Obama Figures Chastising Trump on Iran Have Zero Self-Awareness

By Jonathan Schanzer & Behnam Ben Taleblu

Thursday, August 27, 2026

 

President Donald Trump has tried everything from negotiations to military force to blunt Tehran’s nuclear, missile, and regional aspirations. He has now settled on economic pressure. The president deserves significant credit for his willingness to tackle this challenge, including his decision to strike the Islamic Republic with the aid of the Israelis earlier this year.

 

However, Iran has responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, attacking U.S. bases, and saturating the skies of our regional allies. Iranian escalation has created other problems for Washington, such as depleted munitions stockpiles and a spike in oil prices. This could imperil Republican prospects in the November midterm elections — something the regime seems keen to exploit.

 

Trump’s challenges are compounded further by Obama-era officials who declare his war a failure. But these figures have zero self-awareness. Former chief U.S. negotiator Wendy Sherman called the U.S. war “superpower suicide,” saying it benefits Russia, China, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Obama’s energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, called Trump’s war on Iran a “big mistake” that placed the U.S. in a “cul-de-sac” that is hard to escape. Former U.S. negotiator Jake Sullivan said Trump’s efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz would yield “a massive financial windfall to Iran, and . . . a set of nuclear issues that at present are completely unresolved.” President Barack Obama himself declared, “We’ve now fought a war, spent billions and billions of dollars, put an enormous strain on our military, a lot of people have died and it feels like we are . . . maybe a little worse off.”

 

But what none of these figures cede is that the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), granted the Islamic Republic a “patient pathway” to nuclear weapons. The deal placed fleeting constraints on Iran’s nuclear activities while Washington eased sanctions and transferred billions of dollars to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. This ill-advised approach from Team Obama (and later Team Biden) allowed Tehran to build a vast arsenal of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, and to fund terror proxies across the Arab world.

 

Tellingly, only four months after inking the JCPOA, the IRGC revealed its first underground missile base. These underground missile depots continue to plague the U.S. military as it battles Iranian aggression.

 

Obama-era figures try to tout the restrictions the JCPOA placed on the regime. But the “sunset provisions” of their deal began to expire in 2020, with more expiring in 2023 and 2025. The result: Iran emerged as a threshold nuclear power with the region’s biggest ballistic missile arsenal; access to advanced conventional weaponry; greater regional proxy power; and an economy immunized against sanctions. In short, the JCPOA kicked the can down the road, deferring the hard decisions.

 

President Trump’s Iran policy may not be perfect, but it has encumbered the regime’s malign efforts. His first step was to exit the accord in 2018 after exhorting America’s transatlantic partners to negotiate an alternative and levy strong sanctions, all to no avail. He then imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions on the regime to compel the Iranians to engage in good faith. They refused.

 

When Trump left office and many Obama-era officials who brokered the JCPOA returned to power under the Biden administration, the regime spurned the Additional Protocol, a cornerstone of international nuclear monitoring. The regime’s stockpile of advanced centrifuges and enriched uranium also grew. This included uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, putting the regime on the precipice of weapons-grade uranium.

 

When Donald Trump returned to the presidency, the Islamic Republic was on the brink of completing three dangerous projects. The first was its nuclear program, bringing Tehran perilously close to nukes with a fast-growing stockpile of fissile material. Since Trump dropped bunker busters and Tomahawks on nuclear sites last year, Iran is no longer enriching uranium on its soil, and its fissile material is entombed.

 

The second was Tehran’s missile infrastructure. With industrial-scale production capacity, its stockpiles reached critical levels, granting the regime the ability to saturate the airspace of its enemies — which we have seen in recent months. And third, the regime armed and empowered its proxies around the region to punish and deter the responses of its neighbors when faced with regime aggression.

 

Thanks to Donald Trump’s actions, Iran is unable to advance these strategies in any meaningful way.

 

This doesn’t mean America is winning. If anything, it seems that Washington has fought Tehran to a stalemate. We may have hammered their military, but their willingness to fight an asymmetric war that depletes our munitions and squeezes global energy cannot be ignored.

 

The stalemate can still be broken, however. The president can heap more financial pressure on the regime and maintain the maritime blockade. Our military also continues to ferry vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, easing the energy crunch.

 

Iran’s currency, the rial, just hit another historic low — trading now at 2 million to a single U.S. dollar. The regime’s inability to pay salaries or provide basic services could portend domestic upheaval. The president must now do more to support the Iranian people, who are pro-America and truly loathe their regime. They have been brutalized and slaughtered, but they have not given up. Intelligence, financial support, secure communications, and arms are what they need.

 

The president now understands that, just as the 2015 nuclear deal defined Obama’s foreign policy, the war with the regime will define his. He was right to conclude, “This situation has been going on for 47 years and should have been handled long before I arrived in office.” Seen in this light, Team Obama’s efforts to snipe him should be ignored. Whereas they never derailed Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions, Donald Trump still can.

The Trump Administration Repeats Obama’s Mistakes

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 22, 2026

 

Republicans have consigned themselves to a torturous ordeal in which they’re forced to relearn why they opposed Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal in the first place.

 

Upon the conclusion of the first round of talks with the Iranian delegation in Switzerland, America’s lead negotiator, JD Vance, said the two sides had set “a good foundation for a successful final deal.” As evidence of progress, the vice president revealed that the Iranians had agreed to let International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors back into the country.

 

Obama crowed about that one, too. But the IAEA was on the ground inside Iran both before and for some time after 2025’s Operation Midnight Hammer. Letting inspectors back in is nice, but what they are allowed to inspect, when they’re allowed to inspect it, and what safeguards are in place to prevent Iran from (proudly) misleading foreign investigators are thornier matters.

 

Likewise, Vance assured Americans that they need not worry about the funds Iran will derive from U.S. sanctions-relief initiatives. “If there is [sic] any frozen Iranian assets that are unfrozen, then we have approval over that process,” the vice president insisted, “and then the money would actually go to buy American soy, American corn, and American wheat.”

 

The thing about money is that it’s fungible. Even if the Trump administration manages to verifiably compel Iran to use its unfrozen assets to reward the White House’s preferred constituencies, reliving economic pressure on Iran gives the regime space to divert its resources away from critical civilian projects and toward its terrorist proxies.

 

Maybe the primary reason the JCPOA was destined to fail, even before Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement, was Obama’s intention to use the nuclear deal as a bank shot to address other regional issues.

 

The Iraq War and the U.S. military presence in Iraq set the backdrop against which Obama embarked on nuclear negotiations with Iran. Obama wanted out. And to get out, he needed Iran’s Shiite militias to prop up the faltering Iraqi Security Forces. The plan imploded with the rise of ISIS, but not before Obama’s deference to Iran’s terrorist proxies horrified the Sunni states. This dynamic lit a fire under nascent intelligence-sharing and coordination initiatives with Israel that later blossomed into the Abraham Accords.

