Exceptional (24 page)

The president promised international sanctions would “snap back” into place if Iran cheats. Instead, the agreement actually commits the European Union and the UN Security Council to
refrain
from re-imposing or re-introducing sanctions lifted under this agreement. It also prohibits the UN Security Council and the European Union from imposing any new nuclear-related sanctions. The United States similarly commits “to refrain from re-introducing or re-imposing” sanctions that are lifted under this agreement. If those commitments aren't sufficient to prevent any attempt to impose “snapback” sanctions, the agreement says “Iran . . . will treat such re-introduction or re-imposition of sanctions . . . or such an imposition of new nuclear-related sanctions, as grounds to cease performing its commitments” under the agreement. If Iran cheats, and we learn about it despite the absence of a go-anywhere-anytime verification regime, the protracted international debate about whether the cheating happened and how significant it was will take place under the shadow of the Iranian threat—codified in the agreement—to abandon all their commitments. If history is any guide, President Obama will argue that the trade-off isn't worth it. After all, one can almost hear him saying, we wouldn't want to risk Iran abandoning the deal.

President Obama assures us that his “commitment to Israel's security is, and always will be, unshakeable.” Although no nation is under greater threat from a nuclear-armed Iran than the state of Israel, President Obama has consistently demonstrated more determination to constraining Israeli action than Iranian action. The impact on Israel's security of Obama's attempted détente with Iran has already become evident. On January 18, 2015, Israel struck a convoy traveling in the Golan Heights. The convoy was carrying senior Hezbollah and Iranian officers, including a general in the IRGC. “By treating Syria as
an Iranian sphere of influence,” former national security council senior director Michael Doran noted, “Obama is allowing the shock troops of Iran to dig in on the border of Israel—not to mention the
border of Jordan.”

President Obama has said consistently that all options remain on the table to prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon, including the military option. That was until May 31, 2015, anyway. In an interview on Israeli TV that day, the president took the military option off the table. His deal was really the only option, he said, because military strikes wouldn't be effective. “A military solution won't fix it,” he continued, “even if the U.S. participates.” The Iranians had already noted the change. “There are very few people in today's world who take these military threats seriously,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in a speech in July 2014.

The president has also agreed as part of this deal to remove restrictions on those who facilitated, over the last thirty-five years, Iran's efforts to gain a nuclear weapon. In particular, he has agreed to remove sanctions on individuals who were at the heart of the worst nuclear proliferation network in history, the A. Q. Khan network. In a little-noticed action on April 3, 2015, the day after the outlines of the framework agreement were announced, the U.S. Treasury Department lifted sanctions on B.S.A. Tahir, the man who met the Iranians in the Dubai hotel with the briefcase full of centrifuge designs in 1987. Tahir was the point man, providing technology and centrifuge parts as the Iranians built their illicit nuclear program. He was the CEO, CFO, COO, chief money-launderer, and right-hand man for A. Q. Khan and his global proliferation network. In the deal announced on July 14, 2015, sanctions were also lifted on Gerhard Wisser, another of the key suppliers for Iran in A. Q. Khan's network. Why would President Obama, who claims to want to halt proliferation, lift sanctions on two of the world's
worst offenders? Obviously, it was an Iranian demand as part of the deal, and there seems to be no limit to President Obama's appetite for concessions.

The president has said repeatedly that he is committed to stopping Iran's support for terror and its destabilizing activities across the Middle East. Instead, he now seems intent on ushering in an era of Iran as a political, economic, and military power. Not only has he been unwilling to take action against Iran's interests in the Middle East, he seems to have convinced himself that it is in America's interest for Iran to play a dominant role in the region. And the concessions he has granted in this agreement enhance their ability to do so.

One principle the president has lived up to is something he announced in his June 2009 Cairo speech. “No single nation,” he said, “should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.” It is as though President Obama sees no moral difference between an Iranian nuclear weapon and an American one. The agreement he approved in July 2015 cedes our right to keep the world's greatest state sponsor of terror from obtaining the world's worst weapons.

President Obama told us no deal is better than a bad deal. Now he tells us this deal, which is so bad it
guarantees
the very things he said he was trying to prevent, is the only option. There was another option: America could have negotiated from a position of strength. The president could have left the sanctions in place instead of releasing the pressure just as Iran was beginning to feel the impact. He could have left the military option on the table instead of announcing in May 2015 that there was no workable military solution. He could have recognized that the credible threat of war makes war less, not more, likely. He could have learned from the example of Ronald Reagan's negotiations with the Soviets at Reykjavik that no deal really is better than a bad deal, and some things cannot be conceded. He could have stood firm for the principle that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon.
He could have secured a deal that enhanced America's security. Instead, he agreed to one that puts us at risk.

The Obama nuclear agreement with Iran is tragically reminiscent of Prime Minister Chamberlain's Munich agreement. Both were negotiated from a position of weakness and conceded nearly everything to appease an ideological dictator. Hitler got Czechoslovakia. The mullahs in Tehran get billions of dollars and a pathway to a nuclear arsenal.

The July 14, 2015, agreement jettisons forty years of an international arms control regime, guts the United Nations Security Council's ability to restrict Iran's nuclear weapons program, ends prohibitions on Tehran's ability to build ballistic missiles to carry their nuclear warheads, lifts the embargo on the import of conventional weapons Iran uses and supplies to terrorists around the globe, and removes sanctions that have limited the ability of the IRGC to proliferate nuclear technology, support terror, and kill Americans. Munich led to World War II. The Obama agreement will lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, and more than likely, the first use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

ON APRIL 25, 2005, Vladimir Putin delivered the Russian equivalent of a State of the Union address—his annual speech to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. Speaking of the challenges facing Russia, he said it was necessary to consider Russia's recent history. “Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century.” Where most saw the triumph of freedom over tyranny, Putin saw geopolitical disaster. He has spent his years in office trying to restore what he believes Russia lost.

