Guest Post: Don't blame the U.S. and Israel. Blame Iran.

     "Nothing would improve the prospects of the people of Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Israel more than removing the Islamic regime in Tehran."

          Thomas Friedman, in today's New York Times

Maybe the U.S. and Israel aren't the bad guys. Maybe Iran is.

Yesterday's guest post by Herb Rothschild listed the policy and moral failures of the U.S. and Israel. I invited someone to respond and argue "that the policy and actions of the U.S. and Israel have been honest, above-board, and peace-seeking in this region."

Michael Trigoboff doesn't argue that the U.S. and Israel are good, but rather than their war against Iran is good because it is necessary. Iran is a danger to Israel, to the region, and to the USA. It is fanatical, brutal, and relentless in its desire to destroy The Great Satan (the U.S.) and The Little Satan (Israel.) They pray for our deaths.

Michael Trigoboff is a retired computer science professor at Portland Community College.

Trigoboff

Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff

A response to yesterday's post by Herb Rothschild:

Mr. Rothschild thinks that the United States has no reason to go to war against Iran. I wonder what he thinks incessant chants of “Death to America” are all about. I wonder why he thinks Iran is motivated to get nuclear weapons and who they might want to use them against.

Iran doesn’t just chant its wishes. Iran and its proxies killed over 200 US Marines in Beirut; they captured the CIA station chief in Lebanon, tortured him to death, and sent us a video of the torture; they supplied Iraqi insurgents with IEDs that killed and wounded thousands of our soldiers.

Iran is the foremost sponsor of Islamic terrorism in the world. It threatens all of our regional allies. Its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, provided it with a strong deterrent against attack. Thanks to Israel's destruction of those proxies, that deterrent has evaporated. Iran’s currently weakened state provides a golden opportunity to take down one of our foremost enemies.

Israel made numerous offers to live in peace beside a Palestinian state. The Palestinian response was not just refusal, but refusal accompanied by terrorist violence. One such offer was made to the Palestinians in 2000 by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Not only did the Palestinians refuse to negotiate about this offer, they accompanied their refusal with the Second Intifada, a wave of 140 vicious terrorist suicide bombings targeting school buses, pizzerias, and cafes. Israel had a strong peace movement, but after the Second Intifada it collapsed, because most Israelis saw that the only outcome acceptable to the Palestinians was the total destruction of Israel.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators often chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That's the chant in English. In Arabic, they chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.” The Palestinians want a one-state solution; a state “from the river to the sea” completely free of Jews.

Iran’s ruling ayatollahs are not a normal regime that wants the best for its people. Their extreme Islamic ideology wants nothing less than the destruction first of Israel, then America. Their goal is Islamic rule over the entire world. Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Iranian regime, said this ultimate victory was worth it, even if Iran had to burn in the process. That same ideology was at play in Gaza, where Hamas spent its years of rule building nothing but tunnels so that it could hide under its civilians, turning them into human shields. The fate of those human shields mattered to Hamas only as a propaganda tool against Israel.

Obama’s “nuclear deal” with Iran was fatally flawed by its sunset clauses. By now those sunset clauses would have taken effect and Iran would be free to pursue nukes again. Allowing an Islamic death cult like the Iranian regime to get nuclear weapons is nothing short of criminal strategic negligence.

Israel had to destroy the Iranian proxies before it could go after the head of the snake. The United States is in the same position, but on a much larger strategic chessboard. Ninety percent of Iranian oil goes to China, which is how Iran gets around sanctions. China needs this oil to support its economy. By becoming a proxy of China and stepping onto that larger chessboard, the Iranian regime made a strategic, and hopefully fatal error.

The United States needs to deter China from attacking and taking over Taiwan. A credible threat to cut off China’s external oil supplies could do this. Just as Israel needed to take Hamas and Hezbollah off the chessboard before it could go after Iran, the United States needs the means to credibly threaten China’s external oil supply.

This could be the coherent strategy behind going after Venezuela first, and then Iran. We now control Venezuela’s oil exports. That oil is no longer going to Cuba, and we could stop it from going to China. If we gain that ability with Iranian oil as well, we may have what we need to deter an attack by China on Taiwan.

