Trump cannot be criticised for Iran policy

There’s not much Republicans and Democrats agree on nowadays, but President Trump’s policies in the Middle East has managed to unite them. President Barack Obama, for example, helped sell his nuclear agreement with Iran by claiming that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons. No bipartisan clutch of senators insisted that Obama’s claims clashed with the views of intelligence analysts, who possessed hard evidence of a nuclear weapons programme.

The true test of whether a presidential fiction is acceptable is whether the strategy it serves is sound. In Obama’s case, the answer was no, because his policy did not actually stop Iran’s nuclear programme. It only delayed it, and, in the meantime, strengthened Iran without moderating Tehran’s fundamental anti-Americanism. But Trump understands the centrality of Riyadh in the effort to counter a rising Iran. Trump’s critics counter with the claim that he is emboldening evil. Samantha Power, former ambassador to the United Nations, cited autocrats like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and Vladimir Putin of Russia, saying that “Trump’s siding with the meanest and nastiest out there” will “leave the world even nastier.”

Notably absent from Power’s list of evildoers, however, are Iran and its proxies. The omission is telling. As part of its pivot towards Iran, the Obama administration turned a blind eye to the slaughter in Syria that Moscow, Tehran and its proxies unleashed, and, thanks to the nuclear deal, delivered countless billions to the Iranian war machine. Saudi and the US have been long time allies. Trump’s statement acknowledged that the Saudis are assisting him with stabilising global oil prices as he seeks to quash Iranian oil sales. Trump’s critics are asking us to believe that the priority for stabilising the Middle East today is distancing the United States from one of its oldest allies and instead working to achieve a balance of power.

This is a dangerous assumption that is not born out by experience. In recent years all of America’s allies, from Sisi in Egypt to Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey to Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, have begun spending as much time in Moscow as in Washington. The murder of Khashoggi was a brutal and grotesque act. The United States has registered its feelings loudly and clearly by putting sanctions on the 17 men who were directly involved in the killing. The biblical advice to be as “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” offers sound counsel to anyone who seeks to see their principles influence the world. The advice of Trump’s critics is long on abstract morality but lacking in strategic wisdom.