 

The Vance-led delegation in Lucerne has apparently fallen into a similar trap.

 

In a joint statement on Sunday, the U.S. and Iran, as well as the talks’ mediators, Pakistan and Qatar, affirmed their intention to establish a “de-confliction cell” designed “to ensure the adherence of the termination of military operations in Lebanon.”

 

The Iranian side of the equation was particularly enthusiastic about this provision, even beyond the sanctions relief the U.S. acknowledges and the release of “some frozen assets” that America doesn’t. Moreover, the “de-confliction cell” is already operational. “Lebanese President Joseph Aoun received a phone call from U.S. Vice President JD Vance and discussed consolidating the ceasefire in Lebanon, stopping Israeli strikes, and the possibility of forming a mechanism for this purpose,” i24’s Ariel Oseran reported. “Qatar’s PM and Jared Kushner were also on the call.”

 

Missing from this equation are the parties to the conflict that the “de-confliction” mechanism is supposed to rein in: Hezbollah and Israel. This provision, an extension of the memorandum of understanding’s article 1, is the weakest part of the deal and the component most likely to fail. Maybe that’s why both Iran and the United States have become so invested in it.

 

Indeed, to hear Vance and his political allies talk about the MOU with Iran, you could be forgiven for concluding that the U.S. just finished a shooting war with Israel.

 

The vice president has taken to selling his deal to a faction within a faction of the American right. He’s waged a merciless assault on straw men (the MOU’s critics in Israel want “to go on until every bomb has been dropped, or until every Iranian is dead,” he said recently) and invoked disturbing stereotypes (“Pro-Israel people in the United States make two critical mistakes,” Vance asserted, including “not delineating between America’s interests and Israeli interests”).

 

In a pointed message to Jerusalem, Vance warned that Trump “is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic” toward Israel. “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” the vice president warned.

 

Certainly, Iran has no problem with any of this. Indeed, it was within Tehran’s strategic interests to secure an agreement that treats Israel as though it were all but indistinguishable from Hezbollah — a puppet with no agency independent of America’s and no sovereignty beyond that which America grants it. The MOU’s article 1 codifies that lie. Moreover, it allows Tehran to insist that it should not have to abide by the deal if America’s attack dog does not.

 

In Lucerne, Vance went so far as to all but dismiss Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel. Sometimes, he said, those attacks are just “a junior guy who fires a drone that didn’t have approval from the high command.” Sure, “Israel has to respond to that,” Vance conceded. “But then, sometimes, that response — we could actually have a better and more peaceful situation if Israel responds in the context of the conversation that is ongoing between Hezbollah, Lebanon, Israel, and other partners in the region.”

 

That’s a long way of saying that Israel must subordinate its defense initiatives to the deal. And, really, aren’t they responding to what should be ignorable — perhaps even accidental — attacks on their soldiers, civilians, and territory?

 

The stage is now set for both America and Iran to blame Israel for the MOU’s imminently foreseeable collapse.

 

“What would America do,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked on Sunday, if a terrorist enterprise armed with thousands of rockets and drones attacked U.S. territory from the other side of its borders? “You know damn well what America would do,” he continued. “It would cross the border, create a security zone, kill the terrorists, and protect its people until the threat is removed. That’s exactly what we are doing.”

 

That is what Israel is doing in southern Lebanon. Also on Sunday, Israeli soldiers captured an underground drone “airbase” located just kilometers away from the Israeli border. The IDF even gave journalists a tour of the sophisticated facility that Israeli officials contend was constructed within the last decade “with direct Iranian assistance, including planning and funding.” In a potential intelligence coup, the seizure of this facility — one built to a “much higher standard” comparable to an Iranian missile factory in Syria that the IDF raided in the fall of 2024 — led to the capture of intact Iranian drones by Israel for the first time.

 

That Israeli operation is the sort of thing that Americans should celebrate. Instead, the logic of the MOU compels the United States to wring its hands with trepidation over Israel’s failure to defer to the peace process in Switzerland.

 

As long as the United States remains committed to the MOU, it will be compelled to at least tacitly take Hezbollah’s side in a fight it started with Israel. And all in the craven pursuit of a “peace” unworthy of the word. Of all the mistakes Obama and his acolytes made in their pursuit of the nuclear deal with Iran, this is one that Republicans have no right to repeat.

Dreams of My Mamaw

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, June 19, 2026

 

When I saw the phrase “Hillbilly Obama” getting picked up I was worried that someone had beaten me to the punch.

 

Before I explain that, let’s explain what people mean by Hillbilly Obama.

 

Ben Domenech coined the phrase. “At some point, this Republican Party needs to decide which kind of foreign policy it’s gonna have,” he said on Special Report with Bret Baier this week. “Is it going to be an ‘America First’ foreign policy, one that is bold, that uses American power in key moments decisively in order to affect what it wants to achieve? Or are we going to just backslide into being some kind of ‘Hillbilly Obama’ kind of GOP?”

 

Domenech used the phrase to do two things. First, to describe Donald Trump’s 180 on Iran. Second, to add to the chorus assigning blame or credit for the new 14 Points at Versailles.

 

I don’t really buy that Vice President J.D. Vance is the architect of this “peace.” And even if he deserves outsize credit for convincing Trump to reverse himself, that doesn’t absolve Trump. He’s the president. It was Trump’s decision. The blame-the-bad-boyar argument just doesn’t fly with me, as I discussed earlier this week.

 

But what is clear is that Vance wants the ball. Nick Catoggio called it Wednesday night, and Thursday morning we had confirmation from Vance’s own camp. “Without question, the biggest potential political liability Vance had was the unpopularity of the war in Iran,” someone from Vanceland told Politico’s Dasha Burns. “So it’s fascinating to watch his biggest enemies in the GOP unwittingly inoculate him from that liability by branding him as responsible for the peace deal.”

 

“He now gets to do a media tour defending the president — AKA the kingmaker of our party — from their idiotic criticism of the deal,” the Vance surrogate said. “While even his critics would acknowledge that the vice president is a smart guy, sometimes what really matters in politics is how stupid your enemies are.”

 

I don’t think this analysis is ridiculous, save for one problem: The criticisms of the deal aren’t “idiotic,” and Vance’s “enemies” aren’t stupid.

 

Indeed not every critic of the deal was an enemy of Vance, but the vice president's supporters decided to make it clear they think critics of the deal aren’t just wrong, but stupid and Vance’s foes.

 

Now, the criticisms might be wrong—I don’t think they are, depending which criticisms we’re talking about—and even if they’re right, they may not be proven right on a timetable that hurts Vance. For example, there’s no way Iran builds its own nuclear weapon in the next couple years, but that doesn’t mean this fiasco won’t make it more likely it gets a nuke on some future president’s watch, proving the critics right.

