Iran is "Officially on Notice" and Donald Trump is President. Now what?

Michael Flynn came out and sternly put Iran "officially on notice"

There are two possible Flynn-Bannon-Trump strategies on Iran worth considering.

I. The first is that they're setting the table for war with Iran, plain and simple. The administration will use the recent missile test and subsequent Iranian noncompliance to create a pretext for starting a war. Look at what Flynn thinks about Iran's role in the Middle East, and it's clear that he feels Iran needs to be met directly by force for countering the US's designs for the broader region (see Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the ailing peace process).

In this asymmetric conflict, the US is overwhelmingly more powerful. Suddenly unmoored from President Obama's desire to sustain his anti-war image, the US's military has the capability to swiftly destroy Iran's, and, in doing so, turn a nation with the Gulf's most pro-American populace into another Iraqi quagmire. This is not a good strategy and, like the Iraq War, fails to meet the conditions for just war theory.

II. The other possibility is that this signaling is part of a larger Trump-ian negotiating strategy. Trump's approach to politics is the same as his approach to business: stake out a maximalist position, then negotiate down to what he considers a win, whether that's a good price per square foot or concessions from international adversaries. Under this strategy, Lieutenant General Flynn's blunt public warning, replete with his battle-hardened visage and bulging forehead veins, is intended to convince Iran that the credible threat of military force is just that--credible.

Tellingly, credible threat is the asset that the Obama-Kerry team could never muster in the past eight years of US-Iran relations. Their "all options on the table" proclamations always rang hollow, and its hollowness best explains why the 2014 nuclear deal reflects compromise rather than Iranian unilateral disarmament. For the nascent and unpredictable Trump team, threat credibility has been revitalized and could be exchanged for previously-unattainable concessions. Given this and the perils of reciprocal escalation, the administration ought to prioritize its demands and guard against losing control of the public narrative. This brinkmanship strategy is high risk but potentially rewarding.

We ought to pray that the latter strategy is what the new, muscular administration has in mind and that it has the deft to avoid fostering a situation in which it has to pull the trigger.

The only thing I ever protested in my 31 years was the Iraq War in February 2003, while the D.C. foreign policy apparatus was working overtime to trick you into believing that little Saddam, a veritable awful strongman, posed a threat worth starting a war that has cost trillions (trillions!) of dollars. In the coming days, many of those same ought-to-have-been-discredited voices will try to trick you into believing that little Iran, led by a veritably awful and theocratic government, is also a threat worth starting a financially-crippling and morally-bankrupt war. In the final analysis, I hope that you'll side with me and not the team that brought you the Iraq War.

...Also, for all the 'America First' talk during the campaign, Trump's foreign policy team is oddly neoconservative and interventionist. What happened to being against the globalists?