Both Mr. Rothschild and I are of Jewish heritage. When he thinks about who the good guys and the bad guys are, he might consider what his life would have been like had he been born in Iran instead of here in America.

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Maybe we aren't the good guys

The U.S. claims that Iran is the dangerous one. Really?

Today's guest post holds up a mirror to the U.S. and Israel:

     "How many other countries has Iran, that danger to the world, attacked militarily? None. Israel has invaded Lebanon and Syria and attacked Iraq and Iran. The U.S. has invaded Iraq and Syria and attacked Iran and Yemen."

Herb Rothschild was a professor of English at LSU. He has been a lifetime activist on behalf of peace, justice, and the environment. He is the author of The Bad Old Days, a memoir of his years as a civil rights activist in Louisiana. He was the founder of ashland.news, a now-thriving online newspaper for Ashland, Oregon.

Herb Rothschild

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

Shortly after Trump let Netanyahu lead him by the nose again and attack Iran for the second time, he sent me an email saying that Iran wants to bring DEATH (he loves caps) to America. I’m not sure of that. I am sure that for many years America has wanted to bring death to Iran.

Our hostility dates from January 1979, when popular resistance forced the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to flee. Before that, Iran was a close ally. Indeed, during the Nixon-Kissinger years, it was the anchor of our Middle East policy. We loaded it with weapons, and the U.S. embassy in Tehran was our largest in the world, staffed by more than 1000 Americans, mostly CIA agents and military advisors.

A main reason we liked the Pahlavis—the father, then the son—was that they allowed Western oil companies to exploit their nation’s vast resources at sweetheart prices. Most Iranians didn’t share our pleasure. When a politician named Mohammad Mosaddegh called for nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, there was an outpouring of popular support, and on April 28, 1951, the Iranian parliament voted to appoint Mossadegh prime minister.

Consequently, the British Secret Service and the CIA worked successfully to topple Mosaddegh and reinstall the shah, who subsequently ruled over a restless population through terror. SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, had been created in 1957 with assistance from the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. SAVAK became widely feared for surveillance, imprisonment, and torture. It even operated in the U.S. with CIA consent, spying on Iranian expats and students.

After the shah was overthrown, Carter foolishly allowed Kissinger to persuade him to allow the dying shah to enter the U.S. for medical treatment. Enraged, young Iranians occupied the U.S. embassy, which had continued as an outpost of U.S. spying. They held U.S. personnel hostage until January 1981. In response, the U.S. imposed the first of what were to become a series of economic sanctions.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, believing that its revolution had weakened Iran, invaded his neighbor on September 22, 1980. Thus began an eight-year war in which Iran suffered about 300,000 deaths and 500,000 wounded. During the war, the U.S. provided Iraqi forces with satellite imagery and battlefield intelligence to target Iranian troop concentrations. Iraq also received U.S. agricultural credits and trade, which helped finance its war effort.

It’s impossible to forgive someone whom you’ve injured. So, the U.S. has treated Iran as an enemy ever since the fall of the shah.

Stoking our animosity has been Iran’s support for armed groups trying to save the Palestinians from Israel’s ethnic cleansing. How can a nation (ours) that has furnished Israel the money and weapons with which Israel has been displacing and killing Palestinians since 1948—not even halting the flow of arms as Israel commits genocide in Gaza—tolerate another nation’s taking the opposite side? Isn’t the designation of terrorist states our sole prerogative?

And what a game the U.S. and Israel have played over Iran’s nuclear weapons program! In 2015, Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with the U.S. and five other major powers. Accordingly, it gave up its efforts to develop nuclear weapons and placed its nuclear facilities under continuous monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Israel opposed the agreement, and the Israel lobby nearly succeeded in getting Congress to abrogate Obama’s decision to make the U.S. a party to it.

As soon as Trump took office in 2017, he pulled the U.S. out of the agreement and reimposed sanctions on Iran. Biden didn’t undo that damage. So, Iran restarted its nuclear weapons program, which then became a prime justification for the U.S. and Israel (both nuclear powers) to attack it.

