Iran continues to arm surrogates. (See 1 below)
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Obama wants to paint opponents of his give away ideas into a corner but there are alternatives, other than war, if we only had a tough president who cared about America's security . (See 2 and 2a below.)
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This from a friend, fellow memo reader and board member of a very significant organization actively involved in spreading democracy throughout the world.
Obama uses divide and conquer as his method of choice.
Jewish liberals are being beheaded as they nod. (See 3 below.)
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Natan Sharansky on America having forgotten its soul and confidence in its moral authority.? (See 4 below.)
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Sent to Reince Priebus: My thoughts on three themes pertaining to a campaign strategy.
Once a Republican candidate is selected I believe there needs to be three consistent themes.
First:The Republican candidate must offer a program that presents conservative but believably sensible solutions to protecting our borders, solving illegal immigration, rebuilding our military, solving the morass of tax raising laws and the solvency of Social Security as well as replacing Obamacare.
However, it is also very appropriate to raise concerns about Grandma Hillary and her inability to tell the truth, her many policy failures and incompetence as a policy maker.
Thus, the second should challenge Obama and Hillary with respect to air pollution.
Obama has killed coal, development of energy sources yet is willing to allow Iran to develop a nuclear war weapon which, if launched, will seed the air with poison. Not only is his position disingenuous but inconsistent with his claim of supporting Greens.
Finally, ads should run asking Hillary simple does she regret questions, ie
do you regret your comment "what difference does it make?'
do you regret your comment about being under attack when you got off the plane?'
do you regret making over $100,000 in a staged cattle stock transaction?
do you regret allowing Whitewater Rose Law Firm Documents to suddenly appear in your White House living room?
Do you regret allowing sensitive, if not critical documents, to be stored on your unsecured server which could compromise our nation's security while Sec. of State and then disregarding the laws pertaining to eliminating them?
Do you regret telling Americans how poor you were when leaving The White House?
and there are many more such did you regret questions.
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The new campaign shtick of the likes of Grandma Hillary and Grandpa Bernie Sanders, an avowed and self-proclaimed Socialist, are telling the gullible the rich have been taking what the middle class is losing.
Both ignore the fact that government spending is increasing and entitlements have been expanding yet, none of these facts have any impact on the plight of the middle class.
Both ignore increased government rules and regulations and increased intrusions by government bureaucrats and ignore the fact that these occurrences have anything to do with middle class status and their declining prosperity.
Both take after military spending and Pentagon waste ignoring the waste of big government in general.
No media interviewers challenge their responses. They are allowed to spout off without challenge and thus, the gullible just keep on swallowing the garbage fed them.
Lynn told me of a friend who decided she would switch to CNN, MSNBC and other such liberal media outlets and quit watching FOX to see, first hand, would it shape her thinking. She concluded it was no wonder people think what they do because they are brainwashed by bias and receive no balance.
Cruel gruel!
Hillary is tooling around Iowa informing everyone about economic disparity and the low tax rates of hedge fund managers. This week she is trying out populism's appeal and a page from Obama's playbook believing her audiences are stupid enough to see her as their saviour. Iowans are hard workers, rural people and are far more well informed than urbanites. Iowans also have roots in the soil and core beliefs which should keep them from being blinded by' grandma glitz.'
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Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)'Iran is placing guided warheads on Hezbollah rockets’
Col. Aviram Hasson, of the Defense Ministry's missile defense administration says Hezbollah gets a lot of accurate weapons from
Iran.
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Iran is placing guided warheads on its rockets and smuggling them to Hezbollah in Lebanon, a senior Defense Ministry official said Tuesday.
Speaking at the Israel Air and Missile Defense Conference in Herzliya, Col. Aviram Hasson, who is involved in preparing IDF air defenses, said Iran was converting Zilzal unguided rockets into accurate, guided M-600 projectiles by upgrading their warheads.