 

But the idea that all of the criticisms of this deal are “idiotic” is really quite stupid. Name a foreign policy expert who is not either on the White House payroll, or auditioning to be, who thinks this is brilliant and flawless. I’m sure there’s someone. But are Walter Russell Mead, Niall Ferguson, Ray Takeyh, Bret Stephens, Benny Morris, Trey Gowdy, Jack Keane, Elliott Abrams, nearly everyone at National Review, Commentary, The Dispatch, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies idiots? Not everyone has the same criticisms. Some are nuanced, some strident. Some are of the “wait and see” variety. But as far as I can tell, none are idiotic.

 

But this is how Vance sees politics. Despite zigzagging all over the ideological map in his very short political career, he’s always sure that he’s right where he lands at the moment and that people who disagree with him are either buffoons or liars serving their own selfish interests (or Israel’s) at the expense of the common good and real—sorry, “heritage”—Americans.

 

The Hillbilly Obama line works to describe Vance’s approach because it is eerily similar to not just the substance of President Barack Obama’s defense of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) but also the way he argued for it.

 

On the substance, the idea of the JCPOA was basically a mix of expediency and hope. The idea was to delay any possible nuclear weapon long enough that if Iran ever got one, it would be some other president’s problem. That was the expediency. The hope was that the delay might buy time for Iran to moderate and mature to the point where the regime would recognize the folly of having a bomb. Provide enough carrots and it will abandon its pursuit of a nuclear stick. We can trust Iran’s promise not to pursue a bomb until the promise is no longer necessary.

 

Here’s how Obama put it: “My hope is that building on this deal we can continue to have conversations with Iran that incentivize them to behave differently in the region, to be less aggressive, less hostile, more cooperative, to operate the way we expect nations in the international community to behave.” And: “Do I hope that by virtue of Iran having greater commercial interactions with the world and students’ exchanges taking place and perhaps a generation of Iranian leadership changing, do I hope that the character of the regime changes? Absolutely. But I’m not counting on it.”

 

This is the exact argument Vance is making. The $300 billion reconstruction fund will incentivize the Iranians to see the folly of having a bomb and being an exporter of terror. They will moderate into normal members of the community of nations, and ultimately, join the Abraham Accords.

 

And Vance is defending the Trump administration’s deal with the same Obamaesque rhetorical flourishes. Opponents of the deal only want war. They have no other alternative, and there is no other alternative. Critics are being led by the nose by Bibi Netanyahu or by, wink-wink, neocons. It’s strawmen and accusations of bad faith all the way down.

 

I can provide quotes aplenty, but I should get to my point.

 

Hillbilly Obama all the way down.

 

Obama and Vance are different people in all sorts of important ways. But the similarities are striking. Both men were abandoned by a parent or parents and had troubled childhoods. Both went to elite law schools. Both wrote very successful memoirs before they accomplished much of substance and parlayed their literary fame into political careers. Both harbor profound grievances about the country that made them rich, famous, and powerful.

 

If you think this is far-fetched, don’t take my word for it. J.D. Vance agrees. In 2017, Vance wrote a column for the New York Times explaining how when he was young, he saw a lot of himself in Bill Clinton because Clinton had a childhood similar to his own. He wrote:

 

I often wonder how many kids look at our current president the way I once looked at President Clinton. Barack Obama was elected during my second year of college, and save for his skin color, he had much in common with Bill Clinton: Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal.

 

A bit further on he adds:

 

Eventually, I achieved something roughly similar to the president’s early, personal accomplishments: a prestigious law degree, a strong professional career and a modicum of fame as a writer.

 

We should pause here for a moment to appreciate something remarkable about our country. Two out of the last five presidents, as well as the current vice president, had rocky, dysfunctional childhoods, and yet they rose to the top of our system.

 

Both Vance and Obama’s rise began by leveraging their literary tales of abandonment into being welcomed into the highest echelons of our politics. They both arrived at elite law schools as outsiders and left with the confidence of insiders and the skill to market themselves as professional outsiders. They carved out a beat as representatives of racially aggrieved demographics. Obviously, there are differences. In Hillbilly Elegy Vance criticizes his people for blaming their plight on others. Their problems “were not created by governments or corporations,” he wrote. “We created them.” He added: “Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us.” Obama did little of that in Dreams From My Father. He mostly leaned into and amplified the racial resentments of minorities.

 

To Obama’s credit, however, as president he moved closer to the hard truths and tough love approach. He gave a strong speech at the NAACP in 2009, telling black parents and children that whatever the unfairness of the system, they have “no excuse” to let that control their lives and actions. At Morehouse College in 2013, Obama said, “I have to say, growing up, I made quite a few [excuses] myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing. But one of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is there’s no longer any room for excuses.”

 

Vance has gone the other direction, leaning into resentment and grievance as corporations, elites, and Democrats keep his people down. “America’s ruling class wrote the checks. Communities like mine paid the price,” he proclaimed in his vice presidential nomination acceptance speech.

 

What is remarkable to me is how completely Vance has become a right-wing version of a left-wing identitarian ideologue. When Ross Douthat asked Vance about the un-Christian tone of this administration, Vance fell back on a classically left-wing critique of “tone policing.” “I also think that tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working-class ways of communication and covering them in elite preferences.” As Erick Erickson noted, “This is sort of like how progressives defend various destructive behaviors in various minority communities – ‘it’s just their culture, and we have to respect it.’”

 

The way I read Vance’s argument, it was not just in defense of the crude, ugly, and bigoted rhetoric out of this administration, or the crude, ugly, and bigoted rhetoric used to defend this administration, but of the crude, ugly, and bigoted rhetoric when deployed by “his” people in general. This is particularly gross when you realize he was making this case in the context of a book about his embrace of Christianity, which has a lot to say about “guarding your tongue.”

 

It’s even harder to take when you grasp just how much Vance lies and distorts the views and motives of the people he disagrees with. When the Trump campaign demonized poor, black, legal, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio—“they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats”—Vance didn’t apologize for it, he boasted that we’re “creating a story.”

 

As Kevin Williamson wrote from Springfield at the time:

 

Vance has turned Solzhenitsyn’s maxim on its head: “Let the lie come into the world, but only through me, and only if I get something good out of it.” A man who is not suffering from whatever disease of the soul with which Vance is afflicted would have a hard time even imagining wanting to be vice president—of all petty things!—that bad. A different and better sort of man would understand that bearing false witness against 15,000 poor and vulnerable people in the pursuit of political power is the same as bearing false witness against anybody else.

