Adrift on the River of History

Barry and Joe's not-so-excellent Mideast adventures

America’s foreign policy A Team—not!

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It would be a bold pundit who ventured to make predictions about the future of the Syria and the Middle East at this revolutionary moment, but the abrupt collapse of the bloodstained Assad regime has brought some things into focus—including the utter folly of the Mideast policies introduced during the Obama Administration and reintroduced after the Trump interlude by the Biden Administration.

It is now undeniable in its crystal clarity that Barack Obama’s attempt to normalize relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran and entice it to become a responsible member of the international community was a disaster. So were his related policies of creating “daylight” between the United States and its most important Mideast ally, Israel, and of pursuing that diplomatic mirage, the “two-state solution.” These policies, at the root of which festered Obama’s longstanding antipathy toward the Jewish state (crystalized in dislike and resentment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), played a major role in setting the stage for the current Mideast war, particularly when they were picked up and dusted off by Joe Biden, reversing the Trump Administration’s policy of maximum pressure on Iran and close relations with Israel.

Joe Biden is merely a stupid, senile old man, and one gathers the impression that he junked Trump’s Mideast policies for no better reason than the fact that they were Trump’s Mideast policies. But Barack Obama is not a fool—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he’s not a fool in the style of Joe Biden. Obama is a smart man, and his master vice is intellectual vanity. Like many intelligent people, he tends to think that what he knows is all there is to know, and that he’s always the smartest person in the room.

Obama believed that he knew everything he needed to know about Iran. He also believed that he was smarter and more sophisticated that the ayatollahs, mullahs & etc. who wield power in Iran. In fact, however, he badly misjudged the nature of the Iranian regime. His policy of appeasement—that’s the right word for it—was based on the idea that there existed within the ruling circles of the regime a moderate faction that could be empowered by American concessions. In return, these moderates would be willing to negotiate a deal by which Iran would abandon its drive to develop nuclear weapons.

But there was no such moderate faction in Tehran, and never for a moment did the regime consider swearing off its nuclear ambitions. Obama’s policy was based on a grand illusion reminiscent of the notion held by many Sovietologists during the Cold War: that the top political echelon of the USSR embodied moderate and hardline factions.

The agreement eventually reached between Iran on its side, and the United States, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and Germany on the other, was called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in 2015. Its basic objective was to “unwind” Iran’s nuclear program to a point at which it would take Iran a year to develop a nuclear weapon if it decided to do so—supposedly giving the “world community” time to respond. That wasn’t much in return for all the benefits that the Obama Administration proposed to shower on Iran. The international inspection scheme was full of loopholes and blind spots, nor did the JCPOA cover the country’s ballistic missile program. The Trump Administration withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018, citing these and other deficiencies.

It's clear in retrospect that Obama’s faith in his superior intellectual powers was badly misplaced: The Iranian leadership assessed him far more shrewdly than he assessed them. They perceived that once the agreement was signed, Obama would have strong incentives to turn a blind eye to its shortcomings, and to Iranian attempts to circumvent its terms. The JCPOA was, after all, his signature diplomatic achievement. He would do nothing to jeopardize it. Thus the Iranian regime felt free to pocket every concession and continue on its course toward regional hegemony.

In a roundabout way, Donald Trump bears some responsibility for this foreign policy debacle. One of the bright spots of his first term was Mideast policy. Maximum pressure on Iran and close relations with Israel culminated in the Abraham Accords, the overture to a broad rapprochement between Israel and the Arab states, based on fear of the Islamic Republic of Iran and a belief that a de facto alliance with Israel could maintain a balance of power in the region. But the collapse of the Trump presidency, in which the mercurial temperament and erratic behavior of Donald Trump himself played no small part, brought Joe Biden to power, and he promptly reversed most of Trump’s Mideast policies. The Biden Administration even aspired to revive the JPCOA, but those negotiations went nowhere, the ayatollahs demanding concessions that not even State Department appeasers could stomach.

It got worse. After 10/7 the Biden Administration reverted to Obama’s wrong-headed policy of creating daylight between the United States and Israel, showering the Israeli government with a litany of criticisms and complaints about the IDF’s tactics in Gaza, the supposedly high toll the war has taking on innocent civilians, The President even complaining at one point that Prime Minister Netanyahu was prolonging the war in Gaza for domestic political reasons.

All this seemed odd considering Biden’s long pro-Israel record. But the Biden Administration’s foreign policy team was really the reincarnation of Obama’s foreign policy team and, as we now know, the President’s accelerating decline prevented him from taking a sustained, active part in the formulation of policy. In the immediate aftermath of 10/7, indeed, Biden was his old pro-Israel self. Gradually, however, control of policy slipped from his faltering hands into those of an “anti-Zionist” cabal, embedded in the US foreign policy establishment, deeply hostile to Israel, still dedicated to the appeasement of the Iranian regime, determined to prevent the Jewish state from prevailing in its war with Hamas in Gaza and with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

But this cabal’s machinations merely prolonged the war and threatened to freeze it in place. Supposedly a ceasefire would be engineered, followed by negotiations aiming toward a realization of the fabled “two-state solution.” That the 10/7 pogrom had killed off any possibility of a two-state solution was blithely overlooked. A characteristic feature of Obama-style foreign policy is a belief in process: the conviction that getting people to talk can change facts on the ground. A glance at diplomatic history shows that the converse is the case: When the facts on the ground change, people are more willing to talk things over.

In short, the Biden Administration managed to make such a hash of US Mideast policy that the situation looked hopeless. Then contingent reality took a hand in the matter: After years of brutal civil war, the Assad regime in Syria abruptly collapsed. This was good in itself, of course, Assad and his cronies being gruesome mass murderers of their own people. But it also dealt a crippling blow to Iran. It was through Syria with the Assad regime’s connivance that Iran funneled arms and equipment to Hezbollah, its mercenary army in Lebanon. Now that conduit is plugged, and it will be much more difficult for Iran to refit and rehabilitate Hezbollah, which has been subjected to a severe beat-down by Israel. On top of this, Hamas in Gaza is all but destroyed, and IDF strikes on Iranian military targets have stripped that country of its air defenses. And finally, the dysfunctional, moribund Biden Administration is on its way out. The incoming Trump Administration will almost certainly revive its maximum pressure policy toward Iran and seek close relations with Israel.

In a conversation with Field Marshal Hellmuth von Moltke, Otto von Bismarck is said to have remarked that “The river of history flows as it will, my dear Moltke. If I put my hand into it, I regard that as my duty, not because I think I can alter its course.” Reviewing the train of events that brought the Mideast to its present point, I recalled those words of Bismarck. The combination of factors related above—Obama’s antipathy toward Israel and the policies flowing therefrom, Trump’s reversal of those policies, the collapse of his presidency, the election of Biden and his reversion to the Obama approach, 10/7, the sudden collapse of the Syrian regime—combine and recombine in my mind. It seems to me impossible to trace the present situation, pregnant with possibilities both positive and negative, back to any point of origin.

And it appears to me that no one really knew what he or she was doing. Very likely, Barack Obama fooled himself—could not see that his misbegotten Mideast policy was not the product of cool calculation but of visceral dislike and resentment. The Hamas leadership’s decision to unleash the pogrom of 10/7/2023 brought down catastrophe on Israel, but also on Hamas. The Biden Administration wandered aimlessly through the Mideast maze, as might have been expected with Kamala Harris studying the maps. The Iranian ayatollahs, questing for power, led their country up a blind alley.

Yes, Bismark’s words were wise—but not even he always heeded them.