The Trump Administration's Anti-Iran Theatrics Failed in Warsaw

Paul R. Pillar

Security, Americas

In its obsessive campaign of stoking maximum hostility toward Iran, the Trump administration is isolated except for partnering with Iran’s regional rivals, which means Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

The Trump administration tried to make this week’s Middle East conference in Warsaw what the administration had intended it to be all along: an Iran-bashing exercise that would get Europeans to join in more of the bashing. But the conference instead became what most European governments—whose attendance at the gathering was spotty and often low-level—warned it would be: a demonstration not of U.S.-European unity on policy toward Iran but instead of disunity. That the conference’s final statement makes no mention of Iran has to be a major disappointment for the administration.

In its obsessive campaign of stoking maximum hostility toward Iran, the Trump administration is isolated except for partnering with Iran’s regional rivals, which means Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. These regimes have their own reasons for keeping Iran a pariah—reasons that are distinct from U.S. interests and distinct from any fondness for peace and stability in the Middle East. These three states are responsible for much of the uninvited extraterritorial use of military force —apart from Saddam Hussein’s two offensive wars, the United States’s offensive war in Iraq and other interventions, and Turkey’s intervention in northern Syria—as well as more irregular methods of destabilizing other countries in the Middle East over the past forty years.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu can be considered a winner at Warsaw for using the conference to show he can rub elbows with Arab leaders. It was after a side meeting with the Omani foreign minister that Netanyahu commented in a Hebrew-language interview about Israel and Arab states sharing a “common interest of war with Iran.” Netanyahu’s office later altered its English translation to suggest that he intended only a metaphorical meaning of “war.” Regardless of the translation issue, Netanyahu’s government has escalated its already intense anti-Iran rhetoric, as it did in recently acknowledging for the first time its repeated airstrikes in Syria.