Judah Grunstein gives Trump’s foreign policy too much credit:

Each time Trump crosses some consensus red line, however, the predicted catastrophes fail to materialize.

Some of Trump’s foreign policy decisions have had disastrous consequences for other parts of the world, but the costs borne by the victims of these policies are rarely counted here in the U.S. The slow-motion nightmare in Yemen that the U.S. has continued enabling and supporting for Trump’s entire presidency is one example of this. The costs of his economic war on Iran would be another. The Yemen policy is fueling the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and Iran sanctions are creating another humanitarian crisis that is killing many people. The escalating crisis with Iran has so far not led to open war between our governments, but Trump’s Iran policy has brought the U.S. to the brink of a completely unnecessary war more than once. It seems to have been a matter of sheer luck that no Americans died last month in the Iranian missile attack, and there were still more than five dozen troops that suffered brain injuries. The full cost of the illegal Soleimani assassination is not yet known. I don’t think anyone believes that Iran is finished retaliating. It is a measure of how badly things have deteriorated in just the last two years that narrowly avoiding a completely unnecessary war with Iran doesn’t get counted as proof that Trump’s policy has been a disaster for the U.S. The arsonist has doused the building in gasoline and is playing with matches, so perhaps it is a bit early to conclude that he won’t set it on fire.

Grunstein acknowledges that it is too early to know:

So it might be more accurate to say that Trump’s gambits have not catastrophically backfired—yet.

It is worth noting that almost everything that critics of Trump’s Iran policy predicted has unfortunately come to pass. We said that sanctions would harm ordinary Iranians while bolstering hard-liners in the regime, and we said that the pressure campaign was likely to make Iran back away from its commitments under the JCPOA. We said that designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization was a dangerous and irresponsible move that made war more likely, and it was as a result of that designation that the U.S. and Iran nearly went to war less than a year later. We warned that waging economic war would provoke resistance and more provocative behavior, and so it has. If the worst-case scenario has not happened yet, the Trump administration has been doing everything it can to make it more likely. That is already enough of a failure that we shouldn’t need the worst-case scenario to conclude that Trump’s policy has been a disaster. The danger is not that critics of this policy have been raising the alarm too often or too loudly, but that there has been so little resistance to it in Congress and from the foreign policy establishment. When the captain steers the ship straight at an iceberg, it is cold comfort to say that the collision has not yet occurred. Unless there is a change in the policy that created the crisis and brought things to this point, it is just a matter of time before something much worse happens.