The Trump administration and its supporters want to focus on direct culpability. Are you saying it’s President Trump’s fault that Iran shot down a civilian aircraft? How dare you! When I pointed to the wider context yesterday, my article was seized upon by Fox News as Exhibit A in the case for pro-Trump self-pity. Focusing on the smaller question of direct culpability allows Trump supporters to pivot from something they hate doing—asking the president to provide rational and truthful explanations of his actions—to something they love doing: complaining and feeling sorry for themselves. But that wider context matters.

Trump inherited an Iran problem. The Obama administration’s Iran deal released significant resources to the Iranian state. It lifted many international sanctions on Iranian trade. Economically empowered by the deal, the Iranian regime acted more aggressively in the region from Lebanon to Afghanistan.

The Trump administration’s solution was to cancel the Iran deal and retighten the economic squeeze on Iran, this time using U.S.-only sanctions. Because the U.S. is rich and strong—and Iran poor and weak—the new Trump sanctions did real damage.

But Trump and the people around him never seem to have considered: And then what?

Sanctions are typically tied to a desired goal. Most of the U.S. and EU sanctions on Russia, for example, reply to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. If Russia leaves Ukraine, those sanctions end. Obama-era sanctions on Iran were tied to nuclear cessation. Once Iran signed a nuclear deal that satisfied the Obama administration and its European allies, most of the sanctions on Iran were dropped.

What does the Trump administration want?

That has never been an easy mystery to decode. In a speech to the Heritage Foundation in May 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demanded radical changes in Iranian behavior in a dozen different domains, from ceasing development of ballistic missiles to severing links to Hezbollah and other Iranian clients across the region: “That list is pretty long, but if you take a look at it, these are 12 very basic requirements. The length of the list is simply a scope of the malign behavior of Iran. We didn’t create the list; they did.” Even if Iran did somehow meet all 12 demands, Pompeo hinted at a 13th: the overhaul and maybe overthrow of the Iranian clerical regime itself. “Next year marks the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Republic—Revolution in Iran. At this milestone, we have to ask: What has the Iranian Revolution given to the Iranian people?” Pompeo’s Heritage speech committed the Trump administration to a strategy of seeking to impose total defeat on Iran: a 2003 strategy in a 2018 world.

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But Trump himself seemed to be guided by a very different agenda. Again and again, he sought a personal meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. He repeated his hope for a meeting to reporters as recently as September. While Pompeo pursued a regime-change strategy, Trump seemed to want to replay his Korea diplomacy: a personal meeting he could claim as a win, without much regard for the outcome the meeting might produce.