Appeasement Doesn't Appease

I’ve watched the negotiations between the Obama administration and Iran, as others, with horror. And puzzlement. 

The negotiations were pointless from the outset. There was stasis before. Sanctions prevented Iran from having the money to pursue its nuclear goals. The Iranian people recognized it was their leadership’s unwillingness to play nice on the world playground that was keeping them down, so they rightly blamed them instead of us. Iran was still pursuing nuclear weapons, but was hindered by worldwide disapproval and pressure.

What did the US have to gain from entering into negotiations? What was so valuable that it was worth guaranteeing Iran would develop nuclear technology—along with weapon delivery technology? At least when a similar ridiculously bad negation led to North Korea getting nukes, it didn’t say, “And, by the way, you’ll want these accessories in order to hit distant targets.”

The “executive agreement” signed last week may go down in history as the worst negotiations between nations in the history of the world. I am not using hyperbole. (Nor am I the only one to think so: read here and here.) We went from being in the positive position that was keeping this rogue nation from getting nuclear technology to guaranteeing that they get it in a decade or sooner, along with capabilities to attack not just nearby nations but the United States, with our apparent approval.

And in exchange we got—and asked for—nothing. Not release of Americans being held captive. Not human rights improvements. Not meaningful inspections of nuclear technology development. In fact, rather than US inspectors getting their own samples of uranium, they will blithely accept samples offered to them by Iranian officials. Trust, but don’t verify.

Why?

Because this president wanted to have as a legacy a nuclear deal with Iran. Not a deal to prevent Iranian nukes, just any random agreement that includes discussion of Iranian nukes. And for no reason, really; it’s just part of his bucket list. And all of us are supposed to be willing to risk our not-too-distant-future world for the sake of his whimsical wish.

He wanted it so obsessively, he and Kerry were obviously desperate to sign, no matter what. Iran sat back, refusing everything that was supposed to be on the table. Death to Israel is still their policy toward our ally; that was OK with the Obama team. Continued nuclear program. Everything. Even the ICBMs that were thrown in at the last minute. They knew Obama and Kerry were desperate enough to accept any terms, under any conditions. And they took advantage. We’re lucky they didn’t think to add in, “Oh, by the way, Alaska now belongs to Russia.”

Here’s one description, by Matthew Continetti:

If the deal favors Iran which it unequivocally does—without so much as closing a nuclear facility, this rogue regime gets cash, legitimacy, and an end to U.N. bans on sales of conventional weapons and ballistic missile technology it is because Obama wanted desperately to pursue the diplomatic option and prove its validity.

Here’s Charles Krauthammer’s reaction:

When you write a column, as did I two weeks ago, headlined “The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history,” you don’t expect to revisit the issue. We had hit bottom. Or so I thought. Then on Tuesday the final terms of the Iranian nuclear deal were published. I was wrong.

Who would have imagined we would be giving up the conventional-arms and ballistic-missile embargoes on Iran? In nuclear negotiations?

Victor Davis Hanson, historian and classicist, draws the comparison to the Neville Chamberlain appeasement to Hitler. I think that is a too-kind way of looking at this. But he points out several things we know about appeasement, and how they are likely to play out:

·         First, appeasement always brings short-term jubilation at the expense of long-term security…. A few years from now—after Iran has used its negotiated breathing space to rearm, ratchet up its terrorist operations, and eventually gain a bomb to blackmail its neighbors—the current deal will be deeply regretted.

·         Second, the appeasement of autocrats always pulls the rug out from under domestic reformers and idealists…. Until last week, Iranian dissidents and reformers had blamed the theocracy for earning Iran pariah status abroad and economic ruin at home. Not now.

·         Third, appeasers always wrongly insist that the only alternative to their foolish concessions is war. Just the opposite is true. Time was not on Iran’s side. Teheran was growing desperate for financial and commercial relief from global sanctions and embargoes. In contrast, the world had no such urgency and could have easily waited for a cash-strapped and ostracized Iran to give up on a bomb…. Expect that in five years Iran will be better armed, richer, more confident, more aggressive—and nearly impossible to deter without the use of force.

