As president, Trump followed through. The nuclear deal went down, the sanctions came back, and despite moments of wobbliness concerning troop deployments in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Trump administration held fast in the Middle East. National-Security Advisers H. R. McMaster and John Bolton, United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, and, perhaps most of all, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out a new approach to the Islamic Republic. The Trump administration wasn’t inclined to roll back the clerical regime, but it did seem ready to contest and contain Iran’s Shiite imperialism in Syria, Yemen, and even in Iraq, in which the president had never evinced much interest.

Read: The Trump administration’s lowest point yet

Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, concurrently with his intention to drastically reduce the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan and the likely soon-to-be-announced further drawdown of U.S. personnel in Iraq, has made mincemeat of the administration’s efforts to contain Iran. If you add up who wins locally by this decision (the clerical regime in Iran, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite radicals, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) and who loses (Jordan, Israel, the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds and Sunni Arabs, everyone in Lebanon resisting Hezbollah, the vast majority of the Iraqi Shia, the Gulf States), it becomes clear that the interests of the United States have been routed.

Before Trump pulled the plug in Syria, the rhetorical center of the president’s Iran policy was the “New Iran Strategy” speech by Pompeo at the Heritage Foundation on May 21, 2018. The 12 demands that Pompeo issued to Tehran are not historically provocative—they were, until the coming of Obama, essentially what the United States had always sought: to deny the mullahs nuclear weapons and stop them from spreading their version of Islamic militancy. Washington hadn’t been brilliantly successful in countering Tehran and only occasionally efficient in bringing real pain to the mullahs and their praetorians, the Revolutionary Guards, who are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers since they first drew blood in Lebanon in 1983. But Pompeo, by redrawing the lines, clearly signaled that the United States wasn’t giving up, that a campaign of “maximum pressure” was still coming. It is clear now, however, that the secretary’s speech was a bridge too far for Trump, who may never have read it.

To be fair to the president: The administration’s developing approach was probably never his. A close read of Pompeo’s Heritage speech reveals the tactical quandary that has always been at the core of the Trump presidency’s approach. The secretary put forth a lot of “don’ts” for the regime: “Iran must end support to Middle Eastern terrorist groups, including Lebanese Hizballah, Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad … respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi Government … end its military support for the Houthi militia [in Yemen] … must withdraw all forces under Iranian command throughout the entirety of Syria … end support for the Taliban and other terrorists in Afghanistan … cease harboring senior al-Qaeda leaders … and end its threatening behavior against its neighbors.” But he did not clearly indicate that the United States would do anything to punish the Islamic Republic for its malign actions other than use sanctions.