Trump’s Negotiations With The Mullahs By Bruce Thornton Let’s hope this isn’t another Western fool’s errand.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/trumps-negotiations-with-the-mullahs/
Recently an important report about President Trump and Iran was drowned out by the weeping and wailing over the president’s Liberation Day increases on tariffs. According to Park MacDougald on The Scroll, Axios reported that the president is “seriously considering an Iranian proposal for indirect nuclear talks” . . . and “the administration is now exploring next steps in order to begin conversations and trust building with the Iranians.”
More troubling, MacDougald writes, “Phillip Smyth emphasized that the Iranians, despite holding an extraordinarily weak hand, are effectively offering the White House nothing: no direct talks, no negotiation over ballistic missiles or the regime’s support for its regional proxies, and nuclear negotiation only within the framework of the 2015 nuclear deal.”
We shouldn’t underestimate the president’s commitment to deterrence, or doubt his will to follow through on his pledge to prevent Iran from going nuclear. He has brought back “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran, and deployed six long-range B2 stealth bombers to the joint UK-US military base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean––the only bomber able to drop “bunker buster” MOPS, “Massive Ordnance Penetrators,” 30,000-pound, precision-guided bombs capable of penetrating Iran’s underground hardened nuclear production facilities.
Also, as Smyth points out, Iran is the weakest it has been since its 1980-88 war with Iraq. Its proxies in the region have been neutralized, its economy is on the brink of collapse, its currency is approaching Weimar Germany levels of inflation, and its people are boldly disgruntled and increasingly restless. Now may be the best opportunity to end Iran’s nuclear ambition to destroy, Israel, which it mocks as a “one-bomb state.” Nor should we assume that self-preservation from a threatened repayment in nuclear kind will restrain the mullahs.
But the fact is, for nearly half a century the U.S. and the West have serially appeased Iran, even as it has killed our troops, kidnapped our citizens, and supported proxy terrorists who attack our allies, while stringing us along with duplicitous negotiations and promises they violate, even as they pocket billions of dollars that they’ve used to finance their malign intentions.
How did it happen? During the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, the Carter administration’s foreign policy team drastically misread the Iranian Revolution. It was not, as the West assumed, about anticolonialism, national self-determination, human rights, or brutal autocrats. Rather, it was a religious movement to restore Islam’s 14-centuries-long divine mission to create a world order based on the Koran and sharia law.
As the Economist warned about Carter’s feckless floundering for a deal during the embassy hostages crisis, “The denial of material things is unlikely to have much effect on minds suffused with immaterial things.” As modern jihadists have demonstrated for almost 50 years, they mean it when they say, “We love death the way you love life.”
The other dimension of this misunderstanding is the assumption that diplomatic engagement, transactional negotiations, and the “rules-based international order” can resolve conflicts, since after all, doesn’t the whole world want to live like us Westerners, enjoying affluence, living in peace with the world, liberating women, and having personal autonomy, political freedom, and human rights?
And how does one negotiate and bargain away the imperatives of passionate religious beliefs, traditions, and sacred doctrines created by Allah? As the godfather of the Iranian revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini, allegedly said about the Iranian nation, “I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”
Moreover, such transactional diplomacy that has been at the heart of our foreign policy idealism, has serially failed since the Versailles settlement of 1918, for secular, Westphalian nation-states function in terms of the national interests of their leaders or their peoples, and hold hostage to those interests any treaty or agreement and its terms.
Take North Korea, a gangster-state whose sole guiding principle is maintaining the power, security, and wealth of the Kim dynasty and its minions. Iran’s own nuclear ambitions have found a blueprint for creating nuclear weapons by following the North Koreans’ playbook. For decades–– under both Democrat and Republican presidents–– the Norks brilliantly played the game of negotiation, “agreed frameworks,” “moratoriums,” “inspections,” Western concessions, and broken promises, until the day it announced that its possession of nuclear weapons was a fait accompli.
