Donald Trump has always been the anti-Obama.
He rose in opposition to President Barack Obama and has reversed many of his policies.
But perhaps no Trump undertaking runs so directly counter to Obama’s approach than the Iran War.
Obama sought to accommodate the Iranian regime, while Trump hopes to topple it.
Obama tolerated an Iranian nuclear program, even one theoretically constrained by a nuclear deal, whereas Trump wants to destroy it or set it back for years.
Obama facilitated the rise of Iranian power in the region. Trump, in contrast, is endeavoring to crush it.
Back then, Obama operated on the basis of conciliation and caution. Today, Trump is all about confrontation and assertion.
We don’t know how Trump’s military operation in Iran will turn out. There are a number of ways to see it going sideways or falling short of its goals.
But there’s no doubt that Trump’s vision of the Middle East — with Israel and the Arab states putting their enmity behind them, while the Iranian regime is much reduced or eliminated — is more in keeping with US interests than Obama’s.
The Obama theory was that Iran could be made into a responsible regional player if the nuclear issue were set aside, and if the United States forged a balance of power between Sunni powers in the region and Shia Iran.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal (or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) restricted Iranian nuclear activity, while allowing the regime to sit on the cusp of a nuclear weapon and giving it major sanctions relief.
The Obama administration literally sent pallets of cash to Tehran, and the relaxation of sanctions gave the regime more running room to build up its missile arsenal and terrorist proxies around the region.
Trump 1.0 disrupted this model by tearing up the nuclear agreement and creating a “maximum pressure” campaign to squeeze the regime financially.
The campaign had kneecapped Iranian oil revenue and significantly depleted the regime’s foreign reserves when Joe Biden came into office in 2020, hoping to revive the Obama strategy.
Before Oct. 7, Iranian power had reached a high-water mark. Its proxies dotted the region, from Gaza to Lebanon to Iraq to Syria to Yemen.
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It was working with US adversaries China and Russia. It was partaking of regional leadership, just as Obama had imagined, but not as a moderate force.
Iran wielded its proxies as instruments of an Islamic radicalism threatening to Israel and US interests.
In retrospect, Oct. 7 looks to be for Islamic extremists what Pearl Harbor was for the Japanese — a brilliant, if awful, tactical success that carried within it the seeds of strategic defeat.
Israel went about systematically degrading Iran’s proxy forces and then degraded Iran’s defenses in retaliation for missile strikes.
This paved the way for the 12 Day War and Trump’s strike on the Iranian nuclear program, known as Operation Midnight Hammer.
The strike was a signal that we weren’t going to trust or verify — we were going to try to blow up and bury as much of the Iranian nuclear program as possible.
Operation Epic Fury is the second act. It seeks to destroy more of Iran’s nuclear program and is going after the foundations of Iranian power that Obama left unaddressed in the nuclear deal — namely, the Iranian missile program and other elements of its military.
The campaign is the very opposite of the JCPOA, in its means (military action rather than diplomacy) and its ends.
If it achieves maximal success, there won’t be any Iranian regime to deal with any longer; if it falls short of that, Iranian power and influence will nonetheless have been dealt grievous blows rather than being accommodated or enhanced.
The hope is that if the Islamic Republic falls during or after the war, or is defanged, it will open the way to build on the Abraham Accords.
That first-term Trump initiative rejected the conventional wisdom that the United States had to distance itself from Israel to make peace in the region.
Instead, the US could embrace Israel in a way that was anathema to Obama, and bring together the Jewish state with its Gulf allies, while marginalizing Iran.
Much depends on successfully prosecuting Operation Epic Fury, but there’s no doubt that what Trump is trying to achieve would be better for the peace and security of the region than the policy pursued by one of the least worthy Nobel Peace Prize winners in history.
X: @RichLowry
This story originally appeared on NYPost
