The Problems with Biden’s Surreptitious Appeasement of the Islamic Republic, by Way of Virtually Unconditional Sanctions Relief
And the Case for Confronting Iran
“Washington acknowledges that there is no simple way to return to the original nuclear deal and a longer and stronger deal is needed. Yet the lack of a viable alternative leaves the Biden administration seemingly rudderless. Instead, the White House appears to be stalling for time, hoping some unforeseen bit of good luck resolves its nuclear dilemma. But deferring decisive action may soon become impracticable. Time is on the side of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Soon, no combination of diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions will be sufficient to stop him if he decides he wants the bomb.” — Saeed Ghasseminajad, “A Perilous Equation, Khameini’s Nuclear Ambitions and Washington’s Inaction,” Saeed ~ The National Interest
“Biden entered office in 2021 offering to ease restrictions if Tehran would adhere to its end of the deal. His officials have also occasionally talked about a “less for less” interim agreement, in which some sanctions could be lifted if Iran halted uranium enrichment well short of weapons grade. (The White House last week denied that any such deal is in the offing.)
Yet since Biden’s election, the Iranians have accelerated their enrichment activity as well as the development of missiles and military drones, the better to threaten their neighbors and menace international shipping in the Persian Gulf. They also increased funding and training for a network of proxy militias and terrorist groups across the Middle East. These programs were aided by the Biden administration’s lax implementation of existing sanctions, which allowed the regime to export record quantities of oil.
Although Biden and his officials have repeatedly claimed that they are resolved to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons, they have done little to stop the Islamic Republic from reaching the nuclear threshold, from where it is only days from acquiring enough fissile material for a bomb. Khamenei now says the West, even if it wanted to, couldn’t stop Iran from developing one. (He claims nuclear weapons are un-Islamic, but Iran was caught trying to make one, with Russian help, in 2002.)” — Bobby Ghosh “Iran Wants to Make a Deal the US Must Refuse” ~ Bloomberg
“United States’ favor. While Washington waits, Iran will advance its nuclear program, strengthen its relations with China and Russia, exploit weakened sanctions pressure, and become less isolated from the rest of the world. In the past, Iran has been willing to curb its nuclear activities when it believed the risks of continuing them were too high and it had a credible diplomatic off-ramp. But such conditions are unlikely to materialize anytime soon. Indeed, Iran may believe that its nuclear brinkmanship is finally paying off.” — Eric Brewer and Henry Rome, “Biden’s Iran Gamble” ~ Foreign Affairs
“There’s a reason no one goes to study at the Neville Chamberlain school of foreign affairs” — Ted Cruz trying to be clever, in a scathing, if a little bit shrill and windy, speech indicting Biden’s Iran policy, at the Hudson Institute
In his interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Walter Russell Meade, Bibi Netanyahu recounts an exchange he once had with Barack Obama, in which Netanyahu remarked that preemptive strikes on Iran could greatly enhance the prestige of American power globally.
Obama replied with prototypical condescension, “Bibi nobody likes Goliath. I don’t want to strut the world stage an eight hundred pound gorilla.”
Bibi said he would like to be a “Twelve hundred pound gorilla.”
I agree with Netanyahu. What Machiavelli said about power in Renaissance Florence—that although it’s ideal to be loved and feared, if faced with the choice between being loved or feared, it would be better to be feared— is true about geopolitical power today. Netanyahu added with irony, “virtue has no guaranteed victory in history.”
We can glean the wisdom of that truth from observing the failures of Obama’s conciliatory foreign policy, and the limits of Joe Biden’s dewy-eyed internationalism. I mean all this embarrassing senile, intensely dissonant incoherent bluster about capital D “Democracy.”
