John R. Bradley

Hostages to fortune

After Khashoggi’s murder, America’s support for Saudi Arabia looks increasingly ill-judged

It says something about the level of political discourse in America that Donald Trump decided to trumpet sanctions on Iran not with a speech, but a Twitter meme in reference to Game of Thrones. ‘Sanctions are coming,’ he says – in a picture that might be funny if it were not so serious. The White House is, in its head, playing out a drama where it imposes sanctions and brings the Ayatollahs to heel. In reality, things are working out very differently. When it comes to the goal of containing Iran, Trump is indeed living in a fantasy land.

The date in Trump’s tweet is 5 November, the day America ratchets up already devastating economic sanctions against Iran, following Washington’s unilateral withdrawal in May from the nuclear treaty brokered by Barack Obama. No doubt Donald Trump will exploit the propitious timing to highlight how, four decades on, Iran remains, in his view, entrenched in its hostility to US interests in the Middle East.

How ironic, then, that casting Iran as a uniquely rogue state just got a lot more difficult for President Trump because of another notoriously undiplomatic act inside a diplomatic mission — this one by a 15-man Saudi hit squad on a murderous mission to silence a dissenter in neighboring Turkey.

Officially, Trump is imposing sanctions on the heart of Iran’s economy because of the country’s alleged nuclear treaty violations and its failure to curb its ballistic missile program. This is despite the fact that the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the European Union, Britain, Russia and China all remain convinced that Iran is abiding by the strictest monitoring program ever imposed.

The endgame for Trump, though, is regime change. It’s a strategy based not on military intervention — the US would never dare to attack Iran — but on the hope that oppressed Iranians will rise up against the mullahs as they face the indignity of starvation without meaningful representation.

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