Hasson, who is in charge of upper-tier missile defenses at HOMA – part of the Defense Ministry’s Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure – described Iran as a “train engine that is not stopping for a moment. It is manufacturing new and advanced ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. It is turning unguided rockets that had an accuracy range of kilometers into weapons that are accurate to within meters.”Hezbollah, he continued, “is getting a lot of accurate weapons from Iran. It is in a very different place compared to the Second Lebanon War in 2006.”For Israel, the “ultimate defense is a combination of counter-attack, active defenses, and passive defense [civilian compliance with Home Front Command safety instructions],” he argued.Riki Ellison, founder and chairman of the US Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, also spoke at the conference, which was organized by the iHLS defense website and the Israel Missile Defense Association.The alliance is a nonprofit organization advocating for the deployment and development of missile defenses.Ellison said the US always kept at least one warship in the Mediterranean with an Aegis naval missile defense system to ensure that Israel was protected against long-range Iranian ballistic missiles.“It can stand off the coast and shoot long-shots coming in from Iran,” he said.The US is keen to see Israel complete its multi-layered blanket of missile defenses, which would enable it to defend against Iranian missiles without the Aegis and thereby free up the US Navy’s ships for deployment elsewhere, he added.Ellison told the delegates that the US remained firmly committed to Israel’s security, irrespective of recent disagreements between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.He added that the US could deploy its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries “if necessary, to come into Israel to support your country’s defense.”America is “fully supportive” of Israel getting fully capable Arrow 3 and David’s Sling defense systems, Ellison said.
2) What is the Alternative to Miliitary Attack?
by Jonathan Rosenblumand Yated Ne'eman
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was granted the power of prophecy only to be subsequently cursed that she would never be believed. She warned her fellow citizens of Troy not to allow the Trojan horse into the city, and even tried to set it on fire, only to be publicly ridiculed. The Trojans did not laugh long, however, as the Greeks hidden inside the huge horse razed the city, which only hours before had been celebrating its victory over the Greeks.
Closer to our own day, Winston Churchill was a voice in the wilderness warning his countrymen throughout the thirties of the need to rearm in the face of Germany's military build-up. When Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich to nearly unanimous acclaim to proclaim "peace in our time," Churchill told him that he had chosen peace over honor, but would have neither. Tens of millions of human beings, including more than six million Jews, would perish in World War II due to the failure of the West to heed Churchill's warnings, which fell Cassandra-like on deaf ears.
Opponents of the West's capitulation to Iran over its nuclear weapons program can feel today something of what Churchill experienced throughout the thirties. Distinguished economist Thomas Sowell was not engaging in hyperbole when he declared, "Clearing the way for Iran to get nuclear bombs may – probably will – be the most catastrophic decision in human history. And it can certainly change human history, irrevocably, for the worse." For what other decision carries within in it such potential for mass destruction, on a scale that would make even World War II seem like a stroll in the park. (Be it noted that Sowell is black for all those who reflexively dismiss any criticism of the president as racism.)
All during the forty year Cold War, the Union of Concerned Scientists kept the nuclear clock at five minutes to midnight. If so, today it must be at one second to midnight. President Obama admitted in an NPR interview that even under his own most favorable interpretation of the provisional agreement with Iran, Iran will have zero breakout time to acquiring a nuclear bomb thirteen years from now. Nor will it have to violate any provisions of the agreement to get there.
Since the dawn of the nuclear age, the gold standard of the battle against nuclear proliferation has been the denial to states with civilian reactors of access to the rest of the nuclear fuel style, points out John Bolton, former undersecretary of state for arms control. Now, the West, with America leading the charge, has acquiesced in the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a rogue state and the leading international sponsor of terrorism, which has declared its mission to wipe Israel off the map.
Sunni states of the Middle East have made clear that they will not abide Shiite Iran being the Middle East's sole Muslim nuclear power. (They have never been particularly concerned about a nuclear-armed Israel because they know that Israel's weapons will never be used offensively.) Saudi Arabia already has a deal in place to buy nuclear weapons off-the-shelf from Pakistan, and Turkey and Egypt will follow suit in the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Thus the world's most volatile and unstable region, home to multiple failed states, will also be home to the rapid proliferation of nuclear weapons. The millennial Sunni-Shiite enmity will turn the region into a tinderbox waiting to be lit. Nor is there anything that the United States can do to convince the Saudis not to obtain nuclear weapons as a hedge against Iran's hegemonic ambitions in the region. The Saudis have long since lost all faith in the president and his promises.
