OPINION:
Common sense is a hallmark of superior leadership. Nonsense is a giveaway that a leader is lost. President Biden has clearly gone astray. His catalog of folly is already thick, but one entry alone illustrates his wanderings, and sadly, it might be the most perilous. It’s the president’s determination to restore the Obama-era Iran nuclear agreement in the face of unmistakable Iranian hostility.
Former President Donald Trump’s term for such senseless moves is “a real beauty.” Still, no Trumpian label could fully capture the danger posed to the civilized world when a high-mileage septuagenarian bargains with death-dealing totalitarians. “C’mon, man,” Mr. Biden’s go-to rhetorical tool for beating back skepticism doesn’t translate well into Farsi. He might have no worse luck with “Pretty please.”
The president has reportedly sent U.S. diplomats to engage in preliminary talks with their Iranian counterparts in Vienna. It’s a characteristic of human relations that dialogue is an effective trust-building exercise. Characteristic of Iran, though, is to meet American appeals with demonic indignation. Unsurprisingly, the mullahs sent a boarding party to hijack one ship in the Gulf of Oman and to launch a fatal drone attack on another.
Yet Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken has responded in blinkered fashion. The United States is “fully prepared” to overlook the attacks, he says, and keep the negotiations on track. If trust is a two-way street, Iran is driving on the wrong side of the road, and Mr. Blinken hasn’t noticed the coming crack-up.
The 2015 deal that former President Barack Obama fashioned with the help of global powers only attempted to delay, rather than derail, the Islamic regime’s decades-long quest for nuclear weapons. The pact called for a pause until 2030 in the most critical element of nuclearization — uranium enrichment — but it lacked a foolproof method of verifying Iran’s compliance.
In fact, indications were that the regime was continuing to stockpile fissile material in secret, rendering meaningful restraints on Iran’s nuclear breakout both toothless and temporary. It was owing to those reasons that Mr. Trump walked away from the deal. That which Iran schemed to achieve furtively is now out in the open: Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said last week that Iran is now just 10 weeks away from the capability to build a nuclear bomb.
With Ebrahim Raisi, the newly elected president of the Islamic republic, any expectation that the mullahcracy will approach its international relations with a fresh attitude would be naïve. “The hangman of Tehran,” infamous for his role in sentencing thousands of political prisoners to death, can be counted on to perpetuate the hardline policies that have guided the regime since its 1979 revolution.
As a means of safeguarding the world, the Obama deal was hopelessly flawed. Similarly, Iran intends to get the best of Mr. Biden and advance resolutely toward a nuclear arsenal. To deny it is nonsensical.
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