FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Let’s Make a Bad Deal. The new book, The Iran Wars by Jay Solomon of the Wall Street Journal is reviewed by Omri Ceren In Commentary:
As [Solomon] makes clear, beginning in 2006, officials from the Treasury Department had been traveling around the world systematically building pressure on Iran because of its nuclear program. American officials occasionally cajoled, but just as often they unapologetically deployed American economic power against reluctant foreign entities: businesses, banks, and countries were told they had to choose between having access to the U.S. financial system or doing business with Iran.
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Solomon matter-of-factly describes Barack Obama as obsessed with changing the U.S. position toward Iran, and willing to subordinate much of American foreign policy in service of that goal. Obama started his administration sending secret letters to the head of state, the Ayatollah Khamenei, which recognized the prerogatives of the “Islamic republic” and foreswore regime change. He broadly cut funding to anti-regime groups and specifically abandoned Iranian moderates during the early days of the Green Revolution in 2009, after the regime fixed an election. When nuclear talks seemed to be stumbling, he sent another letter to Khamenei effectively offering Syria as within Iran’s sphere of influence.
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Rhodes and his NSC colleagues would later boast to David Samuels in the New York Times Magazine that they sold the nuclear deal in 2015 by channeling exactly such claims through an “echo chamber” of Iran-issue lobbyists, White House–minted experts, and juvenile journalists. The administration line was that the sanctions regime had been collapsing, it could not have been saved, and no American diplomat could deliver a better deal. Creating and insulating that narrative required obfuscating everything in the previous decade—not just what was in the deal, but how it squandered—and then reversed—a decade’s worth of effort to constrain Iran.
Read the whole thing.