The long-term stability of Saudi Arabia and Egypt cannot be assured – Iran is already stirring the pot in the eastern, majority Shiite, oil-producing provinces of Saudi Arabia and on Egypt's southern border in Yemen. Egypt cannot feed its citizens. As a consequence, there can be no guarantee that if these countries obtain nuclear weapons they will not fall into the hands of terrorist groups.
Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz note in their devastating, multi-prong critique of the recent agreement that all previous thinking on nuclear strategy "assumed the existence of stable state actors." "How will these doctrines translate into a region where sponsorship of non-state proxies is common, the state structure is under assault, and death on behalf of jihad is a kind of fulfillment?" they ask.
Iran itself is the leading sponsor of non-state proxies – Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen – and might well find it useful at some point to transfer some portion of its nuclear arsenal to one of its terrorist proxies, which would be less threatened by retaliation.
James Woolsey, the director of the CIA under President Clinton, and Peter Vincent Pry, a member of the congressional EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) Commission, argue that Iran's Shiite theology, with its emphasis on the appearance of the so-called Hidden Imam, after some apocalyptic event, makes it impossible to trust that any previous models of nuclear deterrence apply to Iran. The founder of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Khomeini was found of saying that the thought of Iran consumed in flames, if Islam were thereby advanced, did not trouble him. In the oft-quoted remark of Bernard Lewis, the leading scholar of the Middle East, a nuclear conflagration may serve as an inducement not a deterrent for Iran's mullahs. Even assuming that the mullahs are not quite as eager for martyrdom as they sometimes say, if the Islamic regime were threatened with collapse from within, all bets would be off on their use of nuclear weapons.
And lest anyone imagine that the threat of nuclear attack is confined to the small state of Israel, Woolsey and Fry stress the vulnerability of the United States. The recent "agreement" (the terms of which are unknown and perhaps unknowable given the wide divergence between American and Iranian descriptions of what has been concluded) makes no reference to any limitations on Iran's ballistic missile program, on which it works closely with North Korea. (The current Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter supported a pre-emptive strike on North Korea's long-range missiles in 2006.)
Iran may soon possess long-range missiles capable of reaching the United States or the capacity to launch a nuclear-armed satellite above the United States. Even one nuclear weapon detonated above the United States could potentially knock out much of the national power grid. The congressional EMP Commission estimated that a nationwide blackout lasting one year from such an EMP attack could result in the deaths of nine out of ten Americans, with IS-like gangs ruling the streets.
HAVING ADMITTED THAT IRAN will be capable of producing nuclear weapons, does President Obama offer any coherent explanation of why they will not do so? Only that having entered an agreement with the United States the Iranians will somehow be mellowed and become upstanding citizens of the international community. That is the same type of magical thinking about the power of signed agreements that pervaded the Oslo process until its utter collapse. That thinking commands virtually no support among Middle East experts, including numerous leading former members of the president's foreign policy and defense teams.
Even the president concedes Iran will not mellow that much: It would be unfair, he said, to demand the Iranians renounce their calls for the obliteration of Israel; that would be asking the mullahs to stop being themselves.
As Kissinger and Schultz put it delicately, "There exists no current evidence that Iran and the U.S. are remotely near an understanding [of what defines stability]. . . . Iran's representatives (including its Supreme Leader) continue to profess a revolutionary anti-Western concept of international order; . . . some senior Iranians describe nuclear negotiations as a form of jihad by other means."
The president's self-estimation of his unique foreign policy insight is not widely shared. His former ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey describes his Middle East policy as a "free fall," and Lt. General Michael Flynn, his former head of U.S. Defense Intelligence, characterizes it as one of "willful ignorance."