Biden I think like Woodrow Wilson, deludes himself that American democracy’s glory consists absurdly in its innocence and moral perfection (all the while, whenever it suits his narrow political interest, trashing the Supreme Court of course; politicizing his own Justice Department protesting in that dissonant hollow way, “Hunter did nothing wrong;” demonizing the Republican party as “semifascist;” unconstitutionally cancelling student loans and contemplating using the 14th amendment to skip Congress on the debt limit)
Democracy to Joe Biden, is a far left progressive candle to him in a dark abyss of white supremacy, MAGA republicans, and billionaires. And since all that counts as big D democracy is Net Zero emissions and antiracism, then we have first to realize how fragile democracy is, say by making desperate slapdash deals with terrorists in the hopes they never bother us anymore, i.e. pulling out of Afghanistan in rolling out an obscene “foreign policy for the middle class,” in the vain hopes that isolationist Trump supporters, privileged “workers,” and asinine nat-cons might hate your presidency a little less.
Doug Mills New York Times
But the idea that the incessant, unrelenting, insufferable sturm and drang of infantilized populist brats has to be pandered to, at grave risk to the global order, necessitating that the US automatically lesson its footprint abroad— just because a dumb faction of Americans considers it desirable that we conveniently disengage from overseas military “entanglements:” will only make intervention sooner or later, like it or not, more necessary and more urgent.
This is hyperbolic but nevertheless it is true, that because Neville Chamberlain failed to confront Hitler at Munich, because Bill Clinton failed to contain Saddam Hussein, because Obama refused to let Ukraine join NATO for fear of antagonizing Putin, to name just a few examples, the West’s well-intentioned but tragically misguided reticence has emboldened autocrats and degenerated into conflicts that would not have happened with a more assertive foreign policy outlook. And I would add the principle reason Iraq and Afghanistan were so muddled and prolonged: was we failed to deploy enough troops with enough firepower, instead fighting in stops and starts. The big historical problem with American foreign policy is that we start wars with the right aims only after hesitating for virtuous reasons— yet we lack the resolve to fully commit ourselves to the high tasks we eventually set out to accomplish almost too late. And our goals tend to be confused from the start.
Confronting Autocracy Head-On is a Superpower’s Duty
Recently it’s on account of Obama that Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and it’s on account of Biden’s Freudian fixation with “Democracy” and that he allowed the reactionary despair of a faction of ordinary Americans to influence policy, that Biden surrendered Afghanistan to jihadists, and shortly thereafter Russia invaded to conquer Ukraine. This is too natural. When you put the national interest or America first, you sacrifice the world by logical necessity, and so ironically endanger American lives; and losing global influence, you make future interventions more likely and more costly. This basic fact of grand strategy doesn’t have a little relevance with regard to the tangled mess the last few administrations have made of the Middle East.
In Hal Brands’s review of Melvyn Leffler’s Confronting Saddam Hussein (sitting on my nightstand) in Foreign Affairs, he writes perceptively,
The ‘No more Iraqs mindset carries other dangers, as well. In an ideal world, Washington would surely love to abandon an unstable Middle East. Yet it cannot because it still has important interests there, from counterterrorism to ensuring the smooth functioning of the global energy market. A stubborn resistance to Middle Eastern wars might help avoid future quagmires. Or as Obama discovered, it might lead to episodes in which violent upheaval builds, US interests are threatened, and Washington intervenes later from a worse position at a higher price.
It might sound crass: but if you ask me, I think it’s been long enough since the US was engaged in an overseas “entanglement.” And now, if only because Biden had the smug conceit to pull out of a region flush with oil but mired in disorder and rife with religious extremism, I’m anxious we’re overdue to start bombing the unrepentant Arab world again. Iran in particular would be the ideal place to begin a new campaign against the imperial ambitions of radical Islam, not least to intimidate China and bolster our posture towards Putin and autocrats in general. Here is why.
