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Don’t Ask Me to Explain The Iran Nuclear Agreement
If anyone is hoping for foreign policy wisdom from me about this, you’re looking to the wrong person. Nothing about this makes sense. Adam Garfinkle’s piece in the American Interest strikes me as closest to rational. He rejects the idea that the negotiations are “a cover for shepherding that bomb into being as an ante toward bringing about an Iranian-U.S. condominium to ‘stabilize’ the Middle East,” this on the grounds that the explanation is essentially a conspiracy theory:
It behooves those who hold such views to explain why an American President would think that multinational nuclear proliferation in the Middle East suits mid- to long-term U.S. national security interests. It obviously doesn’t, and so they cannot explain their position rationally.
But he notes that it would seem the President was willing to accept any deal, however unfavorable:
… the hopeful interpretations attached to this decision … make absolutely no sense. The manifest unwillingness of the President to walk away from these increasingly pointless and even ridiculous negotiations on March 31 directly contradicts the intended message that he is, in fact, willing to walk away. Moreover, if U.S. negotiators make concession after concession after concession, as they have, then it leads others to wonder where the line is that changes a good deal into a bad one from which we walk away. Conclusion: There probably isn’t any such line.
Note that the Iranians are now claiming the Administration is lying about the terms of the deal. No idea what to think of that: I’m not inclined to start trusting Tehran more than I do Washington. If I were, then I wouldn’t worry about negotiating with Tehran, right? But the series of Tweets emanating last night from the Iranian negotiating team hardly filled me with confidence that any kind of deal in which I could repose even face-value confidence had been struck.
What I simply don’t understand is the point of this deal—in the President’s mind. As Garfinkle points out, Iran is already a nuclear threshold state, and we’re already on the verge of massive WMD proliferation in the region. Thus his conclusion follows naturally:
Sooner or later, under either this Administration or its successor, we will be right back where we started before all the talking began: We will have to choose between living with an nuclear-armed Iran, letting some other power try to take care of it, or using a variety of moderate- to high-risk means to first paralyze and ultimately prevent it. When all is said and done, what happened today in Switzerland will be seen as not having made so much as a dent in this wall of bad options.
So why are we doing this? What piece of the puzzle is missing? Could there be any secret provision that makes this deal seem rational? Could there be any good reason to kick this decision further down the line? From what I know of it, the deal doesn’t even seem worth the money spent on all those expensive orchid arrangements.
I surely appreciate that there are no good options—only the least bad—but why the urgency to sign off on this particular bad option? Does it look less bad than the others in any obvious way to you? Is there any information that could be added to the picture of the negotiations we now have that would make you say, “Okay, this now seems clearly to be the least bad of our bad options?”
Published in Foreign Policy, General
Wouldn’t the fact that the Iranians are calling us liars with respect to this deal suggest that one of these two things is correct:
I’m not really seeing another alternative.
If it is #1 it confirms my worst fears and doubts about this administration. If it is #2 then we’ve just lifted the sanctions and gotten essentially nothing — not slow down in the pursuit of nukes, nothing. If that is the case I sure hope Zafar is right because otherwise it would seem to me that we’ve just brought the day of reckoning a little closer.
The Iranians could be:
3 lying for the sake of their domestic politics
So the possibilities could also include combinations: 1 and 3, or 2 and 3, or 1 and 2 and 3.
(I left out number 4 – we fully intend to ignore/upend this agreement – which is actually quite a real possibility when you look at Congress)
Zafar, two things.
First, it might be worth pointing out that your argument leans on Atlantic’s Pete Beinart, who in turn rests upon Gary Sick, calling him an “Iran expert”.
Gary Sick is indeed an Iran expert, in that he was on the national Security Council under, wait for it, Jimmy Carter. He was the first notable voice to take up the torches and pitchforks of the loony Lyndon LaRouche crowd asserting that Reagan had cooked up a deal with the Mullahs to embarrass Carter right before the election, the “October surprise”, which is where we get that term.
This sort of “expertise” is the nightmare bad advice that only an institution oh higher education or some other fat government program could love. Ohm look, he’s holed up at Columbia with a jar of peanut butter and a room full of full-tuition hostages.
Second, when you posit a fourth possiblity that “we” fully intend to upend or ignore this “deal” based on what Congress might do to thwart the President, that’s not something that the administration gets to take credit for.
Indeed no, that would get written up on Congress’ ledger. But you can see that this might be irrelevant to the Iranians?
(October Surprise – ha! I’d forgotten about that – takes me back.)
I’m thinking it would be a good idea for me to read that piece before replying to your comment. I couldn’t find anything by Mike in Tablet–do you mean this one? If we’re talking about the same piece, I’ll mention a few more things that come to mind. Otherwise, if you’d share the link of the piece in Tablet, I’ll read that first.