Yale's Walter Russell Mead has taken to charting in The American Interest the critiques of former senior policymakers of their erstwhile boss, whom Mead describes as President Ahab glancing around the deck only to find that his shipmates are all scrambling for the lifeboats.
In particular, Mead takes Obama to task for falling prey to the illusion common among liberals that they can do better in negotiations with enemies who chant "Death to America!" than more hard-line conservatives by being nice and understanding. Supreme Leader Ali Khameini has proclaimed the negotiations with the United States to be part of a struggle with an enemy, writes Mead, and Obama would be well-advised to take him at his word. It is American power Iran seeks to break, he argues. And to do so, the Iranians will use negotiations to humiliate Obama just as they did when they repeatedly double-crossed Jimmy Carter by dragging out hostage negotiations to make him look weak.
Obama has bet the fate of the world on his ability to pacify Iran with kindness. It is too big a gamble, especially in light of the president's track record of foreign policy insight.
A nuclear Iran will create a world with as many trip wires as Europe in August 1914 on the eve of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Only this time, the combatants will be playing with nuclear arsenals.
Let us stipulate that only a military attack on its nuclear installations can stop Iran. Sanctions alone, without a credible military threat, will not convince the Supreme Leader to abandon a dream that goes back to the early days of the Islamic Revolution any more than mass starvation convinced North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program. And let us further stipulate that such an attack will have consequences, both unpredictable and unpleasant.
Nevertheless the United States undoubtedly has the power to destroy much of Iran's nuclear infrastructure from the air, and many of the Revolutionary Guard's assets for good measure. Former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said this week that for America doing so would only be marginally more challenging than killing Osama bin Laden once his hiding place was discovered. 'At least that was the case until Vladimir Putin agreed to go forward with the sale of advanced anti-aircraft systems to Iran – the only tangible result of the Lausanne "agreement" so far.
In light of the perilous threat of a nuclear Iran, the proper question is not, "What is the alternative to the agreement?" but rather "What is the alternative to a military attack?"
2a)
2a)
Ready for the Truth About Iran? Khamenei Wants to Destroy Us
Why are so many "experts" amazed that there is no deal with Iran? It's certainly not because Western negotiators weren't willing to meet the mullahs halfway; they were eager to compromise, even to drop longstanding demands, in an effort to reach agreement.
The surprise shows that we don't grasp the nature of the Iranian regime, which is why the pundits and the diplomats are so often forced to scramble for explanations when things don't go according to scheme.
Our basic error, from which all the others flow, is that we think our offer of a strategic alliance — President Obama's "outstretched hand" — is attractive to Iran. It isn't. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei doesn't want a deal with us; he wants to destroy us. When he calls us the "Great Satan" or when he leads chants of "Death to America!," he means it.
Khamenei wants to go down in Islamic history as the man who defeated America, not the imam who signed a deal with the devil. He's willing to accept our surrender, but he won't forge a partnership with Obama.
Nor does he care much about the well-being of the Iranian people, any more than Saddam Hussein cared about the Iraqis. Just look at the rising tempo of arrests, torture and executions in the unhappy land of Persia. Iranian leaders don't much care if their citizens don't have enough food or gasoline, and the regime still has plenty of cash on hand — Khamenei personally manages tens of billions of dollars — to fund the things they care most about, from the nukes to the expeditionary operations in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen; support and training for Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad; weapons for the Revolutionary Guards' foreign legion (a.k.a. the Quds Force), and help for al Qaeda, Boko Haram and the like.
They certainly don't like the sanctions. The domestic economy is a shambles (the banks are broke, imports of food staples are stalled because foreign sellers can't get paid and prices are high and rising — chickens are up 30 percent in the last six weeks alone, just before New Year's celebrations at the end of this month). They'd like an end to the sanctions, totally and immediately, but that wasn't the primary reason for their participation in the peace talks, as is so often claimed.
Why did they agree to negotiate? Because Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif convinced Khamenei that the Americans were desperate for a deal, that there was no danger of an American military option and that Iran could get all manner of favors from the Americans without conceding anything important.
