How Trump Can (and Probably Will) Botch the Iran Situation
Last Thursday, a wave of protests broke out across Iran, with tens of thousands taking to the streets for the largest and most sustained wave of political activism in the country in years. By most accounts, what began as unrest over pocketbook issues like high food prices and unemployment soon metastasized into a broader frenzy of agitation against the Islamic regime and its focus on religious issues over economic ones.
It took about a day for Donald Trump to insert himself into the situation.
On Friday, the president took to Twitter to laud the protests as a sign Iranians were fed up with their government for its “squandering of the national wealth to fund terrorism abroad.” And he’s continued sounding off about the protests since, in part by bashing his predecessor’s Iran policies—the Obama administration was famously rather hands-off during the 2009 “Green Movement,“ the last major outbreak of protests in the country, a strategic decision then secretary of state Hillary Clinton came to regret. On Wednesday, Trump went so far as to suggest his administration may take some sort of action in support of the protesters “at the appropriate time,” though as usual with him, it’s awfully difficult to know what this actually means.
Trump’s fixation on the protests isn’t surprising. As always, he seems determined to use the issue to show he’s bigger and better than Obama. Practically speaking, he could conceivably take this opportunity to re-impose sanctions the last administration lifted in 2015 in exchange for a freeze on Iran’s nuclear program. (The waiver on those sanctions needs to be renewed every few months, and the next deadline is coming up in just over a week.) Key Trump allies have also been talking openly about adopting an explicit policy of undermining the Iranian government and pushing for regime change.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvw3bq/how-trump-can-and-probably-will-botch-the-iran-situation
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Please remember that Putin’s greatest wish is for USA to pull out of Iran nuclear deal...
