A new conservative foreign policy group, the Democratic Alliance Initiative, has reminded us how badly wrong many liberals were when it came to their Armageddon-esque warnings against President Trump’s Iran policy.
Reintroducing U.S. sanctions on Iran, more actively confronting Tehran’s external aggression (including in Iraq), and eliminating its terrorist ringleader, Qassem Soleimani, Trump has adopted a markedly different approach to that of President Barack Obama. But in response to each of these actions, many on the political Left have asserted that Trump’s policy would bring nothing but bloodshed and chaos. As a new document by the group points out, these predictions weren’t exactly on the money.
True, some of the group’s assessments are premature. On Soleimani’s assassination, for example, while Iran’s response has been restrained thus far, that will eventually change. As I explained following Soleimani’s death, and as Politico reported this week, Iran will not feel sated until it has assassinated a U.S. official. Still, the recording of general liberal hyperbole and now provably wrong arguments on Soleimani and the Iran nuclear deal is quite amusing.
Take Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama administration official who warned that “without active participation and cooperation by the rest of the world, the United States will face a monumental enforcement and implementation burden with scant support. … The bottom line is that without political support, the U.S. sanctions regime will be a fraction of what it was in 2012.”
This will be news to Iran, which has seen its economy implode under U.S. sanctions pressure. What Goldenberg and those who shared his fears have never fully understood is the size of the U.S. economy. Namely, the means by which the threat of lost access to the U.S. economy was enough to persuade many global corporations to avoid dealings with Iran. The same applies to Adam Szubin, former acting under secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. He warned that “we will not be able to coerce Europe, Russia, and China into shunning Iran’s economy over policy interests that they do not share.” We didn’t need to, we simply needed to offer European companies a new cost-benefit calculation as to the risks of continued investment in Iran.
Even on the Soleimani killing, the predictions were absurdly exaggerated. Richard Haass, head of the Council on Foreign Relations, posited, “I wonder: Did this [National Security Council] process make clear to [Trump] that … economic sanctions would trigger military responses? That killing Soleimani would lead to an open-ended conflict forcing the US to return its strategic focus to [Middle East]?”
I haven’t seen that open-ended conflict, have you?
More tedious, here, is the trend of blaming Trump rather than Soleimani for Middle Eastern instability. Take Rob Malley, head of the International Crisis Group, who proudly announced that he had told the New York Times, “Whether President Trump intended it or not, it is, for all practical purposes, a declaration of war.” Actually, folks, Soleimani declared war on America a long time ago. The truth of his war is best measured by the tidal waves of blood and limbs that flowed out of U.S. vehicles after they were hit by Soleimani’s explosively formed perpetrators (read David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers). Or by the young American soldiers whom Soleimani had kidnapped and executed while they were still handcuffed.
And perhaps, just perhaps, former Obama administration officials should have a smidgen more humility here. After all, it was their boss who gave Soleimani and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei a free pass in 2011, when Iran attempted to blow up the then-Saudi ambassador as he dined at Washington, D.C., restaurant Cafe Milano. When told that the explosion might kill 100 people, Soleimani’s handler responded, “F— ’em.”
