Iran’s bluster deserved a rebuke, but President Trump delivered the wrong one. He could be stumbling toward the same sort of error President Barack Obama committed on Syria and thus further undermine U.S. credibility.
Late on Sunday, Trump tweeted:
To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018
The White House followed that tweet with national security adviser John Bolton’s warning that Trump had affirmed that “if Iran does anything at all to the negative,” it would “pay a price like few countries have ever paid before.”
This is a “red line” that at once is impossibly vague and unrealistically low. It’s an instance of Trump’s laudable instinct toward toughness, but his inexperience regarding what should be said when it comes to foreign policy, and what should be left unsaid.
Trump’s Iran strategy is rightly focused on a new nuclear arrangement that ends Iran’s long-term access to nuclear weapons, constricts Iran’s ballistic missile program, reduces Iranian terrorist activities, and empowers Iran’s young, impoverished population. That strategy is well-defined and eminently achievable. We also celebrate Trump’s departure from his predecessor’s delusions over what the Islamic revolutionary republic of Iran is. After his appeasement of President Vladimir Putin, Obama’s gravest foreign policy mistake took root in his assumption that Iran’s leaders are moderates waiting to be unveiled. Where Obama wrote letters to Khamenei seeking friendship, Trump treats the Ayatollah with the disdain his policies have earned.
Yet a policy of focused strength is poorly served by the presentation of tough-sounding yet vague threats. And that’s what Trump and Bolton’s Monday morning warnings are: vague threats. After all, what constitutes a threat to the U.S. and “anything at all to the negative”? The question is relevant in that those definitions would seem to include not just the everyday Iranian activity of ballistic missile research, financial payments to terrorist proxies, and intelligence gathering against U.S. civilian and military infrastructure, but also Iranian words of threat.
Our ensuing concern: What happens when Iran issues another standard-fare threat today or tomorrow?
The aggressive tenor of Trump and Bolton’s “few throughout history” language would seem to require action of a significant military nature. But what if Hassan Rouhani tomorrow says something along the lines of, “The U.S. will face a furious blow if it endangers our nation.” Do those words deserve U.S. military reprisal? More importantly, would a U.S. military reprisal serve Trump’s own policy interests?
When Iran commits some minor aggression, as it undoubtedly will, Trump will have to decide between a proportional response (thus proving Bolton’s grave language overblown), or “consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before,” thus recklessly escalating conflict over a minor transgression.
The better choice here is not between excessively broad red lines and Obama-style appeasement. It is between over-broad red lines and tightly defined red lines bound to actions that serve Trump’s objectives.
Trump ought to identify specific red lines, determined by real U.S. interests, which will result in U.S. use of force if breached. The first such red line could be any Iranian effort to mine the Strait of Hormuz or otherwise cut off access the Persian Gulf. Second would be any Iranian terrorist attack on U.S. persons or interests — including by Iranian proxies if those proxies operate under Tehran’s effective control (the Lebanese Hezbollah, for example).
To empower these warnings Trump should clarify that those responsible for ordering any breach will be targeted alongside other Iranian assets. Those red lines are both necessary and justified in light of recent Iranian threats to Hormuz and recent Iranian terrorist plots in which U.S. officials were among the targets.
Of course, effective U.S. policy toward Iran cannot begin and end with red lines. So alongside a clear articulation of what Iran must not do, Trump and his team must continue doing that which serves their broader policy interests. That means continued support for Iranians striving for freedom, the active and aggressive countering of Iranian hardliner interests in Syria, South America, and Europe, and the pressuring of European nations to end their economic cronyism in Iran.
This course of action makes the most strategic sense, but also the most moral sense.
As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo noted on Sunday, “Today, thanks to regime subsidies, the average [Lebanese] Hezbollah combatant makes two to three times what an Iranian firefighter makes on the streets of Iran. Regime mismanagement has led to the rial plummeting in value. A third of Iranian youth are unemployed, and a third of Iranians now live below the poverty line.”
Nevertheless, there is no sense in issuing threats that require the choice between ill-advised U.S. action or lost U.S. credibility. President Trump’s hard-headed realism has thus far restricted the Iranian regime’s nuclear ambitions, reduced its expansionist power, and deterred its aggression. The president should not abandon that course in favor of emotive rhetoric that risks unnecessary conflict.