So far, that looks like good analysis. They haven't shut down any part of their nuclear program, and we're paying them off every month with blocked funds. Why should Khamenei make formal concessions when he's getting what he wants anyway? Why should he make a deal with the devil he wants dead?
The Khamenei approach isn't unique to Iran. It's the same gambit used previously by North Korea and currently employed by Cuba: pretend to agree, demand more and more concessions from the Americans, pocket the gains, and go right on with their programs of tyrannical oppression, support for terrorists and the development of new weapons.
If you want to avoid future shock and surprise, just think of the negotiations as a component in the Iranian war against us, not — as so many experts argue to their subsequent embarrassment — as a step on the path to detente.
If our leaders want to avoid future embarrassment, they should recognize that we have real enemies who don't want to seize our outstretched hand. They want to chop it off.
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3)Honey, I Shrunk the Jews!
3)Honey, I Shrunk the Jews!
Imagine if at the height of Apartheid madness in South Africa, the president of the United States had decided to partner with the racist white regime in Pretoria, lift sanctions, and put that country’s illegal nuclear program on a glide path toward obtaining a nuclear bomb. Would South Africa have free and open democratic elections? Would the African continent be a better, safer place today? And what would America look like at home? Would we be a more equal country with an African-American president, or would we be something meaner and uglier? Who knows. But it seems safe to say that instead of honoring Nelson Mandela, Americans would probably be hearing a lot more of David Duke, or worse.
For 36 years now, Iranian officials have threatened to annihilate Israel. As Basij commander Mohammad Reza Naqdi said recently, “Destroying Israel is non-negotiable.” There may be different centers of power throughout the regime, as Iran experts posit, but everyone agrees with the Supreme Leader that Israel—the “Zionist cancer”—has got to go. Middle East experts and experienced Iran watchers in the West typically dismiss such threats as instrumental rhetoric intended to thrill local bigots and separate the Arab and Persian masses from their rulers. So why take such rhetoric seriously? The Iranians wouldn’t ever really use the bomb. In fact, they’re very clever, rational people.
Of course, if you’re a leader in the American Jewish community, you can’t help but hear Iran’s exterminationist rhetoric in a different frame. So maybe the legacy of Rabbi Stephen Wisewas on the mind of American Jewish leaders Monday when President Barack Obama called them to a meeting at the White House. It being Holocaust Remembrance Week, who wants to be remembered as the contemporary version of Wise, who chose to protect his relationship with Roosevelt rather than criticize a president who did nothing to save European Jews from extermination?
“It was one of the tensest meetings I can ever remember,” said one participant who has been invited to many White House sit-downs over the years and requested anonymity. “The president spoke for 25 minutes, without notes,” he told me. “It was very impressive. Some people said very nice things, others expressed concerns, and talked about the role of Congress, and he talked about presidential prerogative, and cited other precedents for it. Lots of people challenged him very strongly, like about taking the threats of dictators seriously when Khamenei says death to America, death to Israel, death to the Jews. The president said he knows what the regime is, which is why he is trying to take away their weapons. He didn’t dismiss what the Iranians say, he just didn’t really address it.”
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal center, who also attended the meeting, was willing to speak on the record to Tablet. “Speaking for myself,” said Hier, “I was not satisfied.” Hier declined to describe the president’s comments but told me the point he made in the meeting. “Mr. President,” he said, “in a few weeks, you and others will be going to Germany to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. What meaning does that have when while negotiating over the nuclear treaty with Iran, none of the six powers said a word when the ayatollah Tweeted about annihilating the state of Israel, or a leading general in the IRGC said this is the regime’s raison d’etre? What meaning does the 70th anniversary have? Hitler said he was going to murder all the Jews in a letterfrom 1919, and he wound up doing it. If you hear the ayatollah saying that, every world leader should repudiate it immediately.”
What else can the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center say? But who knows for sure if the Iranians actually mean to make good on their threats against Israel? After all, say the experts, Iran is not irrational.
