"Trump is in the snapshot; the Iranian regime plays with time "

Tribune. Has President Trump won this round of the fight between the United States and Iran? For the US administration, there is little doubt about the answer. After all, the attack that killed General Ghassem Soleimani, the second most influential figure in the Iranian regime, was a bold gamble that his predecessors did not dare to take, an event whose scope far exceeds the elimination of Osama. Bin Laden or that of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Like the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Trump will have ignored the warnings of experts who were threatening the threat of a catastrophic outcome and will not have suffered the dreaded consequences.

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The Iranian response, a salvo of ballistic missiles aimed at an Iraqi military base that left no casualties, seems like a gesture as dramatic as it is sterile. The White House host will have re-established the deterrent that Barack Obama had erased. He will have manifested the power he exalts without provoking the military confrontation he apprehends. Those who denounce American politics as a show of force devoid of strategy are mistaken: for the president and his allies, it is the show of force itself that constitutes strategy.

But to speak of victory is to go a little too quickly. The Iranian regime has accused the coup, but it also reaped political and diplomatic benefits from the American attack. The anger over the revelation that the Iranian armed forces shot down the Ukrainian plane may be a game-changer, but for at least a while the American operation will have gathered some of the Iranian people around the memory of a military leader who, without being unanimous, appeared as a national symbol.

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At the same time, the American presence in Iraq is weakening. Anti-Islamic State (IS) operations are suffering. Pro-Iranian armed movements in the region are mobilizing. Iran is undoing the nuclear constraints created by the 2015 agreement a little more. And, sterile as it is, the Iranian response is no less striking. Difficult to remember an operation of such a magnitude carried out by a State against an American target – and impossible to remember such an operation provoking no response. Deterrence works both ways.

"Maximum pressure" policy

In addition, the bill is probably not yet fully settled. The US attack also resulted in the death of Abu Mahdi Al-Mohandes, deputy commander of Popular Mobilization units, and the revenge of the militias in that country remains unfulfilled. The Iranian regime is used to drawing on the multiple non-state forces that Soleimani spent his life nurturing and strengthening; its direct response is the exception, camouflage by indirect action being generally the norm.

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