Iran’s Geo-Strategic Threat
Iran hates the west and America in particular. They always have, ever since the CIA instituted the Sha. They are a rogue terrorist state and an expansionist regime that seeks no less than total control over as much of the Middle East as their military and economic influence can afford them. Iran is also the foremost ally of both our two big enemies Russia and China, although we never hear about it in the mainstream news, and Iran is no less threatening than they are. Truly what Russia is to Europe, and China is to East Asia, Iran is to the Middle East. So Iran, being a threat to the Persian Gulf region, particularly Israel—Iran being what it is and long has been—also makes them a threat to the entire world, and therefore, is a threat to America and America’s western and nonwestern allies. Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh write in the Wall Street Journal, “China and Russia Encourage Iran to Go Nuclear”
During Barack Obama’s presidency, as Iran’s nuclear program gained speed, the U.S. and Europe piled on sanctions, sometimes with the approbation of China and Russia. Today, geopolitics—as well as realpolitik nuclear calculations—are much friendlier to the Islamic Republic. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made it crystal clear that Vladimir Putin doesn’t care for a world order led by Europe and the U.S. China, too, has retreated from being “a responsible stakeholder” in a liberal trading system. Instead it is trying to construct its own version of an East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, much of it designed to give Beijing dominion over Taiwan.
This revisionist alliance has ended Iran’s strategic loneliness. Russia, China and Iran all want to diminish American power. They recognize that they need to help each other militarily and economically to achieve common goals. This is why the Islamic Republic has supplied drone technology and artillery shells to Russia for use in a conflict that, at first glance, has no revolutionary Islamic interests. It is becoming increasingly hard to believe that Russia, which appears ready to deliver advanced Sukhoi Su-35 fighters and more sophisticated air-defense systems to Iran, is averse to sharing nuclear expertise and technology with the clerical regime—assuming Tehran is lacking something in its nuclear engineering.
Circumventing US sanctions Biden has declined to enforce with a ghost fleet, as Ted Cruz assesses in harrowing detail in his Hudson Institute speech, Iran has been selling Russia armed suicide drones and cruise missiles which have been invaluable to Russia’s scorched earth tactics, razing Ukrainian infrastructure, and massacring and terrorizing sheltering civilians. In return Russia is selling Iran advanced weapons technology to build Iran’s conventional forces, S-400 SAM’s (Surface-to-air missiles), and poised to give them Su-35 fighter jets.
Regional Menace
Iran funds terrorist proxies all over the Arab Middle East, in Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and Lebanon. These terrorist proxies have recently fired upon, injured and killed American troops in Iraq and Syria with hundreds of deadly ballistic missiles. Under the banner of Palestinean terrorism, Iran supplies Hezbollah in the Levant subjecting Israel to a continual barrage of missile strikes and bombings. They arm the Houthi’s in Yemen to wage a brutal proxy war with Saudi Arabia. However recently with the inauspicious direction of Chinese diplomacy, Iran has brokered a peace with their longstanding Saudi Arabia, such that the Saudis have reopened their embassy in Tehran, effectively nullifying their Sunni enemy for the moment which bodes poorly for Israel’s security. Iran also sells China tons of oil at discounted prices. 80% of their exports go to China. And as if they didn’t distribute enough oil, I read in the Financial Times that they have been provocatively seizing oil tankers bound for the US in the Strait of Hormuz.
And not to be overlooked, Iran is the biggest ally besides Russia of Bashar al-Assad, the genocidal dictator of Syria who with Iranian backing, has massacred 200,000 of his own people using chemical weapons and displaced millions in the Syrian Civil War, Assad who in addition was lately readmitted into the Arab league— an amoral regional coalition of Arabian nations—12 years after the Syrian Civil War, as if nothing had ever happened. Consider Syria an Iranian proxy state.
On top of all this boosting autocracy and funding terror, Iran has plotted countless assassinations on American soil, and poses a serious direct threat to the homeland and Europe, and immediately Israel with long range ballistic missiles. They have ICBM’s (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) that can reach as far as Eastern Europe. At the moment they are even working on a space program which may enable their ICBM’s to reach all the way to America.
