RUTHFULLY YOURS

Barack Obama’s policy was to ask Iran to show some flexibility, give good relations with America a chance, just as he sought to make nice with Cuba, Russia, China, even the Muslim Brotherhood. Odious but not stupid, the mullahs knew a sucker when they saw one.

Watching President Trump scupper the Iran Deal made me wonder where we would be today if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 presidential election. I was reminded of fired FBI Director James Comey’s praise for the defeated Democratic nominee at a Town Hall meeting in April of this year: “Hillary Clinton is more meshed in, trained in, respectful of the norms and traditions that I’m so worried about being eroded today.” Lucky, I thought, Donald Trump is not “meshed in, trained in, respectful of the norms and traditions” that constituted the Obama Doctrine.

Barack Obama’s Big Idea was to ask the US’s traditional adversaries – Russia, Iran, Cuba, China, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and so on – to show some flexibility and give good relations with America a chance. His entreaty, however, was interpreted by Uncle Sam’s traditional adversaries – or, should we say, “partners in peace” – to mean the US, the self-identified guilty party in international relations, wanted a second chance. The Islamic Republic of Iran, eventually, decided it would play along with Obama’s “feel good” diplomacy, and entered into negotiations with the P5+1 (UN Security Council members plus Germany).

For the Obama administration, and for virtually every progressive we-are-the-world Westerner, the Iran Nuclear Deal was what we had been waiting for, the moment when hope and change meet and the promise of a global people’s community takes a giant step forward. Older hands warned that this was all a recipe for disaster, as I wrote in “Wiser Men on the Iranian Deal” back in May 2015.

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice has penned an op-ed column for the New York Times entitled “Trump’s Most Foolish Decision Yet.” Ms. Rice, who previously counseled the Trump administration to “tolerate” North Korea as a nuclear power, has now outdone herself with her most foolish op-ed column yet. She condemned President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Obama administration’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA for short. Ms. Rice was echoing the laments of her boss Obama and Obama’s feckless Secretary of State John Kerry.

Susan Rice argued in her op-ed column that the “U.S. is about to violate a nuclear deal that has worked.” She is wrong. It is the Iranian regime, not the United States, that lied its way into the JCPOA and has been in violation since. And the JCPOA has only worked for the Iranian regime, which reaped the benefits of sanctions relief and cash infusions upfront while making temporary loophole-ridden “commitments.” At best, all this fundamentally flawed deal has done is to create a pathway for Iran’s eventual attainment of nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles capable of delivering them. In about ten years or so, if Ms. Rice is still dispensing advice, she will be counseling the president in office at that time to be prepared to “tolerate” a nuclear-armed Iran. That is what happens when all that a foreign policy consists of is leading from behind, strategic patience and kicking the can down the road.

In the very first paragraph of the JCPOA’s preface, the Iranian regime knowingly misrepresented its intentions, stating it “reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” Iran repeated this “reaffirmation” in subsection (iii) of the JCPOA’s “Preamble and General Provisions.” Susan Rice most likely had this Iranian promise in mind when she wrote in her op-ed column that Iran “foreswore ever producing a nuclear weapon.” At the very time that Iran made this fraudulent misrepresentation of its intentions, which the Obama administration took as gospel, the regime was hiding its “atomic archive” documents on its nuclear weapons program. In 2017, the regime moved the archive to another secret location.

President Trump this week withdrew the United States from the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran. It’s about time. In the long history of delusional diplomatic agreements, Obama’s pact with the genocidal mullahs to halt their development of nuclear weapons was was one of the worst since Neville Chamberlain handed Czechoslovakia over to Nazi Germany. Like Trump’s abandoning of the feckless Paris Climate Accords, ending the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action may contribute to a needed reevaluation of the West’s antique paradigm of diplomatic engagement as the best way to stop aggression and protect our country’s interests and security.

The Europeans, of course, are unhappy. They’ve been doing a bustling business with Iran ever since Obama delivered $1.7 billion in cash on pallets as the payola to the mullahs for going along with the charade. At home, the evangelical internationalists of both parties and the foreign policy establishment are caterwauling, with grim predictions of doom of the sort we heard about North Korea until Kim, his mind apparently focused by Trump’s tough talk, agreed to meet with the president. They all assert that Trump’s move is counterproductive, that under the watchful eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the agreement was working and that Iran had stopped it progress. Not counting ballistic missiles, of course. Now, they warn, Iran is free to start the program back up and obtain a weapon sooner than they would have if the deal remained.

This is what counts as a diplomatic triumph for delusional internationalists: for nearly forty years, a brutal, apocalyptic, fanatical cult has been at declared war on us, threatened our closest ally Israel with genocide, murdered our troops, kidnapped our citizens, fomented terrorism across the world, and declared openly and repeatedly its hatred of us and its intentions to harm our interests––this failing state that brutalizes its own citizens and rampages throughout the Middle East will see its acquisition of nuclear weapons delayed for maybe a decade.

