Murk and Mire

On LinkedIn, Emily Harding, a Director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies lays out her reasons for supporting the Trump Administration's strike on Iran, and what she thinks the next steps should be. Two of those steps are: 

--Make it clear the goal is ending the nuclear program, not toppling the regime. Recognize regime change won’t come from the outside. 
--Open the door wide to negotiations. Invite Iran to seek face-saving measures in exchange for on-the-ground inspections of the damage and verifiable dismantlement of the program.

Which make sense, but they require the administration in Iran to trust what the United States tells them. And when you have a person in the White House who claims to believe in the "madman theory," it's unclear how much trust to put in anything coming out of Washington D. C. if Tehran actually believes that President Trump is irrational and volatile. Of course, on the flip side of this, it's unclear how much face-saving that President Trump would be willing to allow the Iranians, and given his willingness to walk away from agreements made in the past, I suspect that they'd be unwilling to take any assurances that regime change was off the table at face value.

But perhaps a bigger problem is simply the realization that the partisan winds in the United States change. President Trump walked away from the agreement that the Obama Administration made with the government of Iran in the opinion that he could squeeze them for an arrangement more to his liking. What's to say that a future Democratic administration won't do the same? The unilateral way in which the President behaves is going to undermine the idea that the United States can be trusted to honor commitments it makes when those commitments become politically inconvenient. While this is to be expected to a certain degree, the growth in presidential power gives the impression that changes can happen at the whim of one person. And as long as that's the ground truth, making something clear to Iran, or extending an invitation that will be seen as genuine, will be difficult. And this leaves aside the current administration's willingness to resort to hints of regime change as a negotiating tactic.