RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, a fresh political scandal erupted on Capitol Hill over Iran. At issue was a new plan being considered by the Obama administration to provide Iran’s ayatollahs with limited access to the U.S. financial system as a sweetener for their continued compliance with their government’s 2015 nuclear deal with the nations of the P5+1.

Doing so would have effectively reneged on promises made by the White House last summer in selling the nuclear deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) to a skeptical Congress. Back in July, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew waved away congressional worries over the prospects of Iran’s regime being unjustly enriched as a result of the JCPOA. Lew pledged that — irrespective of the provisions of the new nuclear deal — Iran would “continue to be denied access to the world’s largest financial and commercial market.”

The plan would also have been a potential violation of federal law, since under the provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act the White House is required to “block and prohibit” Iranian assets if those funds “come within the United States, or are or come within the possession or control of a United States person.” (Similarly, the administration’s proposal would have fundamentally undermined one of the central pillars of post-9/11 counterterrorism law, the USA PATRIOT Act, by allowing Iran’s tainted money to permeate U.S. financial institutions.)

News of the new initiative drew outraged responses from key lawmakers, who promised — among other things — to penalize U.S. companies who used the opportunity to expand their business with the Islamic Republic. The pushback worked, and by the weekend the administration had walked back the dog on its proposed idea. “The administration has not been and is not planning to grant Iran access to the U.S. financial system,” a spokesperson deployed by the Treasury Department insisted to reporters on April 1.

That, however, isn’t the end of the story. While the White House may have stopped short of giving Iran direct access to the American financial system, it still appears to be mulling workarounds that would nonetheless allow the Islamic Republic to take advantage of the U.S. dollar.

Deterrence is lost through lax foreign policy, an erosion of military readiness, and failed supreme command — often insidiously, over time, rather than dramatically, at once. The following random events over the seven years that Barack Obama has been in office have led to the idea abroad that the U.S. is no longer the world’s leader and that regional hegemonies have a golden opportunity to redraw regional maps and spheres of influence — to the disadvantage of the West — in the ten months remaining before the next president is inaugurated.

The otherwise disparate Boston Marathon, Fort Hood, and San Bernardino Islamist bombers had three things in common: First, the killers had all communicated on social media with radical jihadists, or had come to the attention of both U.S. and foreign intelligence, or had expressed jihadist beliefs. Second, their attacks were followed by administration warnings about not embracing Islamophobia, as Obama doubled down on his administration’s taboo against the use of terms such as “jihadist,” “radical Islamist,” and “Islamic terrorist.” Third, after each of these incidents, there was no stepped-up administration vigilance; instead, there was a flurry of sermons about not blaming Islam for inciting such killers. The greatest check on ISIS terrorism may lie in the hands of ISIS itself: If its operatives continue to cull the Western herd by a few dozen murders every few months, the U.S. will likely continue to do little. If they get greedy and seek a repeat of something on the scale of 9/11, then the American public will force this administration to act. Unfortunately, ISIS may not be so much energized by anger over supposed Islamophobia as buoyed by the administration’s inability to say “radical Islam.”

The Bowe Bergdahl swap for five Taliban terrorists — and National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s praise of the deserter Bergdahl’s service — reinforced the global message that the Obama administration did not necessarily see Taliban killers as killers or American deserters as deserters, apparently because such definitions are anachronistically absolute concepts. After all, who would willingly swap five killers for one deserter? Apparently everything is negotiable and political, given that the U.S. does not feel deeply about either terrorist killers or those who have renounced their duty to thwart them.

On March 30, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected Western pressure for Iran to stop testing ballistic missiles and a statement by a former Iranian president favoring negotiations instead of the missile program by warning in a speech: “People say that tomorrow’s world is a world of negotiations and not a world of missiles.” Khamenei added, “If they say this thoughtlessly, it shows that they are thoughtless. However, if this is intentional, then this is treachery.”

Khamenei’s defiant comments came in the midst of growing international concerns about Iran’s missile program. Iran tested two ballistic missiles last fall and several over the last month. Written on the sides of two missiles recently tested by Iran reportedly were the words “Israel should be wiped from the pages of history.” Iran is expected to soon launch a space-launch rocket that most experts believe will be a test to develop an ICBM capable of firing nuclear warheads against Europe and the United States.

Iran has the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East and is the only nation in history to develop missiles with ranges of 2,000 km or more without having a nuclear weapons capability. Although Iran claims its missiles are not intended to carry nuclear warheads, most experts believe they are being developed as a nuclear weapons delivery system. The United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany said in a joint letter sent this week to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that Iran’s recent missile launches were “inherently capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”