Despite the Biden administration’s two years of cringing, futile negotiations with the Iranian theocrats, he’s back with yet another disastrous proposal–– an unwritten “understanding” regarding the mullahcracy’s efforts to build nuclear weapons. But the regime is close, perhaps mere months, to having enough enriched uranium at the purity needed to manufacture weapons. The current outreach, if successful, will lead to a much more dangerous Middle East, especially for our allies like Israel and Sunni Muslim states.

The “understanding” as reported does nothing to fix the deep flaws in our foreign policy toward Iran for the last 44 years, particularly the failings of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed in 2015 by the U.S. and six other world powers. The provisions of this new plan include pledges from Iran not to enrich uranium any closer to the 90% needed for nuclear weapons, along with the return of American hostages. As a down payment, Iran a few weeks ago received from Iraq $2.76 billion after Biden waived sanctions on the funds. But don’t worry, Iran will spend the windfall on “food and medicine,” an old bait-and-switch we saw Saddam Hussein pull on us after the first Gulf War.

In return for our feckless generosity, Iran will receive further sanctions relief and other payments totaling as much as $20 billion, with a promise of no new sanctions, even as Iran keeps possession of its 60% enriched uranium, enough for five bombs. Nor is it clear the mullahs will face inspections and censures from the International Atomic Energy Agency. By the way, there’s no word on an IAEA finding in February that Iran has already enriched uranium to 84%, a claim that Iran brushed off as an “inspector’s error.”

As the Wall Street Journal editorial said, ‘“Trust but verify’ is being turned on its head. There’s no trust and little verification. The new strategy is hope and pay.”

Moreover, these terms are even worse than the JCPOA that serially has failed to slow down Iran’s march to nuclear weapons, its international adventurism, or its support for terrorism. The “understanding” merely reprises the fatal assumption that signing multinational agreements and joining globalist institutions, absent a credible threat of force, can slow down or stop an aggressor. In particular we shouldn’t put our faith in Iran. After all, in 1970 Iran had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but after the ’79 revolution secretly began violating its terms. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the mullahs started violating the JCPOA before the ink on the agreement had dried.

Especially Iran, since for 44 years, it had declared itself our enemy, attacking U.S. civilians, troops, contractors, and military facilities. This violence escalated in 1983 in Beirut, with the April bombing of our embassy, killing 17; and then in October, with the suicide-bombing of our military barracks housing Marines and other personnel, killing 241––at the time, the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. Before the bombing, our troops were under constant fire and taking casualties  from snipers, rockets, and artillery. The terrorists were trained and financed by Iran.

The damage of these attacks was compounded by the Reagan administration’s failure to retaliate. Unlike the French and Israelis, also the victims of suicide terrorist attacks, who sent their jets to bomb and strafe the terrorists training camps in the Bekaa Valley. Instead, as Secretary of State  George Shultz wrote in his memoirs, the U.S. suffered “pullout fever,” and the Marines “left in a rush . . . . amid ridicule from the French and utter disappointment and despair from the Lebanese.”

The lesson of Beirut also went unlearned. A year after the Beirut bombings, Islamist terrorists kidnapped four Americans in Lebanon, including the CIA station chief William Buckley, who ended up being beaten and tortured to death by Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah terrorist who masterminded the Marine barracks bombing.

The kidnappings were the seed of another act of appeasement, the feckless Iran-Contra scandal. This operation schemed to ransom the Americans by selling Iran over 2,000 TOW anti-tank missiles and over 100 HAWK anti-aircraft missiles. In the end, arming an enemy sworn to our destruction––not to mention that this wacky scheme was seen as way to improve relations with Iran––did secured the release of the surviving three hostages. But they were quickly replaced by three other Americans kidnapped in Lebanon.

Someone forgot Rudyard Kipling’s common sense: Once you have paid the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.

We need to remember these failures, for they sent a powerful message to Iran and other enemies like Osama bin Laden that we are a “weak horse” and would run rather than fight back. No wonder Iran has had American blood on its hands, most recently from drone attacks in Syria.

And don’t forget, Iran has joined Russia and China in a triple alliance of our autocratic enemies.

Give that history of aggression, cringing outreach to the mullahs by the Biden administration merely confirms their contempt for our power.

Worse yet, we don’t even need that sorry history to know that “diplomatic engagement” to negotiate worthless “agreements” end in failure. The two decades before the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia at the 1938 Munich conference were filled with multilateral institutions like the League of Nations, and other treaties like Locarno and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. All three of the future axis powers were signatories to all these “parchment barriers,” and all three violated their terms and invaded other nations––the evil all these pacts were supposed to end. Yet that evil still endures, as Vladimir Putin has graphically demonstrated in Ukraine.

And if those monitory tales of appeasing Iran aren’t enough, take a look at the 30-year  history of North Korea’s march to nuclear weapons. “Diplomatic engagement” produced unreciprocated concessions to the Kim syndicate, such as withdrawing nuclear weapons from South Korea, and letting the North join the Nonproliferation Treaty. The North’s violations of the treaty came a mere two months later, and were met by sanctions that ended up being a mere bump in the road to nuclear weapons capability.

What explains this repetition of failure over multiple decades? Comments by Biden and his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken tell us. “I continue to believe,” Biden said last July, “that diplomacy is the best way to achieve this outcome.” Blinken agreed: “We continue to believe that ultimately diplomacy is the most effective way to deal with this, but that’s not where the focus is.” As one wag responded, “So did Neville Chamberlain.”

Both Biden and Blinken, however, were following the same “new world order” script of their former boss Barack Obama. In 2015, Obama rationalized the feckless Iran nuclear deal by evoking the diplomacy bromides: he praised “new UN Security Council resolutions” as the foundations for “hard, painstaking diplomacy––not saber-rattling, not tough talk,” and decried “military action” that “would be far less effective” in stopping Iran’s nuclear weapon ambitions.

