It’s bad enough that President Biden continues his dangerous effort to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal. Worse yet is the risk that the White House will settle for a worse-than-necessary agreement out of crass political calculation, strategic imperatives be damned.
The Biden version is already worse in every particular way than the rotten accord President Barack Obama entered into in 2015. That pact emboldened Iran — the ultimate bad-faith actor, which frustrated serious nuclear-facility inspection efforts from the start and kept on with its worldwide terror campaign.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps funds and enables not just terrorism across the Middle East but also attacks on US troops, like the rockets that recently struck a base housing our soldiers in Syria.
Yes, Biden struck back Wednesday with missiles at the IRGC’s assets in Syria. But that raises the question: Whence the eagerness to do a deal at all with a power that’s openly hostile on the conventional front?
Fine: A renewed deal might delay by a year or two the day when Iran becomes a nuclear power, which no one except Tehran and its allies wants. But delay is the most it’ll do, since it would sunset in 2025. And the likely massive carveout for Russia’s Iranian energy projects would line Putin’s pocket and push Iran and Russia even closer together.
It’d also free an estimated $100 billion a year for Iran through sanctions relief, cash all too likely to fund terror — when Tehran already persists in attacks even in this country, including plotting to kill former Trump officials John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. (Heck, Team Biden allegedly minimized its response to those plots so as to keep the nuke talks going.)
Tehran is now testing how many more concessions Washington will make to get a deal finalized, and America’s allies worry that the White House will needlessly give away too much just to be able to announce an agreement before the November elections.
After all, Team Biden is intent on providing as many distractions as possible from inflation, crime and the wide-open southern US border, the issues driving Republicans’ likely success on Election Day. An apparent “win” on Iran might even wipe away some of the lingering stain of the president’s disastrous Afghanistan bugout.
Similar calculations explain Biden’s outrageous student-loan giveaway last week — a move that will soon fuel more inflation and increase the federal deficit that the prez just bragged he’d trimmed in the horrifically-misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.
In other words, this White House is obsessed with scoring short-term political gains, no matter the far larger longer-term expense to the nation. It wants every distraction it can get, especially ones that its media allies will blare.
Iran-deal enthusiasts have always painted it as a high-minded act of steely resolve, necessary to avoid war, a Mideast nuclear arms race and/or other geopolitical catastrophes. But none will speak out if Biden gives away the store purely for the sake of grubby retail politics.
Bottom line: If Biden does brandish a deal before November, it’ll be probably be a sellout of America’s interests purely to boost his own party.