Iran’s decision to launch hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel last weekend offers a painful lesson for President Joe Biden. His policy of hoping to induce better behavior from the Islamic Republic through multibillion-dollar payoffs has been revealed as naive fiction. In fairness to Biden, this fatally misguided assumption that the mullahs want to be good-faith partners isn’t his alone. He inherited it from former President Barack Obama.
Take Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser and all-purpose mini-me. He boasted in 2016 that the administration had misrepresented the 2015 Iran nuclear accord to the public, selling Tehran as more trustworthy than they were. Rhodes added that this was no problem because the media were idiots who were easily fooled. Rhodes was so anti-Israel that his nickname in the Obama White House was “Hamas.”
