President Trump claims the United States is “locked and loaded” after Saturday’s serious Iranian attack on one of the world’s most important oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. That has essentially been the president’s posture for four months, which has only encouraged Tehran to escalate its strikes against energy infrastructure around the Gulf. This policy of self-deterrence against Iran needs to end.

Since the founding of the Islamic Republic, Iran has mostly acted with impunity against US targets — from the 1983 Marines barracks bombing in Lebanon to the Iranian-attributed killing of more than 600 US service members in Iraq
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