|
Trending Topics
|
Source: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/trump-bombs-iran
The President Fixes a Historical Mistake
(Tablet) Park MacDougald - President Trump is making a long-overdue correction to decades of a flawed U.S. Iran policy. Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been, both in ideology and in action, an enemy of the U.S. Washington tolerated its provocations, fearing regional instability or a military quagmire; or they convinced themselves that the Iranians, despite their fanatical rhetoric, were rational actors who could be bargained with. Especially after the failure of U.S. nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which inadvertently strengthened Tehran's hand in the region, Iran came to be seen as a problem the U.S. would have to live with, for good and for ill. The basic logic of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was that Washington should recognize Iran's aspirations as legitimate, so that the mullahs would come to feel they had a stake in maintaining the regional order. American allies, in turn, would have to learn to "share the neighborhood" with Iran. This meant restraining U.S. allies from taking their own steps to check Iran's growing regional power. The fatal flaw in the scheme was in misunderstanding Iran's motivations. The mullah's terror regime wanted what it had always wanted and said it wanted over and over, which was to destroy the U.S.-led order in the region, wipe Israel off the map, and overthrow the Gulf Arab states in a global Islamic revolution to be headquartered in Tehran. The U.S.'s accommodating policy allowed Iran to build a fearsome regional empire. This made the Oct. 7 attacks possible.