If the past is prologue, we should expect to see Trump’s frustrated advisors succumb to the bitterness that consumed Obama’s team by the end of his tenure.
“This offer won’t be around forever,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month. The warning accompanied the Trump administration’s overture to Iran in what it billed as the best it could do if Tehran hoped to avoid hostilities over its nuclear program. “At some point,” Rubio continued, “decisions will have to be made about more maximum pressure and other options because Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.”
It’s almost one month later, and we appear no closer to the point of exhaustion. The Iranians took Trump’s proposal — one that multiple reports indicated would have allowed Iran to enrich uranium on its soil despite administration officials’ insistence that it would accept no indigenous enrichment capacity — balled it up and threw it back in our faces. “They’re just asking for things that you can’t do,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “They seek enrichment. We can’t have enrichment.” And yet, the eternal talks are set to continue this weekend in Muscat, where the delegates will presumably restate their mutually exclusive and unbridgeable positions once again.
For some inexplicable reason, Politico surveyed this landscape and determined that the GOP’s hawks are in the driver’s seat.
Owing to an obvious overreliance on the “restrainers” in the Trump administration as sources — a group that is as eager to leak to the press in private as they are to condemn the mainstream media for the benefit of their constituents — Politico’s dispatch sounds the alarms over the degree to which security-minded Americans (not, you know, the Iranians) are scuttling the prospects for peace.
The evidence? The existence of radio host Mark Levin, for one.
Levin has warned the administration that Iran could be “days away” from building a fissionable device — “something Trump’s own intelligence team has told the president is not accurate,” Politico noted. That would be comforting, save for the dubious source of those comforting words and the contradictory evidence indicating that Iran is already a threshold nuclear state. In addition, Levin has impugned the competency of Trump’s all-purpose negotiator, Steve Witkoff, who has little to show for all his globe-trotting.
Beyond Levin, the MAGA movement is equally irritated with the New York Post editorial board, which has independently arrived at many of Levin’s conclusions. “There’s clearly a lobby for war with Iran vs. those who are more aligned with the president,” one anonymous source who is obviously within the “restrainer” camp insisted.
The thing is, this unnamed “senior administration official” might be right. The “restrainer” set may be closer to the president’s instincts. Their problem is that the world simply refuses to comply with their notions of how it should work.
Tulsi Gabbard’s problem isn’t that we are “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.” Her problem is that Trump is becoming increasingly frustrated with Russia’s refusal to abandon its war of conquest in the face of mounting American … gestures of goodwill? She now implies that anything other than more unrequited gestures will beget nuclear Armageddon – not because that’s true but because that argument might persuade the president to toe her pacifist line.
Likewise, J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, and the cast of unnamed restrainers on whom Politico relies for juicy quotes say their problem is with the right’s hawks, but that’s misdirection. Their problem is with Iran, its steadfast refusal to give up its enrichment capabilities, and the Americans who will not countenance allowing the Islamic Republic to break out with a nuclear weapon at a time and place of its choosing. Their fear isn’t that the hawks are winning the argument; it’s that they think they’re losing it.
They’re right about that, but it’s no one’s fault but their own. Like Barack Obama’s brain trust before them, they approached foreign policy from a highly theoretical perspective. Obama’s foreign policy practitioners refused to revisit the flawed framework they applied to international affairs even after it proved itself fatally flawed. Instead, they blamed their shortcomings on domestic political opponents, who were accused of engineering the obstacles in the way of Obama’s success. But the former president’s critics didn’t create those obstacles. They merely noticed them.
If the past is prologue, we should expect to see Trump’s frustrated advisors succumb to the bitterness that consumed Obama’s team by the end of his tenure. It will be our fault when the whole edifice collapses. Be warned: the degree to which we will be castigated for being unworthy of their practical genius will be hard to stomach. We can take solace in the fact that it is a coping mechanism – one that is on full display in Politico’s exposé.
The problems besetting Trump in relation to Iran are, according to this reporting, myriad: the hawks, the “pro-military” community, the Israelis — they all bedevil and confound our peaceable president. Nonsense. His problem — our problem — is reality.