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The Iran Disaster Is an Opportunity to Turn Away From Hawkish Idiocy and Reset Our Relationship With the Region

The amount of time spent in DC obsessing over Iran compared to the actual threat it poses to our country’s security is insane.

A few years ago, I was in Berlin as part of a congressional staff delegation to meet with some of our European counterparts to discuss the issue of Iran. Trump had become president the previous year but was still a few months away from following through on his threatened withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement negotiated by the Obama administration in 2015. The conversations in Berlin were about how to sustain the agreement, and the implications and consequences of a possible US withdrawal.

As the discussion went on, with some of my American colleagues making some of the usual claims about the threat posed by Iran, a German analyst spoke up. “Excuse me, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I have to say: The way you in Washington talk about Iran just seems crazy.”

“Thank you for saying that,” I immediately responded. “I totally agree.”

The way we talk about Iran in Washington is crazy. Look no further than Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent comment to reporters: “Every problem in the Middle East tracks back to Iran.” This is obviously absurd. Yes, the Iranian regime poses challenges. Yes, it has done, and continues to do, very bad things in the region and to its own people. We don’t need to rehearse all those arguments here; you’ve no doubt heard the talking points more than enough times to repeat them yourself, verbatim. But the fact is that the amount of time spent in Washington obsessing over Iran compared to the actual threat it poses to our country’s safety and prosperity is insane. Donald Trump’s catastrophically stupid, and now hopefully concluded, war on Iran is a vivid display of how that obsession has distorted our foreign policy and ended up dramatically diminishing, rather than advancing, Americans’ safety and prosperity, and the safety and prosperity of the world.

To state the obvious, this problem did not begin with Trump. As with so much else in his corrupt and reckless presidency, Trump is the most blatant expression of pathologies that have infected our politics and policy for a long time. The war on Iran is no different. For........

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