Despite that monitory story, the West forged the so-called multinational “Iran nuclear deal” that Barack Obama et al. negotiated and signed in 2015, at the cost of billions of dollars in Danegeld, including $6 billion for five American hostages. In the following 10 years, Israeli intelligence rifled Iran’s nuclear program records and exposed for all to see the extent of Iran’s cheating on the deal.
But there’s a difference between other nations like North Korea reasons for violating signed treaties, and Iran’s purpose: not just national interests or those of the ruling clique, but bringing back the power and glory of the Islamic empire that for a thousand years dominated the infidel West.
That reduction of Iran to Western categories and concepts lies at the heart of our appeasement of Iran encouraged by a failure to take Iran’s religious motives seriously. This blunder was obvious from Barack Obama’s comments in 2015 about the nuclear deal in an Atlantic interview. “If you look at Iranian behavior, they are strategic, and they’re not impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see their interests, and they respond to costs and benefits. . . They are a large, powerful country that sees itself as an important player on the world stage, and I do not think has a suicide wish, and can respond to incentives. And that’s the reason why they came to the table on sanctions.”
But that “worldview” does not share the West’s materialist secularism that reduces religious faith to a personal preference or commercialized holiday rituals that have little influence on how we live and govern. Islam, on the other hand, is a totalizing political, social, and cultural system, and its sharia law covers every dimension of human existence. Pace Obama, Iran’s fundamental “interests,” “cost and benefits,” and ambitions to be “an important player on the world stage” are not our secular ones.
Rather, as followers of an apocalyptic, messianic sect of Shi’a Islam, the mullahs running Iran are pursuing the religiously inspired precepts of the founder of their state, the Ayatollah Khomeini: “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry, ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be jihad.”
Obama, however, is typical of our idealistic foreign policy and failure to take faith seriously. Speaking of Iran’s dubious overtures to reopen negotiations, CENTCOM commander Kenneth McKenzie commented regarding Iran’s abandonment of its Houthi proxies after Trump’s recent strikes against them:
“Because of these developments, we now have an opportunity to bring Iran to the table for substantive negotiations over its nuclear ambitions — negotiations that must be conducted directly, not through third-party interlocutors, and with no scene-setting preconditions or concessions.”
All fine and good, but after 15 years of misdirection and violations of the terms of the agreement, and nearly 50 years of Iran’s lies and lethal aggression against the U.S., all empowered by our serial appeasement, why should the mullahs abandon a process that has brought them dangerously close to possessing nuclear weapons?
Mackenzie’s answers that: “The highest goal of Iranian statecraft is regime preservation. If the survival of the clerical leadership is directly and credibly threatened, Iran will modify its behavior. We now have the tools and the will to create this threat in a meaningful manner.”
But we’ve long possessed the ability to destroy Iran’s nuclear production infrastructure, especially so after the setbacks Israel has inflicted, particularly the destruction of its SS300 missile systems defending those assets. What’s been lacking is the will to act and risk an exorbitant political price.
Most problematic is the claim that “regime preservation” is the cleric’ primary goal, which assumes that they “love life” as much as we do, and so can be threatened into abandoning its long, divinely enjoined project to acquire nuclear weapons. It’s obvious that their arrogant conditions on restarting the nuclear talks–– “effectively offering the White House nothing: no direct talks, no negotiation over ballistic missiles or the regime’s support for its regional proxies, and nuclear negotiation only within the framework of the 2015 nuclear deal,” as Phillip Smyth put it––suggests that they still need significant force to concentrate their minds.
Of course, most of want Trump’s efforts to succeed. But as Secretary of State George Shultz once remarked, “Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.” Fifteen fruitless years of “conversations and trust-building” with the clerics have demonstrated this truth, and left Iran dangerously close to acquiring the weapons necessary for destroying Israel and the clerics’ Sunni enemies.
Preventing that disaster won’t be achieved with “parchment barriers,” but with mind-concentrating force. Let’s hope the president’s efforts do not end up another Western fool’s errand.
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