Our Foes Would Fill Doran’s Mideast Vacuum

Michael Doran might be jumping the gun in claiming that Donald Trump is channeling Ronald Reagan in the Middle East (Letters, March 10). We don’t know yet whether the president agrees with Elbridge Colby and JD Vance that U.S.-Israeli interests don’t overlap enough to justify U.S. military action against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear-weapons program. Mr. Trump may have a red line precisely because others don’t have the will or military means. We should revisit this question a year from now.

In replying to my op-ed “Israel Can’t Substitute for the U.S. in the Middle East” (March 6), Mr. Doran also makes a dubious analogy when discussing the Middle East between the 1950s and 1970s. The Cold War didn’t call for U.S. military intervention in the region—minus President Eisenhower’s decision to let the U.S. Army and Marines sunbathe on Lebanese beaches—because Soviet designs never really threatened the Persian Gulf. In 1946-47, however, President Truman did threaten military action to get Stalin out of Iran. It worked: An outmatched U.S.S.R. departed.