·         Fourth, beneficiaries grow to hate their appeasers…. Under the rules of appeasement, an aggressor privately has only disdain for compromises that benefit him, and yet feels a weird sort of respect for those who deter him. Expect an emboldened Iran to double down on its anti-Americanism, as it brags about how a weak and decadent Great Satan meekly caved to its demands, which will only grow greater.

·         Fifth, allies are always the big losers in appeasement…. Our apprehensive friends and allies in the Middle East—the Gulf states and Egypt especially—will naturally, for their own protection, expect the same sort of nuclear deal that we accorded our enemy, Iran.  America is for a while longer out of Iranian missile range. Not so the Arab world, Israel, and perhaps southern and eastern Europe.

·         Finally, outside observers of appeasement always make the necessary geostrategic adjustments…. China and Russia will never again see any advantage in joining the West in embargoing and sanctioning a would-be nuclear state—not when such a hard-won common front can become utterly nullified at any moment by a fickle United States. Both powers will grow closer to Iran.

There is a very long list of things this president has done that are detrimental to America. This is beyond Obamacare. This is beyond using the IRS to target his political foes. This is beyond forcing nuns to pay for employees’ abortion-inducing drugs. Although it is hard to believe we live in a world where any of these things could happen in America, this is far worse. This is existential.

Obama calls this an “executive agreement,” rather than a treaty, so that he can bypass Congress. Still, he had promised Congress sixty days to go over the agreement (and disapprove with legislation which he would veto). But he broke his word (no surprise) after just a few days and sent it on to the UN Security Council, which approved it soundly—a clue that it’s a bad idea.

The deal is so clearly bad for America, so clearly the worst negotiation terms ever agreed to by people with free will, but what we do not know for certain is motivation.

It is possible that Obama and cohort Kerry actually believe America is a bad and evil actor on the world stage, and that the only way to be fair, if we can’t deprive ourselves of nuclear weapons, is to let all the other countries have them as well, including the "Death to America" radical enemies. It’s possible that they believe “the right side of history” is to recognize America is in decline and the decline is to be “managed,”—which we might have expected would mean “make the best of the bad situation” rather than “make it so.” They might think they’re the best people to run the ship when it needs to be run into the iceberg. They have expressed things that lead to these conclusions.

Or it’s possible that Obama HATES the very basis for this country—God-given human rights to life, liberty, property and ways of pursuing happiness. He hates the limits written plainly in the Constitution. He hates freedom, prosperity, and civilization. He hates anything that opposes him in whatever he wants to do for whatever reason. He wants America to fall into the dustbin of history. And he loves the evils of force, dictatorship, tyranny in every form—as long as he’s in power to tyrannize others.

Either he is the stupidest negotiator ever to lead a major nation, or he is much more evil than we could have imagined. Or a combination. Either way, he has set in motion arming radical Islamists and has facilitated their worldwide attacks. J’accuse.

Constitutionalism

I mentioned last week that one of the ways I was celebrating the anniversary of the Constitution was by participating in the course provided free by Hillsdale College (constitution.hillsdale.edu). Last Thursday was opening day, and then there are weekly lectures on Mondays for several weeks. Anyway, Thursday evening’s keynote included a speech by Charles Krauthammer (which you can still see in the archive—he’s about 20 minutes in, after a couple of shorter speeches, and speaks for 30 minutes plus Q&A). 

