Surveying the Obama administration’s overall Middle East policy in light of its dogged pursuit of the deeply flawed nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic, Emily Landau asks if the damage can be repaired:

President Obama has left the Middle East a far more dangerous place than it was eight years ago. Not merely because the nuclear agreement opens the door to the terrifying prospect of a nuclear Iran within ten-to-fifteen years, and perhaps even sooner, but because the administration then enabled an emboldened Iran to emerge over the course of 2015-16, unchallenged by Washington. In fact, while negotiating the deal, the U.S. president was already helping to transform the Islamic Republic, with its extremist, hegemonic agenda, into the region’s preeminent power at the expense of traditional U.S. allies.

For example, despite Barack Obama’s pretense of focusing exclusively on the nuclear issue by way of securing the deal, . . . the president resisted upholding the redline he had set with regard to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons due to a warning issued by Tehran: if the U.S. resorted to military force in Syria, it could scuttle the nuclear negotiations. Obama continued to shun the Syrian crisis to his final days in office so as not to upset Tehran and risk rattling the nascent nuclear deal. [Thus] Washington left Syria to Iran (and Russia) in return for the nuclear deal, a tradeoff that the administration denies. . . .

Obama’s only achievement lies in kicking the nuclear can down the road to future administrations. But he created a reality in which it will be far more difficult to stop Iran down that road. With its nuclear program legitimized by the deal, Tehran is much better poised to forge ahead at a time of its choosing. For, contrary to Obama’s emphatic statements, the agreement does not end Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, nor has it lived up to the president’s hope of ushering in a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations.

The challenge for the Trump administration is to try to reverse some of these negative trends. In making the best of a bad situation, the preferred route at this point—after Tehran has already pocketed billions of dollars—would be neither to renounce the deal nor try to renegotiate it but rather to enforce it strictly as well as strengthen its provisions. Much can be achieved by reversing the Obama administration’s approach to Iran—recognizing Tehran’s overt hostility to U.S. interests and responding with firm determination to its provocations.

Robert Satloff has some harsh words for the U.S. government in this regard, words I take especially seriously because Satloff is someone inclined to political moderation. Why, he asks, have American diplomats failed to achieve anything in their endless rounds of talks in Doha and Cairo? Because

there is simply not enough pressure on Hamas to change course, accept a deal, and release the remaining October 7 hostages, stuck in nightmarish captivity. . . . In this environment, why should Hamas change course?

Publicly, the U.S. should bite the bullet and urge Israel to complete the main battle operations in Gaza—i.e., the Rafah operation—as swiftly and efficiently as possible. We should be assertively assisting with the humanitarian side of this.

Satloff had more to say about the hostages, especially the five American ones, in a speech he gave recently:

I am ashamed—ashamed of how we have allowed the story of the hostages to get lost in the noise of the war that followed their capture; ashamed of how we have permitted their release to be a bargaining chip in some larger political negotiation; ashamed of how we have failed to give them the respect and dignity and our wholehearted demand for Red Cross access and care and medicine that is our normal, usual demand for hostages.

If they were taken by Boko Haram, everyone would know their name. If they were taken by the Taliban, everyone would tie a yellow ribbon around a tree for them. If they were taken by Islamic State, kids would learn about them in school.

It is repugnant to see their freedom as just one item on the bargaining table with Hamas, as though they were chattel. These are Americans—and they deserve to be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.