In an article in Unherd, the strategic analyst Edward Luttwak calls on the Biden administration to “unleash Israel” by giving the Netanyahu government the green light to attack Iran’s nuclear installations and/or the Khark Island oil terminal. Luttwak, however, has little faith that Biden, or whoever is actually making decisions in this White House, will follow his advice because “those officials who run Biden’s foreign policy cling to their dream of reconciliation with Tehran, believing that all would now be well if only Trump had stuck by the nuclear agreement negotiated by Obama, their former boss.” Luttwak calls it “the persistence of the Obama delusion.”
It should be clear by now to anyone whose judgment is not clouded by Obama worship that Obama’s Middle East policy was an unvarnished failure. It began, you may recall, with the president’s apology to Iran for America’s role in the 1953 coup that overthrew the government of Mohammad Mossadegh and reinstalled the Shah in power, portraying a geopolitical achievement of the Eisenhower administration that every successor presidential administration appreciated until the Jimmy Carter debacle as an historic wrong. Obama pledged to the Mullahs that he was “prepared to move forward” in improving relations with Iran. In that same speech in Cairo, Egypt, Obama sought “a new beginning” with the entire Muslim world.
Next came Obama’s promotion of the so-called “Arab Spring,” acting under the naive “belief in the salvific power of global norms” to transform autocracies into democracies in the Middle East — a belief shared by his predecessor George W. Bush. In Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, the Obama policy miserably but predictably failed to advance democracy or, more importantly, American interests in the region. As James Jay Carafano wrote, Obama’s “experiment with normalizing Islamist extremists” failed everywhere it was tried. “Obama and his team,” wrote Stephen Walt, “mistakenly viewed the Arab Spring as a large-scale, grass-roots uprising clamoring for liberal democracy.” Obama’s policy, Jonathan Tobin reminded us, led “to more repression and the emergence of radical Islamist parties and terror groups” in all the targeted countries, except Tunisia.
Undaunted by those failures, Obama compounded them by negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran that did nothing more than, in Tobin’s words, “strengthen Tehran’s efforts to achieve regional hegemony.” The much-heralded deal not only did not halt Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, it also secretly gave Iran hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and tried to give Iran access to the U.S. financial system to convert nearly $6 billion in Iranian assets. Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies called the Iran nuclear deal “one of the worst unforced strategic errors in the history of U.S. foreign policy.”
In return for Obama’s policy of appeasing Iran, the Mullahs have provided the fiscal and military wherewithal (some from North Korea and China paid for no doubt with Obama’s cash gifts and the Obama–Biden lifting of sanctions) to their proxies in the region (Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other Islamist forces) who have used it to wage war against Israel and U.S. interests in the region. Iran’s proxies have killed and kidnapped Israelis and Americans. The Biden administration is staffed with Obama holdovers who, Luttwak writes, suffer from the same delusion about Iran that motivated Obama.
Israel is reportedly expanding its military incursion into Lebanon against Hezbollah and has fired missiles at buildings in Damascus, Syria. Axios reports that the Biden administration has lost trust in Netanyahu’s government. Luttwak knows that the Netanyahu government in Israel will take whatever actions it deems necessary to ensure that Iran cannot inflict a nuclear Holocaust on Israel and its citizens, whatever the wishes of American officials. What he calls the “persistence of the Obama delusion” among Biden administration officials will likely mean that Israel will have to strike Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure — as it did in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007. That may result in all-out war between Iran and Israel. Such are the wages of appeasement.
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