The White House rejects claims by Democrats that it lacks a coherent strategy on Iran, claiming President Trump is following a consistent approach designed to pressure Iran to drop its nuclear weapons program and stop fomenting violence in the Middle East.
“The strategy for Iran is pretty straightforward,” said the senior administration official. “Give up your terrorist activity and malign behavior. Give up your persistent pursuit of nuclear weapons and focus your effort on the Iranian people and making Iran a great nation, which it has all the potential to be.
“Our strategy has been, Iran can have a prosperous future. The Iranians are good people. They are smart; they are well educated. There’s a bright future for Iran, but they have to make a decision,” said the official. “There are two paths: They can do what’s right for the Iranian people, or they can continue to try to build a nuclear program and lead terrorist efforts throughout the Middle East.”
The U.S. strike that killed Quds Force Gen. Qassem Soleimani last week has been pegged alternately as “reckless,” “collapsing the moral space between the US and its enemies,” and not part of a coherent strategy.
“President Trump has no strategy here, no endgame,” former Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday in New York. “His constant mistakes and poor decision-making have left the United States with a limited slate of options moving forward. And most of those options are bad.”
The attack broke with a year of muted action in response to increased provocation from Iran. “It hard to envision how this ends short of war,” wrote the Obama administration’s national security adviser Susan Rice over the weekend.
Trump has repeatedly voiced his intent to withdraw U.S. troops from the Middle East and is now facing questions about where the assassination of Iran’s top general fits within this. As commander of the elite Quds Force, Soleimani led the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as it pursued terrorist operations and sought to further Iranian interests through a network of proxies and foreign partners.
The senior administration official suggested killing Soleimani to prevent potential new strikes against American interests is not inconsistent with a broader strategy.
“We saw a threat, whether it would have been carried out today, tomorrow, in the near future — it was clear and present,” a senior administration official said. The White House’s strategy for Iran hasn’t changed, this official said. “People said there’s no way that unilateral sanctions can be effective, and that’s proven to be wrong.”
Underlying the pressure on Iran has been an escalating series of strikes and counterstrikes.
If you look at the progression, the “tit for tat,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an expert on energy security and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. It began in 2018 with the targeting by Iran of two Iranian Kurdish opposition party headquarters in Iraqi Kurdistan, killing 18. It was a “ratcheting up,” Jaffe said, culminating in the attack last week on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
After that, Trump ordered Soleimani to be taken out.
Tehran is under pressure, and the weight of sanctions on a faltering economy leads Jaffe to question how well-equipped Iran is to handle escalation. They are not in a position economically to fight a war, Jaffe said.
“Iran has had forty years of whipping up this sort of rhetoric. They specialize in that,” said former Obama State Department official Ray Takeyh. But they have struggled to assess an American political leadership they don’t get and a president who has “unsettled” them.
Domestically, Iran has other issues, with the country’s leadership facing an aggrieved populace. Tired of a government “held together not with piety but patronage,” Takeyh said, and “tired of wasting Persian resources on Arab civil wars.”
“They had continued to enrich uranium, develop mass centrifuges, and ballistic missiles,” and had reactivated a nuclear facility nestled in the mountains. “For all practical purposes, they had pulled out of the agreement,” Takeyh said.
Trump’s strategy “operates on instinct,” said Takeyh. In the case of killing Soleimani, “I think his instincts have been sound. Instinctively, he seems to recognize that the demonstration of American power can, among adversaries … restore deterrent power.”
As for where Iran stands today, Takeyh said to imagine the hit to your team when an elite player is injured. “Go across the street to Brooklyn and see how they are doing without Kevin Durant,” Takeyh said, referring to the injured star of basketball’s Brooklyn Nets.
