Andrew Bacevich points out that U.S. Iran policy is driven mainly by the interests of our reckless clients:

The central theme of present-day American policy regarding Iran is deference. Nominally, US policy is made in Washington. Substantively, it is framed in Riyadh and Jerusalem, with the interests of the United States figuring only minimally in determining the result.

It is one of the many absurdities of Trump’s foreign policy that a president who boasts about putting America and American interests first should run a foreign policy defined to such an extraordinary degree by catering to the wishes and preferences of a handful of client states in the Middle East. The supposed “Jacksonian” nationalist angry at how America has been ripped off by everyone suddenly turns sycophantic when it comes to handing out gifts to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Trump is hardly the first president to conflate U.S. interests with those of client states, but he has done it more enthusiastically than most. More to the point, the phony deal-maker has nothing to show for all of this except an impasse with Iran that could lead to war. The U.S. is getting ripped off all the time by these governments under Trump, and he is the one facilitating the scam.

If Bacevich’s claim seems hard to accept, answer these two questions: what U.S. interests are served by relentless hostility towards Iran, and what U.S. interests are actually threatened by Iran? Unless we treat the interests of regional client states as identical with ours, the answer to both questions is none. How does it benefit the U.S. to blow up a successful nonproliferation agreement that resolves an outstanding dispute with another country? It doesn’t. It suits the preferences of hard-liners in the regional governments that hate and fear Iran. How does it benefit the U.S. to wage an economic war that strangles the economy of a nation of more than 80 million people? It doesn’t In fact, it harms U.S. relationships with our major European allies, it strains ties with many of Iran’s other trading partners, and it ratchets up tensions that expose U.S. forces in the region to greater danger. It is Iran’s regional rivals that wish to see Iran isolated and impoverished as much as possible. The U.S. absorbs costs while pursuing a policy that doesn’t advance any American interests.

Bacevich continues:

Yet it is manifestly the case that the United States today will undertake no action regarding Iran that Saudi and Israeli leaders find objectionable.

There is no other part of the world where the U.S. defers to its so-called “allies” as completely as the U.S. defers to its regional clients in the Middle East. One reason for this is that hawks overestimate the importance of these “allies” and seem to think that the U.S. needs them more than they need us. In reality, they aren’t allies at all, and they are all liabilities to one degree or another, but they have a lot of organized support and lobbying groups in Washington to maintain the illusion that these relationships are very valuable. These entanglements bring with them nothing but headaches and involvement in our clients’ conflicts, and both the U.S. and the region would be better off if we stopped indulging them and giving them whatever they want.

Bacevich concludes:

But for Trump the place to begin is to recall the lesson that John Kennedy learned back in 1962: to mistake an annoyance for an existential threat is to court disaster. Recognizing that Iran qualifies as the former rather than the latter is to take an important step toward enabling Washington to reassert control of US policy.

The place to start is understanding that Iran doesn’t pose a threat to the U.S. and our government’s obsession with Iran has nothing to do with our security.