Jimmy Carter began the first Iranian hostage crisis and Reagan ended it. Obama began America’s second Iranian hostage crisis.

President Trump just ended it.

On January 12, 2016, Iran’s IRGC terror force seized 2 US Navy vessels, extracted classified information from their crews at gunpoint, broadcast images of American sailors on their knees and forced an officer to read an apology. A day later, the Islamic terror state released its American hostages.

Three days later, Implementation Day lifted sanctions on Iran. By next month, Iran was claiming that it had received over $100 billion in sanctions relief.

It was not the last ransom payment linked to the nuclear deal.

On January 17, Obama illegally airlifted $400 million in foreign currency on unmarked cargo planes to the IRGC as a down payment on a $1.7 billion ransom for four American hostages being held in Iran.

Since then, Iran has taken more American hostages.

President Trump made it clear that there will be no more dirty deals and payoffs. “America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail.”

The hostage he set free was American foreign policy. Obama didn’t ship $1.7 billion to Iran because he cared about the four American prisoners or the Navy sailors. They were just icing on the yellowcake. Iran wasn’t able to dictate to the White House because it was holding American prisoners as hostages, but because it had imprisoned Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize and was holding his beloved legacy hostage.

President Trump on Tuesday withdrew the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal, rightly calling it “defective at its core.” Yet he also offered Iran a chance to negotiate a better deal if it truly doesn’t want a nuclear weapon. Mr. Trump’s challenge now is to build a strategy and alliances to contain Iran until it accepts the crucial constraints that Barack Obama refused to impose.

The Obama Administration spent years negotiating a lopsided pact that gave Tehran $100 billion of sanctions relief and a chance to revive its nuclear-weapons program after a 15-year waiting period. Instead of cutting off “all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb” as Mr. Obama claimed, the deal delayed the country’s entry into the nuclear club and gave the mullahs cash to fund their Middle East adventurism.
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Mr. Trump outlined a more realistic strategy in October, promising to work with allies to close the deal’s loopholes, address Tehran’s missile and weapons proliferation, and “deny the regime all paths to a nuclear weapon.” An Iranian nuke would be a modest problem if Iran were a democracy. But the Islamic Republic is no India and has a four-decade history of oppressing its own people, taking foreign hostages and threatening neighbors with extinction.

State Department policy chief Brian Hook spent months shuttling between European capitals to get an agreement to strengthen inspections of suspected nuclear sites, stop Iran from developing ballistic missiles and eliminate the deal’s sunset provisions. Deal signatories China and Russia don’t share U.S. strategic goals in the Mideast, but the Trump Administration’s reasonable presumption is that Britain, France and Germany do.

Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal struck a fatal blow against Obama’s foreign-policy legacy.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the Washington Free Beacon.

President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a.k.a. the Iran nuclear deal, on the afternoon of May 8. The deal, announced to such fanfare in July 2015, did not live to see its third birthday. And for that, I am grateful.

Why? Because the president said not only that America will be leaving the accord. He declared that the period of waxing Iranian influence in the Middle East is at an end. The deal financed several years of Iranian expansion through Shiite proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. By reimposing sanctions, President Trump will weaken an already ailing Iranian economy. The Iranian currency, the rial, has plummeted in recent weeks. Inflation is rampant. The financial system is corrupted, dysfunctional. Strikes are proliferating and often turn into displays against the government. This is a situation the United States should seek not to mitigate but to exacerbate.

Removing ourselves from the deal puts Iran on the defensive. Its people and government are divided and uncertain how to respond. Its leverage is minimal. Iranian citizens have seen their leaders use the money from the deal not to improve the economic lot of the average person but to fund the military, IRGC, and other instruments of foreign adventurism. Implicit in the deal was recognition of the Islamic regime as a legitimate member of the so-called international community. President Trump has rescinded that recognition and the standing that came with it. The issue is no longer Iranian compliance with an agreement that contained loopholes through which you could launch a Fateh-110 heavy missile. The issue is whether Iran chooses to become a responsible player or not, whether it curbs its imperial designs, cuts off its militias, abandons terrorism, opens its public square, and ceases its threats to and harassment of the United States and her allies. That choice is not Donald Trump’s to make. It is the Iranian regime’s.

The Iran deal empowered the totalitarians. Trump’s exit squeezes them.

President Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal is the greatest boost for American and global security in decades.

If you think that is an exaggeration, then you evidently think the Obama administration’s injection of well over a hundred billion dollars — some of it in the form of cash bribes — into the coffers of the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism was either trivial or, more delusionally, a master-stroke of statecraft.

Of course, there’s a lot of delusion going around. After repeatedly vowing to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons (with signature “If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance” candor), President Obama, and his trusty factotum John Kerry, made an agreement that guaranteed Iran would obtain a nuclear weapon.

