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The Iran Deal’s Destructive Legacy for U.S.-Russia Relations

March 1 2018

Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s former foreign-policy guru, recently announced that he—along with other former Obama-administration officials and former Hillary Clinton staffers—is starting an organization to campaign against candidates for office whose national-security platforms they disagree with. No doubt, writes Noah Rothman, it will attack the Trump administration for its conduct toward Moscow. But Rhodes and his colleagues have a credibility problem:

The challenges the West now faces from Moscow are directly attributable to the last administration’s Iran policy. [It] entered office determined to shift the balance of power in the Middle East toward Tehran to achieve a variety of utilitarian ends. Such a shift would allow the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq secure in the belief that Baghdad’s security, if not autonomy, would be preserved within a Shiite-dominated sphere of influence. A nuclear accord would also stave off the prospect of conflict with Iran over its burgeoning atomic-weapons program for the time President Obama was in the White House. Those objectives informed policy toward Moscow—one of Iran’s most influential allies.

Absent Russian diplomatic and material cooperation, there would have been no Iran deal. Thus, no concession for Moscow was too much. The desire to preserve the prospects of an Iran deal led the administration to pursue a cloying “reset” with Russia just months after its invasion and dismemberment of neighboring Georgia. It compelled Barack Obama to withdraw his self-set “red line” for action against Syria, another Russian ally. . . .

The administration’s dreams of détente with Iran compelled John Kerry’s State Department to elevate Moscow to the role of chief power broker in the region, facilitating Russia’s diplomatic offensives elsewhere in the Middle East. . . . The crisis in Syria, where Americans and Russians are [now] coming into dangerous proximity, was inflamed by Iran as Democrats did their best to look the other way. . . . In concert with their Russian allies, Iran and its proxy Hizballah have been implicated in grotesque crimes against humanity. The whole time, Russia and Iran coordinated their actions in Syria openly. The Kremlin has, for example, played host to General Qassem Soleimani, a sanctioned Iranian figure believed to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. military personnel in Iraq. . . .

[T]he claim [Rhodes’s] organization will peddle—that the United States has done nothing to correct for the Obama administration’s craven leniency toward Iran and Russia—is contemptible. That absurd claim is likely a byproduct of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment’s justified insecurity over its dubious record.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Barack Obama, Iran, Iran nuclear program, Russia, Syrian civil war, U.S. Foreign policy

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic