empowering iran
If the passage of the ACA in Obama’s first term was his to be the forty-fourth president’s greatest domestic policy achievement (it wasn’t), then the Iran nuclear agreement in President Obama’s second term was to be his foreign policy masterstroke (like the ACA, it wasn’t).
Obama was operating on the naïve assumption that the Iranian regime, despite its public appearance of being led by millenarian religious zealots, was a rational actor seeking normalization in a world that had isolated them.
Part of Obama’s goal was to distance the United States from the Middle East after more than a decade of being bogged down there. Unfortunately for Obama, carefully laid plans, or perfect academic theories on how humans should act rarely translate well in the real world. The Iranian regime could not be trusted.
What’s more, entrusting Iran with nuclear weapons was the work of a madman. After all, Iran was one of the world’s leading state sponsors of global terrorism.
Obama believed that if he allowed for the Shiite Muslim-dominated Iran to acquire nukes, with the predominantly Jewish democracy of Israel long having possessed nuclear weapons, and a Sunni Islamic world nominally led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that was opposed to Iran, a balance of power that would lead to long-term peace would be at hand.
Any attempt by the United States to normalize relations with Iran and allow for the peaceful march toward Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities would only militate Tehran further against the West, believing the Western powers were weak and could be toppled.
President Obama even partnered with the Islamic Republic of Iran to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an organization that was itself birthed because of shabby Obama foreign policy when he decided to sloppily withdraw US forces from Iraq. Because of that short-sighted decision, Iran was given carte blanche to expand into Iraq and connect its power base with that of Lebanon, thereby threatening Israel.
Today, Iran is one of the world’s leading forces of instability. Their growing nuclear weapons capability as well as their newfound alliance with China and Russia, could lead to the breakout of the third world war—something that Obama’s hairbrained scheme in 2015 was supposed to avert.