My intuition–which should not be confused with scholarship or analysis–is that Garfinkle is right to suspect that above all, we’re seeing the influence of Attribute 1 types (I like your typology, btw, and suspect it’s very useful. I’m going to give it a lot more thought.).
I’d like to make a chart of everyone who’s apt to have had an influence on this policy and really try to figure out why he or she was put in that position, how much influence he or she has, who else might have an influence, and what information they might have that we can’t know about. My intuition should be taken as just that, of course– intuition, which is not much better than “prejudice.” I should probably spend some time trying to figure out why I have this intuition.
I’m not inclined to see Obama as simply someone who hates America, end of story. First, because I’ve never had a sense of a strong emotion of any kind from Obama–which is why many people respond to him as psychopathic, I suspect. But that doesn’t mean he is one; it just means that I don’t have a good, intuitive sense of Obama’s internal life. I’ve never met him in person or even seen him in person. I’ve only seen him on television. I know I respond badly to him and dislike him, but he doesn’t truly remind me the campus radicals I’ve known–and I’ve known many. He doesn’t have that kind of lunatic passion about him, does he?
I don’t find political arguments predicated on the idea that Obama is a traitor or a psychopath useful: not because either idea can be ruled out as absurd, prima facie–such things can happen, historically–but because a large number of Americans who are clearly neither psychopathic nor traitorous see some value or logic in many of his policies. Since that’s the electorate–and really, our argument is with them–it seems to me much more useful to argue that Policy X is not logical. To stick with the Spock arguments, in other words. Otherwise, people who don’t (for some reason) have the same can’t-stand-the-guy instincts about Obama can dismiss what we’re saying as irrational–and a form of identity politics–all too easily.
There may well be a very significant problem with his character, but none of us will ever have an insight into his soul, and we certainly can’t prove it. We can look at specific policies, though, and say, “That makes no sense.”
For sure, many people vote in an irrational way, but there’s nothing we can do about that. I figure a good 20-30 percent of voters are willing to be persuaded by arguments (I can’t prove this: again, it’s an intuition based on a lot of experience of talking to my fellow citizens), and that’s actually enough. Those people need to be convinced, and many of them can be. I do not believe America is a completely lunatic country. I believe it’s going through a very weird period, though, and one that deeply confuses me.
It seems to me that what we’d be looking for is not, necessarily, a ramping up of the military budget. (That’s what I’d look for if I were looking for a sign that we were taking Russia and China seriously.) What I’d look for is a sign that the Administration sees the proposed inspection mechanism as an opportunity for better intelligence-gathering. Obviously, they wouldn’t advertise that. Still, it doesn’t seem entirely implausible. I can’t simply rule out the idea that they’re thinking that way as absurd.
My big concern is that I don’t see any effort to prepare the American people. I see no sign that Obama is saying, “If this doesn’t work–and there is a high likelihood it will not–the options left to us will require great sacrifice. My fellow citizens must be prepared for this.” That seems to me obviously so, and it seems to me it is his responsibility to say so. I think this is the heart of my concern about what he’s doing: He’s not preparing people for a very plausible outcome. Do you think Americans already understand this, deep down?
I find it tragic that we could–in all seriousness, and for good reason–be wondering who is more likely to be lying. That we’re wondering suggests something is very wrong, just on the face of it.
I’m not, but I might believe neither of them.
I don’t forget that at all. But I suspect Obama would not say to anyone in the defense community, “Our policy is a nuclear Iran and WMD proliferation.” I assume that he’s made a different kind of argument, and that it’s an argument that allows those around him to feel that they may strongly disagree with him, but he’s not simply insane. If he he were saying, “Our policy is a nuclear Iran and WMD proliferation,” I think that would be leaking to the press like crazy, and frankly, I think we’d have defections. Snowden-style. Don’t you?
I can’t help thinking that there would be fewer reasonable fears of smoke and mirrors if Congress had not declared war on the President. An unintended consequence.
No, but he also said that Obamacare would lower health insurance premiums by $2500 per year. So no, he isn’t promising us a nuclear armed Iran – he is just doing it. He mouthed the words in the 2012 to the UN, but those were just mouth noises –
In other words, the negotiations that lead to the policy of a nuclear armed Iran are being held by people who are incompetent (note the inclusion of the negotiator that gave us nuclear armed North Korea – Wendy Sherman). I include in the incompetent label those subscribers to trans-national progressiveism – the ideal that what one country has all should have – under the umbrella of pro(re)gressive ideals.
Since the details are being kept at the plum book level and higher you don’t get defections. They are sufficiently staffed with like minded people to ensure this.
