Zarif stressed that he believed that these four men were at odds with President Trump, a leader averse to military entanglements in the Middle East and somebody who, left to his own devices, would happily cut a new deal with the Islamic republic rather than try to squeeze it into submission. But if the Iranian foreign minister genuinely thought Trump would tack a different direction a few weeks ago, he may think otherwise now.

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On Monday, the New York Times reported that acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan last week presented an updated military plan that included the possible deployment of 120,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East, which could theoretically form the logistical springboard for a ground invasion of Iran. Shanahan did so on the apparent request of Bolton, who not long before issued a video of himself announcing the arrival of a U.S. carrier group in the region in response to supposed new threats from Iran and its militant proxies in Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere.

“The high-level review of the Pentagon’s plans was presented during a meeting about broader Iran policy,” noted the Times. “It was held days after what the Trump administration described, without evidence, as new intelligence indicating that Iran was mobilizing proxy groups in Iraq and Syria to attack American forces.”

The following day, Trump scoffed at the report but didn’t deny that he would entertain such a commitment. “It’s fake news, okay?” he told reporters. “Now, would I do that? Absolutely. But we have not planned for that. Hopefully we’re not going to have to plan for that. And if we did that, we’d send a hell of a lot more troops" than the 120,000 figure floated by the Times.

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Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle complained that the White House had not fully briefed Congress on the current state of play, my colleagues reported. On Wednesday, the United States ordered all “non-emergency” personnel stationed in Iraq to leave the country, ratcheting up tensions in the region even further.

“Iran is and has been for decades a malevolent actor and a state sponsor of terror,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) told Post columnist Greg Sargent. “But I’m also gravely concerned about actions taken by the administration that appear calculated to put us on a collision course.”

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The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign on the Iranian regime seeks to choke off Iran’s oil exports and coerce the regime to change its policies in the region. (Experts warn that sanctions are only galvanizing nationalist sentiment among Iranians.) In response, after a year of reckoning with the United States’ reimposed sanctions, the Iranian government resumed a number of its nuclear activities previously curtailed by the nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers — an agreement that Trump, spurred by Bolton, opted to reject.

“The sense of foreboding is tangible, the threats from both sides are no longer rhetorical,” wrote the New Yorker’s Robin Wright. “Before the nuclear-deal negotiations began, in 2013, Washington was consumed with hyped talk of the United States or its allies bombing Iran. If the nuclear deal formally dies, talk of military confrontation may again fill both capitals—even if neither country wants it.”

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In an interview with CNN, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, suggested that the talk of new U.S. troop deployments to the Middle East was “psychological warfare” and then echoed Zarif’s talking point. “Nobody is going to have benefit from such a conflict in our region, except for a few, some people in Washington and some countries in our neighborhood,” Ravanchi said.

For now, the Trump administration insists that it doesn’t want a fight. “We fundamentally do not seek war with Iran,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on the sidelines of meetings with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday. “We have also made clear to the Iranians that if American interests are attacked we will most certainly respond in the appropriate fashion.”

But the White House’s moves have clearly irked allies in Europe and elsewhere, if not the “four Bs” identified by Zarif. On Monday, Pompeo unsuccessfully crashed a gathering of European foreign ministers, hoping to gin up a united front on Iran. He came away with little to show for it. Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, cautioned that rather than “maximum pressure” on Iran, "the most responsible attitude to take should be that of maximum restraint and avoiding any escalation on the military side.”

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On Tuesday, Spanish authorities announced that they were withdrawing a frigate from a U.S.-led naval group in the Persian Gulf because Madrid wanted no part in an explicitly anti-Iran mission. “The U.S. government has taken a decision outside of the framework of what had been agreed with the Spanish navy,” acting defense minister Margarita Robles told reporters in Brussels. On the same day, a leading British military officer in the anti-Islamic State coalition said there was “no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria,” according to the Guardian, seemingly contradicting the recent messaging from American civilian and military officials.

For some analysts, the lessons of the 2003 invasion of Iraq — which saw Bolton and other U.S. officials twist intelligence to justify war — have gone unheeded.

“I really cannot believe that we failed to learn anything from the first decade of this century,” Elise Jordan, a former official in the George W. Bush White House, said during an appearance on MSNBC. “And we are actually considering escalating with Iran in a war that would further destabilize the region and unleash God knows what in terms of chaos in a very troubled region already.”