What is it about Switzerland? Three Presidents have tried their luck at dealing with blatant insanity. Obama played his cards in Lausanne in 2015 while Biden bet on Vienna five years later. Geneva’s turn had come. The President’s golf pal Witkoff went through the motions. Last night Trump gave thumbs up. The Mullah team had its final chance. At that moment in Tehran all hell broke loose.
Of all murky lunacies, redoing nuclear talks with born liars and lunatics is the most comic, the most idiotic, the most perilous. “The president wants diplomatic solutions. He prefers them greatly.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio had to mask Trump’s serial ultimatums tagged with frantic appeals for Tehran to negotiate. He’d risked sailing close to the wind, given Obama’s “worst deal ever made,” that crude denouncement now putting the President’s political life at risk. The Special Envoy was having a third stab at a nuclear deal. The Mullahs would have been relishing one cop-out after another. And they slipped a fourth round of playing postman’s bluff onto the rumor mill.
Never mind the MAGA movement. A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs conducted in February 19-23 found that both the left and right view Iran’s nuclear program as a threat. At the same time they lack trust in the President’s judgment. As for the isolationist crowd, a military escapade in the Middle East scares the hell out of them. Zionists getting America to fight their wars are not the flavor of the day. Bait clicks for populist Tucker Carlson and professor John Mearsheimer were as likely as the risk of Iran’s ballistic missiles to de-escalate.
Many in the MAGA movement look askew at the President’s involvement in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Gaza as a betrayal of his vow to put “America first.” It would all have blown up in his face had Trump not bombed the terrors of Tehran to smithereens but cut a deal which froze rather than dismantled their nuclear program, declaring it better than Obama’s excuse for a deal.
For sure, the motives of the 44th and 47th Presidents were poles apart. A signature legacy motivated the former to bargain with the devil. And he meant to empower Iran’s theocracy, not bring it down. Indeed Obama was about to turn the old order upside down. Iran, hitherto America’s number one foe, was going to be, in the world’s number one hotspot, America’s number one ally. A detente brewed between the world’s powerhouse and the world’s sour pickle jar.
Witkoff was spared having to wave a dead duck of a deal. I’m sorry, but I struggle to give the real estate developer the time of day as an authentic broker of global peace. Take the latest statement he gave in an interview with Trump’s daughter-in-law :
He’s curious as to why they haven’t … I don’t want to use the word capitulated, but why they haven’t capitulated. Why under this sort of pressure with the amount of naval power that we have there, why they haven’t come to us and said, ‘We profess that we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do.’ And yet it’s hard to sort of get them to that place.
Certainly Trump prevaricated like nobody’s business. Last Friday he spoke like a pettish lad demanding that Iran “better negotiate a fair deal.” This followed Iran’s gunning down of 32,000 protesters in February’s uprising. One expected Trump to stand by his word. In January Trump had declaimed that the U.S. would come to the rescue of protesters if the regime resorted to violence to quell the uprising. Then the atrocity — locals told the BBC it was unlike anything before. Trump reacted how? He promised Iranians that “help is on the way.” They waited. We waited.
Moving to new ground he told Tehran it must do two things to avoid an attack by America’s gulf armada: “Number one, no nuclear. Number two, stop killing protesters. They are killing them by the thousands.” On CBS Evening News he warned about “very strong actions” if public executions occurred. “They were going to hang 837 people, and I gave them the word, if you hang one person, even one person, that you’re going to be hit right then and there. I wasn’t waiting two weeks and negotiating. And they gave up the hanging. They didn’t hang 837, supposedly they didn’t hang anybody.”
It came over as naive about how Jew-hatred works. Too close he sailed to Obama, who at one time lectured The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg about the behaviour of monster Mullahs.
“There are deep strains of anti-Semitism in the core regime, but they also are interested in maintaining power.”
Goldberg begged to disagree. “It’s my belief that it is difficult to negotiate with parties that are captive to a conspiratorial anti-Semitic worldview; not because they hold offensive views, but because they hold ridiculous views…. I don’t believe that the regime can be counted on to be entirely rational.”
The truth lies deeper. Yes, there’s nothing calculated in verbal attacks of the kind that Iran makes. Like a volcano they seem to emanate from some deep superheated disturbance. But when anti-Semites spew vitriol at Israel they do more than distort facts or recite a miscellany of canards. Seldom do anti-Semites react to provocation, to what Jews have done. When a core figure warns that Iran needs only 24 hours and an excuse to wipe Israel off the map, he’s not mad at Israel’s deeds. He’s passionately in love with hating Jews.
More than his support for Israel, more than displaying empathy for the Iranian people, he had to stand by his word.
Anti-Semites are not, as the phrase goes, in their right minds. In a real sense they are out of their minds. A passion can do that. And the passion that collects around Israel is like no other. It consumes whole countries, even distorts trade. Quite sane leaders lose their minds over Israel.
Walter Russell Mead would agree.
“Nations and political establishments warped by this hatred tend to make one dumb decision after another — starting at shadows, warding off imaginary dangers, misunderstanding the nature of problems they face.”
It’s what Goldberg was getting at, and what pulled him up short. Debriefing Foreign Policy Journal afterwards he bemoaned the President’s obtuseness.
“Obama doesn’t seem to fully understand that anti-Semites actually believe the dangerous and idiotic things they say.” Had he not been a died-in-the-wool Democrat, perhaps Goldberg would have paid closer attention to the President’s own “take” on the subject. Had he done so Obama would not have slipped the most cardinal error past him:
The fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power; and so the fact that (Iran’s) supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.
But it does: ergo the fatal move which ultimately cost the Third Reich victory. No one taught Obama that the extermination of Jews was not a means to an end but an end in itself? He doesn’t know that the Final Solution was not a part of the war effort, it was fully equal to the whole war effort? He’s not aware that resources needed for winning the war were diverted to the higher priority of putting Jews to death? He never read about the failure of Operation Barbarossa, a turning point in the fortunes of the Third Reich, in no small measure caused by the diversion of trains for Hitler’s genocide project? Hitler condemned his own troops to the pitiless Russian winter so that trains to death camps would continue to run and oven chimneys would continue to smoke.
Let Trump beware. More than his support for Israel, more than displaying empathy for the Iranian people, he had to stand by his word. Remember, he publicly vowed to rescue the Iranians. Last night’s joint attack was late for tens of thousands of freedom-crazed Iranians who lost their lives. Even so, he was not another Obama who drew a red line but recoiled from keeping it. “If you dare cross this line I shall draw a new one.”
READ MORE from Steve Apfel:
When Fighting Antisemitism Becomes a Spectacle