How else did Hillary (and her staff) conduct the foreign policy of the US for 6 years via non-governmental email?
The policy is guaranteed to produce, however, a nuclear armed Iran and the proliferation of WMD.
I’m inclined to believe, “partisan, incompetent, and in a bubble such that decision-makers aren’t exposed to strenuous disagreement.” That sounds intuitively plausible to me.
It may well be. Right now the region is so so profoundly unstable that I’m hesitant to say any policy is “guaranteed” to result in anything. Our policy may–inadvertently–be wise. There’s at least a chance that the next Administration may be able to take action in a more competent way.
If Congress declared war on Obama, it’s for the same reason FDR declared war on Japan.
Sort of like “let Germany and Russia tear each other to pieces (in 1942-3) before we intervene effectively in Europe”. But, there were then many communist agents in high places in our own government who operated effectively to assure Russia of preferred status as a recipient of US aid. Maybe we have something like that going on now, ensuring that Iran has nuclear weapons and sufficient delivery capability.
#65 Claire
Re the Michael Doran piece, you’re correct that it appeared in Mosaic and not Tablet as I “misremembered.”
If you’re still based in Paris, it may not have come to your attention that this Doran piece apparently generated a *tremendous* amount of discussion in DC. For what it’s worth, Lee Smith among others has praised it strongly.
Re my “typology” (Attributes 1 through 5, etc.), I would strongly differ with you. The Attribute 1 types (Democratic hacks & message-enforcers) are precisely as I describe them: Namely, they are errand-girls/boys whose missions are only ever green-lighted by the Attribute 3 types, in other words the Obama-as-World-Savior true-believers such as Jarrett and McDonough. Obama’s MO is to obtain in-cocoon affirmation from the Attribute-3 inner circle on the intrinsic “rightness” of what he wants to do; the Attribute-2 types furnish Obama with the imprimatur attesting to his opting for the “smartest” path; and the Attribute-1 types go out and “make it happen” (mostly by spinning and/or leaking at elite levels) — they press the public-consumption (and Democratic Party-consumption) version of what was cooked up by Obama in conjunction with the Attribute-1’s and -2’s.
On the matter of Alinsky, remember how we both lamented Barry Rubin’s passing on a thread of yours the other month? Re-check through his stuff: I have no doubt he would affirm what Ball Diamond Ball and the others I vote with here are saying.
It behooves me: to put Israel into the equation. Obama has no use for Netanyahu’s gov’t. Israel is all nuked up. Why should they be a dominant nuclear power in the region? Obama has a soft spot for Islam. He doesn’t see the Islamic world any less important than Israel. On the contrary, his whole history tells me he favors Muslim countries. A nuclear counter balance in the Middle East makes sense from his perspective. What if there is nuclear proliferation? Another couple of shaky states with atomic power just evens the playing field. If Pakistan and India are a stand off, so is the rest of the region. In Obama’s world view Israel is not necessarily our key ally in the region. Why assume that defending Israel’s democracy is as important to him as to some of us? It seems likely that he sees Israel as petulant. He got that right. Obama wouldn’t be the first to believe that a Middle East without, or with a less powerful Israel, would be a lot more logical. Certainly, an Israel without that tough little Jew, Bibi, might make some sense.
Garfinkle sees things from the perspective of a rational (perhaps a tad naïve) western mind. How could any American President fall for such a bad deal? But to Obama, and his supporters, it’s a perfectly rational deal. I believe he is not afraid of Islamitization, there, in Europe, and even here. You assume patriotism in a commander in chief. You have every right to expect same. It doesn’t mean his concept is compatible with yours. All I’m suggesting here is that his antipathy towards an uncompliant Israel is a factor. On a larger world scale it’s Garfinkle’s patriotism that blinds him to an understanding of contempt for ones country. It can’t be! Yes, it can.
It’s important to note that these negotiations preceded the flap with Netanyahu’s speech, but while he was even more ensconced in power; before he dissolved the government. So this deal was to be railroaded regardless of whether the left or right was in charge. This guy wouldn’t bat an eyelash if Israel disappeared.
I’ve been researching Black Liberation Theology. Yeah, I know it old news, but I believe it’s even more relevant today with what’s going on. Take a look, if you haven’t already, at Black Liberation Theology & Marxism & Islam – Is Obama The Nexus? Posted on March 26, 2008 by politicalnighttrain. It think it helps explain why Obama is indirectly facilitating the acquisition of nuclear power in Iran. It might further behoove Garfinkle to check out a legal fiction called the “Black Rage Defense” created by Attorney William Kunstler. That is, if they seriously want to get into possible presidential motivation.