 

This week, Vance has casually lied and distorted the views of his critics, in America and Israel, purely out of political ambition. Critics want the war to continue “until every bomb has been dropped or until every Iranian is dead.” He falsely claimed that members of the Israeli Cabinet attacked Trump personally, and threatened that doing so risks losing America as an ally. But there were no such personal attacks. He lied about what the memorandum of understanding said, insinuating that those who relied on accurate reports were spreading “Iranian propaganda.” When the reports were revealed to be accurate, he said, “Words don’t matter, ladies and gentlemen.” Trump has the highest IQ of any president, we haven’t privileged white South African refugees over all others, Trump didn’t say he loves inflation: On and on it went.

 

But it’s all fine, because whatever Vance says in service to his ambition is self-justifying, and anyone who disagrees is an idiot or acting in bad faith. That’s the lesson Vance has taken from his meteoric rise through the meritocracy. And why not? Who can dispute it’s worked for him so far.

Will Obama Get the Last Laugh on Iran?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

Former President Barack Obama told the hosts of ABC’s Good Morning America on Monday that he’s “doubtful” Donald Trump’s negotiating team can improve on his nuclear deal with Iran. It’s unlikely, Obama speculated, that this president will hammer out terms with Iran that represent “a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place and had worked for, for a long stretch of time before we, the United States, pulled out of it.”

 

Trump shouldn’t want to give his predecessor the satisfaction of being right. But to hear the president and his administration’s officials talk about the deliberations with Iran that will follow the implementation of an emerging cease-fire agreement, Obama may get the last laugh.

 

For now, though, talk is all we have, and pronouncements about what is and isn’t in the cease-fire vary depending on who is doing the talking.

 

The Iranians insist that they’re getting up-front financial relief in the form of unfrozen assets. Trump administration officials disagree. Tehran appears convinced that a postwar $300 billion reconstruction fund is a done deal. The president’s representatives insist that provision could be a possible sweetener, but it is contingent on Iran’s compliance. Everyone seems to believe that Israel’s defensive operations against Hezbollah will cease and the IDF will withdraw from Southern Lebanon — everyone, that is, save the Israeli government.

 

It seems that the Trump administration isn’t even clear on the terms it negotiated to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In a Sunday interview with the New York Times, reporter David Sanger confronted Trump with the Iranian interpretation of the memorandum of understanding, which the Islamic Republic claims only suspends tolling on the strait for 60 days while a new status quo is established. By contrast, Trump insists the contested waterway will be “permanently toll-free.” But Vice President JD Vance cast doubt on Trump’s definitive pronouncement.

 

“Well, our expectation is that the strait is going to be opened in a toll-free way for the long term,” he told CNBC, “and that’s the sort of thing that we’re going to figure out in these technical negotiations.” What was the point of a negotiated cease-fire but to relieve the Trump administration of the obligation to restore free navigation through the strait by force, as the U.S. had done in the past?

 

The contradictions and inconsistencies on offer from the Trump administration deprive good-faith observers of confidence in the administration’s willingness to impose desirable terms for a more durable peace in forthcoming talks over Iran’s nuclear program. Already, seasoned foreign affairs observers, like Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, see shades of Obama’s JCPOA in the emerging contours of a final deal within the cease-fire.

 

“It does look very similar to the JCPOA, which Trump scrapped,” Ignatius said Monday. “Some of the provisions may even be somewhat weaker.” Subsequently, the vice president lent some credence to that pessimistic assessment.

 

During his Monday media blitz, Vance told CBS News hosts that the U.S. seeks a final agreement that “ends” Iran’s nuclear program, deprives it of its enriched uranium stockpiles, and is backed by a robust verification regime. But, he added, there is no resemblance to the JCPOA here. “We have comprehensively destroyed their nuclear program,” Vance told CBS News.

 

“What this agreement does is say to the Iranians that you don’t have access to the money to rebuild that nuclear program,” Vance clarified in his sit-down with CNBC. How? Apparently, through an unfalsifiable construct. If Iran wants access to the “world economy,” it will have to “give up the long-term nuclear ambition.” If they don’t do that, “they’re never going to have the resources to rebuild it from where it is today.”

 

How that assertion comports with the Trump administration’s openness to “unfreezing” the Iranian economy as well as a Gulf-region-funded reconstruction fund is probably subject to interpretation.

 

Vance is correct to observe that the conditions that prevail on the ground in Iran today cannot be compared with the status quo in 2015. The JCPOA flooded Iran with cash, compelled the regime only to mothball (not destroy) its nuclear bomb program’s components, and included terms that legitimized Iran’s pursuit of advanced uranium enrichment capabilities when it sunset. With the destruction of much of the Iranian nuclear program and its defense industrial base, the Trump administration couldn’t recapitulate those Iran-favorable terms even if it wanted to.

 

Yet, Trump told the Times that he was contemplating an agreement in which he could settle for an Iranian commitment to suspend domestic enrichment for 15 or maybe even 20 years — a far cry from his initial objection to any uranium enrichment on Iranian soil ever. Now, that enrichment must only be “for non-military purposes,” Trump said after he apparently entertained revivifying the JCPOA’s farcical “caps” on enriching uranium beyond the grade necessary for use in civilian reactors. In addition, Trump is “in no rush to get the near-bomb-grade fuel out of its underground sites,” Sanger’s report continued.

 

After all, the final backstop ensuring Iran’s compliance is America’s willingness to go back to war to ensure that Iran never digs out the bomb-making material entombed in its devastated nuclear sites.

 

But the United States demonstrated unequivocally over the last two months that it is not willing to go back to high-tempo combat operations against Iran, even to conclude the conflict on terms unambiguously favorable to America and the West. “Fundamentally,” Vance insisted, “we have the leverage; we have the diplomatic, economic, and military leverage.” That’s little more than a self-affirming mantra if the U.S. isn’t willing to apply the leverage it is holding in reserve.

 

Many will be tempted to draw definitive conclusions about both the war that brought us to this juncture and the trajectory of events that they are certain will follow it. Those conclusions would be premature. To the extent the terms of this agreement are known and not contested by the parties it supposedly binds, it is an agreement to keep talking. And that would be fine if the U.S. and Israel intended to proceed with the plan for this war that they articulated at its outset.

 

“Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach,” Trump said in a message to the Iranian people at the war’s outset. “This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.” He and his subordinates restated Trump’s premise more than once that there will be a “clear signal” to the Iranian people “for you to be able to come out” and take down the Iranian regime.

 

Of all Trump’s departures from the JCPOA’s framework, that was the most important. He rejected the logic of a deal that recognized the Islamic Republic as a permanent feature of the regional landscape. In his interview with Sanger, Trump warned only that if Iran’s leaders slaughtered protesters again, Tehran might forfeit access to sanctions relief.

