Introduction

Outside of the crisis in Syria, Trump's ‘America First’ foreign policy has also seen some interesting and comprehensive deviations concerning Iran. Iran posed a unique challenge for Trump given his well-established disdain for the Iran nuclear agreement and his renewed framing of Iran as the ‘leading state sponsor of terrorism’, coupled with his caution at the prospect of escalation. As a result, Trump was almost consistently on the cusp of conflict with Iran following the decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCOPA) in 2018. These tensions would culminate in the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani and increase the presence of US troops in the region, following an Iranian missile attack against the K-1Air Base in Iraq which left an American contractor dead on 27 December 2019. While there is a clear distinction between the different types of ideas presented, the manner in which they present is slightly different compared to previous cases, yet the impact on foreign policy remains formally the same. Variation is still present and persistent despite relative stability in the material and ideational bases of state interests.

In this chapter, I work to show how tensions between principled and cognitive interpretations of US interests towards Iran saw the Trump administration on the brink of conflict as Trump struggled to reconcile his desire to re-establish US dominance, while at the same time avoiding war. I begin by providing a brief overview of the tensions that surrounded the construction of the JCPOA. I argue that Trump constructed a principled justification, drawing on existing domestic anxieties, to withdraw from the agreement, as he worked to displace the interest-based logic enshrined in the JCPOA. Trump would do this by issuing principled, communicative appeals characterizing Iran as the ‘leading state sponsor of terrorism’ and speaking to domestic concerns that Iran was violating the terms of the agreement, despite evidence to the contrary. In this way, Trump was able to weaponize principled arguments that Iran continued to be an irrational actor pursuing nuclear weapons to the detriment of US security interests.

Second, I show how the withdrawal from the JCPOA prefigured escalating tensions leading to prolonged contestation between different types of ideas as to whether or not to use force against Iran.