Humanitarian Disgrace
They oppress, brutalize, and routinely butcher their own people. Every year they brutally execute hundreds of civilians as punishment for protesting the regime’s autocratic rule. Since the state’s morality police murdered a woman for incorrectly wearing her head scarf, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the military arm of the theocracy has waged a particularly brutal crackdown on protests to the regime over the last nine months. This even included a plot to poison little girls.
The Nuclear Program and the Perversity of Biden’s New Deal
Here’s the other thing. After taking decades to develop the technology and acquire the knowledge, Iran is on the brink of a nuclear break out. They have hundreds of pounds of enriched uranium, which they will soon be able to produce in large quantities at the level of weapons grade. And they make no attempt to conceal that such weapons will be used to realize their colonial designs on the wider Middle East. As Putin uses nukes as a coercive tactic to rebuild the USSR, there’s no doubt Iran will do the same thing, menacing neighbors and threatening nuclear strikes. If we allow it.
Given Iran is malicious, given they are revolutionary, and given they are the third wheel to Putin and Xi’s “No Limits” romance, it goes without saying, the Islamic Republic absolutely cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. And if we absolutely cannot allow that, it follows we are permitted to resort practically to any means necessary to stop it. And the terrible stakes dictate we don’t take half measures.
Matthew Continetti writes in his fuming Washington Free Beacon column, “The Biden (Iran) Deal that Dares Not Speak its Name,”
Imagine you are a senior national-security official. A revolutionary foreign power has worked for decades to undermine American strength and American alliances in a critical region. It is the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism and has funded and directed proxy forces that have killed and maimed U.S. personnel. Its goal is to drive the United States from its corner of the globe and eliminate America’s closest ally in the Greater Middle East. It has spent the past four presidential administrations building the military and technical infrastructure to produce nuclear weapons while concealing and lying about its program. It violates human rights with impunity and has spent the past nine months brutally suppressing a popular revolt against its theocratic rule. It supplies the drones and other weaponry that Russia uses to prosecute an illegal and barbaric war on the sovereign nation of Ukraine.
Would you be inclined to bargain with such a regime? If your answer — against all evidence — is yes, then you can look forward to a short and unhappy career in Joe Biden’s State Department. For President Biden is on the verge of betraying Congress and the American people by rewarding the Islamic Republic of Iran for its various misdeeds.
Biden’s attempts to revive the Iran deal are scandalous. It is immoral as well as dangerous to contemplate. Though he finally did admit the deal dead in November, (saying this, that it was dead but that he wasn’t calling it that— rather Trumpian if you ask me), he has skipped plan B (what I endorse: tightening sanctions, enforcing cooperation with the IAEA through the snapback mechanism of the JCPOA, and first and foremost military pressure) instead exploring a plan C, as Henry Rome and Eric Brewer call it in Foreign Affairs— dumber than another Iran Deal. It is an agreement couched as an “understanding”—to skip congressional review— that in spite of all Iran’s provocations and executions, Iran put its nuclear activity on pause while Biden floods the economy with free money by waiving sanctions. Yes unsurprisingly he’s trying Bidenomics (throwing money at x to see if it will make x cooperate with you, synonyms: bribe, grift) on the Iranians to see if it will help him postpone the Iran question until after 2024. If I throw money at the IRGC like I threw money at student loans, will that get me their vote, too? You half-expect his offer to lift sanctions would be conditioned on Iran promising to set the money aside for decarbonization too.
In a recent letter to Biden in an attempt to compel him to honor the obligations of the 2015 Nuclear Agreement Review Act—passed with the Iran deal binding the executive to broker no deals with Iran without congressional review— Republican senator Michael Mcfaul eloquently lays out the perversity of Biden’s goals and their Wilsonian intent,
Beyond Iran’s nuclear provocations, its malign activity continues to threaten vital US national security interests. Iranian proxies continue to attack US troops in the Middle East. In recent months, Iran has seized oil tankers operating in international waterways, violating freedom of navigation and attacking the global economy. Iran is attempting to assassinate Americans on US soil and continues to arm its proxies throughout the Middle East. Additionally Iran is fueling Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine by providing drones and other weapons in violation of restrictions set out under Annex B to United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231.
