The case for not caring about Iran's "regional influence"

The Middle East doesn't matter

At Vox, I was mostly out of the foreign policy hot takes game and I’m not sure how far I want to lean back into it since mostly I find establishment thinking about national security to be so out to lunch that it’s hard to even engage with.

But since Biden will swiftly face a concrete choice about Iran policy, I wanted to throw my two cents in here.

If you read sensible centrist foreign policy hands’ takes on Joe Biden and Iran, you tend to get something like what veteran national security hand Michael McFaul says in this thread: we should abandon Trump’s failed “maximum pressure” strategy, re-enter the Iran Nuclear Deal, and then, in the context of the deal, devise new ways to contain Iranian influence in the region.