Details: Pompeo directed heavy rhetorical fire at Iran. In contrast to President Obama — who in a major 2009 address in Cairo expressed his desire for a new relationship with Tehran, despite a history of mutual grievances — Pompeo promised “to confront the ayatollahs, not coddle them” and to combat “the full array of the regime’s malign activities.”

• He defended the Trump administration’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal and said that the 12 demands he outlined for Iran to become a “normal nation” in his first major speech as secretary last May are still U.S. policy.

Unlike his predecessor in the George W. Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice, who chided U.S. partners for jailing dissidents, Pompeo made no mention of Saudi Arabia's brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi or its continued incarceration of peaceful advocates of reform.

Pompeo also called on Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to “unleash the creative energy of Egypt’s people,” but praised his “courage” in “promoting religious freedom” — even as some 60,000 political prisoners languish in Egyptians jails, five years after Sisi took power in a coup.

The bottom line: To the extent that the Trump administration has a strategy for the Middle East, it appears light on military presence and heavy on rhetoric and economic sanctions. Echoing Obama, Pompeo called this a “new beginning,” but whether it will be any more successful than his predecessors' initiatives remains to be seen.

Barbara Slavin directs the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council.

Where it stands:

• The administration has granted India a waiver to continue to import about 1.25 million tons of oil a month from now until March.
• South Korea, Turkey and Iraq have sought and are expected to receive similar exemptions.
• China bought a huge quantity of Iranian oil — 20 million barrels — in October, to tide it over for several months.

Between the lines: The more successful the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign is against Iran, the higher oil and gasoline prices will rise, hurting U.S. consumers and potentially sparking a global recession. The administration also risks further antagonizing U.S. allies that remain committed to the Iran nuclear deal and want to keep Iran compliant.

More stringent punishments will also incentivize the EU and others to find ways to work around the U.S. financial system. While the efficacy of such mechanisms remains to be seen, they provide an important political and psychological boost for the Iranian government.

Iran, meanwhile, is already employing techniques used during prior periods of heavy sanctions to continue selling oil and reaping the profits. These include turning off the tracking devices on Iranian oil tankers and transferring oil to other ships on the high seas. Iran is also expected to commingle its oil with Russian crude to circumvent sanctions.

The bottom line: Trump's sanctions against Iran will be less successful than those imposed in 2012, when the Obama administration had near universal international support and the sanctions were backed by both the UN Security Council and the EU. Iran will try to wait out the Trump presidency in hopes that a successor will return to the 2015 nuclear deal or seek new negotiations based on more realistic premises.

Barbara Slavin directs the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council.

The hawkish rhetoric within the administration — from the president to National Security Advisor John Bolton, from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook — bears a strong resemblance to President George W. Bush’s before the 2003 Iraq invasion. In his 2002 "Axis of Evil" speech, Bush said that the U.S. “will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.”

Of course, Iraq turned out to have no such weapons, and devolved into a quagmire from which the U.S. has yet to extricate itself and from which a stable democracy has yet to emerge. Iran, meanwhile, has no nuclear weapons either, and still hews to a deal that curbs its ability to produce such weapons for at least a decade.

It is to justify a unilateral withdrawal from this accord that the Trump administration has escalated the information war against Iran and re-imposed punishing sanctions. On Tuesday, the State Department released a 48-page screed entitled “Outlaw Regime: A Chronicle of Iran’s Destructive Activities.” The first product of Hook’s “Iran Action Group,” the document sifts through 40 years of Iranian history to paint the bleakest portrait possible, at the expense of context and nuance.

The bottom line: Iran does indeed present challenges. But to accuse Iran, as Pompeo did, of responsibility for a “global torrent of destructive activity,” or to threaten Tehran, as Bolton did, with “hell to pay if you cross us,” is to invite a war that could eclipse Iraq in its destructive consequences for the region and beyond.

Barbara Slavin directs the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council.