 

This might be the most humiliating of the apparent retreats to which Trump may have committed the United States. The threat posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran will not abate until the Islamic Republic of Iran ceases to exist. If Trump has forgotten that central paradigmatic feature of successful efforts to contain and roll back the Iranian menace, he will fail at the negotiating table.

An Obama Alum Mourns How Effective Their Social Security Demagoguery Was

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 12, 2026

 

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has somehow managed to avoid an encounter with reputational or professional consequences for damaging his employer’s credibility, drew my attention to a provocative op-ed this morning:

 

 

The search-engine-optimized headline Times editors chose to grace the essay composed by the chairman of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Jason Furman, did the piece’s author no favors: “Social Security Is Going Broke,” it read. “Where Is the Outrage?”

 

“This week the Social Security trustees announced that the trust fund for retirees and survivors will be exhausted in just six years,” Furman wrote. “That’s six years before tens of millions of Americans could see their benefits cut by 22 percent.”

 

“The crisis is closer than anyone in the Clinton or Bush years ever imagined we might let it get,” Obama’s top economic mind asserted. Alas, Furman mourned, policymakers are likely to “kick” the crisis “down the road again” with temporary stopgaps, and the public is either apathetic or hostile toward meaningful reforms that could avert the program’s imminent insolvency.

 

This, Furman suggests, is a fact of life as intractable as the weather. Social Security is “the third rail of American politics,” he warned. “Touch it and you get electrocuted.”

 

How did we find ourselves in this predicament? Furman’s cursory historical review fails to uncover a culprit. Perhaps his investigation was hindered by his obvious conflict of interest. After all, the problem Furman laments has been dutifully cultivated by the political party to which he has devoted himself.

 

Democrats spent decades demagoguing the issue of Social Security reform, attacking anyone who dared notice the program’s documented shortfalls. It was a reckless and irresponsible political messaging campaign. But it was also a wildly successful one on the Democratic Party’s own terms.

 

Recall how Democrats reacted back in 2005 when George W. Bush proposed allowing workers to divert just 4 percent of their payroll taxes into personal retirement investment accounts. Furman’s former boss, the 44th president, accused Bush of attempting to “privatize Social Security and gamble your retirement.”

 

From the presidential pulpit, Obama continued to radicalize the public against sensible reforms to America’s unfunded liabilities, accusing Republicans of adding “trillions of dollars to our budget deficit while tying your benefits to the whims of Wall Street traders and the ups and downs of the stock market.” Obama didn’t quite accuse Republicans of wanting to “destroy” Social Security, but Democrats didn’t object when legacy media outlets did.

 

“Cutting benefits in half, risking Social Security on the stock market,” warned the narrator in one pro-Obama spot from the 2008 campaign. “The Bush-McCain privatization plan. Can you really afford more of the same?” Even the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus was repulsed by the Obama campaign’s mendacity. “The Obama campaign stretches the truth beyond recognition when it says that this would cut benefits in half,” she observed.

 

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s 2012 presidential campaign made a valiant effort to persuade Americans of the fiscal reality that would consume them if they failed to confront it. When it came to Social Security, the Romney-Ryan camp’s message hued closely to the statutory language. In the absence of reform, they warned, the law compels Social Security to cut benefits for current recipients.

 

“We respect you enough to level with you,” Ryan told an unruly AARP audience in the fall of 2012. America’s entitlement programs are on a trajectory toward insolvency — an ill-fated arc worsened by Obamacare. But the American people were in no mood to be reasoned with, and the Obama White House exploited their attachment to the fantasy that Social Security was on sound footing.

 

The Romney-Ryan ticket “could include increasing taxes on Social Security benefits for middle-class seniors by an average of $460 a year,” the Obama campaign warned (a prospect Furman now embraces, among other “tweaks”). But that was “not part of Romney’s tax plan,” the Center for Public Integrity noted. Nor did the Romney-Ryan ticket seek “higher taxes for seniors on Social Security, including taxing benefits for seniors who make less than $32,000 a year for the first time ever,” as Obama’s allies claimed.

 

The Obama campaign even published a video warning seniors that Republicans would steal money from the pockets of the elderly so they couldn’t afford even that $20 on “a birthday present for your grandson.” No wonder those AARP activists were hopping mad.

 

By the end of the last decade, not only had the general public been persuaded that Social Security was just fine, but the progressive left concluded that the program could and should be expanded.

 

In 2019, Elizabeth Warren’s aborted presidential campaign published a widget that allowed users to calculate how much money they’d receive from her bigger, bolder Social Security program. “We should be increasing Social Security benefits and asking the richest Americans to contribute their fair share to the program,” her campaign declared in a display of contempt for those of us who know who pays payroll taxes, from which Social Security’s funding is statutorily drawn. Bernie Sanders agreed. “It is time to expand Social Security, not cut it,” he declared. Progressive Democrats have been attempting to do just that via legislation ever since.

 

Democrats got what they wanted. If Social Security is difficult to reform today, that’s only because the public believes Democrats when they contend that it needs no reforming. And the Trump-led Republican Party has thoroughly internalized the lessons they were taught by the Obama operation in 2012.

 

“There are people who would cut Social Security, throw our grandparents into poverty,” JD Vance said on the campaign trail in 2024. In his piece, Furman mourns the inclusion of a provision in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that “included a de facto benefit increase that came at the expense of revenues partially earmarked for Social Security,” which contributed to the dire projections now coming from the program’s trustees.

 

That was fiscally reckless, but it takes a lot of nerve to blame the GOP for responding to the political inducements the Democratic Party has expertly exploited.

 

Furman positions himself as a brave truthteller, but he’s not telling the whole story of how the nation committed itself to a fiscal crisis. He and the president he served deserve their share of the blame, but that’s not what Times readers want to hear. Thus, Furman’s piece is yet another contribution to the Democratic Party’s decades of mendacity when it comes to Social Security.

I, Obama: Our Insufferable Ex-President

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

When Barack Obama was elected president for the first time, I was still living in England. Had I been in the United States, and eligible to vote, I would not have voted for him. But I remember thinking nevertheless that it was a remarkable — even a beautiful — thing that, just over four decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the people of the United States had elevated a black citizen to the highest office in the land. Martin Luther King spoke of the Declaration of Independence as a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. That an African American could now be chosen to lead the federal government struck me as a solid indication that, at long last, that initial vow had been substantiated.

 

I still think that. Which is one reason, among many, why I regret that I cannot stand the man. Periodically, we are treated to a reasonable stretch of silence, and I begin to wonder whether I was unfair to him while he was in office. And then he comes back, says something profoundly irritating, and reminds me exactly why I was so irked by him in the first instance. Now, as then, when Obama speaks, I am left looking around in astonishment at other people, trying to determine whether they, too, can see that the whole edifice is a ball of hype and gamesmanship. You know what I’m talking about: that Apollonian affect — that studied, above-it-all mien, which, even when he was president, allowed him to engage in bare-knuckle politics while pretending that he was a detached, innocent bystander whose only concern was for the forgotten middle.

