It also wouldn't require a PhD thesis for Trump to understand that Iranophobia is bad for business. Iran is a tremendous developing market ripe for investment, as attested by European, Russian, Chinese and South Korean interest.
Assuming Trump's campaign promise of no more regime change adventures holds, the new US strategic mission across Southwest Asia would be to essentially guarantee that global supply chain sea lanes remain open and secure -- to the benefit of booming business across the Rimland. Russia and China could not agree more.
Everyone who's been to Iran -- neocons haven't -- knows Tehran won't be subdued with angry threats. Iran has been under US sanctions for no fewer than 38 years. Absolutely nothing across Southwest Asia can be accomplished, geopolitically, without Iranian participation.
Nobody -- except the usual suspects -- wants confrontation. The Joint Chiefs had already informed then President Obama that Washington cannot go to war again until at least 2022; part of Trump's platform is exactly to facilitate the means to recruit, retrain and re-tool a new US military.
And even in the (terrifying) event that the Pentagon hits Iran, it would take just a few Iranian ballistic missiles strategically deployed against oil fields and oil refineries around the Persian Gulf to spell out the end of the petrodollar.
Tehran is betting on -- and wants to profit from -- a new multipolar world order. Beijing knows there is no New Silk Road if Iran is constrained. Iran's arc of development is inevitable -- and European, Russian and Chinese investors know it. An American geography professor who conducted a project on the US presidential race told me that among pro-Hillary, anti-Hillary, pro-Trump and anti-Trump factions, "in no case did any of the four sides mention the New Silk Roads, or OBOR." Trump's cabinet -- with the possible exception of Secretary of State "T.Rex" Tillerson -- may also fit this mold.
To speak loudly and carry a tiny stick could not be more counter-productive. It might be a stretch to expect Trump to actually read his foreign policy dalang, but if he went through Kissinger's World Order he would learn that "the United States and the Western democracies should be open to fostering cooperative relations with Iran. What they must not do is base such a policy on projecting their own domestic experience as inevitably or automatically relevant to other societies, especially Iran's."
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