https://spectator.org/coddling-iran-brings-war-to-the-middle-east/?

Coddling Iran Brings War to the Middle East

Francis P. Sempa

It cannot be stated too frequently that during Donald Trump’s presidency the Middle East was at relative peace and the Abraham Accords charted a new course for U.S. foreign policy there. This accord removed the irreconcilable Israeli-Palestinian conflict from center stage and replaced it with a realism that hadn’t been seen since the Nixon administration. In Trump, America had a president who didn’t care what Thomas Friedman wrote about the region in the New York Times, and who was determined to break through the bureaucratic inertia of the State Department (like Nixon and Kissinger did) to make deals that would benefit U.S. interests.

Trump’s approach, as Edward Luttwak points out in an insightful essay in Unherd, broke with the “delusional” policies of the Obama administration, which unfortunately have reappeared under Biden. As a result, Iran has been emboldened, launching proxy wars against Israel, supplying the Houthis with weapons to cause havoc in and around the Red Sea, and most recently attacking Israel directly with ballistic missiles and drones. Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian forces within the United States hold public anti-Israeli/anti-American demonstrations on college campuses and elsewhere. The world is reaping what Obama sowed.

Luttwak notes that Obama’s Iran policy “has achieved the exact opposite of what he had wanted.” The U.S. and Iran, instead of reconciling, are fighting a proxy war in the Middle East. The Obama apology tour of the region in 2009, his nuclear deals with Iran, and the removal of sanctions against the regime have reaped a foul and dangerous harvest. Obama’s policies, Luttwak explains, gave Iran’s leaders “the time and the oil revenues to recruit Shi’a militias from Lebanon to Yemen now holding the Middle East to ransom.” Luttwak writes that it was delusional of Obama to believe that he could persuade the Mullahs to abandon their “‘death to America’ hostility.” And while Luttwak gives Obama credit for refraining from following the advice of some neoconservatives to attack Iran militarily (Trump, too, wisely rejected similar advice), the overall approach to the region during his eight years was a combination of Wilsonian imprudence regarding the so-called Arab Spring, hostility to Israel, and deference to the region’s Islamic regimes.

Trump reversed Obama’s deferential approach and was openly and substantively hostile to Iran and its proxies in the region. But that changed when Biden took office. Luttwak writes: “Partly because Obama compelled Biden to take on [Robert] Malley as his own Iran coordinator (until he lost his security clearance), the Biden Administration moved very fast to repudiate Trump’s hostility to the Ayatollah’s regime, going overboard in its own attempt at reconciliation.” Luttwak describes Malley as a “law-school buddy” of Obama’s who had “extreme hostility to Israel.” Biden, Luttwak notes, removed the Houthi militia from the terrorist list. Biden also renewed a sanctions waiver that Trump had rescinded in early 2020 in an effort to revive the flawed nuclear deal that Trump had rightly abandoned. 

Israel has succeeded in blunting Iran’s proxy and direct attacks despite the flawed Obama/Biden policies. And Luttwak believes that Iran’s strategy in the region has backfired. Iran’s Shia control of Damascus and Baghdad, he explains, has caused Sunni Arab states, including Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia to “abandon their hostility [to the Jewish state], openly or discreetly.” And Israel’s response to Iran’s air assault, Luttwak notes, likely terrified the Mullahs because it demonstrated the vulnerability of Iran’s chief nuclear installation.

Meanwhile, Thomas Friedman, who people in the Biden administration undoubtedly read, keeps calling for regime change in Israel.