Mead Shrugged

If you don’t know who was right over the last seven years, you are not likely to have the first clue what to do next or who can be relied on for sound policy advice.

Walter Russell Mead doesn’t want us to bicker and argue over who killed who:

If the U.S. is going to develop an effective response to this combination of strategic threats, our political leaders will have to move beyond finger pointing and blame games over the fate of the JCPOA. Republicans can say justly that Mr. Obama’s decision to sign something as consequential and controversial as the Iran nuclear deal without the bipartisan support needed to get a treaty ratified in the Senate was a historic mistake. Democrats can reasonably riposte that Mr. Trump’s unilateral withdrawal made everything worse. Such matters can be left to the historians. The question before us now is not who was right in 2015 or 2018. It is what we do next.

It is a ridiculous dodge to shrug your shoulders and say that the answers can be “left to the historians,” as if policy analysts and scholars do not have ample information to reach their own judgments about these issues themselves right now. If you don’t know who was right over the last seven years, you are not likely to have the first clue what to do next or who can be relied on for sound policy advice. Of course, Mead has been in sympathy with the deal-wreckers for years, so his feigned neutrality can’t be taken seriously. He is like a pyromaniac excitedly watching an arsonist’s handiwork and then pretending not to know who is responsible for the fire.

It is clear that negotiating the nuclear deal significantly reduced the danger that Iran’s nuclear program would be used to build nuclear weapons. The deal was doing exactly what it was supposed to do and Iran was fully complying with it until the U.S. chose to go back on its word. The decision to break that agreement and wage economic war on Iran despite Iranian compliance was one of the more consequential blunders in recent U.S. foreign policy. Trump took an issue that was being successfully managed and turned it into a potential crisis. Biden has since had the chance to reverse Trump’s policies, and he has botched it because he is afraid of being accused of “weakness” by the same people that created the current problem. Iran hawks were wrong in 2015 when they opposed the agreement, and they were wrong again when they supported Trump’s decision to violate it, and they are still wrong today as they agitate for bankrupt coercive “options” that solve nothing.

Biden is presented as facing a choice of “failing” to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons or launching an attack on Iran. If this is the choice, then it is not not a very tough one at all. As undesirable as an Iran with nuclear weapons might be, an illegal preventive war that wouldn’t prevent anything would be much worse for U.S. interests and international security. Beyond being ineffective and a spur to more proliferation, an attack on Iran would be criminal aggression that would add another stain to America’s reputation. There is still a third, better option of restoring the agreement, and failing that there is a fallback option of living with an Iranian nuclear program that is very advanced but still peaceful.

Mead says that if the U.S. “fails” to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, “the consequences for American power in the Middle East and globally would be profound and perhaps irreversible.” It is doubtful that the consequences would be so severe, and Americans should not be railroaded into accepting a new, unnecessary war on the basis of such speculative claims. North Korea acquired nuclear weapons sixteen years ago despite repeated statements by one president after another that such a development would be “unacceptable.” As it turned out, the U.S. has been able to live with that outcome and has not suffered the disastrous consequences that were supposed to have followed from it. In the event that Iran did acquire nuclear weapons, the U.S. would learn to live with it and adjust. The worst thing that the U.S. could do in response is to launch a war that would further sap its resources and consume its attention when both are needed elsewhere.