The Biden Administration and Iran: DEI Manifested as Foreign Policy For the DEI crowd, Iran was the perfect petri dish for a new foreign policy rooted in Western self-abasement, guilt, and deference to “indigenous” voices. By Michael Ginsberg
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been killing and harming Americans directly or through proxies from the moment of its birth in 1979. America has suffered 45 years of murder, mayhem, and the perpetual targeting of American interests at the hands of radical Islamofascists.
Yet since 2008, Democrats, led by President Obama, have reoriented American foreign policy to actively seek a rapprochement with the blood-soaked mullahs of Iran. Time and again, the Iranians have shown they are committed to violence against America and its allies, and time and again, Democrats have ignored Iranian actions to pursue accommodation.
From where did this delusional notion that the US could reach an understanding with fanatics who scream “Death to America” come? And why is the Democratic foreign policy establishment committed to this policy in the face of overwhelming evidence Iran has no interest in détente with the US?
If you ask me, it’s the same scourge that has undermined so many American domestic institutions: DEI.
The Biden Administration’s Iran policy—which is nothing more than a resumption and continuation of the Obama Administration’s Iran policy—is DEI manifested as foreign policy.
Iran is DEI catnip. For the DEI crowd, Iran today is a non-Western, Third World country, the alleged victim of Western meddling and colonialism that threw off its supposedly Western-imposed chains and established a government whose defining characteristic was hostility to the West. It was the perfect petri dish for a new foreign policy rooted in Western self-abasement, guilt, and deference to “indigenous” voices.
Obama came to office in 2008 viewing Iran as a victim of Western imperialism and that he and his team would right the wrongs of the past. He made that clear when he said he would meet with the Iranians with no preconditions; when he obsequiously sent Nowruz greetings to the Supreme Leader of Iran; when he took no action to support the protesters of the 2009 Green Revolution; by making his first major foreign speech an address to the Islamic world in Cairo; and through his frequent references to and apologies for the US’s involvement in the coup that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953. (As with so much else of DEI, this event is oversimplified; in point of fact, at the time of the coup, Mosaddegh was unpopular and there was substantial domestic support for his ouster.)
Obama also hinted at his views on Israel in his Cairo speech. He counseled Palestinians to abandon violence in the same way that blacks in the US and South Africa had—thereby connecting American slavery and Jim Crow and South African apartheid with the complex dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. If Palestinians were the “blacks” in this morality play, Israelis must be the “whites”—the equivalent of American and South African segregationists. In so doing, he revealed that, at some level, he had adopted the progressive left’s DEI-infused view of Israel as a European colonial project in the Middle East and an affront to the indigenous peoples of the region.
The speech itself, titled “A New Beginning,” intended to reboot the relationship between the US and the Muslim world and specifically included outreach to Iran “without preconditions and with mutual respect.” Obama thought his personal background and his different worldview positioned him uniquely to be the interlocutor that would bring Iran in from the cold.
And through his presidency, he emphasized his intention to put “daylight” between Israel and the US.
Obama did not cede American influence in the Middle East to Iran in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian Territories because it was in America’s best interests—it manifestly was not in America’s interest—but because of his ideological commitment to removing Western influence from non-Western regions.
Obama revealed his preference for non-Western influence in the Middle East and the Islamic world in his frequent references to Iran’s “equities” in Syria. He dressed up Iran’s effective colonization of Syria into a forward operating base for attacking Israel with the clinical, intellectual-sounding bureaucrat-ese of Iran simply having “equities” in Syria. Iran’s colonial activities in Syria and throughout the Middle East were acceptable to the DEI-riddled Democratic foreign policy establishment, of course, because it was a non-Western country doing the colonizing.
For Obama, diminishing the United States and elevating Iran so that they were equals on the playing field of the Middle East was an article of religious faith. Never mind that Iran had 40 years of American blood on its hands, from Beirut to the Khobar Towers to Iraq. In the delusional DEI foreign policy mind, the “authentic” Iranian regime should be treated as an equal of the United States. Bowing and scraping to the mullahs was Obama’s way of showing just how much he respected other, non-Western cultures and how far he was willing to go to make amends for the sins of the West. It was DEI as foreign policy.
Iran, of course, has no interest in DEI or anything other than the raw exercise of power to achieve its messianic goals of spreading the Islamic Revolution and destroying Israel. Women are beaten for not wearing headcoverings properly, homosexuals are hung from construction cranes, and political protesters whom Iranian government militias have shot in the eye can attest to this. And Iran’s overriding ideological mission is the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of the Jews. Iran makes no secret of this.
Iran gleefully pocketed the concessions made by Obama and his guilt-ridden, DEI-besotted Democratic foreign policy solons and built its Ring of Fire around Israel by colonizing Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza. Obama may have been engaged in naval-gazing, virtue-signaling penance, but Iran was playing for keeps.
Now that Israel is finally, finally dismantling the terror proxies Iran established in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza, the wages of Obama’s DEI foreign policy are patent. The progressive left internalized the Obama Administration’s fundamental treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a European colonial state imposing its will on the noble indigenous Palestinians. The same leftists who scream bloody murder about Israel being a theocracy have no complaints about the Islamic Republic of Iran. The country considered non-Western gets a pass because DEI dictates that we must not judge other cultures.
The Biden Administration and the Democratic Party, for which DEI has become an animating principle, have done all they could to restrain Israel from attacking Iran, eliminating its nuclear program, and creating space for the people of Iran to topple the government they so hate. The Democratic base views a supposedly Western power (Israel) imposing punishment on a non-Western country as the rebirth of Western colonialism. The energy of the Democratic Party is with those marching in support of Hezbollah and Hamas, harassing Jews on campuses and in the streets, and calling for boycotts of anything Israeli. The language the progressive left uses—Israel as an “apartheid” or “colonial” state—leaves no doubt that the progressive left, and the Democratic Party it runs, develop Middle East foreign policy by applying a DEI framework.
The Islamofascist government running Iran is tottering. Its days are numbered, and it may well fall before the end of 2025. When it does, it will be a scene reminiscent of the end of the Cold War, when the long-suffering peoples of Eastern Europe finally threw off the yoke of communism and again breathed free. This historic triumph of freedom was a humiliation for the progressive left that for so long had championed coexistence with the Soviet Union and sympathy for socialism. The same humiliation awaits the progressive left when the Iranian people finally free themselves from their tyranny.
Imposing and applying the DEI framework to its foreign policy has set the progressive left up for this humiliation, and when it happens, it will be richly deserved.
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