In December, President Obama said that he wished to see
Iran ultimately become a “very successful regional power.”
His wish — a nightmare for the Western-oriented Arab states — is becoming a
reality. Consider:
● Gulf of Aden: Iran sends a
flotilla of warships and weapons-carrying freighters to reinforce the rebels in
Yemen — a noncontiguous, non-Persian, nonthreatening (to Iran) Arabian state —
asserting its new status as regional bully and arbiter. The Obama
administration sends an aircraft carrier group,
apparently to prevent this gross breach of the U.N. weapons embargo on Yemen.
Instead, the administration announces that it has no intention of doing
anything. Meanwhile, it exerts pressure on Saudi Arabiato
halt its air war over Yemen and agree to negotiate a political settlement
involving Iran.
● Russia: After a five-year suspension, Russia announces
the sale of advanced surface-to-air missiles to Iran, which will render its
nuclear facilities nearly invulnerable to attack. Obama’s reaction? Criticism,
threats, sanctions? No. A pat on the backfor
Vladimir Putin: “I’m, frankly, surprised that [the embargo] held this long.”
●Iran: Last week, Obama
preemptively caved on the long-standing U.S. condition that there be no
immediate sanctions relief in any Iranian nuclear deal. He casually dismissed
this red line, declaring that what is really important is whether sanctions can
be reimposed if Iran cheats. And it doesn’t stop there. The Wall Street Journal reports that Obama is offering Tehran a $30 billion
to $50 billion signing bonus (drawn from frozen Iranian assets) — around 10
percent of Iranian GDP.
● Syria: After insisting for
years that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria “step aside,” the U.S. has adopted a hands-off policy toward a regime described by our own
secretary of state as an Iranian puppet.
● Iraq: Iran’s Quds Force
Commander Qasem Soleimani, director of Shiite militias that killed hundreds of
Americans during the Iraq War and were ultimately defeated by the 2007-2008
U.S. surge, operates freely throughout Iraq flaunting his country’s dominance. In March, he was directing the same Iraqi militias, this time against
the Islamic State — with the help of U.S. air cover.
This is the new Middle East. Its strategic reality is
clear to everyone: Iran rising, assisted, astonishingly, by the United States.
Obama’s initial Middle East
strategy was simply withdrawal. He would enter history as the ultimate peace
president, ushering in a new era in which “the tide of war is receding.”
The subsequent vacuum having been filled, unfortunately and predictably, by
various enemies, adversaries and irredeemables, Obama lighted upon a new idea:
We don’t just withdraw, we hand the baton. To Iran.
Obama may not even be aware
that he is recapitulating the Nixon doctrine, but with a fatal
twist. Nixon’s main focus was to get the Vietnamese to take over that war from
us. But the doctrine evolved and was generalized to deputize various smaller
powers to police their regions on our behalf. In the Persian Gulf, our
principal proxy was Iran.
The only problem with Obama’s
version of the Nixon doctrine is that Iran today is not the Westernized,
secular, pro-American regional power it was under the shah. It is radical,
clerical, rabidly anti-imperialist, deeply anti-Western. The regime’s ultimate
— and openly declared — strategic purpose is to drive the American infidel from
the region and either subordinate or annihilate America’s Middle Eastern
allies.
Which has those allies in an
understandable panic. Can an American president really believe that appeasing
Iran — territorially, economically, militarily and by conferring nuclear
legitimacy — will moderate its behavior and ideology, adherence to which
despite all odds is now yielding undreamed of success?
Iran went into the nuclear
negotiations heavily sanctioned, isolated internationally, hemorrhaging
financially — and this was even before the collapse of oil prices. The premise
of these talks was that the mullahs would have six months to give up their
nuclear program or they would be additionally squeezed with even more
devastating sanctions.
After 17 months of serial
American concessions, the Iranian economy is growing again,
its forces and proxies are on the march through the Arab Middle East and it is
on the verge of having its nuclear defiance rewarded and legitimized.
The Saudis are resisting being
broken to Iranian dominance. They have resumed their war in Yemen. They
are resisting being forced into Yemen negotiations with Iran, a country that
is, in the words of the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., “part of the problem, not
part of the solution.”
Obama appears undeterred. He’s determined to make his
Iran-first inverted Nixon doctrine a reality. Our friends in the region, who
for decades have relied on us to protect them from Iran, look on astonished.
