If his confused op-ed is any indication, the former secretary of state doesn’t quite know how we got here or where we’re going.
The editorial staff at the New York Times should have saved Antony Blinken from himself. In a Tuesday op-ed, Joe Biden’s secretary of state issued a confused verdict on Donald Trump’s contributions to Israel’s war against Iran’s nuclear program. In it, he condemned its presumed failures while also taking credit for its manifest successes.
“First, it never should have come to this,” Blinken insisted. From this lament, he launched into a familiar defense of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was, Blinken alleged, an airtight seal on Iran’s nuclear ambitions that somehow also allowed Iran to experiment with advanced and efficient nuclear centrifuges — setting itself up to break out with nuclear capability after it had spent ten years building its forces and bilking funds out of the West.
“Iran would have access to an industrial-scale nuclear program, fully-funded, with few restrictions and the most advanced centrifuges as soon as the sunset clauses within the JCPOA came into effect,” American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin observed in early 2017. Indeed, those sunset clauses would have entered into effect this year.
The JCPOA would have “bought us at least 15 years instead of just a few,” Blinken said. “And it avoided the risk of Iranian retaliation — such as Monday’s missile attacks directed at our forces in the region — as well as the potential for further escalation,” he added. That missile attack was never designed to imperil U.S. forces — Iran itself made certain of that. It was a de-escalatory signal that Blinken almost certainly comprehends but, perhaps, hopes his readers won’t.
Blinken’s claim also presupposes that Iran had ceased its support for terrorism and initiatives aimed at harassing and terrorizing U.S. troops and civilians while the JCPOA was operative. That’s just not true. In addition, Blinken’s argument that “Iran could rebuild quickly” following the U.S. strikes assumes that the U.S. and Israel would accept that outcome. If Iran does try to rebuild its weapons program, given the degradation of Iran’s defenses and its terrorist proxies, it’s just as likely that both Washington and Jerusalem will enforce the new status quo they’ve established in the region with more strikes on Iran’s now limited capabilities.
That would probably be fine with Blinken, though. In an abrupt about-face, the former secretary of state pivoted from criticizing Trump to insisting that Trump’s military successes are not his alone. After all, “Mr. Trump’s actions were possible only because of the work of the Obama and Biden administrations,” Blinken wrote.
The Obama administration accelerated development of the M.O.P. and had contingency plans for the type of operation that Mr. Trump authorized. Mr. Biden instructed his team to rehearse, test and refine those plans. We also conducted, in 2023, the largest-ever joint exercise with Israel — something of a dry run for this latest action.
There is something to be said for the continuity of the U.S. position regarding the unacceptability of a nuclear Iran. To one extent or another, every president this century has called that outcome unacceptable and prepared the means to prevent it. But only Trump pulled the trigger on the consequences his predecessors merely advertised. Even if he seems to find the circumstances that begat this moment somehow yucky, Blinken clearly welcomes the new opportunities they present.
“I wish that he had played out the diplomatic hand we left him,” Blinken concluded. “Now that the military die has been cast, I can only hope that we inflicted maximum damage — damage that gives the president the leverage he needs to finally deliver the deal he has so far failed to achieve.” The former secretary of state doesn’t seem to have considered the possibility that an agreement that verifiably resolves the threat posed by an Iranian bomb was not possible while the Islamic republic was dedicated to its pursuit.
These strikes and the promise of more to come could convince Iran that its 20-year, $500 billion investment in a bomb program is lost. Maybe not. Either way, Iran was never going to be seduced into voluntarily giving up its nuclear weapons program.
The Obama-era foreign policy brain trust’s vision of a Middle East in which Iran and Saudi Arabia maintain a balance of terror in the region, battering Israel while the U.S. bugs out, is dead and buried somewhere beneath the rubble of the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant. If Blinken’s confused op-ed is any indication, this brain trust doesn’t quite know how it got here, and it’s just as confused about where we’re going.