 

People often say that the primary problem with Barack Obama was that he was racially divisive. I’m not sure this is true. Certainly, he had his moments — the “acted stupidly” (about the police involved in the Henry Louis Gates incident) and “if I had a son” (about the Trayvon Martin shooting) mistakes among them — but, overall, I was never especially bothered by his record in that realm. Indeed, insofar as Obama discussed race, he did so in the same manner as do other elite progressives with whom I disagree. Sure, I don’t like it. But that isn’t a problem with him so much as a problem with the movement to which he belongs. America was not a racial paradise before Barack Obama came into office, and it is not a racial paradise now that he’s been out for a decade. If I were to compile an audit of the reasons why that is the case, the presidency of Barack Obama wouldn’t make the list.

 

No, the problem with Obama was that he was politically divisive — and in ways that were rendered particularly infuriating by the insistence of his acolytes that he was just a plucky technocratic moderate who wished devoutly to find compromise with the other side. Barack Obama was — and, indeed, Barack Obama is — no such thing. On the contrary: He is a committed ideologue and a partisan brawler who, by dint of his considerable talents, has worked out how to hide both of those traits from the average member of the public. Where Bill Clinton was a moderate (at least after 1994), Barack Obama merely played one on TV. He would posit “the one hand,” and then posit the “other,” and then, however objectively ludicrous the spatial characterization might be, place himself right in the middle of the dispute. When he meant “Democrats,” he’d say “democracy.” When he meant progressivism, he’d say “common sense.” Even when he was doing something self-evidently grotesque — suing nuns for declining to provide contraception, for example, or supporting abortion up to the moment of birth — he’d coat his position in six tubs of treacle. If you could see it, it was infuriating.

 

He’s still doing it. Having spent years opposing gerrymandering on the grounds that it had led to a status quo in which “our parties have moved further and further apart, and it’s harder and harder to find common ground,” Obama went all in on Virginia’s recent attempt to turn a 51–46 state into a state with ten Democratic representatives and one Republican representative. By trying to overturn the state’s constitutional prohibition on gerrymandering, he said in one of the many TV ads, radio spots, and mailers in which he appeared, Democrats in Virginia were simply trying to “stand up for our democracy.” And who couldn’t be for that?

 

A few days later, Obama weighed in on the news that an armed left-wing extremist had been prevented from killing people inside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — including the president, the vice president, and members of his cabinet — by playing the humble observer. “Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner,” Obama wrote on X, “it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy.”

 

Which sounds nice, unless you understand that, by the time that post appeared, the would-be shooter’s manifesto had been published in its entirety by every news outlet in the country, and that it was abundantly, irrefutably, inescapably clear that the perpetrator had been engaged in political terrorism. The target, the manifesto confirmed, was “administration officials,” along with the “Secret Service,” “Hotel Security,” and “Capital Police” and “most everyone” else if they got in the way. Why? Because in his view, the administration is full of “criminals” and the president is a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” In some circumstances, “although we don’t yet have the details” is a virtuous and necessary prefatory statement. Here, it was hardball politics at its most cynical. Obama understood that, rightly or wrongly, his “side” would be blamed for the actions of the perpetrator. So he hastened to muddy the waters and to replace the specific actions of a specific man with the abstract concept of “violence.” It was irritating. And typical.

 

Much has been made in the press of the supposedly dramatic break between the Obama presidency and the Trump presidencies, but I don’t consider the two men to be as far apart as many others seem to. Often in American history, the voting public swings sharply away from the style of the exiting president and consciously chooses his polar opposite to replace him. Thus, at various points, have we moved from Woodrow Wilson to Warren Harding, from Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter, from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, from George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton, and so forth. One might be tempted to include Obama and Trump in this list. But how different are they, really?

 

Both men were treated as celebrities by the public and the press, and as messianic figures by their boosters. Both men offered the country an us-vs.-them politics (Obama, famously, said that Mitt Romney was “not one of us”). Both men consciously centered attention on the executive branch, with Obama vowing that “where Congress won’t act, I will” and Trump suggesting that “I alone can fix it.” Both men were extraordinarily partisan, reflexively tribal, and wont to cast their opponents as an existential threat to the country. Both men relied on the tactic of “stray voltage” to distract the media from the administration’s core issues. Both men had a conception of what a “real American” looks like — in Obama’s case, the problem was people who “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment”; in Trump’s, the problem is literally anyone who doesn’t like him — and they focused on those people to the exclusion of everybody else. The biggest difference I can detect is that Trump likes to display his ego, whereas Obama liked to disguise his. But badly disguised egomania is still egomania. Had it wished to, the American electorate could have responded to Barack Obama’s two terms by selecting Scott Walker or Martin O’Malley as his successor. They didn’t though, did they?

 

Which, ultimately, makes Barack Obama something of a tragic figure in American life. Without doubt, he has a lot going for him. He is intelligent. He is tall. He is attractive, albeit in an easily caricaturable sort of way. He has a lilting voice. Unlike Bill Clinton, he did not embarrass the country by carrying on with the interns; unlike Trump, he did not behave like a narcissistic lunatic while performing his official duties; and unlike Joe Biden, he did not spend half of his time in the White House decaying before the cameras. As a classically liberal conservative, I was never destined to approve of Obama’s politics. But I could plausibly have liked the guy.

 

I don’t. Meet the old boss. Same as the new boss.

That Same Old Song

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 06, 2026

 

Barack Obama is deeply concerned for the institutional health of the Republican Party. Indeed, whatever the current iteration of the GOP happens to be, it is, in the 44th president’s estimation, an ailing version of what preceded it.

 

Obama expressed his profound disquiet over the GOP’s constitution in a recent interview with outgoing CBS host Stephen Colbert. “When I was president, people would ask me, ‘What change would you like to see in Washington? ‘” Obama’s answer reflected his belief that the only problems in the nation’s capital were his political opponents. “I’d say, ‘I’d love a loyal opposition,” he said of the presumably disloyal Republican Party.

 

“I’d love a Republican Party that was conservative in some ways, you know, didn’t agree with me on a whole bunch of stuff, but believed in rule of law, judicial independence,” and “empirical evidence, and science, and wasn’t constantly tapping into our worst impulses,” he drawled. “And there has been a Republican Party like that in the past, and I want to see that return because I think you have to have two healthy parties.”

 

Obama always excelled at flattering himself and his allies in a manner that sounds like he’s merely offering objective analysis. But Obama merely perfected this tactic. For Democrats, the last version of the GOP, the Republican president out of power, or the late conservative lawmaker are forever better than what they have to deal with now. Take former Senator Mitt Romney.

