By Tom Rogan
Monday, January 18, 2016
‘Inspectors will monitor Iran’s key nuclear facilities 24
hours a day, 365 days a year,” President Obama promised yesterday. Praising the
Iran deal’s implementation, he asserted that Iran cannot build a nuclear weapon
and that the Middle East has been made safer. Tellingly, the president also
referenced Iran’s detention of U.S. sailors last week: “We worked directly with
the Iranian government and secured the release of our sailors in less than 24
hours.”
These two quotes illustrate President Obama’s kidnapping
of realist international-relations theory, which, as he sees it, involves
balancing U.S. interests with the realities of a complicated world. Or, as he
puts it, “Don’t do stupid sh**.” The president believes that, with a mix of
hard compromise and unwavering leadership, he has prevented a nuclear-arms race
and facilitated Iranian political moderation. But this isn’t realism; it is
delusion.
First off, it’s willfully ignorant. Consider again
President Obama’s remark on inspecting “Iran’s key nuclear facilities.” It’s
relevant because it reminds us that the deal in fact prevents timely inspections of other Iranian military sites. And by
describing only some nuclear facilities as “key,” President Obama is tacitly
accepting Iran’s obstruction of non-key
facility inspections. Iran will simply use military sites for
nuclear-weaponization research and then claim those facilities are off limits
or clean them up before inspections.
This isn’t really debatable; after all, Iran’s ongoing
ballistic-missile tests prove its public determination to build a
nuclear-weapons delivery platform. Of course, announcing new sanctions
yesterday on eleven individuals and organizations connected to Iranian
ballistic-missile research, the president said he will “remain steadfast in
opposing Iran’s destabilizing behavior elsewhere.” He neglected — as do most in
the media — to mention that these new sanctions are so weak that they’re
functionally irrelevant. Iran will simply use new cut-out entities and further
evasion to continue its ballistic activities. The Obama administration knows
this, the Sunni monarchies know this, the Iranians know this, and the Europeans
— who cannot wait to get their hands on Iranian business contracts — are
banking on it.
The second way in which this deal distorts realist theory
is in its fatally narrow-minded strategic vision. As I noted recently at
National Review Online, Iran’s unchallenged dissection of U.S. credibility on
inspections, missile tests, support for regional terrorism, etc., is fueling
reciprocal escalation by the Sunni-Arab monarchies. As a consequence,
opportunities for political moderation in the Middle East are rapidly being
displaced by sectarian extremism. Making matters worse, as attested by
President Obama’s failure to meet with Jordan’s King Abdullah in Washington
last week, the president seems to have decided to simply ignore America’s Sunni
allies. This preference for a short-term perceived win (the Iran deal) over
long-term U.S. influence with the Sunni kingdoms (promoting political reform
and restraining their sectarian impulses) further exemplifies the president’s
defective realism.
Yet the president’s realist delusion is enabled by many
in the international-relations community. Just contemplate how his Twitter
supporters mobilized this weekend. Professor Daniel Drezner of Tufts University
gleefully tweeted: “All US negotiations with Iran this week have been a
win-win. Which, if you believe relations with Iran’s regime are zero-sum, is
infuriating.” Drezner also claimed that the Iranians released in exchange for
Jason Rezaian and Amir Hekmati and two other Americans were largely
insignificant actors. Vox’s Max
Fisher tweeted: “Amazing fact: Iran surrenders the bulk of its nuclear program,
and it is considered a partisan issue in America whether that is good or bad.”
From the Council on Foreign Relations, Micah Zenko tweeted that every Joint
Staff and Central Command defense planner is “elated.”
All these claims deserve great scrutiny. First, while
defense planners hope the Iran deal will hold, they also know it fuels second-
and third-order risks of sectarian escalation. Moreover, although I support the
deal to release Rezaian and company, we shouldn’t pretend that the released
Iranians are insignificant. They were variously involved in supporting Iran’s
satellite communications capability, in stealing U.S. technology for the
Iranian military, and in hacking into the U.S. power-grid and airline-service
databases. According to an American cyber-investigations firm, the airport hacking
involved Iranian attempts to access ground-crew credentials. It doesn’t take a
genius to understand why Iran wants access to civilian aircraft and power
infrastructure: the capability to launch spectacular attacks on U.S. and allied
interests. Again, realism demands our assessment of the facts in the context of
Iran’s previous actions. For one, we should remember Iran’s 2011 attempt to
blow up a packed Washington, D.C., restaurant.
Oh, and as Josh Rogin reports, two other Iranian suspects
the Obama administration has agreed to stop pursuing are involved in the
drowning and starving of Syrian civilians.
Finally, any true realist must also accept what this deal
means for hard-liners aligned with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC).
Holding dominion over key sectors of Iran’s economy and controlling foreign
commercial access to the economy, the IRGC is getting a big payday. Realism
also requires our objective assessment as to where the IRGC will spend its
money: exported death.
Consider that in the past five years, the IRGC has
plotted an attack on the U.S. capital, supported the Taliban, assassinated U.S.
allies in cities such as Beirut, and kidnapped U.S. citizens. And upon
presenting these tests of U.S. resolve, the IRGC has witnessed two distinct
Obama-administration responses: silence and, as in the case of last week’s
sailor kidnap, gratitude. Yesterday, we learned of another Iranian test: Within
the past few days, several Americans were kidnapped by a militia in Baghdad. I
would confidently venture that an IRGC-proxy such as Kataib Hezbollah is
responsible. As I warned back in December, “if the IRGC leadership senses
American weakness, it will take hostile action (directly, via KH, or via covert
subgroups) against U.S. interests.”
Don’t get me wrong; realism demands that we actively
pursue diplomacy with Iran. Iran’s youthful population is an existential threat
to the theocrats and a source of major internal political pressure. We must not
alienate these future leaders with a leap to military action. Yet by our
failure to deter Iran’s hard-liners, we only encourage them further. And in
their empowerment, political moderation perishes. Foreign-policy realism
demands that we sometimes deal with unpleasant people. But it also requires our
commitment to honest policy.
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