Rather than using United States diplomatic leverage and military deterrence to dissuade Iran from engaging in these malign activities, this administration is rewarding Iran’s bad behavior in exchange for a false promise of deescalation.
To be clear Biden’s carrots now are to waive sanctions, liquifying the Iranian economy with billions of dollars in unfrozen assets—the administration says, only for “humanitarian” applications, as if we could enforce that—in exchange for a promise that Iran abruptly halt their nuclear ambitions, and accept the oversight of IAEA inspectors and return American hostages; importantly this is not to even roll back and limit the nuke program, the key stipulation on which the Iran Deal was predicated. And in response: Ayotollah Khameini, de facto theocrat of Iran, has said he will only cut a deal on the condition Iran is permitted to keep the structure of the nuclear program wholly intact.
Why, Though I’m not Sure it Needs Explaining, This is a Hideous Idea
This would be a terrible ghastly bargain with the devil only the most irresponsible imbecile could make, because, it probably goes without saying, it would strengthen and grow the Iranian economy, then when the IRGC consider themselves self-sufficient enough, they can renege on their promise—like any deal you make with an autocracy— and restart the weapons program again, becoming a full-blown imperial Islamic superpower. Also whatever deal Biden makes on Iran’s terms could not in itself guarantee transparency on the nuclear enrichment activity. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board notes in “Biden’s Iran Courtship,”
Color us skeptical that an unwritten agreement, without clear technical restrictions, would compel Iran to reinstall monitoring equipment, turn over data or submit to enhanced inspections. It isn’t clear what role the IAEA would play, and the U.S. would risk Iranian withdrawal if it insisted on real verification or responded meaning-fully to Iran’s foreign aggression or domestic crackdowns.
In contrast the Foundation for Defense of Democracy’s Richard Goldberg sketches out a more assertive alternative Iran strategy in the Dispatch, “Iran Needs an Ultimatum, Not a New Deal,”
Iran is obligated under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to declare its nuclear materials and activities to the IAEA. But an IAEA director general is only as strong as the agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors allows. Led by the West, that board has dallied and demanded Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA just twice in five years. Its upcoming June 5 meeting presents an opportunity to change course.
Instead of being rewarded with a toothless nuclear deal, what Iran needs is an ultimatum: Meet a clear timetable for cooperation with the IAEA or the West will refer Iran’s NPT non-compliance to the U.N. Security Council for countermeasures. Russia or China might want to protect Iran at the council, but both countries would be powerless if the United Kingdom, France, or Germany—remaining JCPOA member states—completed the “snapback” of U.N. sanctions on Iran. The snapback procedure was built into the JCPOA and its accompanying Security Council resolution just in case Iran breached its nuclear commitments.
Among the benefits of snapback are restoring the U.N. arms embargo on Iran, preventing a missile embargo from expiring this October, eliminating the JCPOA’s nuclear sunsets, and restoring an international demand that Iran halt all enrichment-related activities. Unless Russia or China can get a resolution passed to overrule it—a resolution that can be vetoed by the West—the snapback would occur after 30 days.
The Wall Street Journal basically recommends the same solution. While I would support these preventive measures as a logical first resort, I think a mature Iran policy should emphasize embargoes and more sanctions are no substitute for what Netanyahu calls a “credible military threat” if Iran pursues WMDs in defiance of their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and undeterred by UN sanctions and arms embargoes.
Today’s Iran Hawks Need to Face up to the Limits of Sanctions
Indeed we need to have the far-sight to consider where it would leave us if Iran were to repudiate cooperation with the IAEA. They already have. They have only contempt for the IAEA. And we sanction them a lot already. Trump sanctioned them a hell of a lot. Sanctions don’t seem to be working, especially not with Russia and China in their back pocket. I’ve seen some right-wingers argue the sanctions by strangling the economy have emboldened the protesters. But there is another argument that sanctions have only hardened the regime and made it harder for the protesters. And there’s no question that since Trump abandoned the Iran deal that under his “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions that Biden moronically has chosen to quietly hit the brakes on, the weapons program has accelerated, unconstrained and undeterred by the US’s clear pivot to abandon the Middle East under the last three populist anti-interventionist administrations.
