…His actions reveal a president steering between what he considers to be two wrecks. The first is George W. Bush’s regime-change war in Iraq. Trump called that war possibly the worst decision in presidential history and promised his voters never to repeat it. The second is Barack Obama’s Iran policy. After Iraq, Obama concluded, America’s only remaining course was to retreat, pay Tehran for quiet, and call it peace. Trump’s critics can imagine only these two headings, so each camp accuses him of steering toward the one it hates. But the president is attempting something harder: He is applying enough force to change the calculus of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps without tipping into the war of conquest toward which the dynamic of the conflict is pulling him. The bombing has proved insufficient, so he is tightening an economic siege in its place. Whether that middle course can succeed is the real question of the stalemate. Answering it begins with the military balance, which [Lindsey] Graham’s theory took for granted. READ MORE