Washington has treated the Iranian threat as a problem to contain and postpone. Trump’s wager is that the greater danger now lies in allowing that strategy to continue.

For nearly half a century, the United States has pursued a policy toward Iran defined by a fundamental contradiction. Washington has consistently recognized the danger posed by Tehran’s ambitions while repeatedly avoiding a final reckoning with them.

Successive administrations have imposed sanctions, negotiated agreements, conducted limited military operations, and strengthened regional alliances. Each approach has produced temporary successes. None has fundamentally resolved the strategic problem.

That record should force an uncomfortable conclusion: managing the Iranian threat is not the same as reducing it.

President Donald Trump’s decision to confront Iran more directly rests on precisely this calculation. His approach carries undeniable risks. But the debate has too often focused exclusively on the dangers of action while treating the dangers of inaction as manageable, abstract, or distant.

The central question facing Washington is not whether confrontation with Iran involves risk. Of course it does. The relevant question is whether continued restraint now carries a greater strategic risk than decisive action.

Increasingly, the answer appears to be yes.

The Failure of Deferral

For decades, American policy has operated on the assumption that time would make the Iranian problem easier to manage.

Time would allow sanctions to weaken the regime. Time would create opportunities for diplomacy. Time would produce internal political change. Time would strengthen deterrence.

But time has also worked for Iran.

While Washington debated, negotiated, sanctioned, and periodically retaliated, Tehran expanded its military capabilities, strengthened networks of armed partners across the Middle East, improved its missile programs, and continued to advance capabilities associated with a potential nuclear weapons program.

The result is not a problem that has disappeared through patient management. It is a problem that has become more technologically sophisticated and strategically consequential.

This is the central weakness of strategic patience: it is prudent only when time favors the patient.

For the United States, there is increasing reason to doubt that it does.

A policy of indefinite containment assumes that Iran can be prevented from crossing critical thresholds indefinitely. It assumes that deterrence........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)