Richard Haass Blasts Administration’s Lack of Long-Term Plan in the Middle East

EXCERPT:

HAASS: “The additional problem here is bad situations can get worse. This is not on the edge of getting resolved. Just the other piece of news out of Asia, we're taking our last aircraft carrier out of Asia. So instead of having a pivot to Asia, we're now strategically pivoting away from it toward the Middle East. Negotiations and diplomacy are going nowhere. There's an interesting story, I think, in today's 'Wall Street Journal,'  I read it, about how Iran's strategy now is to think about offensive operations over time. So we thought this was going to be easy. Another Venezuela, we thought it was going to be time limited. Well, what we've basically done is stirred up a hornet's nest. And it's not exactly clear how we walk away from this or how we back down and not leave, essentially, everybody in the lurch and Iran in control of the Middle East. So the kinds of pressures we're seeing on this deployment are not going to go away.”