“America should know,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said to a groups of diplomats on Sunday, “that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars.” The remark, which perhaps sounded better in Farsi, doesn’t quite make sense in English: The U.S. tried peace with Iran, and the nation’s rulers only redoubled their efforts to abet terrorism across the Middle East and aid rogue regimes around the world.
President Donald Trump’s hectoring response to Rouhani was thus not totally unreasonable: “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!”
To which Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif replied in similarly emphatic terms, though without the trenchancy of Trump’s broadside: “COLOR US UNIMPRESSED: The world heard even harsher bluster a few months ago. And Iranians have heard them—albeit more civilized ones—for 40 yrs. We’ve been around for millennia & seen fall of empires, incl our own, which lasted more than the life of some countries. BE CAUTIOUS!”
It’s true that Trump’s tweet was unpresidential and rash in the way his pronouncements often are—it makes little sense, for one thing, to promise punitive action against a nation merely for a threat. Those all-caps CONSEQUENCES should be brought to bear on Iran for carrying out its threats, not for the threats themselves. Still, the president’s meaning is sufficiently clear. The administration is squeezing Tehran, and for all its tough talk the regime can do little about it.
U.S. sanctions on Iran, long waived as part of the 2015 nuclear deal, are scheduled to be reimposed in a few weeks. The departments of State and Treasury are pressuring NATO allies and others to stop purchasing oil from Iran. And in an address on Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced an aggressive soft-power initiative to broadcast Farsi-language television, radio, and online content into Iran, “so that ordinary Iranians inside Iran and around the globe can know America stands with them.”
The protests that exploded on the streets of Iran last year—the protests about which America’s allegedly progressive commentators and policymakers were largely silent—never quite went away. Across the country anti-government protests are still erupting for one reason or another, and one of the chief grievances expressed by these dissenters is that the mullahs in Tehran have sent enormous amounts of money to prop up the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. Western analysts believe Iran has “invested” at least $30 billion and perhaps as much as $105 billion in Syria. Money that might have built bridges or schools was used instead to cultivate a terror-state proxy.
In his address Pompeo noted these protests, pledged U.S. support for those carrying them out, and drew a broad comparison of the Iranians’ struggle for freedom with that of America’s revolutionary struggle: “When the United States sees the shoots of liberty pushing up through rocky soil, we pledge our solidarity, because we too took a hard first step towards becoming a free country a few years back.”
We don’t know if Rouhani’s regime will collapse or survive for another decade, though we hope the establishment of an open and secular government is in Iran’s near future. Nor are we confident that Trump’s defensibly hawkish stance on Iran won’t dissolve into its opposite the way his “fire and fury” pronouncements against Kim Jong-Un quickly turned into boasts that North Korea no longer poses a threat.
But for now, blustery tweets aside, the president’s stance is the right one. Iran’s regime is responsible for mayhem around the Middle East and far beyond, and he is right to promote its conclusion.
