Stronger regional collective defense is also needed. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are shouldering the burdens of countering Iran’s growing footprint around the Arabian Peninsula. Formal U.S. military backing, and possible support from Israel, will raise the costs to Tehran of further aggression while reassuring our worried allies.

Public announcements and military exercises will make these intentions, capabilities and allied unity abundantly clear to Tehran. Strategic communications can also amplify investors’ continued wariness of the Iranian market and, in combination with human rights, terrorism and missile sanctions, increase internal strains on the regime.

The person on whose shoulders the fallout from the staffing shortage rests most heavily is Brian Hook, the head of the department’s office of policy planning. A former adviser to Mitt Romney, Hook was a founder of the John Hay Initiative, a hawkish foreign-policy think tank whose other two founders, Eliot A. Cohen and Eric Edelman, were (and still are) among Trump’s most vociferous critics. Cohen and Edelman put their names on anti-Trump letters during the 2016 election; Hook didn’t.

The conversations caught on wiretaps planted by the Turkish police are alleged to show a conspiracy to help Iran skirt American sanctions by trading gold for gas…

“I’m sure Erdogan worries about that, and I’m sure he worries about what could come out at trial,” said Eric S. Edelman, a former United States ambassador to Turkey. “Either one could be very damaging to him.”

"They are engaging in Hezbollah-like behavior and taking hostages to use as trade bait," Eric Edelman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Turkey between 2003 and 2005, told me this week. Edelman said he suspects Erdogan is more interested in exchanging prisoners for Reza Zarrab, a Turkish gold trader who was arrested last year for violating sanctions against Iran through dollar transactions that went through Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Erdogan's government has urged the U.S. at the highest levels to drop the case against Zarrab.

Eric Edelman, who had the USD-P job for the last four years of the Bush administration, called the breadth of issues covered by the job “staggering.”…

Former ambassador Eric S. Edelman concurs. “The press appearance was the most humiliating, degrading performance by a secretary of state that I have seen in my lifetime. He was clearly ordered by the White House to go out and lavish slavish praise on the president.” He points out that “Trump’s comment that Tillerson has refuted the story and NBC owes an apology is evidence” that Tillerson was ordered by the White House to go out there. Edelman adds, “His statement was actually the quintessence of the non-denial denial.”