US should rethink Middle East policy to avoid war with Iran
The Washington Examiner magazine urged the Trump
administration to rethink its Middle East policy to avoid confrontation with
Iran.
The paper said the US foreign policy should be
designed with one constituency in mind: the American public.
The public expects policymakers and lawmakers in
Washington to always keep their interests, not global abstractions,
front-of-mind and do what is best for the country’s national security.
When decisions are made that unnecessarily
complicate conflict resolution or shut the door on diplomacy (sanctioning the
Iranian foreign minister, to take the most recent example) the public expects
Washington to reassess, think about the long-term, and correct the mistake.
Just as important, the public trusts Washington to
understand when the interests of the United States diverge from those of its
friends around the world and when they align with competitors.
In the case of US policy in the Middle East
generally, Washington is performing woefully below expectations. Either out of
naiveté, a fixation over confronting Iran, or both, the Trump administration
continues to confuse the narrow U.S. interests in the region (preventing a
major disruption to global oil prices and eliminating anti-American terrorist
threats) with the far more expansive aims of some countries in the region.
An implacably hostile confrontation with Iran
undermines US interests; after nearly two decades of U.S. military operations
in the Middle East that have produced nothing but strategic drift and strained
pocketbooks, the worst thing for Americans is another war, it said.