How many other countries has Iran, that danger to the world, attacked militarily? None. Israel has invaded Lebanon and Syria and attacked Iraq and Iran. The U.S. has invaded Iraq and Syria and attacked Iran and Yemen. That’s just in the Middle East. If I were to list the other countries the U.S. has attacked and invaded in my lifetime, I would exceed the word limit Peter gave me.

Surely it’s time for us to rethink the designations of “good guys” and “bad guys” in the geopolitical narratives that we have been fed for so long. Or do we fear the moral obligation to resist that such honesty will impose on us?

 

[Note: In the interests of wholesome discussion of serious issues, I will happily consider potential guest post submissions which choose to argue that the policy and actions of the U.S. and Israel have been honest, above-board, and peace-seeking in this region.]

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Easy Sunday: The kids are all right.

Middle school students in Medford, Oregon, were suspended for cutting class to participate in an anti-ICE protest.

The protest is OK. The discipline is OK. 

I love it.

Rogue Valley Times news story

It is almost spring in Medford, with sunny and clear afternoons in the 60s. Early trees are budding. Young people are restless. 

Fifty years from now the students won't be reminiscing with former classmates about the problem sets in their algebra class. But many of them will remember the thrill of organizing a non-permitted, skip-school protest of the rough and misdirected policing by ICE. They will retain memories of the honking horns of cars on the street, and the trouble they got into.  

They will remember it better thanks to having gotten in trouble.

For some, the protest was learning how to pitch an independent idea to classmates and to organize them. Perhaps different leaders emerged than those from school-approved activities like student body elections and athletic teams. Students got direct experience with the school's justice system for behavior the school found transgressive no matter how worthy the students believed the cause to be. It will be a good topic of discussion among them. Was it fair or unfair? 

The event was not a simulation of life, a school project to prepare, get graded, and then discard. It wasn't a civics class about how a bill becomes law. It is a tiny bit of real life because it was outside of school and forbidden.

I am happy to see that this walkout protest was about protesting ICE. I suspect this protest will age well for them. Some of the people at risk of deportation will be their friends and the families of their friends. 

I take enough pleasure in seeing political engagement by young people that I would even feel OK if I learned that young people were protesting in support of Kristi Noem: "Bring her back! Bring her back!"  I would shudder, of course, about their choice of position, but I would appreciate their engagement with the broader world. 

People with political power -- people more or less my age -- don't give up their power willingly. Their power is torn from their aged hands by the next generation, who don't ask for permission. 

Like the tiny buds on plum tree branches at my farm, the protest is not a plan for beginning the next cycle. It is the beginning of the next cycle..

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For-Profit Medicine

The U.S. healthcare system costs more than the systems in peer countries. 

Our health outcomes are no better.

Today's guest post offers hopeful news.

In some arenas, the profit motive and competition drive down costs. This doesn't work in healthcare, where consumers interact with the system out of need, not choice, and where most payments are made by third parties. Our current system leads to vertical integration and monopoly pricing at every level.

U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D - MA) and Josh Hawley (R- MO) have introduced a bill to change that.

Bruce Van Zee is a retired nephrologist. He lives in Medford, Oregon and calls himself a "Never Trumper." He began sharing his thoughts during this second Trump term in his new blog on Substack. He allowed me to republish his post from yesterday, a welcome bit of good news amidst news of the Iran war, "unconditional surrender," inflation, job losses, and the drip from the Epstein coverup. He would welcome new subscribers:  https://bvzcvz.substack.com

Van Zee

Guest Post by Bruce Van Zee

Break up Big Medicine Act

Some Hopeful News about For-Profit Medicine

Imagine being in the market for a home. You contact a realtor who agrees to show you some homes for sale. You find a home you like and submit an offer. The offer is accepted and your realtor then refers you to a mortgage bank, home inspector, and a title company. You are a bit surprised by the steep fees of the companies, but eventually, the deal is completed. Later you learn that the only homes the realtor showed you were ones that the conglomerate that owned the realtor’s firm had listed. The same Real Estate Conglomerate also owned the title company and the mortgage bank and the home inspector’s firm. You ruefully calculate by retrospectively comparing other non-conglomerate pricing that you paid way too much.