 

“He’s the modern voice Republicans need,” said onetime Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid prior to his death in 2021. “I like him.” That’s quite the turnaround from when Reid baselessly accused Romney of felony tax evasion, later explaining the lie away as an instrument of political utility. “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Reid later said of his own mendacity.

 

Then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had a change of heart when it came to the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee. “Doesn’t Mitt Romney look good to us now? Oh my God,” she mused in 2019 as Romney contemplated a run for the U.S. Senate. “Wouldn’t it be nice if he were president of the United States?” How odd. Either the man she accused of being “kind of sexist,” a liar, and a racially hostile bigot somehow managed to burnish his reputation with the former speaker in a relatively short period, or she never meant a word of her criticisms in the first place.

 

Even Obama got in on the act. When the acute political imperative was to attack Trump, Romney served as a useful foil. “I think I was right and Mitt Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought that they couldn’t do the job,” he told one interviewer in 2016. Trump, by contrast, was “unfit” for the office. That’s quite the reversal from four years earlier, when Obama had cast Romney as a “bullsh***er.” Obama’s running mate had said that Romney wanted to bring slavery back, and his campaign accused the GOP nominee of being guilty of negligent homicide.

 

For Democrats, the Republicans who are dead and gone are always somehow better than whatever we have today. It’s a trite political tactic that reflects less on its subjects and more on those who deploy it.

Obama’s Obfuscation Fits a Partisan Pattern

By Daniel J. Flynn

Friday, May 01, 2026

 

History shows that partisans often obscure the political motivations of assassins when they threaten to tarnish their own side.

 

Barack Obama claimed in a Sunday afternoon statement that “we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.”

 

Well, we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind Obama’s Sunday afternoon statement. A generous interpretation wonders whether the former president and his handlers had composed it hours before its actual release, by which time Cole Allen’s motives seemed transparent. A more cynical, and popular, interpretation posits that by muddying clear waters Obama wished to conduct damage control for progressives and hamstring any popularity rebound for the reeling President Trump.

 

It turned out that Allen, the armed man who attempted to storm the event, donated a small amount to Kamala Harris, associated with a strange (even by left-wing standards) group called the Wide Awakes, and wrote a hyperbole-laden manifesto that demonstrated that left-wing clichés and conspiracy theories regarding the Trump administration fueled his bad decision.

 

Obama’s apparent obfuscation of all that fits a pattern. Partisans often obscure the political motivations of assassins, wannabe and actual, when they threaten to tarnish their own side. They do this by depicting the shooters as men of mystery with views opaque to outsiders. They similarly do this by inventing ideologically flattering conspiracy theories.

 

Three of the four successful assassins of U.S. presidents subscribed to some variant of communism. Charles Guiteau, who spent more than five years living at the Oneida Community that practiced a communism so extreme as to embrace group marriage and collective parenting; Leon Czolgosz, a votary of anarcho-communist Emma Goldman; and Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marxist who lived in the Soviet Union, all strangely held views shared in common with a tiny sliver of the American population. Like mental illness, extreme left-wing political beliefs stand as a fairly common denominator among those who engage in political violence.

 

Particularly in Oswald’s case, the political left — starting with the Communist Party USA just days after the assassination — undertook an enormously successful propaganda effort to delude the American people that not a communist but the CIA or the mafia or the John Birch Society or wealthy Texas oilmen murdered the president.

 

National Review grasped this from the very beginning.

 

M. Stanton Evans marveled in the National Review Bulletin published immediately after the assassination how liberals could remold facts for their ideological uses even when the facts so blatantly undermined them.

 

“The President of the United States is assassinated by a Marxist,” Evans wrote. “That Marxist is himself murdered by an idolator of the President and his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. American liberalism surveys this monstrous scenario and concludes — that it is the fault of ‘the Radical Right.’”

 

Two months later, Stefan Possony, a Hoover Institution senior fellow and occasional contributor to the magazine, foresaw a day when the American public believed in fantastical lies regarding the Kennedy assassination if the conspiracy theories did not go unchecked. He wrote to William F. Buckley Jr. of a campaign to blame the FBI or anti-communist groups for the evil deed clearly committed by a communist.

 

“This is not the first time in U.S. history that the political background of a Presidential assassination was obfuscated,” Possony wrote Buckley. “The present operation is beginning to have initial successes — if we do not set forth a factual interpretation, we shall one day rue this omission.”

 

Possony’s words, quite prophetic in retrospect, also apply to our age of assassination. The murderers of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and the failed assassins of Donald Trump, shared in common not insanity but left-wing views. For the reasons stated by Possony 62 years ago, it seems important to correct the record when tinfoil-hat types distort it, but even more so when former presidents do.

Barack Obama Is Still Annoying

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, April 27, 2026

 

I am grateful to Barack Obama for popping up in my feed from time to time to remind me why I never liked him:

 

 

This message was built on top of a lie. At the time that this was posted — 5:15pm ET last night — we did, in fact, know “the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.” We knew it because the shooter’s manifesto had been published, and because every news outlet in the country had reported on it. Specifically, we knew that the suspect had said that he was profoundly opposed to President Trump, that he wanted to target officials in the Trump administration, and that he had been involved with various left-wing groups. By 5pm, these facts had been reported by CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, and a whole host of newspapers.

 

Perhaps Obama thinks that, politically, the suspect’s politics do not matter? That’s a defensible position. Perhaps, like me, he thinks that everyday rhetoric should not be blamed for the actions of zealots. That’s defensible, too. Perhaps he is opposed to collective punishment. That’s admirable — if true. But it is also irrelevant, because, instead of saying any of those things, Obama said, “we don’t yet have the details about the motives,” and this was in no sense true.

 

Why does this annoy me? It annoys me because, as was also neatly illustrated by his advocacy during Virginia’s recent redistricting push, Barack Obama has mastered the art of being a vicious partisan while pretending to be judicious. To this day, Obama is held up by a certain sort of political commentator as the gold standard of what a politician should be. He is no such thing. He is — and he always was — a brawler with solid PR. It is, indeed, virtuous to refuse to speculate on motives when those motives aren’t available. But, in this instance, the motive was available. It was just inconvenient. So Obama ignored it, and, in a tone that sounded lofty and responsible, he spread what in any other circumstance would be described as “misinformation.” This was not a one-off. He did this all through his presidency, and he has done it all through his post-presidency, too. He is not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.

The ‘Iran Deal’ Was Never the Solution to the Regime’s Nuclear Program

By Rebeccah Heinrichs

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

We are a mere three weeks into Operation Epic Fury, but with the “doomerism” coming out of a large segment of the professional national security world, you’d think we were a decade into a catastrophic, spiraling world war and on the precipice of a global economic recession.

