Meghan L. O'Sullivan, Columnist

Trump's Iran Plan Does Too Much and Too Little

Aiming to fulfill a campaign promise, the president misses the real threat: Iran's efforts to destabilize the Middle East.

October 13, 2017 at 8:36 PM UTC

By Meghan L. O'Sullivan

Meghan L. O’Sullivan is a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the North American chair of the Trilateral Commission, she served on the National Security Council from 2004 to 2007.

This close to blowing it up.
Photographer: Drew Angerer

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

President Donald Trump’s advisers are at pains to emphasize that Friday’s speech on Iran policy was an effort to lay out a comprehensive strategy to tackle the malign behavior of the Tehran regime, not just an announcement that the president had refused to certify Iran’s compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal. Their frustration that the headlines missed the forest for the trees is understandable -- given the need for an Iran policy, not simply an Iran nuclear strategy, which was essentially the approach of the Barack Obama administration.

But Trump’s advisers only have the president -- and not the media -- to blame. The Iran nuclear deal has long been the focal point of the president’s rhetoric and was the centerpiece of the speech. And the decertification of the deal was one of the few tangible actions outlined by the president.