He related his theme, about our surprising reverence for the Constitution, to the spontaneous movement among people to rise up and take action, to say to government—you have gone too far! We call it the Tea Parties, or maybe other names like 9/12ers or liberty groups. But people have acted totally contrary to how the opposition behaves (paid organizers fomenting faux grassroots responses) and to what they have come to expect (grumbling capitulation). As Krauthammer put it: 

So on the one side we have American hyper-liberal government trying to push us to a more social democratic system, and then miraculously, or astonishingly, no matter how you want to see it, you can believe in providence or not. But amazingly there is a spontaneous reaction. It was not led. It was not organized. It was no conspiracy. People reacted against this push to the left, and the movement has been called Tea Party, but in reality it’s much more widespread, expressed itself in the November elections of last year, which calls for a more restricted vision of government, more consistent with the intent and the aim of the founders. I would call it constitutionalism, or a return to constitutionalism.

He talked about how philosophically perfect this movement is. It’s hard to summarize this justly, but he said that, in the past the argument against New Deal-style overreaching has been to point out the inefficiencies and arbitrariness—good arguments, but not apparently strong enough to halt the encroachment. The new argument is rooted in the enumerated powers Constitution—which limits the powers of government. As Gandalf, we say to the evil Balrog of big government: “You shall not pass!”

Here’s a portion of Krauthammer’s description of the difference in defense of our liberties: 

The traditional defense against government encroachment over the last decades has been not to argue about enumerated powers, but to argue on the grounds of the Bill of Rights, and to claim individual, the inviolable sphere of freedom and sovereignty of the individual: “You can’t do X because it goes against individual rights and the Bill of Rights.” But that idea, that kind of defense, tends to concede that outside of that private sphere surrounding the individual, the government is free to roam and to rule.  

The attack today on the basis of enumerated powers is a stronger attack on big government. Because now it argues that it is government, not the individual, that is constrained by a sphere around it. And that sphere constrains the government because of the enumerated powers in the Constitution beyond which it may not go…. 

In some ways it’s a kind of recapitulation of the argument that is the basis of the 10^th Amendment, but it has I think a larger implication, because once you talk about enumerated powers, you’re going to the heart of the expansion of the state, ever since the New Deal. And that I think is why it’s so important.… 

This to me is the final judicial attack on big government. The commerce clause for 80 years has been the high road to the expansion of government, which is why the framers of Obamacare were so contemptuous and dismissive at the beginning of any constitutional challenge, that they just assumed, “We’ve been using it ever since the 30s, and we’re going to use it again,” and now it’s under challenge—and these Democrats are not dismissive anymore. They’re scared. They’re afraid of two things: that they will be rebuked and defeated by the courts, and even if not that they will be rebuked and defeated by the people at the polls in November. 

That’s why I have reasonable hope for the future. I do think that this popular reaction—again, inchoate, unorganized, undirected, that developed into this tsunami that we saw on election day last year, and that still animates the opposition—as one unbelievably wondrous sign of the health of the body politic. And the fact that it has concentrated on exactly the correct constitutional issues, that it refers to, finds its strength in constitutionalism itself, is encouraging.  

It’s not just the traditional arguments that Obamacare or these other expansions are inefficient, they are not economically sound, they lead to bureaucratic inefficiency; that would be OK, but it wouldn’t be enough, not at this time. The argument now, the resistance now, is emphasizing, is rooted in an attack on the constitutional illegitimacy of what is being done. And that, in a constitutional republic, is the heart of the matter. 

A good portion of his speech talked about how unusual and providential it is that we reverence the Constitution in the first place. Most places around the world do not abide by the words in a written document. It is heartening that even our opposition recognizes that it must convince the people of the legitimacy of its actions—by torturing the meaning of the Constitution if necessary, but recognizing that the people will not just ignore our basic law. So when the people understand the Constitution, and stand up on their own, joining together, to say, “The Constitution says you shall not usurp this power from the people, and we do not grant this power,” the big government pushers must of necessity back off, albeit with weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

The very fact that I do not feel alone as I passionately defend my love and respect for the Constitution is indeed reason to hope. To hope that, after a century of encroaching big government, we can change, to return to principles rooted in our miraculous, brilliant Constitution.