OPINION:
The P5+1 negotiators with Iran follow the American lead, and that is why the talks have gone off-track. Both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry seem to have trained at the Blanche DuBois Academy of Global Studies, where they were taught to rely on the kindness of strangers as Blanche did in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The French, applying real politik, would have provided firmer guidance.
The prevailing Obama grand vision holds that concluding a nuclear agreement with Iran will usher in a de facto alliance with that sponsor of terror to stabilize the very region it is quite willfully and handily destabilizing. This is delusion writ large. When Ayatollah Khamenei calls America “the great Satan” and shouts “death to America,” I do not, as the president and his national security team apparently do, believe this is a coy way of agreeing in code to enter the president’s delusion and abandon the Iranian regime’s strategy.
If a mushroom cloud of Iranian provenance rises over Tel Aviv, I expect that a retired Barack Obama will join with others in counseling Israel not to overreact.
PAUL BLOUSTEIN
Cincinnati
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