Trump’s strategy for Iran needs a complete reset

The Middle East is hotter than normal this summer and the man who has foolishly turned up the thermostat and left everyone sweating is none other than Donald Trump.

The American president’s rash decision last year to unilaterally withdraw from an international nuclear treaty with Iran and renew crippling economic sanctions on that country has resulted in the kind of dangerous pushback from Iran’s rulers that a first-year political science student could have predicted.

Last week, Iran announced it had slightly gone over the limit on uranium enrichment it had agreed to in that 2015 treaty — known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Just before that provocation, Iran revealed it had marginally exceeded the treaty’s 300-kilogram limit on the size of its uranium stockpile.

Other acts of defiance were more overtly aggressive. Late last month, Iran shot down a U.S. spy drone the Americans said was in international airspace. Trump ordered U.S. warplanes to retaliate but thankfully, just 10 minutes before the attack, recalled them. Meanwhile, the Americans still insist Iran has attacked six ships in the Strait of Hormuz since May.

And in a sign the dispute could embroil other participants, a Royal Navy warship last week warned off Iranian gunboats that Britain said were threatening a British tanker navigating the same strategic body of water.

So far, this bubbling pressure cooker has not exploded. Trump might think he can bully Iran into making some kind of new deal with the U.S. For their part, Iran’s mullahs might believe their carefully calibrated and still restrained displays of force might win them a favourable outcome in which Trump gives way.

But the plain facts are the leaders of both sides are unreliable and a minor miscalculation by one or the other could ignite a war no one wants. Or at least no sane person should want.

To be sure, Iran is far from an innocent school child being harangued in the international playground. It is a malign, authoritarian, theocratic state with a dismal record of fueling Middle East violence and instability.

It has been involved in proxy wars with Saudi Arabia in Syria, Yemen and Iraq. It is an implacable foe of Israel and feared as such by that country. And as tensions with the U.S. escalate, Iran has warned it might close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil is shipped.

Despite all this, until Trump took the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran was living up to its side of the bargain. This was confirmed time and again by the International Atomic Energy Agency which has access to Iran’s nuclear laboratories and facilities. Moreover even now, as it tramples the boundaries of this deal, Iran would require a year or more to build an actual nuclear weapon.

While the re-imposition of the American economic sanctions has not changed this reality, it has damaged Iran’s economy and infuriated its leaders.

What they want now is clear: an end to the sanctions. What Trump desires is fuzzier. This appears to be yet another example of him sounding the charge before he knows where he wants to go. Trump needs help. The world can only hope that the treaty’s other signatories, which include Germany, the United Kingdom, France, China, Russia and the entire European Union, can somehow persuade the two sides that words are better than weapons at finding a solution.

Negotiations, not confrontations, can turn down the heat in the Middle East before someone gets seriously burned.