries, pundits
have observed that English
is missing a gender- neutral,
third-person pronoun that
could be used in place of
he or she when gender
is unknown or irrelevant.
People have tried to fill this
gap with many words that
didn’t fit, like generic he,
which isn’t actually generic,
and hundreds of made-up
pronouns like thon
(a combination of that and
one) that never took off.
The answer, Baron
explains in What’s Your
Pronoun?: Beyond He & She,
has always been the singular
they. Though grammarians
may insist that it be used
only as a plural, the masses
regularly use it in a singular
way, as in “Did they leave a
message?” In recent years,
it’s gained ground, thanks to
the LGBTQ community, which
has embraced it as a way to
refer to non binary people
who identify as neither men
nor women. And that helped
inspire influential authorities
like copy editors to put down
their red pens.
ÑKaty Steinmetz
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