It has been dubbed the Pottery Barn rule: you break it, you own it. That’s what then US secretary of state Colin Powell warned his president, George W. Bush, ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It has become an aphorism of American foreign policy regarding the Middle East.
Donald Trump’s approach, as many analysts have noted over the past fortnight, has a different flavour: we broke it, you fix it. As he eyes a potential exit from the war in Iran, he is cajoling US allies into resolving the unfinished business – chiefly, reopening the critical Strait of Hormuz.
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“That’s not for us,” he said this week. “That’ll be for France, that’ll be for whoever’s using the strait … there’s no reason for us to do it.”
But that is not the only outstanding item. The Iranian regime retains 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, believed to be buried underground, that could be the starting point for a reborn nuclear program. Moreover, the regime itself survives – albeit wounded – and with a new appreciation for the havoc it can wreak in the strait.