Trump Signals New Strategy on Iran: A Waiting Game

President Trump says he is leaning toward a new solution to the Iran nuclear crisis: Declare it is over, even if not much has changed. Mr. Trump and his team have taken to asserting that they have the Iranians right where they want them. They say they no longer need a new nuclear agreement that would remove potential bomb fuel from the country, or to limit Iran’s missile capability, two of the leading reasons the president cited 10 months ago for going to war.

Mr. Trump appears — at least for now — to have rejected a series of military options that would involve intense, if time-limited, attacks on military installations, nuclear sites and even some energy infrastructure. All the talk this year of sending in commandos to seize roughly 970 pounds of uranium from the country, enriched to a near-bomb-grade level of 60 percent purity, has been abandoned, albeit for the moment. So has the detailed analysis of whether America’s biggest bunker busters are powerful enough to get deep into Pickaxe Mountain, a site U.S. intelligence believes — but is not sure — is the location of advanced centrifuges that can purify uranium into bomb fuel.

In comments to reporters this week in Paris, where he was attending a meeting of foreign ministers from the Group of 7, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described an approach best characterized as strategic patience: waiting for sanctions on Iran to take their toll and ultimately crack their government. “At this point, the economic campaign and the pressure and the devastation that our economic campaign is having on the Iranian regime is working so well that the president really doesn’t have any need to conduct major combat operations,” Mr. Rubio said.

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