WASHINGTON—“Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo spoke…with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi. Secretary Pompeo welcomed Prime Minister Kadhimi’s new government,” Foggy Bottom spox Morgan Ortagus said Thursday. “They look forward to working together to provide the Iraqi people the prosperity and security they deserve.”

Unburdened by precedent, Ortagus explained that the U.S. was helping Iraq to establish “the right conditions for success.” The U.S. was renewing, for four months, a desperately-required waiver to allow Baghdad to import electricity from Iran, though the regime in Tehran was never mentioned in the statement. 

This is the business of Mike Pompeo’s State Department amidst a global pandemic that’s ushered in unemployment unheard of since the Great Depression and perhaps mortally wounded the political prospects of the secretary’s boss, President Trump. The virus battered America worse than most of its peers, nevertheless, the globe’s leading power is adjudicating electricity sales between two middling players in a region of collapsing relevance. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. To crib a line from Paul Kemp: life’s full of exits.

The low-hanging fruit remains Afghanistan, the longest-running war in the nation’s nearly two-hundred and fifty year history. Zalmay Khalilzhad, President Trump’s tough-minded pointman on the country, is in Doha this week pressing Taliban negotiators to speed up the drawdown. The veteran of the region and native of the country in negotiation should be applauded for his efforts. As recently demonstrated by Daniel Davis at Defense Priorities, a continued ground presence in the troubled country isn’t making America safer, perhaps the opposite: “The U.S. is secure against terrorism because of its capability to monitor and disrupt terrorist plots from afar—not due to occupational forces.”

The president should follow his first instinct, the correct one. He can declare victory and deliver a meaningful exit before the November election, casting himself as a decided departure from his failed predecessors: he ended a war, and started no new ones. It’s a course of action weighed in administration circles since Trump’s inauguration. 

But the president has demurred. Trump’s opponent, Mr. Biden, was chief lieutenant of a well-meaning administration that nonetheless kept the U.S. mired in a region attenuated to national interest. President Obama didn’t close the disgraceful Guantanamo Bay prison, escalated involvement in theaters such as Libya and Syria, and most assuredly did not exit Afghanistan. 

It’s possible the former vice president will surpass his predecessors—he was, infamously, one of the more strategic voices on the country, winning the ire of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary Hillary Clinton. And especially compared to Mrs. Clinton, particularly, that goes double on Libya. But if Trump, that purported heir to Nixon, wins a reasonable peace with honor in Afghanistan, he can present himself as the first occupant of the Oval in a generation to have cut bait, not been baited. 

Such a salvo would be a compelling electoral argument against changing horses, even for the sometimes-commendable Mr. Biden. Such a grand maneuver would also come at time of, at last, positive movement to hire figures in the administration more committed to the president’s original, core message of foreign policy restraint and reevaluation of unscrutinized trade deals. 

After coronavirus, as long away as that may be—and after the election, as pressing as that may seem—the U.S. has the opportunity to take a larger step back from a morass: it should exit more broadly from the Middle East, including deemphasizing conflict with a contained and demoralized Iran. The president’s rhetoric about “endless wars” has been contradicted by a needless cold war against the mediocre mullahs. But the past needn’t be prologue, if a more inventive spirit should take hold in the West Wing.  

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has been both steely and prescient on the China challenge. But he’s one of the worst bad actors on the Middle East, including masterminding an inappropriate letter to Iran’s government five years ago that undermined then-President Obama. Regardless of feelings toward Obama or the Iran Deal, anyone who fashions himself a nationalist should mean it. 

Ditto Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. Sen. Hawley is an inspired and encouraging voice of foreign policy restraint. But, as some have quietly grumbled, he echoes the president’s rhetoric on foreclosing on “endless wars,” but has twisted few arms on the Senate Armed Services Committee, nor defied the administration on Yemen, as some of Trump’s friends, such as Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Matt Gaetz, notably have. 

Once upon a time, a new Republican president had defeated his Democratic opponent, in part on a message of challenging China, America’s only true competitor, and leaving much of the rest of world to its own devices. His name was George W. Bush. Cowed by crisis, he did the opposite. You know the rest. A serious confrontation with China should mean letting the past lie. And for partisans, if nothing else, inertia cedes the floor to the Republicans’ opponents.