Thankfully, this dark scenario can’t happen under U.S. law because of legislation prohibiting these incestuous and monopolistic relationships. RESPA (Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act) and other antitrust regulations prohibit such self-dealing and require disclosure and freedom to seek other services outside of the conglomerate.

Unfortunately, such is not the case with mega for-profit health insurance companies. Currently, many for-profit insurance providers (UnitedHealth, Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Elevance) operate vertically integrated companies that not only offer health insurance, but often provide a provider network of physicians, pharmaceutical company and pharmacy benefit manager, and a medical device company that they own. So, if a person purchases one of these companies’ health insurance policies, they are often referred internally for all services. One can escape the network for other physicians or pharmaceuticals, but the costs are usually higher.

The problem is that there is a host of information showing that these companies are profiting off every step of the vertical referral chain and driving up health care costs. I previously posted data showing the cost overruns of Medicare Advantage over traditional Medicare (here and here). The WSJ also has an excellent expose on the rip-off of government and taxpayers by the mega for-profit health care companies (here). Among other strategies, the vertically integrated companies subverted federal guidelines designed to limit profitability of their insurance arm by taking additional pieces of profit out of the provider and pharmaceutical entities as well.

Well, help is on the way! In a rare bipartisan partnership, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have introduced the Breakup Big Medicine Act (here). This needed legislation would prevent vertical integration of health services and, if it becomes law, would require existing companies to divest of their vertical integration services within a year or face penalties. A company could not own both an insurance company and a physician network nor could they own a pharmaceutical chain or pharmaceutical benefit manager firm or medical supply company. Hospitals would still be allowed to have employed physicians. The legislation would be analogous to the Glass-Steagall act that regulated and separated commercial and investment banking, and to the RESPA act for realty. The hoped result would be to decrease overall costs and stimulate competition. But, given our lobby-driven system of legislation that gives disproportional power to monied interests, the chance of passage is meager.

There is a humorous You-Tube video with the satirical Dr. Glaucomflecken and Elizabeth Warren that is worth the few minutes to watch. It gets the point across:

YouTube: Click here

(courtesy of Dr. M. Matthews)

My own view is the bill is a step in the right direction. But as I’ve indicated earlier, if America wants to really effect health care reform and decrease costs while improving quality, we need a well thought out National Health Plan like virtually all other western developed nations. America has twice the cost and poorer outcomes compared to these other nations. Medicare -For-All is one avenue to get us there with the safeguards and reforms previously outlined (here) and (here).

Thanks for listening!

Our troops deserve better.

I wish for the well-being of our troops in the Middle East.

They deserve a better president.

Email I received yesterday:

Peter, I agree with Trump that Iran is a danger to the world.  Should Democrats be hedging their comments on the war? Maybe our actions there will turn Iran into a friendly nation. What should Democrats be thinking or saying about this war?

Most of my readers are old enough to remember when the U.S. decided to make war on Iraq. People who were early critics, including Barack Obama, looked wise in hindsight. People like Hillary Clinton who were on record in support of the Iraq war, looked foolish. Maybe Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction. People want to be on the right side of history before the history is written. 

My response to the inquiry:

I wish for the well-being of our troops in Iran because I am an American. Those troops are an extension of me and my country, and I am vicariously responsible, even if I did not vote for Trump. My generation of Americans was put into peril in Vietnam, and I empathized with their situation then and again now. The fact that the war was flawed in its purpose, and was continued for the cynical purpose of political advantage in the 1972 election, heightens the victimhood of Vietnam veterans and the nobility of their service. I don't blame the soldiers carrying out the war against Iran. Quite the opposite. I wish them well.

This war, done this way, by this president, is a mistake. Some things --heart surgery, for example -- need to be done carefully if they are to be done at all. If you plan to do the surgery with a chain saw, it is better not to do it. Trump is carrying out this war in a way unlikely to produce a good outcome. 

--  Trump is continuing his pattern of turning our republic into a serial dictatorship by defying Congress' power to declare war. The Constitution is collateral damage.

--  Trump sprung this on our allies and the countries in the region, putting their governments, their citizens, and their economies in peril. A good outcome in Iran will require the cooperation of many nations. Trump demonstrated that we are a presumptuous, careless, untrustworthy hegemon that will ignore their interests in favor of ours.

