Is President Trump seeking an Iran Deal 2.0? Far be it from us to predict the moves of a leader whose principle tenet is unpredictability. Yet several acts in the president’s first days in office could raise hopes among American and foreign supporters of rapprochement with the Islamic Republic. We don’t share those hopes. A wiser and more strategic course would be to eschew efforts to appease the Iranian regime.

Yet Mr. Trump is publicly severing ties with the architects of his first term’s policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran. He is stripping a former national security adviser, John Bolton, of secret service protection. The president never disavowed the 2020 killing of an arch-terrorist, Qasem Soleimani. Tehran is threatening to assassinate anyone involved in that decision, including Mr. Bolton. Exposing him to danger is a major error of judgment. 

An outspoken foreign policy hawk, Mr. Bolton, after leaving the White House, became a critic of Mr. Trump. Yet, as he noted on CNN, he has also heavily criticized President Biden. Regardless, Mr. Biden, after learning that Iranian assassins are after Mr. Bolton, ordered that the ex-aide’s security detail be beefed up. To date, the mullahs have been unable to avenge the Soleimani killing. Mr. Trump can’t want that to happen on his watch. 

An even more puzzling move is the president’s “you’re fired” announcements in respect of four government officials, made on social media shortly after midnight following Monday’s inauguration festivities. Specifically, one of those sacked, Brian Hook, seems an odd candidate for such public flogging. A veteran diplomat, Mr. Hook most recently headed the president-elect’s transition team at the department of state. 

Like Mr. Bolton, Mr. Hook, who was Mr. Trump’s special envoy on Iran, is on the mullahs’ hit list. It is unclear if Mr. Hook’s new employer at State would now strip him of protection as well. A consummate professional, Mr. Hook has refrained from publicly criticizing superiors, including Mr. Trump. Tea-leaf readers would be forgiven for concluding that the only reason he was fired is that Mr. Hook is considered too much of an Iran hawk. 

Whether such a reading is correct is beside the point. Officials of the Iranian regime and their Western supporters are hopeful. “Perhaps now there is an opening for renewed Iran diplomacy,” is how a European diplomat relayed that feeling recently to our Benny Avni. “I hope that this time around, a ‘Trump 2’ will be more serious, more focused, more realistic,” Tehran’s vice president, Javad Zarif, told a supportive crowd at Davos, Switzerland Wednesday. 

Mr. Trump is proud of scaring foes by making threats on which he won’t necessarily act. Mr. Bolton, he said, “was a very dumb person, but I used him well because every time people saw me come into a meeting with John Bolton standing behind me, they thought that he’d attack them because he was a warmonger.” Now that Mr. Bolton can no longer be “used,” Mr. Trump says “we’re not going to have security on people for the rest of their lives.”

If Mr. Bolton was useful in scaring adversaries, though, wouldn’t attacking him now have the exact opposite effect? And what does firing Mr. Hook tell appeasement-mongers? Was quitting the Obama-era Iran deal, as Mr. Trump did in 2018, merely temporary, to be replaced with a new “beautiful” deal? Wouldn’t a “snap back” of global sanctions at the UN, or backing an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, serve us better?