Of course Iran is irrational. It is irrational in its very essence, for anti-Semitism is the form that unreason takes in modern political life. Disregarding the regime’s anti-Semitism is not a way of politely papering-over stray rhetoric or a barely relevant superstition that is not of any conceivable relevance to grand matters of state. It is to willfully ignore the nature of the regime. Seen from this perspective, the White House’s key foreign policy initiative—to strike a deal with such a regime—is willfully perverse, and doomed to failure.
The Washington scorecard on the Iranian nuclear deal is clear—there are winners and there are losers. On one side, there are those who oppose any deal that does not prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but only postpones a nuclear breakout. That side includes AIPAC and CUFI and the vast majority of the pro-Israel community, both Jews and Evangelicals, the mainstream of the Republican party, and a number of key Democratic voices, from Senator Robert Menendez to Alan Dershowitz. This side lost. It was routed because the President of the United States wanted a deal with Iran—even a bad deal.
The winning team includes not just the White House, but also advocates of the deal, from journalists and Middle East experts to lobbyists and former policymakers. No doubt many of them sincerely want nothing other than comity with the Islamic Republic, historical reconciliation after nearly four decades of enmity.
The problem, however, is that the administration is not striking a deal with Iranian moderates or the good people of Iran who we are frequently told love America and have no issue with Israel, in spite of the massive “Death to America, Death to Israel” rallies. Rather, the White House is coming to an accommodation with a sick regime.
And insofar as the White House is providing billions in sanctions relief, and partnering with the regime in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon while providing it with a pathway toward attaining a nuclear bomb, it is effectively rewarding Iran for its behavior and its rhetoric. Instead of walking away from the negotiating table or telling Khamenei to go to hell when he threatened to obliterate Israel, Obama doubled down in his efforts to get a deal. After all, say the experts, the exterminationist anti-Semitism isn’t nice, but it shouldn’t really be taken seriously.
The winners then include not just the White House and the American voices of reason who want peace with Iran, but also the fringe characters, who are now welcome to air their views about the tentacle octopus of Jewish power at conferences and panels here at home, because, after all, anti-Semitism is no big deal. The winning side is a big tent of bedlam—the obsessives who rant about Jewish money and mind-control, and Jews sending Americans out to die for Jewish causes. The White House has opened the door to this freak show by striking a deal with a regime that embodies anti-Semitism of the most virulent sort, at a moment when Jews are being abused and gunned down on the streets of Europe. Who does that kind of message embolden?
Roosevelt never lifted a finger to save European Jews, but he did defeat the Nazis. Obama writes letters to the man who threatens to exterminate Jews and promises him peace. American Jewish leaders have plenty to worry about. The cost to American political life of legitimizing exterminationist anti-Semitism may turn out to be one of the worst parts of a bad deal.
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4)--
On a number of occasions during the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, the Israeli government has appealed to the United States and its allies to demand a change in Tehran’s aggressive behavior. If Iran wishes to be treated as a normal state, Israel has said, then it should start acting like one. Unfortunately, these appeals have been summarily dismissed. The Obama administration apparently believes that only after a nuclear agreement is signed can the free world expect Iran to stop its attempts at regional domination, improve its human rights record and, in general, behave like the civilized state it hopes the world will recognize it to be.
4)--
When did America forget that it’s America?
Natan Sharansky, a human rights activist and former political prisoner in the Soviet Union, is chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
As a former Soviet dissident, I cannot help but compare this approach to that of the United States during its decades-long negotiations with the Soviet Union, which at the time was a global superpower and a existential threat to the free world. The differences are striking and revealing.
For starters, consider that the Soviet regime felt obliged to make its first ideological concession simply to enter into negotiations with the United States about economic cooperation. At the end of the 1950s, Moscow abandoned its doctrine of fomenting a worldwide communist revolution and adopted in its place a credo of peaceful coexistence between communism and capitalism. The Soviet leadership paid a high price for this concession, both internally — in the form of millions of citizens, like me, who had been obliged to study Marxism and Leninism as the truth and now found their partial abandonment confusing — and internationally, in their relations with the Chinese and other dogmatic communists who viewed the change as a betrayal. Nevertheless, the Soviet government understood that it had no other way to get what it needed from the United States.