They rationalized this dereliction with the nostrum that an unverifiable delay in nuclear-weapons development, coupled with Iran’s coup in reestablishing lucrative international trade relations, would tame the revolutionary jihadist regime, such that it would be a responsible government by the time the delay ended. Meantime, we would exercise an oh-so-sophisticated brand of “strategic patience” as the mullahs continued abetting terrorism, mass-murdering Syrians, menacing other neighbors, evolving ballistic missiles, crushing domestic dissent, and provoking American military forces — even abducting our sailors on the high seas.

What the assorted apologists for the Iran nuclear deal have failed to grasp is a simple distinction: the difference between suspicions and confirmation. The IAEA based its assessments on “over a thousand pages” of documents; now we have a hundred thousand.

Moreover, these are in effect a hundred thousand signed confessions of the Iranian regime that it intended to create nuclear weapons and load them on missiles manufactured by itself. The miniature minds of the apologists are simply incapable of grasping the historic magnitude of the Mossad’s discovery.

The picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu standing before two displays, one of file folders and one of compact discs, symbolizes possibly the greatest coup in the history of espionage: the Mossad’s acquisition of the archive of Iran’s program to create nuclear weapons. A runner up for that title might be the advance information about Operation Overlord, the Allied landing in France at the end of World War II, supplied by Elyesa Bazna from Ankara and Paul Fidrmuc from Lisbon.

Nazi Germany failed to act on that information about the intended landing site on D-Day. Instead, it fell victim to false information provided by a supposed spy who was working for the Allies. The parallel to that failure is the present rush of politicians and so-called experts who pretend that the Mossad’s coup tells us nothing new and merely proves that the deal is more justified than ever. They claim, in particular, that before the deal was agreed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) already knew the broad details of what the new information reveals.

What the assorted apologists for the Iran nuclear deal have failed to grasp is a simple distinction: the difference between suspicions and confirmation. The IAEA based its assessments on “over a thousand pages” of documents; now we have a hundred thousand.

For the American left, the Iran nuclear deal is becoming the peace process—that is, a landmark foreign policy project of a Democratic president reflecting the most cherished liberal beliefs about the world, that is failing at great cost to millions of people yet whose failure cannot be admitted.

The political beliefs that marched liberals down both of these diplomatic dead-ends were the same. Democratic administrations sought to turn anti-western enemies into friends, terrorists into decent citizens, through diplomatic engagement, concessions, and money. They were sympathetic to the Palestinian and Iranian Third Worldist rhetoric of resentment and accusation, and believed that by acknowledging grievances the United States could prove its good intentions, open dialogue, build trust, and transcend old misunderstandings and conflicts. Layered on all this is the rational materialist worldview; Clinton and Obama couldn’t seem to grasp that some people prefer their concept of honor or victory to a higher per-capita GDP.

President Obama articulated all this perfectly in late 2014, as he began selling the Iran deal:

[Iran has] a path to break through that isolation and they should seize it. Because if they do, there’s incredible talent and resources and sophistication inside of—inside of Iran, and it would be a very successful regional power that was also abiding by international norms and international rules, and that would be good for everybody.”

The peace process and the Iran deal are the two great liberal foreign policy projects of the past 30 years, neither of them has worked, the sources of their failure are identical, and in both cases the left is handling its failure the same way: by denying it exists, by relying on friends in the media and in Europe to cover it up, and by scapegoating those who point it out as warmongers.

It’s time to reinstate sanctions and ramp up the pressure on Tehran.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu dropped an intelligence bombshell on the world Monday and, with it, may have signed the death warrant for the 2015 Iran nuclear accord: Thousands of files seized from inside Iran definitively prove that the Islamic Republic has been deceiving the international community all along. The regime lied to the International Atomic Energy Agency about the existence of a nuclear-weapons program, and, in direct violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), hid its massive archive of nuclear knowhow.

The response from President Donald Trump should be no different than his response to North Korea: maximum pressure until the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

In 2015, when the Obama administration negotiated the JCPOA, critics warned that Iran would ultimately follow in the footsteps of North Korea, which reached its own nuclear agreement with America in 1994. In that accord, known as the Agreed Framework, North Korea promised to freeze its production of plutonium in exchange for heavy fuel oil and light-water reactors. As it turned out, the North covertly developed a uranium-enrichment program, which, when combined with its unabated development of ballistic missiles, turned it from a national-security problem to a national-security nightmare.

Just two and a half years into the JCPOA, it appears Iran’s intentions are equally nefarious: It is using the JCPOA to buy time to regain economic strength while continuing work on ballistic missiles and advanced centrifuges until it decides to build nuclear weapons. The regime’s own archive, as revealed by Netanyahu, confirms that Tehran is on a slow but clear path toward nuclear capability.

Netanyahu’s revelation comes days before President Trump’s deadline for Europe to help him fix certain flaws in the nuclear deal or else face an American exit. For months, State Department negotiators have worked with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Berlin to find ways to force inspections at Iranian military sites, extend the deal’s restrictions beyond 2025, and curb the Iranian ballistic-missile program.