Samuel Johnson described a second marriage as a triumph of hope over experience. This adage sums up the Biden administration’s determination to revive Obama’s dangerous doctrine in the Middle East that failed dismally the first time around. Worse, this reprise of past mistakes threatens to undo the significant though provisional progress the Trump administration achieved in the region by doing exactly the opposite of its predecessor.
Instead of courting the rabidly anti-American Iranian regime, President Trump deemed Iran enemy number one in the Middle East. He rightly abrogated President Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal because it facilitated Iran crossing the nuclear threshold even if the Iranians abided by it, depended on Iranian goodwill in non-existent supply to verify it, subsidized Iranian aggression by lifting sanctions, and relied on the UN Security Council to re-impose sanctions in the less than reliable event we detected Iranian violations in a timely fashion. Obama’s Iran deal also did not tame either Iran’s genocidal threats toward Israel or Iran’s relentless campaign to incite sectarian violence across the Middle East through its surrogates in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen. Nor did Obama’s Iran deal constrain Iran’s burgeoning ballistic missile program menacing to America’s allies in the region and, eventually, to our NATO allies in Europe.
Conversely, President Trump’s re-imposition of stringent primary sanctions and the threat of secondary sanctions crippled the Iranian economy, significantly diminishing the regime’s capacity to project its power and its noxious doctrines beyond Iranian borders. President Trump’s decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem—emblematic of broader policy to embrace rather than distance the U.S. from a decent democratic Israel—bolstered American credibility globally. Contrary to dire predictions of Middle East regional experts, President Trump’s repudiation of the fallacy of moral equivalence between Israel and its mortal enemies did not undermine in the least the administration’s successful efforts to facilitate the emergence of a regional coalition—with Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia as the linchpins—to contain Iran. President Trump managed to accomplish all this without involving the United States in another conflict in the Middle East that would have detracted from his long overdue goal of devoting primary energy and attention to the Indo-Pacific. President Trump’s unstinting support for America’s emergence as an energy superpower also diminished the imperative of embroiling the United States in many of the conflicts in the Middle East that our energy dependence on that volatile region had heretofore necessitated.
President Biden risked casting all of the Trump administration’s progress away by doing the same thing as President Obama did while expecting different results. All signs attest to the Biden administration’s eagerness to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal largely on Iran’s terms—no significant changes in the deal’s terms, a swift and significant easing of sanctions, and no fundamental change in Iran’s external behavior. President Biden miscalculates, likewise, that reviving the Iran deal may pave the way for transforming Iran from an adversary to partner akin to Nixon and Kissinger’s opening to China—an analogy Kissinger has assailed as false and dangerous. The Biden administration’s conciliation of Iran goes beyond the Iranian nuclear program. Presenting the State Department’s 2020 report on human rights, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken named Saudi Arabia as a significant violator while making no mention of an Iranian regime that is at least as bad or possibly even worse.1[i] President Biden’s restoration of aid to the Palestinians while giving President Netanyahu the cold shoulder and rejecting Israeli entreaties about the danger of the Iran Deal signals the administration’s inclination to put distance between the United States and Israel, another staple of the Obama Doctrine.
President Biden’s reprise of the Obama Doctrine’s flawed assumptions and policies in the Middle East will yield the opposite of what the administration intends:
- More turmoil, strife, and peril at the expense of U.S. interests and our principal allies in the region.
- An emboldened Iran facing less effective constraints.
- An impending nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile region as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and other regimes react predictably to American conciliation of Iran that accepts de facto Iran possessing nuclear weapons.
- An increasingly imperiled Israel struggling whether to strike Iran preemptively, risking diplomatic isolation, or else contend with Iran’s diabolical employment of its nuclear capabilities as a shield for its surrogates—Hamas and Hezbollah—waging a war of annihilation aimed at demoralizing Israelis at home and demonizing Israel internationally.
- Intensified pressure on Western countries to make unsavory bargains with Middle East tyrants as the Biden Green New Deal imperils our capacity to remain an energy superpower. Count on the chaos and erosion of American credibility in the Middle East having negative ramifications elsewhere, most ominously in the calculations of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, our Middle Eastern allies and collaborators will mourn President Trump’s defeat while yearning for a Republican victory in the 2024 Presidential election that offers the most plausible option for reversing the Biden administration’s perverse perilous course.
