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It is 15 months since President Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran deal, known as the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”. In its place, he announced a new US strategy of

“maximum pressure”. It is beyond dispute that the JCPOA deal was deeply flawed. It was, at best, a temporary fix for the issue of Iranian nuclear proliferation, and didn’t deal at all with

Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism or regional interference. Trump replaced a mediocre deal with a list of 12 demands that are unrealistic in their grandiosity and not anchored by any coherent

strategy. Worse than that, his curious mixture of disengaged foreign policy substituted with unrealistic bilateral deals misses the more important strategic point: that Iran and Russia have

transformed their conventional, strategic position since 2015. Trump has, of his own volition, backed himself into a no-win position. As Gibraltar releases an Iranian tanker in defiance of

the US, “maximum pressure” has become a more transformative policy than Trump could ever have imagined. But it is American foreign policy credibility, her regional influence in the Middle

East and her most vital alliances that are being transformed. Despite issuing new demands that include everything from Iran ending its nuclear programme, releasing hostages, ending support

for terrorism and ending its destabilising activities across the Middle East – effectively demanding that Iran stops being Iran – Trump now appears in danger of repeating exactly the same

mistakes which undermined Obama’s JCPOA. For all his bluster and demands, Trump has suggested that he is quite prepared to make a deal with Iran that is solely concerned with limiting its

nuclear capability. In effect, this would mean renegotiating the same deal as Obama, but from a weaker position and without the support of his European allies. Trump pulled out of the deal

because he claimed it did not achieve enough and conceded too much. But his end game remains confused. Does he seek to bring the Iranians back to the negotiating table? And if so, what does

he meaningfully expect to achieve beyond the terms already established by the JCPOA? Or does he really seek regime change? Certainly regime change by means of “maximum pressure” is extremely

unlikely. The other alternative for regime change would be military action of an unthinkable magnitude, something Trump has effectively ruled out. Trump’s bellicosity and his confusion in

delineating consistent goals has alienated his European partners in the JCPOA. The President is actively engaged in hostilities with them over their continued trading with Iran, exacerbating

a long standing ideological fissure over the EU. European frustration is palpable. The idea that “maximum pressure” fixes some sort of weakness of will in the sanctions regime is misplaced.

As one participant in the JCPOA negotiations said “it would be lovely to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero, nobody in the sanctions community thought that was a political reality because

what it meant was countries like China, Turkey and India cutting their imports of Iranian oil to zero…they weren’t going to…that leaves you in a standoff, either you are going to sanction

the bank of China or you are going to balk.” Such a step against China would be untenably bellicose, and taking it over Iran is unlikely to be a move that even Trump would consider. Perhaps

the only area in which we can divine some clarity in Trump’s thinking is his own red lines. He made an error of judgement in what was supposed to be a demonstration of his own restraint when

he suggested that he considered, but rejected, military action in retaliation for Iran’s downing of a US drone. Obama, too, flirted with unclear red lines in Syria, much to the detriment of

US policy. The fact that Iran is now rejecting Trump’s attempts at back channel negotiation is a sign that the Iranians realise just how fatally flawed and riven with contradiction his

position is. The US stance towards Iran is a microcosm of the contradictory impulses at the heart of the Trump doctrine. He is by inclination an isolationist who has done a great deal to

undermine many of America’s strategic relationships, be they in Europe, Asia or the Middle East. This might matter less if the President was clear about his end goals. Should nuclear

diplomacy be transactional – focused narrowly on the discrete nuclear challenge, or transformational – comprehensively addressing the objectionable behaviour of these regimes? Rhetorically,

with both North Korea and Iran, the Trump administration aspires for the transformational. The problem is that the President sees the possibility, however implausible, of limited bilateral

agreements to reach profoundly transformational deals as a substitute for sustained US global commitment. As a result, the possibility of a return to a genuine policy of sustained

containment towards Iran, Russia or China is currently impossible for Trump without a change of foreign policy. Iran cannot be considered in a vacuum and the whole strategic picture has

changed since the JCPOA was agreed in 2015. Rather than seeking to renegotiate the deal, the US should have been containing Iran through her regional alliance system in the intervening time,

and making greater effort not to cede control of Syria. In fact, while the US has drawn down her presence, the Iranians stepped up assistance to Assad in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and

the Houthis in Yemen. Indeed Iran has been transformed militarily by the experience of fighting in Syria. It is the first time since the Iran-Iraq War that Iran has made a prolonged

deployment of conventional forces, going far beyond simply supporting proxy forces or using the covert Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran’s military, its Hezbollah proxy and some new

Pakistani and Afghan Shiite militias have all gained valuable experience and Iran has perfected its use of these disparate forces in combat. Perhaps more importantly Iran dropped the veneer

of deniability that marked previous military operations, now publicising its role in the conflict and edging towards the type of “hybrid” operations that Russia has perfected in Europe.

Tehran’s historically fraught relationship with Russia has also been transformed. The war in Syria may not have erased this suspicion, but it has provided tangible examples of what can be

achieved when Russia and Iran align their interests. The two countries now have a model of combining Russian air support with the various Iranian controlled ground forces. Unsurprisingly,

Russia has stepped into the vacuum left by America’s dwindling presence. Syria has proved to be the fulcrum for Russia’s extraordinary resurgence in the Middle East. It is, of course, no

accident that Russia and Iran will meet in Ankara on September 11, the second time this year, to discuss the involvement of the three countries in sponsoring the Astana peace process in

Syria. For Russia, it is a chance to permanently cement their diplomatic and strategic position in Syria. The possibility is that the talks will be expanded into a strategic alliance between

Russia, Iran and Turkey. In a sign of deepening ties, Russia and Iran have signed a military cooperation agreement this month, which seems to be predominantly naval. It is now expected that

there will be a provocative joint naval exercise in the straights of Hormuz later this year. Trump’s limited focus on bilateral deal making with Iran misses the necessity for a more

strategically astute plan for the region that contains Russian, Iranian and Turkish ambition. He seems unable to take a multidimensional approach to geopolitical problems, instead

squandering political capital to settle partisan scores. So while the US fails to reverse the strategic challenge presented by Iran’s partial denial of access to the Straights of Hormuz,

Trump focuses instead on applying pressure to Israel to block a visit by “the squad” of leftist Democratic senators. He has substituted partisan cronyism for a strategic alliance. It is hard

to see how the interests of either the US or Israel are served by such actions, given the gravity of what is actually happening in the region. It is not too late for the US to change course

and to craft a new policy geared towards the challenge of containing Russia, China and Iran. Such a policy would look completely different to the current Trump doctrine, but also different

to the containment policy of the Cold War. The US must deal with three adversaries who both cooperate and compete with each other, both a blessing and a curse for policymakers. Equally the

US has to expend greater effort in supporting local alliances, particularly in the Middle East. Perhaps most importantly, committing to a strategy of containment would rectify the two

contradictory impulses of Trumpism: disengagement globally and over engagement bilaterally. It would mark a change of focus for a man who prefers “winning” at the deal table to stepping back

and taking decisions with global ramifications. Unsurprisingly the possibility of conflict emerging by mistake rather than design is consuming US attention. As in the trade war with China,

North Korean nuclear diplomacy, the collapse of the nuclear treaties with Russia, the US is simply lurching from crisis to crisis, tweet to tweet. Trump has created looming potential for

crisis in the gulf. It is going to take an uncharacteristic change in approach for him to realise that the challenges he faces from the Middle East, Russia and China are interlinked – and

that they cannot be so simply disconnected.