For starters, consider that the Soviet regime felt obliged to make its first ideological concession simply to enter into negotiations with the United States about economic cooperation. At the end of the 1950s, Moscow abandoned its doctrine of fomenting a worldwide communist revolution and adopted in its place a credo of peaceful coexistence between communism and capitalism. The Soviet leadership paid a high price for this concession, both internally — in the form of millions of citizens, like me, who had been obliged to study Marxism and Leninism as the truth and now found their partial abandonment confusing — and internationally, in their relations with the Chinese and other dogmatic communists who viewed the change as a betrayal. Nevertheless, the Soviet government understood that it had no other way to get what it needed from the United States.
Imagine what would have happened if instead, after completing a round of negotiations over disarmament, the Soviet Union had declared that its right to expand communism across the continent was not up for discussion. This would have spelled the end of the talks. Yet today, Iran feels no need to tone down its rhetoric calling for the death of America and wiping Israel off the map.
Of course, changes in rhetoric did not change the Soviet Union’s policy, which included sending missiles to Cuba, tanks to Prague and armies to Afghanistan. But each time, such aggression caused a serious crisis in relations between Moscow and Washington, influencing the atmosphere and results of negotiations between them. So, for example, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan shortly after the SALT II agreement had been signed, the United States quickly abandoned the deal and accompanying discussions.
Today, by contrast, apparently no amount of belligerence on Iran’s part can convince the free world that Tehran has disqualified itself from the negotiations or the benefits being offered therein. Over the past month alone, as nuclear discussions continued apace, we watched Iran’s proxy terror group, Hezbollah, transform into a full-blown army on Israel’s northern border, and we saw Tehran continue to impose its rule on other countries, adding Yemen to the list of those under its control.
Then there is the question of human rights. When American negotiations with the Soviets reached the issue of trade, and in particular the lifting of sanctions and the conferring of most-favored-nation status on the Soviet Union, the Senate, led by Democrat Henry Jackson, insisted on linking economic normalization to Moscow’s allowing freedom of emigration. By the next year, when the Helsinki agreement was signed, the White House had joined Congress in making the Soviets’ treatment of dissidents a central issue in nearly every negotiation.
Iran’s dismal human rights record, by contrast, has gone entirely unmentioned in the recent negotiations. Sadly, America’s reticence is familiar: In 2009, in response to the democratic uprisings that mobilized so many Iranian citizens, President Obama declared that engaging the theocratic regime would take priority over changing it.
Reality is complicated, and the use of historical analogies is always somewhat limited. But even this superficial comparison shows that what the United States saw fit to demand back then from the most powerful and dangerous competitor it had ever known is now considered beyond the pale in its dealings with Iran.
Why the dramatic shift? One could suggest a simple answer: Today there is something the United States wants badly from Iran, leaving Washington and its allies with little bargaining power to demand additional concessions. Yet in fact Iran has at least as many reasons to hope for a deal. For Tehran, the lifting of sanctions could spell the difference between bankruptcy and becoming a regional economic superpower, and in slowing down its arms race it could avoid a military attack.
I am afraid that the real reason for the U.S. stance is not its assessment, however incorrect, of the two sides’ respective interests but rather a tragic loss of moral self-confidence. While negotiating with the Soviet Union, U.S. administrations of all stripes felt certain of the moral superiority of their political system over the Soviet one. They felt they were speaking in the name of their people and the free world as a whole, while the leaders of the Soviet regime could speak for no one but themselves and the declining number of true believers still loyal to their ideology.
But in today’s postmodern world, when asserting the superiority of liberal democracy over other regimes seems like the quaint relic of a colonialist past, even the United States appears to have lost the courage of its convictions.
We have yet to see the full consequences of this moral diffidence, but one thing is clear: The loss of America’s self-assured global leadership threatens not only the United States and Israel but also the people of Iran and a growing number of others living under Tehran’s increasingly emboldened rule. Although the hour is growing late, there is still time to change course — before the effects grow more catastrophic still.
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