The upcoming negotiations between the United States and Iran may be the only way to avoid military conflict between the two countries. President Donald Trump, assuming that recent large public anti-regime protests have weakened the Iranian government, has taken what he sees as an opportunity to pressure the Iranians over their nuclear and ballistic missile programs and assistance to foreign groups in the Middle East. He has moved air and naval forces to the region and may even think such threats or actions could collapse the regime.

Trump’s military intimidation could take a couple of different paths. A politician who has campaigned on staying out of foreign bogs seems to have become drunk with the potential of military action after the U.S. military’s successful snatch of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Yet Trump avoided a sustained military action on the ground that would have been required to change the socialist regime there. Instead, he seems to have been satisfied with the surviving regime providing him protection money in the form of revenues from a prospective rejuvenation of the now-outdated and decrepit Venezuelan oil industry.  (However, Trump may be out of office before such raw imperialism results in........

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