As a senior national-security official, imagine a revolutionary foreign power that has worked for decades to undermine American strength and alliances in a critical region. It is the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism, has funded and directed proxy forces that have killed and maimed U.S. personnel, and aims to drive the United States from its corner of the globe and eliminate America’s closest ally in the Greater Middle East. This foreign power has spent four presidential administrations building military and technical infrastructure to produce nuclear weapons while concealing and lying about its program. It violates human rights with impunity and has spent the past nine months brutally suppressing a popular revolt against its theocratic rule. Additionally, it supplies the drones and other weaponry that Russia uses to prosecute an illegal and barbaric war on the sovereign nation of Ukraine.
Given these circumstances, would you be inclined to bargain with such a regime? If your answer is yes, then you can look forward to a short and unhappy career in Joe Biden’s State Department. According to news reports, President Biden is prepared to authorize billions of dollars in payments to Iran in exchange for the release of U.S. prisoners, a halt to militia attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, a moratorium on ballistic-missile sales to Russia, and a freeze on uranium enrichment at 60 percent. However, Biden cannot call the agreement a deal because he wants to avoid congressional review. The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 forbids the president from relieving nuclear-related sanctions on the Islamic Republic without congressional approval. The administration’s end run around the law is clever but pathetic.
This deal that dare not speak its name will have no force and will rely entirely on the goodwill of the 84-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a grizzled trickster and ally of Vladimir Putin. The agreement says nothing about Iran’s deadliest proxy, Hezbollah, or about Iran’s drone traffic. This omission is consistent with Biden’s habit of selling out America’s allies, whether it be the democratic government of Afghanistan, the peoples of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, or the Ukrainians resisting Russian occupation. Biden’s bribe is limited in scope, bereft of accountability, brazenly desperate, and lacking in strategic purpose. Its aims are political, as Biden wants to keep the Middle East quiet ahead of Election Day 2024.
Appeasing Iran does nothing to further the cause of democracy. Nor does attempting détente with a China that has grown in belligerence since the spy-balloon incident earlier this year. Slow-walking weapons deliveries to Ukraine while hemming and hawing over Ukraine’s future in NATO is also not helpful. If Joe Biden wanted to preserve and promote democracy abroad, he would do more than give the occasional speech on the subject. He would mobilize hard power to confront authoritarians and deter them from hostile acts.
Biden has made a career out of misjudgment, and this sure-to-fail bargain with Iran is another entry in a depressing catalogue.
