| The Almost-Maybe-War With Iran Is Still On |
 | | John R. Bolton, President Trump's national security adviser. Oded Balilty/Associated Press | |
| You could be forgiven for concluding from last week's climbdown that the risk of war with Iran has been averted, President Trump having announced that he had called off military strikes. |
| But it's not so. |
| Mr. Trump's big reveal, rolled out in a set of tweets, offered a showman's flair and a reassuringly, if conspicuously, clean narrative — one later picked at by former, and in some cases current, officials who called it implausible and out of line with how military actions and assessments work. |
| The Aaron Sorkin-style plot points included Mr. Trump's stern resolve against Iran, checked only by his compassion for civilian life, culminating in his just-in-time intervention to demand answers from "a General" whom Mr. Trump orders, in the episode's tense final moments, to stand down. |
| Soberly, in his telling, but with his steely gaze ever trained on the Iranian menace, Mr. Trump instead diverted his retaliatory energies — Iran had shot down an American drone that it and later Russia said had crossed into Iranian airspace, but the United States said had been just on the edge of Iran's territory — away from military violence and into economic and diplomatic pressure. |
| This was where Mr. Trump's narrative dovetails with that of the wider American foreign policy establishment, which tends to view economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation as the responsible tools of a responsible world power, necessary to rein in bad actors and keep the peace. |
| But the American campaign of "maximum pressure" to damage Iran's economy and isolate the country diplomatically, is not a practical, peaceful tool for averting conflict. It is the conflict. |
| It is easy for Americans to take for granted that economic and diplomatic pressures at this scale — and they have been just as "maximum" as Mr. Trump promised — fall far short of war. But that is not how they are taken in target countries like Iran. |
| These measures, by design, affect millions of Iranians, often profoundly, curbing their ability to provide for their families, their access to medicine, even the safety of their commercial airplanes. Like any economic calamity, sanctions this deep are thought to reduce life expectancy and increase infant mortality. |
| American diplomatic isolation of Iran, by heavily pressuring other countries to curb their own trade with the country, threatens to worsen Iranians' pain even further and for years to come. |
| Whether or not you feel that this constitutes an act of war, it is often experienced that way by its targets. More to the point, it gives the government of that target country little choice but to defend itself against an American threat that some Trump administration officials and allies have portrayed as deliberately existential. |
| Administration officials have said that Iranian leaders can bring an end to all this any time they want by simply complying with American demands. |
| But those demands are so broad as to constitute an effective Iranian capitulation, which would leave the country extremely vulnerable to the American military action that those same officials have repeatedly threatened. Recall that the United States has, in recent memory, toppled the governments of two of Iran's neighbors through military force. |
| Those same American officials have, often in the same breath as offering Iran an olive branch, described policy toward the country in ways that would give even the most optimistic Iranian reason for skepticism. |
| Even if the terms became acceptable to Iranian officials, they have said that they cannot risk entering into an agreement with the Trump administration after Mr. Trump violated the nuclear agreement despite his own intelligence services finding that Iran was complying. |
| Brian Hook, the administration's special envoy for Iran, has dismissed this Iranian objection, saying, "They knew what they were getting into when they negotiated a deal with a president who had about a year and a half left in office." |
| The outreach that led to the nuclear agreement in fact began almost immediately after President Barack Obama won his 2012 re-election campaign — the point at which he had the longest remaining time in office. In any case, Mr. Trump himself has about a year and a half remaining in his term before he is up for re-election. The implication of Mr. Hook's comment seems to be that, if Iran enters into another agreement with the United States, it should expect the Americans to break it. |
| The United States subsequently announced sanctions on Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, a highly unusual and escalatory move that makes it harder for the Iranians to meet the supposed American desire for a diplomatic de-escalation. |
| So what is the point of American strategy toward Iran, if not to get Iranian leaders to strike a new agreement with the United States? |
| "Our pressure campaign is working," Mr. Hook told Congress this month. When one member of Congress asked Mr. Hook how he was measuring success, adding that Iran had grown more aggressive rather than less, Mr. Hook did not dispute this, saying that Iran's economy had suffered, leaving the government with less money. |
| Nicholas L. Miller, a Dartmouth College political scientist, wrote in summary, "We may not have achieved any of the strategic goals of our pressure campaign, but at least Iranians are poorer." |
| Mr. Hook's comments seemed unlikely to alleviate any impression Iranians might have that the United States is bent on hostility toward Iran, and maybe even regime change (the stated position of John R. Bolton, the current national security adviser), and that, as a result, Iran's only avenue for defending itself — and quite possibly for maintaining the survival of the state — is to escalate in response. |
| "From Tehran's perspective, it seems like it's dealing with an entity that doesn't want to engage in dialogue and is engaging in what feels like gratuitous escalation," said Dina Esfandiary, a Harvard University expert on Middle Eastern security issues. "They feel cornered." |
| But Iran, as a smaller and weaker state, can hardly respond in-kind by imposing sanctions on the American economy or by cutting the United States off from the outside world. Its only available tools are military. |
| "We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Iran has no proportional means to respond to the non-military aspects of the admin's 'maximum pressure' policy," Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, who edits a publication on policy toward Iran called "Bourse and Bazaar," wrote on Twitter. |
| And that is why Iran experts and international relations scholars have been warning that the Trump administration's "maximum pressure" campaign isn't some offramp from the crisis with Iran — it is the crisis, it is the thing that has created the conditions for an escalation to war, and that deepens those conditions every day that passes without resolution. |
| Brett McGurk, until recently the administration's special envoy to the coalition against the Islamic State, warned his former bosses, in a recent article for Foreign Affairs, that they were driving the United States and Iran toward war. |
| American policies toward Iran, he wrote, "if carried to their logical conclusion, necessitate a change of government" — regime change, which Iran certainly seems to consider an act of war — and had left "no plausible on-ramp for Iran to enter negotiations, since nobody, including the Iranians, knows what Iran is supposed to negotiate about." |
| "Without prospect for talks, pressure becomes an end in itself, which begets counter-pressure — and an increasing risk of conflict," Mr. McGurk concluded. |
| Back in the United States, and especially in Washington, the sense of crisis has abated; attention has drifted onto the next round of crises and dramas. But in the Persian Gulf, the mutually escalatory dynamics that makes the situation more explosive every day that passes, and that can already feel to Iranians like a live conflict, are very much ongoing. |
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