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Source: https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3510732-us-needs-a-strategy-for-a-realigned-middle-east/
U.S. Needs a Strategy for a Realigned Middle East
(The Hill) Lawrence J. Haas - Gone are the days when the Middle East was bifurcated between Israel and everyone else - and when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was considered the main obstacle to wider Arab-Israeli peace. As recent events make clear, the region is increasingly bifurcated with Israel and its growing Sunni Arab allies on one side, and Iran and its state and terror-group allies on the other. The talks in Vienna on reviving the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran seem to exist in a "never-never land" with little connection to today's new reality: Iran's nuclear program and related ballistic missile program are both far more advanced than they were in 2015, Tehran refuses to come clean about its past nuclear activities, and the regime is growing more brazen in its regional aggressiveness. Washington needs a new strategy for Iran that is not centered on reviving a nuclear agreement that - in its time-limited restrictions on Iranian nuclear work and loophole-filled inspection regime - was too weak to begin with. The writer is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council.