Thanks to our Substack community for support and interest. Sharing a few more things. Yesterday, Dany had a piece in Foreign Policy laying out the Iranian plan to use its proxies to begin a war to annihilate Israel. It doesn’t matter that such plans are beyond the real world. What matters is that Iran has made clear its strategy in no uncertain terms.
Bizarrely, perhaps, a very slightly different version of the FP piece was sitting in copy edit last week. But that makes Israel’s surprise all the more shocking.
Some additional thoughts are below.
In the wake of the dreadful Hamas attack on Israel, there have been repeated accusations — accurate — that the Biden administration’s transfer to Iran (via Qatar) of $6 billion amounts to a direct subsidy of the Hamas war ongoing. While this indictment is correct as far as it goes, it fails to advance an argument about the future. In fact, this war is an indictment of an entire philosophy that has taken hold in the security and foreign policy establishment, and that has prevailed throughout the last three administrations: That the United States must “pivot” away from the Middle East towards more urgent challenges from Beijing and Moscow.
For the Obama administration, the nuclear agreement with Iran represented an effort to repudiate the 9/11 wars — the “forever wars” that isolationists and know-nothings adore referencing — and to firmly settle the questions of the Middle East with a deal to make everything go away. That it was a bad deal is not the point. The point is that the philosophy underpinning it — that there are options to settle the existential claims of hostile powers with goodwill and smarts — is fundamentally false.
The Trump team understood the weakness of the Iran nuclear deal, but with its avowedly mercantilist bent, also believed there was a deal to be had to manage—and thus offload—the region. Iran policy would be a casual boot on the throat of the Iranian economy, with day to day management subcontracted to a new coalition of Sunni Arabs and Israel. And while it was heartening to see a half-century of enmity to the Jews set aside, the Trump policy was at heart a pivot by another name.
Enter Biden, whose foreign policy intellects sourced themselves in a resuscitation of their early years with Obama, and an even more dangerous covert effort to satisfy Iran. Thus the money, the secret “understanding “ with Tehran to lay off American targets and slow nuclear enrichment – a conspiracy with terrorists to fool the US Congress.
It is all wrong, not simply morally or tactically, but also strategically. Powers like Iran do not make real deals. Terrorists do not accommodate a pivot. Concessions feed the beast. After 9/11, many of us were forced to remind our compatriots that not a decade has gone by in which there has not been a war in the Middle East to upend each president’s varying desire for his version of “nation building here at home.“
The answer to putting the Middle East into a second tier of threats and focusing on the very real menaces from Russia and China is victory. Victory comes from defeat. And that is what the United States must facilitate for Israel and for our own interests: the complete and utter defeat of Iran and its agents. Otherwise, inevitably, we will be back again and again.