-- Trump makes outrageous and arrogant demands on Iran. Trump first urged an organic revolution by the people of Iran to establish a new peace-seeking government without having made any provision for such a revolution. He then backtracked and said that he should shape their government, a comment so presumptuous as to make any good outcome less possible:. 

  "They are wasting their time. Khamenei's son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodríguez] in Venezuela."

He later told NBC news:

“We want them to have a good leader. We have some people who I think would do a good job.

--  Trump displays shocking ignorance of the historical, ethnic, and religious factors that would be part of any successful new government in Iran. For example, Trump urged the Kurdish ethnic minority in Iraq to revolt. Shanaz Ibrahim Ahmed, Iraq's Kurdish First Lady, responded:

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq - "In 1991, the Kurds were urged to rise up against the regime of Saddam Hussein, only to be abandoned when priorities changed. No one came to our defense when the regime deployed helicopter gunships and tanks to crush the uprising. Those memories remain vivid and etched in our minds.

Today, we commemorate that chapter as “Raparin” and we do not forget what it taught us.

More recently, we saw what happened in Northeast Syria, or Rojava. After all the promises that were made, after Syria’s Kurds stood on the front lines of the war against ISIS, we witnessed how they were treated.

Today, the Kurds of Iraq have finally tasted a measure of stability and dignity in life. Because of this, it is very difficult, indeed impossible, for Kurds to accept being treated as pawns by the world’s superpowers.

The experiences are there. The empty promises are there. Too often, the Kurds are remembered only when their strength or sacrifice is needed. For that reason, I appeal to all sides involved in this conflict. Leave the Kurds alone. We are not guns for hire."

Her tone displays what a bumbling troublemaker Trump is considered to be. She openly voiced contempt.

Trump established a brand that wins him support among his MAGA base, his damn-the-torpedoes, git-'er-done man of action. He doesn't wait for permission. He doesn't care about process. He alone can do it. Trump the singular hero.

His DOGE efforts with Elon Musk's symbolic chainsaw, his ICE department with careless and rough immigration enforcement, and his slap-dash Liberation Day tariffs are all part of a pattern. The Iran war is another iteration of sloppy execution.

Things might work out in Iran. I hope so. Nevertheless, a Democrat can condemn Trump for initiating a dangerous, poorly-planned war. Our troops deserve better. The country deserves better. 

I am confident that history would be kind to that position.

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Call it what it is. (Our republic depends on it.)

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.”

          Confucius 

We are undergoing a silent Constitutional Convention, updating the work that took place in Philadelphia in 1787.

We are turning the U.S. from a republic into a democratic serial dictatorship. 

The Constitution is being re-written because we have a president who is governing as a single decision-maker -- a strong man -- and he isn't being stopped. There is the written Constitution, the old pro-forma rule book, and there is the real Constitution, the actual day-to-day procedure for doing things. The new rule is that the president can do anything he wants so long as at least 34 members of the U.S. Senate allow it. The Supreme Court can delay things, but as we saw with tariffs, presidents can assert a workaround and start a new clock running at the snail pace of judicial appeals. The Supreme Court needs to walk on eggshells. They, too, understand the new reality. The court, like Congress, can be ignored.

The mechanism for unitary presidential power is the power to define words. The most powerful of words is "war." It is the "elastic clause" under the new Constitution, the word that provides flexibility and open-ended power. 

By declaring that we were under invasion by immigrants,Trump said we were at war, enabling him to take control of immigration policy, the taxing power, and the power of the purse. He asserted that "war" triggered the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Moreover, since we were at "war" with other countries due to an asymmetric balance of trade, President Trump could impose and revise tariffs -- i.e. levy taxes -- at his personal pleasure.

This week Trump joined Israel in firing missiles at and dropping bombs on Iran, killing its head of state and much of its leadership. Our bombs killed some 160 schoolgirls. We "obliterated" Iran's nuclear facilities. The U.S. Navy sunk an Iranian naval vessel on the high seas, killing 180 Iranian sailors. U.S. embassies were hit by Iranian missiles. Trump says we have a goal: a new government in Iran, forced under compulsion of violence by a foreign state. That is the very definition of war.

