Trump’s Iran deal is result of unrealistic ambitions for an untenable war

As the adage goes: no plan of battle survives first contact with the enemy. Donald Trump entered the war with Iran with maximalist goals: eliminating the country’s nuclear programme, destroying its ballistic missile programme and ending its support for regional military groups including Hezbollah and Hamas. He exits it with Iran’s word not to build a bomb and to hold further nuclear discussions, no mention in writing of the ballistic missile programme and with Hezbollah celebrating a “victory” as the memorandum of understanding (MOU) instituted a ceasefire in Lebanon, where Israel has seized a swath of the country as a “buffer zone”. Iran’s key asset ended up being the strait of Hormuz, the waterway that almost every previous simulation of the war predicated would be quickly cut off by Iran . To reopen the strait, the administration was forced to fold on its broader goals or face what Trump called a “worldwide depression”. Barbara Leaf, a distinguished diplomatic fellow at the Middle East Institute and a former US assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, said the US had started the war with “disastrously unrealistic assessments of the regime’s resilience”, as well as Iran’s readiness to seize the strait of Hormuz and attack US and foreign facilities in the Gulf. “The US rapidly found that overmatching an adversary that has spent four decades honing its asymmetrical warfighting doctrine and skills would not be the war it had prepared for,” she said. …