| | | | Iran "appears to be standing down," President Trump said Wednesday, and the two sides are communicating through a Swiss diplomatic channel, but does that mean the crisis is over?
After last night's Iranian attacks on bases in Iraq, Daniel Drezner wrote hopefully in The Washington Post that it could be: There's a difference between a tit-for-tat and a march toward war, Drezner noted, and "[r]ight now we are just at tit for tat. Hopefully that is where this ends for now." In addressing the nation, Trump backed away from threats of military retaliation; the next steps, Drezner wrote, would depend on Trump's ability to de-escalate.
But Trump also promised more sanctions (which Iran's foreign minister has previously called "economic terrorism"), and Iran's strikes followed several days of analysis suggesting Tehran would play a longer game. The Economist, for its part, concludes "[t]his is unlikely to be the final word," predicting small-scale proxy attacks and a return to nuclear brinksmanship. | | President Trump drew a nuclear line before even greeting the room during his address to the nation on Wednesday, later calling for a new Iran nuclear deal. He did so amid growing talk of Iranian activity. Since the Soleimani strike, Iran has announced it will no longer abide by the restrictions of the 2015 deal, and analysts have expected its nuclear program to ramp up. At the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Abbas Milani warned that a slide toward war with the US would give Tehran more reasons to develop a bomb.
That said, Iran's moves are more "ambiguous" than some think, according to Mark Fitzpatrick and Mahsa Rouhi of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Iran has declined to take more provocative steps—such as kicking out inspectors, enriching uranium above 20%, or shirking limits on its plutonium-producing plant—and retains some flexibility in how far it can go. Notably, European powers haven't sought to reimpose international sanctions over Iran's activity, Fitzpatrick and Rouhi point out, though Russia and China "of late have become more critical." | | | The strike that killed Qasem Soleimani "is the latest and most conclusive evidence that Iranian revolutionaries have no greater friends than their supposed enemies in Washington, D.C.," Pankaj Mishra writes for Bloomberg. At nearly every turn, the US has inadvertently helped Iran's hardliners by supporting despots and flexing its power in the region—patterns of behavior that diminish America's credibility and demonstrate a failure to understand anti-colonial sentiment. Soleimani's death, Mishra argues, has created a new national martyr, galvanized opposition to the US, and will ultimately force America to retreat from the region. | | Should the US Just Leave? | | | As Fareed has noted, the Soleimani strike risked dragging the US into further conflict in the Middle East—but two analysts at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft suggest it's a good opportunity for the US to simply leave. After the Iraqi Parliament voted (nonbindingly) to expel foreign troops, Annelle Sheline argues that America should heed those wishes and withdraw—reducing the risk of war with Iran and improving relations with Iraq at the same time. Many have noted that leaving Iraq would end the US fight against ISIS there, but Helena Cobban suggests a new arrangement could be worked out, with China or Russia offering to help Iraq in that fight if the US exits. | | | It's been said before that income inequality has returned us to the era of robber barons, but in the winter issue of American Affairs, Joel Kotkin goes a step farther, arguing that America is veering toward feudalism. The three classes of feudal France—clerics, warrior-aristocrats, and a Third Estate of merchants and peasants—have been replaced by a "knowledge class" of upper-middle-class intellectual elites who reinforce capitalist ideology, a new aristocracy of tech billionaires, a Third Estate of gig-economy workers and the traditional middle class, and an "untouchable" class of the homeless and addicted. To reverse this trend, Kotkin argues, the new Third Estate will have to recover its political power and shape society's organization. | | | | | | |
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