Trib ignores sound negotiations that ended Iran war threat in 2015.

The Trib's editorial 'The U.S. can protect tankers from Iran, with help from allies' implicitly accepts Trump administration falsehoods about the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and recent attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. In so doing the Trib exacerbates Trump's greatest threat to world peace: his blowing up Obama's signature foreign policy accomplishment last year and his seeking a casus belli to attack Iran outright now.

First the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. To state "The 2015 nuclear deal Trump shelved was too narrow in its scope" is preposterous. Iran had abandoned its nuclear program years before the 2015 deal. US war hawks never wanted a deal because the final agreement signaled an end to their years long effort to take out Iran as a rival hegemon to the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel in the Middle East. Trump ran on repeal both to placate his war mongering base and to satisfy his lust to undue every Obama accomplishment. The Trib is whistling past the graveyard in calling for European support for a new nuclear deal. They're outraged by the folly of US policy, know the current agreement is working, and will never go along with Trump's true agenda: Iran regime change.

Regarding the current tanker attacks, Trump has rushed to judgement, ignoring reports from the owner of the Kokuka Outrageous that the explosion was above the water line and not an Iranian mine as Trump insists. With false US reports of attacks/threats used to justify war going back to the USS Maine explosion in 1898 (Spanish American War), Gulf of Tonkin attack in 1964 (Vietnam War) and the Mother of All fairy tales, 2002's Iran WMD (second Iraq war), the US has zero credibility when fomenting war.

Instead of the fantasy that Europe will support an even more onerous and senseless nuclear deal, the Trib should demand end of cruel, inhuman sanctions which already constitute war on the Iranian people. We've been disrespecting, degrading, destabilizing Iran since we partnered with the UK to overthrow the democratically elected leader Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953. Sixty-six years is enough.