The Trump foreign policy is like the administration’s domestic policy: a little irreverent, ambitious, and completely impervious to experts’ warnings.

Two Christian schools of thought might support covert operations and espionage: the just war tradition and a kind of “dirty hands” moralism. The dirty hands view says all those in political power must unavoidably resort to evil for the common good. The just war tradition has a different approach.

For Nicholas Kristof to say that Americans “are willing to starve Yemeni schoolchildren” because “we dislike Iran’s ayatollahs” is so simplistic as to be immoral in itself.

The United Nations has failed to do what it was created to do—“promote the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security.”

Some in the US government have suggested that we should make a grand bargain with Russia over Syria that would let Assad stay as Moscow curbed Iran’s power in the country. But such a deal would lead to the mass exile or massacre of civilians stuck in the international community’s failed de-escalation zone of Idlib and cement Iran’s control over Syria.

Sanctions and corruption have stunted Iran’s economic growth, and reforms will be difficult because of entrenched interests. This gives American policymakers a crucial diplomatic tool.

The Arab coalition and the US find themselves in the awkward position of directly and indirectly supporting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula while they fight the Houthis in Yemen.

Since the 1980s, the MCIG has played a leading role in suppressing political and cultural speech that contradicts Tehran’s revolutionary creed. But while the Obama administration sanctioned the ministry in 2012 for engaging in censorship, its current leadership has escaped Washington’s attention. By sanctioning the ministry’s current head, Abbas Salehi, Washington can send the mullahs a message that their ideologically driven repression will carry a price.

Earlier this month, large parts of southern Iraq rose in tumult and turmoil as hot, thirsty, and angry citizens complained about unemployment, lack of services, corruption, lack of water, and lack of electricity in a country with the world’s fifth largest proven oil reserves.