The Case for Contingency Planning
We need to confront the inconvenient reality that economic sanctions and diplomacy won’t be enough to contain Iran or stop them going nuclear, and potentially bringing the might of the US military back into the Middle East. Sanctions are a blunt instrument insufficient for containing a heavily armed—and arming—countries with deeply radical ideologies. And the UN is mainly a symbolic organization with no universally legitimate authority to guarantee world peace and cooperation.
And Iran is pretty close to acquiring WMD’s already. We can try and impose a new regime of rules on them, but we have already tried this, and it doesn’t seem to be working. Let’s be honest. Though we still have a lot of diplomatic and economic options at our disposal, no amount of diplomacy or sanctions so far seems sufficiently stringent to contain Iran’s imminent break out. Even if we trigger the snapback mechanism of the JCPOA and with the IAEA we successfully limit their program—perhaps by destroying some centrifuges, setting up more surveillance cameras—Iran already has the knowledge to build the bomb.
When I listen to conservative Iran hawks drone about more sanctions, I feel tired to read this stuff. I think before we do anything else, we should be thinking about marshalling together the support of US-Israel allied nations, and uniting with Netanyahu to simply clobber the IRGC.
Before we go any further with sanctions or embargoes, we need to be real, and we need to be straight, and we need to at least put military force on the table. Jonathan Schechter in his Hudson Institute article, “The System is Blinking Red Over Iran” admits,
… the president, his administration, and Congress can make clear that the United States and its allies can and will use force to prevent Iran from violating its nuclear obligations. The United States would not be moving its red lines, but rather enforcing them. Doing so would send a powerful message to Iranian leaders that they have already crossed America’s red lines and need to back down.
Such a threat might not be effective. But without a credible American commitment to use force, no diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear problem is possible
Time to Get all Tangled up in the Middle East Again: the Smart Way to Beat Back Russia and China
Iran is a revanchist rogue terrorist, radical Islamic, fascist beast. And the Middle East is a much more dangerous place now than it has been in decades with America gone and clearly desiring to stay away after Afghanistan, Israel vulnerable left to fend for themselves, the Saudis pacified and more interested in American golf anyway. Moreover as we deserted the Middle East the Islamic republic has the support of China the second biggest economy in the world, and Russia their rogue genocidal twin, and I suppose Bashar Al-Assad. Jesus Christ
Short of igniting a full blown Iraq War redux, we should draft plans to unite with Netanyahu who has already offered his support and wants our help, to knock out the Revolutionary Guard. With the combined force of the US and Israeli militaries, we should fly in and concuss them at marginal expense and inflict a devastating toll on their nuclear program. Instead of thinking of this as a last resort, we should think of it as an opportunity to show the world the West will not stand for nuclear proliferation, for terrorism or territorial aggression, and that we’re still hard on this stuff, and perhaps liberating Iranian women particularly from the tyranny of radical Islamic oppression.
— Jay
I agree with you about the fact that "more" sanctions are likely to do little to stop Iran from doing whatever it wants to do but I am not sure how the type of military action you propose would actually works. None of Iran's direct neighbors(Turkey, Afghanistan, Azerbaijian, Pakistan, and Iraq) would support military action(unlike Kuwait against Iraq in 2003) and by many accounts all actually support the mullahs in Tehran. Essentially the US and Israel would have to re-invade Iraq simply to even get to Iran first and I am not all sure Kuwait would support another invasion of Iraq simply for US troops to move on from to Iran. So we would what have to invade Syria from Israel through the Golan to invade Iraq to invade Iran? I don't think in a million years the American people would ever support such a strategy.