The Real Issue in the Iran Debate

By Rick Richmond, COMMENTARY

The transcript of Senator Marco Rubio’s conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg, published yesterday, contains a concise and incisive analysis of the catastrophic consequences of President Obama’s foreign policy – the result of a basic belief that America was the problem in the world, not the solution, and that the Middle East could be stabilized if only Israel transferred more land to the Palestinians. Obama’s seriatim withdrawals from the region created a vacuum that has led to chaos:

It’s led to chaos in Iraq, it’s increasingly leading to chaos in Afghanistan. … You’ve seen the chaos in Libya. You’ve seen the chaos spreading to other parts of North Africa as well …[U]ltimately they’re forcing this president back into the region. This is the guy who was going to get us out of these conflicts, but now he has been pulled back in, and he’s trying to do it in the most limited way possible. But this is ending up making it worse, not better, because … people are looking at these limited air strikes and saying, “This is not American power. We know what American power really looks like, and this isn’t it.” This is a cosmetic show of force that ultimately shows you’re not truly committed … and this has undermined our credibility with Jordan, with the Saudis, with the Egyptians, with others.

The Iran deal is the culmination of a policy of intentional retreat — one that sent troops to Afghanistan with a pre-established time limit and a speech reminding soldiers that the country the president really wanted to build was his own; and an Oval Office address announcing an end of our combat mission in Iraq by emphasizing — in the first paragraph — “the need to rebuild our nation here at home.” In his testimony this week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kenneth Pollack of The Brookings Institution stated that every U.S. ally in the region fears that “the United States plans to use the [Iran deal] to justify further disengagement from the region,” by treating the deal as a “get out of the Middle East free card”:

That a war-weary and “Middle East-weary” U.S. administration will point to the JCPOA and say, “See, we removed the greatest threat to U.S. interests and allies in the Middle East, so now we can afford to step back from the region even more than we already have.” I fear that the JCPOA will justify another “pivot to Asia,” which as best as I can tell was nothing more than an excuse for pivoting away from the Middle East, with demonstrably catastrophic consequences in Iraq and elsewhere.

Michael Singh of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy testified at the same hearing that the U.S. objective has never been simply to conclude a nuclear agreement with Iran, because a deal is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The deal looks like “a significant strategic reversal” by the United States — one that is:

accommodating Iranian nuclear expansion after years of opposing it, lifting sanctions on Iran after years of expanding them, and facilitating Iran’s financial and diplomatic reintegration into the international community after years of seeking to isolate it. These actions stand in opposition to longstanding U.S. strategy in the Middle East … [and] inevitably leads allies to conclude either that our commitment to that strategy and to the region itself is diminished, or that we are embarking on a broader strategic realignment.

The Iran deal reflects a secret strategy that dare not speak its name, because it reflects the twin approaches that created the catastrophe of the twentieth century: appeasement and isolationism, this time masked by slogans (leading from behind, pivoting to somewhere else, building our strength at home, etc.), false assurances on the order of you-can-keep-your-plan-if-you-like-it (your sanctions can “snap back,” we’ll have “unprecedented” inspections, all options will remain “on the table”), and a strategic realignment that treats Iran as a stabilizing force in the region that will fight ISIS and al Qaeda for us while we leave.

A policy of American retreat, had it been forthrightly professed by Obama in 2012, would never have led to his re-election. He presented a very different position during the campaign from the one he pursued as soon as he could be more flexible. In the October 22, 2012, presidential debate on foreign policy, Obama promised that Iran would face a choice: “They can take the diplomatic route and end their nuclear program or they will have to face a united world and a United States president, me, who said we’re not going to take any options off the table” (emphasis added). He had an exchange with the debate moderator that could not have been more explicit:

SCHIEFFER: … What is the deal that you would accept, Mr. President?

OBAMA: … our goal is to get Iran to recognize it needs to give up its nuclear program and abide by the UN resolutions that have been in place. … [T]he deal we’ll accept is they end their nuclear program. It’s very straightforward. [Emphasis added].

The deal currently before the Congress does not end Iran’s program, but rather approves it, subject to temporary limits. It abandons the UN resolutions in place and substitutes one that will leave Iran with nuclear-weapons capability and a breakout time of virtually zero, even assuming the deal is upheld in every detail. It gives Iran space and legitimacy to work on the ballistic missiles necessary to deliver its eventual weapons, and just in time for the end of the deal. It allows Iran to re-arm itself with conventional weapons in the meantime and provides the financial resources to stabilize a despicable regime and assist its allies. It is the ultimate U.S. withdrawal, the recognition of a new hegemon to replace America, the abandonment of allies in the region in favor of a separate peace that enables the U.S. to go home.

Is this what the American people want? What will they say to their representatives, who are now coming home from Washington for a month, before they return for a historic September debate that will be about more than PMDs, centrifuge numbers, managed access, and various other arcane details. The real issue is: are we willing to be fundamentally transformed? What kind of country do we want to be?