"We need to walk away. Just walk away. And rebuild our missile inventories, and fast-track drone and counter-drone materiel. We need to rearm after wasting all of our weaponry. Quickly." - 1PG

We cannot just walk away. There are two reasons:

1. We cannot allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Absolutely not. If they do develop one, it cannot be undone (see North Korea). Plus if Iran does develop nuclear capabilities, they will use them, there will be nuclear bombs going off in Israel, Saudia Arabia, and other places in the Middle East and eventually London and other parts of Europe. Iran is a terrorist state and there is no bigger terrorizer than a nuclear bomb. Even if is a just a small suitcase bomb snuck into somewhere, it will be deadly and change the world. Unfortunately stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon has become much more difficult due to Trump's incompetence. It is probably impossible to stop Iran diplomatically because Trump negated the diplomatic solution. I am fairly sure that if Iran was offered the same terms that were in the JCPOA they would turn it down without a thought. Why would they accept it? So if diplomacy is out, that means the only other solution is militarily. While we wouldn't need to have the military footprint that we have right now, we will have to keep resources available to heavily bomb Iran whenever it looks like they even thinking about restarting enriching uranium.

It is a completely terrible option, but I would have at least a little more respect for Trump if he declared he wanted regime change and would invade and take control of Iran until a leadership could be set up that did not want to pursue a nuclear goal. Because at least then he is doing something that would address the root cause of the problem: Iran developing nuclear weapons. Instead he destroyed the diplomatic option, then he temporarily destroyed (or at least severely damaged) the Iranian stockpile of uranium, but he hasn't addressed the root problem: Iranian leadership wants to get a nuclear weapon (or at least be able to threaten getting one). Furthermore he has embarrassed himself by bragging about how he has destroyed the Iranian navy and taken out large parts of their air defense network. It is embarrassing because the Iranian Navy and air defense network are strategically unimportant. They do not mean anything strategically in the region. He has done all of this bluster and wasted all of the military might of the USA just to take diplomacy off of the table and not solve anything because he was too cowardly to follow through on regime change. If we do not want Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon we have to keep some level of military commitment there. We either need to commit to putting forth the resources for regime change or we need to hang around and keep an eye on them and be ready to attack with little warning.

Trump left the U.S. with no good options regarding Iran getting a nuclear weapon.

2. The second reason we cannot just walk away is the Strait of Hormuz. Trump's folly helped give life to Iran's biggest trump card. If we walk away, Iran will control the Strait of Hormuz. They will charge foreign tankers money to transit the Strait and they will go back to being able to sell oil on the world market (and use their new wealth to invest in a nuclear program). The U.S. broke the Strait so we cannot just really walk away. I mean we could walk away, it was just mean that every other country in the Middle East is unhappy with us because not only did we make a mess and then walk away, we also made it much more expensive to ship oil from the Middle East. Asia won't be too happy with us either making their energy costs higher.

Trump really screwed up in Iran. Not only did he spend a lot of time, resources, and money accomplishing nothing strategically long term, but he got us caught in a trap with no non-horrible options to escape.