With bullying, extortion, blackmail, covert operations, the threat of nuclear strikes, and outright military invasion, Putin is desperately
trying to reestablish Russia as a global power and reimpose Russian dominance over large swaths of Europe. The sovereignty of his neighbors is of little concern to him. Under the pretext of coming to the aid of Russian-speaking populations, Putin is using force to redraw the map of Europe. In the early years of the Obama administration, President Obama and Secretary Clinton were either unable or unwilling to recognize Putin's true intentions. When those intentions turned into actions, President Obama consistently failed to take any meaningful steps to stop him.

President Obama's approach to Russia began where his approach to Iran did—with the assumption that America was to blame for the tensions in the relationship. The problem was not Vladimir Putin's behavior but rather George Bush's. To drive this point home, and signal a time of new beginnings, Secretary of State Clinton presented Russian foreign minister Lavrov with the now-infamous “reset” button in front of the world's press in
Geneva in March 2009. The button was a grand gesture, presented in a box tied up with a bow. After he opened the box, Lavrov looked down on the button as the cameras rolled. “You got it wrong,” he said. The label on the button said “overcharge,” not “reset.” Later, Secretary Clinton's staff chased down the Russian delegation pleading with them to allow the Americans to
fix the label.

The translation mistake could have happened to anyone. Secretary Clinton has explained that it was really the thought that counted, the policy behind the “reset” button. Unfortunately, the policy was as flawed as the translation on the label.

President Obama visited Moscow in July 2009. In a speech at the New Economic School, he described the world of the Cold War:

At that time, the American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything
from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the
other had to lose.

It's the perfect picture of a world divided between two morally equivalent powers dug in to their individual “ideological trenches,” conveniently leaving out that only one side oppressed, terrorized, built walls, and killed to keep its people within its borders. The Cold War, as Obama told it in Moscow that day, wasn't won or lost. It “reached a conclusion.”

Twenty years later, Obama continued, America now rejected the idea of powerful nations leading a global world order. “As I said in Cairo, given our interdependence any world order that elevates one nation or one group of people over another will inevitably fail. The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game—progress must be shared.” In this new world, governed by an idealized “international system,” Obama explained, “rules must be binding, violations must be punished, and words must mean something.”

Obama's vision was simultaneously prescriptive and passive—these things all “must” happen, yet there is no mention of who will make them happen. “Progress must be shared”; states that attempt to dominate others “will inevitably fail.” There was no recognition, and worse, no apparent understanding, that the triumph of freedom was the result of the
actions
of free nations—especially the United States. The Cold War simply “reached a conclusion,” like a lecture does, or a particularly boring book. The president's failure to understand this fundamental truth—that freedom must be defended and America must lead that defense—has been the fatal flaw in his policies. It was on full display that day at the New Economic School in Moscow.

After serving two terms as Russia's president from 2000 to 2008, Vladimir Putin was prevented by the Russian constitution from serving
a third. When Obama visited Moscow in the summer of 2009, Putin had stepped aside as president, although he was still running the country, and he hosted Obama at his country house outside Moscow.

The meeting opened with a lecture from Putin on America's misconduct and lies. Then he moved on to Russia's role in Europe. Putin had launched his efforts to regain lost Soviet territory with the 2008 invasion of Georgia, and now he demanded that the United States recognize Russia's sphere of influence over all the former Soviet republics. U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul called Putin's lecture “grossly inaccurate,” adding, “but that's his
theory of the world.”

President Obama was nevertheless anxious to further the “reset” of the relationship. This meant eliminating irritants. The missile defense system planned for Poland and the Czech Republic was at the top of this list. In his speech at the New Economic School, the president acknowledged Russia's concerns and announced that the United States would be undertaking a review of the plans.

America's new Russia policy was causing grave concern in Central and Eastern Europe. As President Obama's trip to Moscow came to an end, twenty-two former heads of state, cabinet ministers, ambassadors, and scholars from Central and Eastern Europe published an open letter to the American president. They urged that America not walk away from Europe or give in to Russian bullying. “Our nations are deeply indebted to the United States,” it began:

Many of us know firsthand how important your support for our freedom and independence was during the Cold War years. U.S. engagement and support was essential for the success of our democratic transitions after the Iron Curtain fell twenty years ago. Without Washington's vision and leadership, it is doubtful that we would be in NATO and
even the EU today.

It was critically important, they continued, that America “reaffirm its vocation as a European power and make clear that it plans to stay fully engaged on the continent.” The free nations of Europe faced many challenges. Russia was at the top of the list. They were under no illusions as to Russia's plans. America shouldn't be, either. The leaders explained:

Our hopes that relations with Russia would improve and that Moscow would finally fully accept our complete sovereignty and independence after joining NATO and the EU have not been fulfilled. Instead Russia is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th century agenda with 21st century tactics. . . . It challenges our claims to our own historical experiences. It asserts a privileged position in determining our security choices. It uses overt and covert means of economic warfare, ranging from energy blockades and politically motivated investments to bribery and media manipulation in order to advance its interests and challenge the transatlantic orientation of Central and Eastern Europe.