Iran - US Conflict: Between 'ending Iran' and 'no more endless wars': The unraveling of Trump's incoherent Iran strategy - by Alexander Griffing

One month on from U.S. President Donald Trump’s last-minute non-bombing of Iran, tensions in the Persian Gulf have escalated even further and his administration’s strategy for dealing with Iran is less clear than ever. 

Trump now faces critical challenges within his own party and his own administration to both sides of the carrot-and-stick dynamic he hopes will achieve a nuclear and ballistic missile-neutered Iran: military force and negotiations with Tehran. 

Confidence at home in Trump’s leadership on Iran suffered a major bipartisan rebuke this month, when the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to block Trump from waging war with Iran without Congressional approval. 

Republican leaders in the Senate, who are likely to kill the amendment (repeating a similar effort in June), slammed the move as signalling to Tehran that the United States is divided. They fear that could potentially weaken Trump’s position in any future negotiations with Iran.

Meanwhile, the list of hostile incidents between Iran and the U.S. and its allies is lengthening. Iran seized two British oil tankers in the Gulf, eventually releasing one, a day after Trump said the U.S. destroyed an Iranian drone in the Gulf - a claim that Tehran immediately denied. In June, Iran shot down a U.S. Navy drone in the same area.  

That act prompted Trump to authorize a military strike on Iran, only to call it off at the last moment, despite being, in his own words, "cocked and loaded" - because the estimated death toll of 150 Iranians was "not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone."  

Critics derided Trump’s hesitation to take action as analogous to former President Barack Obama’s inaction after Syria’s Bashar Assad crossed the president’s much-hyped "red line" and used chemical weapons against civilians and opposition forces.  

Trump is being squeezed between his bombastic rhetoric, having vowed to "end Iran" if they attack the U.S. or its allies in the region, and his lack of action in response to serial Iranian aggression. 

Trump has scored one minor victory: Iran has offered, for the first time, to enter negotiations on its ballistic missile program. However, they are demanding a quid pro quo that Trump would be loathe to offer: a commitment from the U.S. to stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE - a policy which has been roundly rebuked by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress because of their use in the devastating civil war in Yemen.  

Trump has also been playing around with the officials tasked with the Iran file. At the end of last week, Trump confirmed that he gave Republican Senator Rand Paul, a staunch isolationist, a green light to negotiate with Iran.

Paul, son of libertarian lion Ron Paul, is a strange character to add to the White House mix deciding Iran policy: both National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are known as longtime Iran hawks. Bolton once even penned a New York Times op-ed entitled, "To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran."

Trump has boxed himself in between establishment GOP hawks and a growing, more isolationist faction within the party. The divide between Rand Paul and John Bolton, or Tucker Carlson and Mike Pompeo, perfectly illustrates that when it comes to war/no war with Iran, none of Trump’s choices are good choices. None will bolster his credibility with all wings of the GOP, his White House staff or the international community, which is watching with mounting concern.

Read more at: Between 'ending Iran' and 'no more endless wars': The unraveling of Trump's incoherent Iran strategy - U.S. News - Haaretz.com

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