Trump says he’ll talk to Tehran. Meanwhile, an American military buildup in and around the Persian Gulf is under way.
“Iran does want to talk,” Donald Trump told the reporters and delegates gathered in Davos to watch the president launch his “Board of Peace” initiative. “And,” he added, “we’ll talk.”
This isn’t the first time the president has entertained the prospect of renewed dialogue with representatives of the Islamic Republic. It’s not even the first time he’s appeared open to diplomatic engagement since the Iranian regime began slaughtering the anti-establishment protesters in the streets. It’s possible that the overture is genuine. But the American military buildup in and around the Persian Gulf says otherwise.
“The United States Navy now has two Nimitz-class nuclear-powered supercarriers en route to Europe and the Middle East,” Forbes reported on Wednesday. As Iran embarked on its brutal crackdown on dissent in defiance of the president’s warnings, the Pentagon rerouted the USS Abraham Lincoln from its deployment in the Western Pacific to the Gulf. The Lincoln will soon be joined by the USS George H. W. Bush, which left its home port in Norfolk, Va., this week and is believed to be bound for the Eastern Mediterranean. In addition to this firepower, the U.S. has quietly augmented its combat and support aircraft posture in the region in concert with the U.K., which has done the same.
If Trump is inclined to talk with the illegitimate gangster government in Tehran, those talks will occur against the backdrop of a massive allied military posture on Iran’s doorstep.
But then, what is there to talk about? As the Wall Street Journal’s editors observed following the paper’s publication of an op-ed authored by Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi, who defended the regime’s violent repression of dissent and foreshadowed more to come, the Iranian regime has thrown down a gauntlet before the president.
“Keep in mind that, as foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi is the soft face of the regime,” WSJ’s editors wrote. “He’s supposed to be the diplomat we can talk to. Yet his message today to the world betrays Iran’s harsh reality.” And that reality is that there are no reformers in the Islamic Republic’s governing apparatus; no moderates with whom the West can do business. What’s more, the regime has challenged American credibility. It now hangs in the balance.
“This is a threat against Americans, an attempt to intimidate the Trump Administration,” the Journal’s editors said of Araghchi’s threat to retaliate against the U.S., its interests, and its allies if attacked and to abjure the “restraint” it supposedly showed in its response to the strikes on its illicit nuclear weapons program. “We wonder how President Trump sees this threat, especially since the regime so clearly crossed his ‘red line’ against shooting protesters.”
Given how frequently the president cites Barack Obama’s failure to enforce his own self-set “red line” against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the editors probably assume that Trump will not take this challenge in stride. Nor should he.
If Trump’s offer to recommit to negotiations is a bluff, it appears to spectators like a hollow one. The Iranian bomb program is buried beneath several hundred tons of rubble. Its proxy armies are hollowed out. Its state-based allies are out of power or are preoccupied. Its ballistic-missile program, while still dangerous, is not a chip the Iranian regime would ever bargain away. And with anti-regime sentiment nearing crescendo, a byproduct of the economic discontent cultivated by the West as a direct outgrowth of its sanctions regime against Iran, it’s reasonable to presume that Trump would attempt to guide U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic to its logical conclusion.
Right?