Though President Donald Trump's showdown with Iran mercifully ended
short of a full-blown war, the near miss did nothing to defuse a
confrontation almost certain to boil up again soon.
While both
sides can claim strategic advances and political payoffs, the riskiest
standoff between the enemies in decades may have transitioned their
confrontation to a new, more dangerous phase. That's because the
structures of conflict and the diplomatic disconnect between
revolutionary Iran and a nationalistic US administration that tore up
the nuclear deal involving both countries are still in place.
The
showdown uncorked a fierce controversy in Washington, where there's a
widening partisan dispute over Trump's rationale for the killing of
Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani, which sparked the crisis.
The
weeklong scare also left a chilling memory of how the impulsive choices
of a seat-of-the-pants President brought his nation to the cusp of
another war in the Middle East.
It's possible Trump might learn
the wrong lessons from his brinkmanship. And the drama exposed the
failings of a gutted national security team staffed largely by
inexperienced or deeply ideological officials apparently prone to
confusion and mixed messages.
On the upside, tensions that
culminated in Trump's evaluation that Iran was "standing down" after not
killing any Americans in strikes at bases in Iraq did not spin out of
control. Both sides were apparently able to telegraph their intentions,
through public rhetoric and a Swiss diplomatic channel, to avoid
miscalculations that could have spilled over into a war.
While
there are hopes that stepping back from the brink will give each side an
incentive to kick off a fresh diplomatic process, it's more likely they
will return to the same state of mutual loathing that has prevailed for
40 years.
Iraq is still on edge -- a brace of rockets landed in
the highly fortified Green Zone of Baghdad on Wednesday -- the area that
hosts the US Embassy, which was previously attacked by a pro-Iran mob.
The
drones and missiles may have been pulled back for now, but it would be
naive to assume this episode is over. Events in the Middle East take
months and years to play out. And Iran's history suggests that it will
not view a limited missile strike as sufficient vengeance for the
killing of a top leader like Soleimani -- who headed the elite Quds
Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, meaning more proxy
militia violence is likely.
"I think that anybody who tells you
that this is over and that the retaliation has now ceased and we can all
make assessments based on where we are right now ... that's very
unlikely. The story is far from over," said Susan Hennessey, a former
National Security Agency attorney who is now a CNN legal analyst, on
"The Situation Room."
Still, after looking like he was talking
the United States into the kind of Middle East quagmire he decried as a
candidate, Trump was glad to step back on Wednesday.
"Iran
appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties
concerned and a very good thing for the world," he said at the White
House.
The President's team, eyeing his reelection race, has
material to work with. They will boast about how Trump, daring to take a
step discounted by his predecessors as too inflammatory, wiped
Soleimani, whom he blasted as a terrorist "monster," off the planet.
More
strategically, Trump may have established a principle that could be
significant in future US-Iran tensions. The killing of Soleimani, who
masterminded Iran's regional network of militia allies like Hezbollah
and Hamas, signals that Washington now sees Iran's proxy activity as
grounds for military action, a new threshold in the confrontation.
"There
was a direct attack, direct assault on the US Embassy, US sovereign
soil, by Iranian proxies," said David Urban, a senior Trump political
adviser and veteran of the first Gulf War.
"This President,
unlike presidents in the past, decided to say, 'No longer will the US
allow Iran to attack the US via proxies,' " Urban told CNN's Christiane
Amanpour. That new standard could be significant given Iran's record of
using affiliated groups to attack US targets -- such as the assault on
the US Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983. But it could also be a
trigger to a future conflict.
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