It is clear that the final terms of the agreement between the U.S. and Iran fail to meet any of the goals publicly stated by the administration at the outset of the talks, even goals reiterated just a few months ago (e.g., “anytime, anywhere” inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites). There can only be two reasons for this failure: Either the Obama administration is uniquely inept at negotiations, or the negotiations regarding Iran’s nukes were nothing but a smokescreen for the pursuit of an entirely different agenda. The former, while marginally plausible, hardly begins to explain how we got from an initial position in which we held a winning hand, to an outcome in which Iran walked away from the table with nearly all the chips.
That leaves the second reason. But if that’s the case, what was the hidden agenda behind the talks? Questions raised during the negotiations strongly suggest that the real purpose of the talks was not to negotiate the terms of Iran’s abandonment of nuclear weapons technology, but rather to agree on the terms by which Iran would re-enter the family of nations as a regional power, even at the price of acceptance of Iran’s eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons.
