In standoff with Iran, Trump is reaping what he sowed

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an inadvertent admission Wednesday while en route to emergency meetings in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The top U.S. diplomat was checking in on Washington’s close regional allies in the wake of a suspected Iranian strike on a major Saudi oil facility. The attack dealt, at least briefly, a crippling blow to Riyadh’s exports, shook up global markets and clouded the region with a new threat of conflict.

Pompeo described the strike on Saudi Arabia as “an act of war” by Iran, a charge vociferously denied by Iran. Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for the attack, but U.S. and Saudi officials doubt that claim and stress, as Pompeo did, that it has “the fingerprints of the ayatollah” — a reference to Iran’s supreme leader.

When pressed by reporters traveling with him about the efficacy of Trump’s current approach, Pompeo said something he perhaps didn’t quite intend. “I would argue that what you are seeing here is a direct result of us reversing the enormous failure of the JCPOA,” he said, using the official acronym for the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers that Trump opted to leave.

View the complete September 20 article by Ishaan Tharoor on The Washington Post website here.