John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are the hawks behind Trump's Iran policy

[DonViejo]

Trump’s Iran policy, explained by the views of his top two foreign policy advisers.

By Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchamp [e-mail] Jun 21, 2019, 1:25pm EDT


President Donald Trump says he called off a US strike on Iran 10 minutes before it was planned to begin on Thursday night. To understand how we got to this point, you need to understand the people in charge of Trump’s foreign policy: National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

These two men are longtime supporters of regime change in Iran. Bolton, in particular, has elevated advocacy for a US strike on Iran into something of a personal North Star. In the absence of a confirmed secretary of defense — the last one, James Mattis, last one resigned six months ago — Bolton and Pompeo have been the key figures in Trump’s foreign policy. And while they’ve clashed at times, they have successfully guided the president toward a campaign of “maximum” economic pressure on Iran and military deployments to the Middle East that have helped bring us to the brink of armed conflict.

Now, Trump did campaign on withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. But he also campaigned on the idea that the Iraq war was a mistake and that more major wars in the Middle East like it would be a mistake.

The deep irony is that Trump has picked two foreign policy principals who champion the thinking that produced George W. Bush’s war. The result is an increasingly dangerous standoff with Iran that could still spiral into a wider, devastating conflict.

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https://www.vox.com/world/2019/6/21/18700711/iran-news-trump-john-bolton-mike-pompeo