More trouble
The smartest thing Tehran could have done, of course, was simply put off the Sunday missile test for another time. Everybody’s delaying everything till some pieces, at least, fall into their places. Some countries, like Mexico, are already feeling the heat. Others, like those included in the Muslim ban, are in shock. And Iran is a sorer spot than most. Surely discretion would have been the better part of valour in this case, especially since the orthodoxy had seen how the dark days of sanctions just before the July ’15 breakthrough tore through the middle and lower income groups.
But Trump, too, has been too quick on the draw. His Muslim ban has already done his trumpetted fight against ISIS no good. Now he’s alienating one of the main fighters against the Islamists – and he himself admitted as much about Iran, on Fox no less, just before the election. The daggers drawn with Tehran will have a direct bearing on the snake pit of the Syrian war; which, in turn, will not just decide the fate of Syria and the wider Middle East, but also crucial trans-Atlantic alliances like nato and a possible, limited US-Russian rapprochement.
Now that the sanctions are in place, an immediate de-escalation seems unlikely, chiefly because Iran isn’t blinking. The days when you could expect other countries to intervene and help break the ice, so to speak, are already old times. Trump has caused far too much uncertainty for most countries to take clear positions, especially, unfortunately, in the Muslim world. The Middle East is already a different world from ten years ago, when George Bush gambled on the Iraq war, and lost. Obama ended further in red, but he did, quite remarkably, put a lid on the nonsense with Iran since the Shah’s ouster. Opening that wound again could well be the worst thing to happen to the Middle East in times when much of it is already tearing at the seams. If Bush was bad and Obama worse for this miserable region, Trump is turning out terrible.
