Critics of the deal are taking a wait-and-see approach to the new strategy. "Just going after the IRGC, while certainly having a lot of virtues, it’s not a complete strategy. 

Since Donald Trump took office, the growth of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and the increasing capability and diversity of its ballistic missile force have made that country the most urgent threat to U.S. national security.

Congress, meanwhile, has named a new commission to review the NDS, military readiness, the strategic environment and other issues.

“Obama was suspicious of what the generals were telling him. They were telling him to put in more troops than he wanted to,” said Eric Edelman, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy under George W. Bush. “Trump does recognize that just pulling out is not an option. If the Taliban takes over and then there’s a terrorist attack, that is a big political risk for him,” Edelman added.

Looking on the positive side, Trump confessed to changing his mind and did lay out the stakes in the region. Restating that it will be up to Afghans ultimately to secure their country and that the United States would commit to helping them arrive at that goal while putting pressure on Pakistan was reassuring. Former ambassador Eric Edelman recapped the positive elements

Since the end of World War II, virtually every president has attempted to reset U.S.-Russia relations. Harry S. Truman confided in his diary that he was tired of “babying” the Soviets when they didn’t carry out the obligations they had undertaken at Yalta. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Spirit of Geneva” sought to make a new start with Stalin’s successors. John F. Kennedy sought to recalibrate relations with his disastrous Vienna summit, in June 1961, which paved the way for the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Richard Nixon sought détente with the increasingly sclerotic Brezhnevite leadership. Jimmy Carter also tried to change the terms of U.S.-Soviet relations early in his term, as did Ronald Reagan, who famously proposed a new strategy—“We win, they lose.” Some of these resets were based on the need to get tougher with Russia and some were based on a desire to find common ground. But after the Cold War, all of the efforts went unrequited. The specific irritants in each case were different, but at the end of the day, all of them failed because the Russian reform project faltered in the late 1990s. As a result, rather than joining the liberal international order, Russia became a revisionist state whose fundamental orientation limited the scope for successful engagement with Moscow. That is why Trump’s reset will almost certainly fail—and a good thing, too, since accommodating Moscow’s current demands would almost certainly mean sacrificing traditional U.S. interests.