Arguing that the past sixteen years of U.S. conduct toward the Middle East have facilitated the dangerous empowerment of Iran to the detriment of America and its allies, Michael Doran hopes that the president’s visit to Saudi Arabia and Israel this week will signal the beginning of a more effective approach to the region:

We still don’t know the full details of Donald Trump’s approach to the Middle East, but his hard-nosed ethos and willingness to question foreign-policy dogmas offer an opportunity, in principle, to dispel several fallacies that led to these strategic blunders. . . .

[I]t is false that our support for our longtime friends is a cause of instability, and that by distancing ourselves from them while reaching out to our enemies we can make the world a safer place. (It’s an even worse fallacy to imagine that we can create a Middle East without enemies.) And it’s just as wrong to assume we can cleverly pull Russia away from Iran in Syria. The tensions between them are insignificant compared with their shared interest in propping up the Bashar al-Assad regime and eroding American influence.

[Further], the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not the center of gravity in the Middle East, nor is it ripe for solution. President Obama, like President Bush before him, put a lot of effort into resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict—a worthy but useless undertaking that diverted them further from addressing Iran’s regional ascent and, later, Russia’s. . . .

But recognizing mistakes is just the first step. The next requires rejecting the temptation, to which President Obama succumbed, of defining the defeat of Islamic State as the pre-eminent strategic goal. If President Trump destroys the group, but fails at the same time to build a stabilizing regional coalition, his victory will be very short-lived. The next Islamic State will rise from the rubble, and Russia and Iran will exploit the ensuing chaos.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.