Haaretz:
U.S. President Donald Trump’s about-face in deciding not to attack Iran in response to its downing of an American drone isn’t the beginning of the end of the Gulf crisis. It isn’t even the end of the beginning.
Iranian attacks on targets belonging to America’s allies in the Middle East (and in the case of the drone, an American target) haven’t achieved their goal yet. On the other hand, Tehran also hasn’t received a resounding lesson about the costs of its actions.
Therefore, it’s very possible that such Iranian actions will continue, either via satellite organizations like the Houthis in Yemen or Shi’ite militias in Iraq, or by the Revolutionary Guards themselves, albeit without officially claiming responsibility.
The praise Trump won for refraining from escalating the situation is justified, but it didn’t solve the problem at the heart of the crisis. Tehran wants to force Washington to ease the economic sanctions against it. But Washington is conditioning this on a return to negotiations over a new version of the nuclear deal, which would impose much more stringent terms on the Iranians.
This is a gap that currently seems difficult to bridge. And in the absence of a solution, Iran will presumably continue to apply pressure, possibly in the near future.
Iran clearly doesn’t want a war. Though a war wouldn’t obliterate it, as Trump threatened over the weekend, the balance of forces doesn’t favor the Islamic Republic. Yet nothing the U.S. administration has done to date seems to have convinced the Iranians that they’d be better off stopping their provocations.
In his statements to the media after aborting the attack, Trump presented his decision as choice between two options: approving a strike on Iran’s aerial defense system that the Pentagon predicted would have killed around 150 people, or scrapping it. But in reality, the Americans have a broader range of choices.
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