IRAN/NUCLEAR/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “With the Trump administration’s controversial decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran, the confrontation between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic has entered a new stage. Many of America’s European allies fear that Donald Trump is retracing the path of George W. Bush toward war in the Middle East—this time with a country that is larger, more complicated, better armed and more populous than Iraq. That is almost certainly an oversimplification. As Mr. Trump’s North Korea diplomacy has shown, he is capable, for better or worse, of combining sensational threats with extraordinary overtures of peace. He can shift from threatening North Korea with ‘fire and fury’ one week to promising aid and trade the next. His Iran policy is likely to be at least as dramatic, confusing and hard to predict. Now that the U.S. has withdrawn from the nuclear deal, the next question raging in and around the administration appears to be whether the American goal should be to change Iran’s behavior or to topple its regime. Before taking up his post as national security adviser, John Bolton was clear about where he stood. ‘The behavior and the objectives of the regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime itself,’ he said in July 2017. In May 2018, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani told reporters that the administration is ‘committed to regime change’ in Iran.”
-Walter Russell Mead, “Trump’s Iran Gambit,” The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2018 10:56 am