Required Reading

Marc Thiessen explains the Gruber Doctrine for Cuba and Iran:

The Gruber Doctrine is based on the premise that, in the words of the now infamous MIT professor, “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” and that the “basic exploitation of the lack of . . . understanding of the American voter” is “really, really critical” for enacting your preferred policies.

That is precisely what Obama is doing when it comes to Iran and Cuba.

With Iran, the administration is once again relying on a “lack of transparency” to ram through its nuclear deal. Even Iran’s foreign minister dismissed the administration’s talking points describing the framework agreement as “spin.” Obama is warning that the only alternative to his deal is “another war in the Middle East ,” even though he has yet to reveal the key details: Will sanctions relief be front-loaded, as Iran insists, or will sanctions come off gradually, as the Iranians meet certain performance benchmarks? Will there be any transparency into Iran’s past secret nuclear activity, information that is critical to verifying its compliance today? Will there be “snap inspections” and access to all Iranian facilities, both civilian and military? Iran says no. Obama is counting on the fact that Americans won’t be able to follow all the details about “centrifuges” and “domestic enrichment capacity.” He won’t share the details but wants us to trust him that there will be “unprecedented verification.” If you believe that, you probably still think that if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Cuba I’m not at all worried about. Havana’s last claim to fame was “helping” Venezuela complete its socialist revolution-from-above, and the entire hemisphere has seen how well that worked out. Frankly, Cuba doesn’t matter that much since the Soviets left, and keeping the Russians out is a longterm project for perhaps the next several presidents. The worst that Obama could do would be to evacuate Gitmo, but I’m not sure even he would go that far.

But Iran…

Iran was merely a problem to be managed, once upon a time. But Bush held the door open for them in Iraq, and Obama seems determined to hand the entire region over to the mullahs. Now, Iran is Our Neverending Permanent Crisis, which seems likely to embroil the Middle East in a decade or more of wars of various intensities.

Obama’s only remaining choices are either to hand Tehran the whole enchilada, or to walk away from the nuclear agreement he’s pegged as his foreign policy legacy. His only remaining hope is that our Arab “allies” can somehow re-cage the tiger.