But for the purposes of triggering laws enacted by Congress to protect its constitutional duty to declare wars, Trump is saying this is not a war. It is a "military operation." Congressional allies are going along. Senator Lindsey Graham (R - SC) says this isn't "technically" a war.

The United States is rewriting the Constitution through practice and accretion. When words can mean whatever a president wants, laws written with words have no power. A president can define tariff, tax, regulation, invasion, war, emergency, emoluments, bribe, or any other word however it serves his interests. Trump is doing so now. It is pretense and he is shameless about it.

Congress has the power to impeach and convict a president who flouts congressional power. The writers of the original Constitution presumed that congressional members' desire to protect their institutional prerogatives would be enough for them to insist that a president share power. That is no longer true. The situation will change if and when this president becomes such a political liability that Republican senators conclude that he must be removed. That will send the message that Congress is relevant, after all, acting as a stopgap remedy. 

That action does not restore the Constitution. When Impeachment and conviction is, at long last, the tool Congress is willing to use to limit presidential power, it signifies that a new Constitution is in effect. A president is a temporary, elected dictator. Congress is a passive board of directors, an advisory panel, giving a veneer of legitimacy up until the president really screws up and needs to be fired.

We know this system of governance. It is the system in place in city and country governments, on school boards, and in nonprofit and corporate boards of directors. They hire a CEO, who runs things during his tenure. If a problem emerges and someone needs to take the fall to restore public or investor trust, the CEO is fired and replaced. The institution survives.

That system can work, but it is not the constitutional system we lived under for 245 years.

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Trrmp wants a USA-friendly autocrat in Iran

"You say you want a Revolution
Well, you know
We all wanna change the world. . . 

You'd better free your mind instead"

   The Beatles, "Revolution 1, 1968

Trump wants to leave Iran's rulers in place. Forget revolution.

Keep the police. Keep the public employees. Keep the government structure. Keep all but the very top military. Keep the autocracy.

Trump doesn't want something new and organic to rise up in Iran. That is too unpredictable.  Forget messy democracy. He wants a pro-American business partner who owes his position to Trump. He wants another Venezuela deal.

Jim Stodder put this insight together for me. Jim is a college classmate. He left school for a while amid the anti-war disturbances of the era, then returned to complete college and then get his Ph.D. in economics from Yale. He taught international economics and securities regulation at Boston University.

Guest Post by Jim Stodder

Will Trump offer Iran the same kind of deal he’s offering Venezuela and now Cuba?             

 

The deal is – “Go ahead and run your own affairs; repress your people however you want. Just stop messing with U.S. security and give us a piece of that oil and gas revenue.”  

 

He’s already made this deal explicit with Venezuela, mentioned it to Cuba, and said he’d like to discuss it with Iran.  All that democracy stuff was for his American audience.  For getting what he wants, democracy in these countries would be a bug, not a feature.

 

There are many things in such a deal that would appeal to Trump:

* It would be the easiest and quickest resolution.

* It would therefore win the most political support in the U.S.

* It offers many avenues of enrichment for his friends and family.

* Even if it’s just a ploy or falls apart, the prospect of such a deal makes it less likely Iran retaliates with serious terrorism like a dirty bomb. (It still has enough nuclear expertise to do it, and it doesn’t take an ICBM.) 

* Controlling Iran’s oil gives the U.S. leverage over China. The Economist magazine says China gets 4% of its crude from Venezuela and more than 10% from Iran.

 

There’s a counterargument to the last point, however.  It is that making Iran less secure for China makes Russia more important as its supplier. China gets about 20% of its oil from Russia, via several oil pipelines and ships from Russia’s Far East. It also gets almost 40% of its natural gas imports from Russia via the Power of Siberia 1 pipeline and LNG ships, again through Russia’s East.

 

Against this growing importance of Russia, the fact remains that 40% of China’s crude oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran could choke off.  On balance, I’d say that controlling Iran increases Trump’s leverage over China. And giving Russia more power has never been something about which Trump seems too concerned.

 

If I were advising Trump, I'd make the case. Given the direct benefits to him, he'd give it serious thought. 

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