Obama, of course, was right about empty bluster without action. But bad diplomacy without action is even more dangerous.

This fetishizing of diplomacy is a staple of the “rules-based international order” idealism promulgated by the globalist elite. Here at home, it has been a go-to criticism of Republican foreign policy, part of the Dems’ accusations that Republicans are trigger-happy brutes without the nuanced sensibilities required for diplomacy.

George W. Bush, for example, in 2002 labored for months to no avail to get the U.N. to sanction the war against Saddam Hussein. Yet critics abroad and at home faulted Bush for ignoring diplomacy: the Senate Minority Leader, Democrat Tom Daschle, a few days before the war began, said “I’m saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to war.”

Similarly, the Democrat candidates for the upcoming presidential election “offered a near-unified assault” on the president, according to the New York Times, for, among other charges, his “failure to enlist the help of the United Nations in conducting the war”––even though Hussein had violated with impunity 18 U.N. Resolutions, and Bush had spent several fruitless months on diplomacy in a failed attempt to get the U.N. to approve the war, and salvage some of the   U.N.’s damaged credibility.

This canard that Bush had “failed” at diplomacy––despite having persuaded 48 nations to join the coalition army that ousted Hussein––quickly became received wisdom for the Dems. Presidential candidate Barack Obama made this alleged failure a leitmotif of both his campaign, and the Democrats’ foreign policy.

In 2007, Obama in a Foreign Affairs article called the war a “morass,” one we should withdraw from rather than “escalate,” a nod to the old Vietnam rhetorical playbook. In an obvious swipe at George Bush, Obama wrote, “we must launch a comprehensive regional and international diplomatic initiative to help broker an end” to the war. More generally, he said we needed “to reinvigorate American diplomacy,” and “renew American leadership in the world.” He pledged “to rebuild the alliances, partnerships, and institutions necessary to confront the common threats and enhance common security.”

Finally, Obama sounded the old notes of idealism and American guilt: “To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people,” which means helping other nations “not in the spirit of a patron but in the spirit of a partner––a partner mindful of his own imperfections.” Jimmy Carter couldn’t have said it any better.

In rejecting the mild realism of the Bush administration, Obama set out a naïve “citizen of the world” foreign policy, one in which our own national security and interests, not to mention sovereignty, must be subordinated to the security and interests of the “global community.” This approach, Obama wrote, requires working through transnational institutions like the International Criminal Court. In 2009, Obama told the Financial Times, “In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people will succeed.”

Yet as history shows us, nations who do try to dominate, from Nazi Germany to Putin’s Russia, will not be stopped by fine words, cringing apologies, and lofty ideals. This ecumenical vision ignores the great, sometimes conflicting diversity of the world’s peoples. Conclaves of diplomats exchanging bromides and posing for the cameras do not always share a “harmony of interests,” a “common ground” that allows for a resolution of conflicts absent a credible threat of lethal force.

For all nations have their own interests and cherished beliefs that often conflict with those of other nations, and will usually require a contest of force to be resolved. This means not that we can neglect diplomacy or alliances, but that alliances and treaties should be negotiated only when the primacy of our own security and interests is assumed.

Barack Obama’s globalist idealism made him popular in the halls of Brussels and the solons of Davos so admired by Democrats, but their application in foreign policy put at risk our own security and that of our allies. For example, in 2011 Obama withdrew our troops from Iraq, creating a vacuum that the jihadist terrorist gang ISIS filled; and allowing Russia to seize a major role in the Syrian civil war, still ongoing over a decade later.

Obama had to return some troops back to Iraq, but the lesson went unlearned. For example, in 2014, Vladimir Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine. The lack of a mind-concentrating response to Putin’s violation of national borders only encouraged more adventurism until Putin began the conquest of the rest of Ukraine last year, for now a war of attrition with no plausible end-game.

Despite these repudiations of Obama’s idealism, in 2015 he committed this country––without bothering with Congress’s, and perforce the citizens’ approval––to the misbegotten Iran nuclear deal. Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out, to the great consternation of our foreign policy idealists, who like Obama and the Europeans considered the deal the acme of “smart diplomacy.”

Nor did Obama’s vice-president Joe Biden learn any of those lessons. In 2021, he ordered the shambolic evacuation of Afghanistan, losing 13 soldiers in a terrorist bombing. He also left behind American citizens, Afghan allies, and billions of dollars in weapons and military infrastructure for the lupine Taliban, who two decades earlier had nurtured al Qaeda, and now have created a haven for ISIS and other jihadists.

These failures have many bipartisan fathers, but central to all is the diplomacy delusion, the notion that aggressors can be talked out of their perceived interests, revanchist passions, and traditional beliefs, particularly regarding violence.

On this point, the last word goes to the great historian of Soviet Russia, Robert Conquest, who wrote about the dangers of naïve diplomacy. In Reflections on a Ravaged Century, he said about Cold War diplomacy,

“Since diplomats’ forte is negotiation, they believe negotiation to be good in itself . . . . But the Soviets did what their interests required when the alternative seemed less acceptable, and negotiation was merely a technical adjunct. . . . It is easy enough to fall into the trap of thinking that others think within reason like ourselves. But this trap is precisely the error that must be avoided in foreign affairs.”

For a century we have fallen into that trap.  Ronald Reagan avoided it and won the Cold War through tough diplomacy, backed by military spending on armaments, and kinetic pushback on Soviet adventurism. For as Thomas Hobbes said, “Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” That’s the lesson our foreign policy idealists need to learn.