The WSJ's Bad Revisionism on U.S. Iran Policy

If containing Iran is the proverbial white whale, that should tell us that the U.S. needs to abandon the pursuit before it leads to ruin in the form of another unnecessary war.

A new Wall Street Journal report on Iran and U.S. policy contains this bizarre claim:

For more than two decades, Western policy on Iran has vacillated. American presidents repeatedly shifted the balance between diplomacy and force, outreach and attempted isolation. 

The U.S. approach to Iran has not changed that much from one administration to another in this century. The report’s summary is not accurate. U.S. policy has been defined by harsh sanctions and collective punishment of the population. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much wavering from that approach in the last twenty years.

Obama’s policy was somewhat different from that of other presidents in that he was prepared to agree to sanctions relief in exchange for major concesssions on the nuclear issue, but even this brief period of modest compromise was bookended by intense economic warfare. Even when Obama was at his most accommodating, U.S. policy towards Iran was still generally hostile and coercive. The moment of the most significant “outreach” to Tehran involved agreeing to stop strangling Iran’s economy, and it was taken for granted that the “outreach” ended there.