The New Yorker:

By Robin Wright 

The Trump Administration’s pronouncements on Iran have gyrated at a vertiginous pace in recent days. On Sunday, after a golf game at his club outside Washington, D.C., the President returned to the White House and unleashed his fury on Twitter. “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran,” he vowed. “Never threaten the United States again!” On Monday, a calmer Trump told reporters that Washington had “no indication that anything’s happened or will happen.” Any provocation would be met with “great force,” he added, yet he would also “certainly negotiate” if Iran called. Then, on Tuesday, the acting Defense Secretary, Pat Shanahan, declared that the (still unspecified) threat from Tehran had been contained. “We’ve put on hold the potential for attacks on Americans,” Shanahan told reporters. “Our posture is for deterrence. I just hope Iran is listening. We’re in the region to address many things, but it is not to go to war.”

A showdown may seem less imminent, but the dangers still lurk. Americans are nervous. The majority now believes that the two nations will go to war within the next few years, a new poll by Reuters/Ipsos reported this week. It’s up eight per cent from a similar poll a year ago. The numbers may reflect the rhetorical drumbeats of war more than a real understanding of the threat on the ground, since the Administration has refused to explain it. Fears may well rise further. On Thursday, the Pentagon reportedly proposed to deploy a military surge of five thousand to ten thousand U.S. troops to the Middle East, as well as more warships and Patriot missiles, to deter Iran. They would join a growing array of American military might—a battleship-carrier strike group led by the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, a bomber task force including B-52s, and marines who specialize in “expeditionary warfare”—now being deployed off the Iranian coast. It’s no longer a slow creep.

“President Trump will insure that we have all the resources necessary to respond in the event that the Islamic Republic of Iran should decide to attack Americans or American interests or some of our great soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, who are serving in that region, or the diplomats serving in Iraq or elsewhere,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on “Fox & Friends,” on Thursday. “The exact force posture, the President is looking at every day.” The President, Pompeo said, “is determined to change the course of that regime.”

Iran has countered with its own provocative rhetoric. On Monday, the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, responded to Trump on Twitter. “@realdonaldTrump hopes to achieve what Alexander, Genghis & other aggressors failed to do. Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone,” he wrote. “#EconomicTerrorism & genocidal taunts won’t ‘end Iran.’ #NeverThreatenAnIranian. Try respect—it works!” On Tuesday, President Hassan Rouhani distanced Iran from engagement. “Today’s situation is not suitable for talks. Our choice is resistance only,” he said . And, on Wednesday, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei vowed that Iran’s youth “will witness the demise of the enemies of humanity, meaning the degenerate American civilization, and the demise of Israel.” He also publicly criticized his own President and foreign minister—a rarity in Tehran—about how they handled the 2015 nuclear deal, produced after two years of tortuous talks with the world’s six major powers. Iran seems as divided as Washington at a critical time. Meanwhile, Tehran still has its own array of troops and proxy militias across the Middle East; many are positioned in the same arenas as U.S. troops.

The question amid the buildup and rhetorical flames is how to prevent a showdown either soon or a few years down the road, and how to eventually de-escalate. As tensions flared between the two nations, I called on John Limbert, one of the fifty-two diplomats taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran after the 1979 revolution. We’ve had a running conversation about the Islamic Republic since I covered his four hundred and forty-four days in captivity. Limbert is a scholar of Iranian politics, history, and culture; he often invokes lines from the great Persian poets—Hafez, Rumi, and Sa’adi—in his elegant Farsi. I asked him how we ended up in yet another Iran crisis—and why Washington and Tehran have still not figured out a way to deal with each other.

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