On Iran, it's groundhog day all over again.
The signals point towards the Democratic party’s default of empowering evil people
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US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign minster Jawad Zarif, Vienna, 2015
When anxiety first surfaced that in Joe Biden the US would once again be led by a president who would be soft on Iran, some others attempted a positive gloss. Don’t worry, they said; in light of Iran’s appalling aggression over the past four years and the fact that the regime was now far weaker than it had been, Biden would be exceptionally stupid to cosy up to Tehran and re-empower this lethal threat to the Middle East and the west.
But with the Biden era about to begin, those fears have become even stronger. For the signals are all pointing towards the Democratic party’s cultural default of empowering evil people both at home and abroad and abandoning or actively trashing their victims. And against stiff competition from the world’s tyrants (China, North Korea, Russia), the Iranian regime is arguably the most dangerous.
In 2015, it was given a tremendous boost by the nuclear deal, brokered by US President Barack Obama and supported by (to their eternal shame) the UK, France, Germany and others. The fiction was that the deal would stop Iran from developing the nuclear weapons with which they had pledged to erase Israel and attack the west, because the agreement would bring the regime in from the diplomatic cold and thus transform it into a regular government.
The opposite happened. The deal funnelled billions of dollars into the regime, enabling it to increase its dominance of the region, repress its own people still further and continue its sponsorship of international terrorism. Far from stopping the Iranian bomb, the terms of the deal meant that at best it would only delay the Iranian nuclear weapons programme by a few years, and only assuming that the regime would not continue to cheat and lie.
It was actually a deal to facilitate the Iranian bomb and fund the regime’s genocidal and fanatical aggression abroad and tyrannical repression at home. It made Neville Chamberlain’s Munich agreement with Hitler look by comparison like an act of principled statesmanship.
In May 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the deal and reimposed punitive sanctions on Iran. There are reports that the incoming Biden administration has already opened talks with Tehran over rejoining that agreement.
Biden has said he wants a renegotiation of the terms of the deal before he agrees to rejoin it. But it is extremely unlikely that he will toughen those terms.
The team Biden has assembled which will deal with Iran is overwhelmingly Obama’s team that was responsible for the 2015 deal disaster. William Burns, who has been appointed director of the CIA, and Jake Sullivan, the new National Security Adviser, were instrumental in paving the way for the 2015 deal through the secret talks they had with Iran at Obama’s behest.
The new Secretary of State is Anthony Blinken, who was also closely involved in creating the deal. He has wrong-headedly claimed that America’s withdrawal from it has placed Israel in more peril from Iran rather than less (which is emphatically not the view of Israel’s own government; but hey, what do they know?).
Blinken’s deputy, meanwhile, is the ineffable Wendy Sherman, one of the most inept western diplomats ever to walk the international stage. Having offered North Korea various cash prizes and diplomatic concessions which president Kim Jong-il promptly pocketed while continuing to accumulate nuclear weapons, she subsequently matched this catastrophe by caving in to Iran at every point.
