A mega-deal to end the war

Much attention has focused on how the current war with Iran began — not so well argued, not necessarily so legal. But the real question is how it ends.

Although President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do not inspire much confidence about their intentions, there is an achievable blueprint for an outcome that could leave the world a far better place.

Unless the conflict produces a strategic outcome that actually solves the underlying problem, it will merely be remembered as another costly episode in the long and destabilizing history of Middle Eastern chaos.

And there is a whopper of an underlying problem here. For decades, Iran has built a system designed to spread revolution across the Middle East while maintaining a theocratic police state at home. It pursued nuclear capabilities, developed increasingly sophisticated ballistic missiles, and armed a network of proxy militias from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen. This has kept the region on tenterhooks and occasionally in flames. Without Iran, there would probably have been no Oct. 7.

The Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal attempted to constrain Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for economic relief, but it did little to address the broader architecture of missiles, militias and revolutionary ideology. Trump walked away from that deal in 2018 — a foolish move which, coupled with no other effective measures, enabled Iran to resume enrichment.

The result is the situation today: a confrontation that many observers fear could spiral into an ever-wider war, but that also presents a rare opportunity to permanently dismantle the threat Iran’s regime poses to the region and to its own people.

That objective should be uncompromising: Iran must permanently abandon the pursuit of nuclear weapons, dismantle its long-range missile program and end the financing and arming of militias across the region.

The goal should not be Iran’s humiliation or destruction as a nation. The Islamic Republic may even survive in some form. What should not........

© The Hill