 

In actuality, the United States and Israel are militarily crushing the Iranians, the Arab world is siding with America and condemning Iran, and the Europeans are leaning toward actively helping the United States secure the Strait of Hormuz.

 

The Iranian air force and navy are smoldering in rubble. The United States is mercilessly bombing  Iranian underground missile factories so that, years from now, if there are enough people still alive who know how to make them, they won’t be able to. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who claimed to be the leader of the Islamic world, was killed on the first day of Epic Fury, and his son, crowned the new supreme leader, is either dead or otherwise incapacitated. He has not appeared publicly. The Israelis have eliminated the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the regime’s military police force, the Basij. These evil officials were the most competent at and responsible for arming and equipping terrorists, defending the regime, and repressing the Iranian people.

 

The worst-case-scenario predictions about Iran’s possible retaliations against America have not materialized. There have not been thousands of American deaths (there have, tragically, been 13 service member deaths, due mostly to accidents). As the operation goes on, the tempo of Iranian missile and drone strikes continue to decrease, with some periodic spikes. And Iran’s economy, already squeezed by American and European sanctions, is experiencing even greater degrees of distress. Even so, the mere threat of Iranian attacks against shipping in the vital Strait of Hormuz gives the flailing terrorist regime leverage to wield against the world’s superpower.

 

No analyst, no matter how well-informed and equipped with the best historical case studies, can predict with high confidence how this war will end. Will the regime utterly collapse or be sufficiently weakened so that a more pragmatic leader complies with U.S. demands? It’s impossible to know. This war is unprecedented in the overmatch of American-Israeli capabilities and military competency against a shockingly weaker enemy whose strongest backers have mostly decided against helping it (with the important exception of Russia’s reported willingness to aid Iran in targeting). That said, until the Strait of Hormuz is secure, and the Iranian drones and missiles stop soaring, the war isn’t over. Still, the extensive progress of the military campaign so far has not stopped the most ardent critics of the war from predicting — with the utmost confidence — that it will end in catastrophe for America and its allies.

 

Many national security pundits tell us that, despite America’s overwhelming success in destroying thousands of targets on the campaign’s list, the Iranians are winning the war.

 

We’re told that despite the United States’ destruction of Iranian cruise missile sites along the strait’s coastline and the elimination of their mine-dropping ships, there’s nothing the United States can do to stop the regime from holding the strait hostage.

 

They say that the United States’ successful bombing campaign and Israeli targeted strikes against regime leaders have only strengthened the Islamic Republic’s fanaticism and resolve.

 

We are told that, even though the tempo of the Iranian missile and drone launches has dramatically decreased, the Iranians have surprises up their sleeves and are holding back the best capabilities and about to unleash massive, and more precise, strikes (the same argument espoused by Iran’s state media propaganda).

 

We’re told the regime leaders who were renowned for their ruthless repression and terrorism, when eliminated, will be replaced by Islamist radicals who are far more hardened, more willing to take risks, and more dangerous, and that even though the Islamic Republic’s top nuclear scientists have been eliminated, new nuclear scientists will appear and accelerate the nuclear weapons program with abandon. We’re told that the Iranians will rebuild their missiles and drones and that the United States is woefully unable to replenish its stocks.

 

No matter how much the United States and Israel achieve everything on their to-do list, no matter the clearly explained military objectives, strategy, and success of the endeavor, the end is still somehow a humiliating defeat for President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

The architect of the Obama administration’s echo chamber, Ben Rhodes, has been the most insightful when trying to divine the meaning behind the fact-defying “doomerism.” He recently posted on X: “As with Iraq, the problem is not the strategy or tactics of the Iran war. It’s the decision to fight an unnecessary war in the first place.”

 

The reality is, many of the loudest critics are wedded to the fiction that the 2015 Iran deal was the solution to the terrorist state’s nuclear weapons work, that it shielded Iran from U.S. and Israeli military intervention, thereby keeping the United States from entering a war it would lose.

 

But even the Iran deal’s biggest defenders must admit that it uncorked billions of dollars in sanctions relief to the terrorist regime, even though it didn’t meet the criteria for a “good deal” set out by the Obama administration at the start of negotiations. It didn’t have “anywhere, anytime” inspections (rather, it provided Iran with a heads-up and a delay before inspections, allowing Iran to hide activity); it required cooperation from Russians and the Chinese for full snapback sanctions; it didn’t restrain its missile program (it shockingly relaxed sanctions on its missile program, to the dismay of senators); and it had sunset provisions.

 

Senator Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) outlined some of the deal’s merits and its shortcomings in his explanation for why he opposed Obama’s deal. As he explained, the defenders insisted that the “imperfect” deal was better than no deal because the alternative was necessarily war.

 

This was the central claim of Ben Rhodes’s echo chamber: the Obama Iran deal or disastrous war. Why? As Schumer explained, this false choice relied on the logic that the Iran deal would moderate the regime, and without it, the regime would not change, inevitably leading to a high-cost clash with the West.

 

Schumer wrote:

 

If one thinks Iran will moderate, that contact with the West and a decrease in economic and political isolation will soften Iran’s hardline positions, one should approve the agreement.  After all, a moderate Iran is less likely to exploit holes in the inspection and sanctions regime, is less likely to seek to become a threshold nuclear power after ten years, and is more likely to use its newfound resources for domestic growth, not international adventurism.

 

But if one feels that Iranian leaders will not moderate and their unstated but very real goal is to get relief from the onerous sanctions, while still retaining their nuclear ambitions and their ability to increase belligerent activities in the Middle East and elsewhere, then one should conclude that it would be better not to approve this agreement.

 

Schumer was right then to reject the deal. Within a year of the agreement being finalized, reports indicated that Iran was busy on clandestine nuclear-related work while using billions of dollars in sanctions relief for funding, training, and supplying Islamist proxies around the region. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis were all well-resourced at the expense of American, European, and Gulf security — not to mention the long-suffering Iranian people.

 

President Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018 for the same reasons Senator Schumer opposed it, and he immediately reimposed sanctions on the regime to dry up its funds and slow down its aggression and dangerous missile development.

 

But the echo chamber that was so active during the Obama administration is active now, still insisting on pushing the myth that the choices were the Iran deal or a doomed war that a supposedly resilient, formidable, and adaptable Iran regime would win. Today, those echoing the myth blame Trump and Netanyahu for the war, not Iran’s supreme leader or the IRGC for amassing thousands of missiles, advancing its nuclear program and lying to inspectors, and not the Basij for massacring tens of thousands of Iranian protesters, thereby proving the hardened, radical nature of the inhumane regime.

 

Operation Epic Fury is crushing the Iran regime and destroying its ability to threaten U.S. interests. In directing the campaign, Trump is bursting the myth of the loud and determined echo chamber.