By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, December 05, 2013
According to our recently proposed treaty with the
Iranian government, Iran keeps much of its nuclear program while agreeing to
slow its path to weapons-grade enrichment. The Iranians also get crippling
economic sanctions lifted.
The agreement is not like détente-era arms reductions
with the Soviets. After all, each superpower in the Cold War had enough nuclear
missiles to reduce most of civilization to cinders. One mistake could have
ended in Armageddon.
In this supposed win-win deal, America does not have to
worry about another costly and unpopular preemptive military action to stop
proliferation. Iran keeps its nuclear program. It makes lots of money and can
apparently maintain its ongoing support for global Islamic terrorism.
Unfortunately, such pacts of mutual advantage involving
dictatorships do not have a good historical pedigree.
They were often proposed in the late 1930s and early
1940s on the eve of, and during, World War II. In early 1939, Soviet strongman
Joseph Stalin toyed with the idea of boxing in Nazi Germany by joining with
democratic France and Britain.
When that gambit did not work out, Stalin suddenly
flipped and came to terms with Hitler himself through the Molotov-Ribbentrop
non-aggression pact in August 1939. Stalin also later cut a similar deal with
his former Japanese enemies in April 1941.
Authoritarians turned on each other just as often as they
fooled democracies. They used these pacts to bide their time and never abode by
their commitments once they found them no longer convenient. Hitler broke his
non-aggression pact in less than two years and invaded the Soviet Union. Only
after the European war was nearly won did Stalin turn on Japan and renounce his
formerly convenient agreement that had left the British Commonwealth and the
United States alone to fight the Japanese in the Pacific.
Dictatorships also used such wink-and-nod agreements in
ways that went far beyond the treaties. The point of the Molotov-Ribbentrop
non-aggression pact was not just to prevent a German-Russian war for a few
months. It also turned both tyrannies loose to gang up on Poland and begin
World War II.
Russia got a free hand to invade Finland. With his
eastern border temporarily quiet, Hitler turned west to attack France and bomb
Britain. Once the Japanese signed on with Stalin to secure their own rear in
Manchuria and Korea, they simply redirected their war efforts to attack Pearl
Harbor and further expand the conflict. With the end of the Nazi threat, Stalin
reneged on most of the agreements for postwar Europe that he had entered into
with Britain and the United States.
Should we expect anything less from Iran?
Because Iran is not a consensual society, our nuclear
deal will last only as long as Iran finds it strategically useful. After
restoring their fiscal health, expect that the Iranians will abruptly reboot
all their centrifuges and finish making a bomb. The theocracy will also use the
present non-aggression arrangement with the United States to double down in
Syria, energize Hezbollah and strengthen Hamas.
Just as the German-Russian deal ensured the start of
World War II in Europe, and the Russian-Japanese accord led to Pearl Harbor and
a Pacific theater of conflict, so too a now heady Iran will use its diplomatic
exemption to fund more terrorism and offer more provocation to Israel and the
Sunni Gulf states.
The United States has already learned after its Syrian
backdown that dictator Bashar Assad was emboldened and is now clearly winning
the war against the insurgents. He certainly seems more legitimate and
confident ever since we begged Syria not to use any more weapons of mass
destruction and asked the United Nations to help dismantle what they could
find.
Americans are $17 trillion in debt and tired of
intervention in the Middle East. Anything that might preclude the need to bomb
Iran's nuclear facilities to prevent a nuclear theocracy is understandably attractive.
But the problem with such appeasement is that it only delays a reckoning and
usually ensures war.
The tough sanctions against Iran were finally beginning
to work. The regime was getting desperate and running out of money to fund its
bomb program and terrorist appendages.
Then, suddenly, we caved -- allowing Iran both a nuclear
program and normal commerce. The deal has terrified our Arab friends,
bewildered some of our allies and isolated Israel.
More than 70 years ago, various deals among totalitarian
Germany, Japan and Russia were not worth the paper they were written on. If the
recent accord with Assad did not teach us that old lesson about trusting
dictators, the one with Iran soon will.
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