Mick Hartley

The Biden administration has at least shown some backbone over Ukraine, with stern words, warnings to China to back off (which they'll probably ignore), and some serious sanctions. What will happen though, as seems all too likely, if things get worse? Suppose an increasingly demented Putin, enraged by the slow progress in Ukraine and determined to prove that the West have no stomach for a fight and now is the time for the Great Russian Renaissance, launches attacks on NATO countries. That would bring some serious pressure on Biden – well, on us all, but particularly on Biden – and I can't say I'm convinced he's the best man for the job.

Look at his record. The Afghan withdrawal was a bungled disaster. And now he's trying to cosy up to Iran, re-activating Obama's JCPOA but, as Gabriel Horonha noted in his Tablet article last week (which I posted about at the time), This Isn’t Obama’s Iran Deal. It’s Much, Much Worse. Iran, as I've noted already, featured as one of George Bush's much-derided "axis of evil". North Korea's still there, Iraq's been replaced by Syria, and now we have Russia and no doubt China too. But yes, Iran is still there. Still as intransigent in its hatred of all things western. And Biden and his team are deluded enough to think this a regime they can negotiate with in good faith: balance out the old Sunni-Shia divide, bring in Iran as a responsible player in Middle Eastern politics, and, not coincidentally, mark out their desire to reduce their long-term alliance with Israel. But in Tehran we have a regime whose main foreign policy goal is the elimination of the "Zionist entity", who have no concern for human life as long as it's in the right cause – as shown in the war with Iraq when they sent children armed with plastic keys to paradise to clear mine-fields by walking over them – and are driven only by their adherence to a hard-line Shia Islam. They'll continuing building their nuclear weapons sanctions or no sanctions, but thanks to Biden the sanctions will go and the money will start pouring in again.

Well, Melanie Phillips in the Times today has, I think it's clear, been reading that Gabriel Horonha article herself, and makes some very good points:

In talks in Geneva, the US has been trying to revive the 2015 agreement with Iran brokered by Barack Obama. This enabled Iran to build nuclear weapons legitimately after 15 years, though Israel feared it would be sooner. Meanwhile, sanctions were lifted, allowing billions of dollars to fund Tehran’s regional power grabs, terrorist activities and attacks on America and its allies.

Donald Trump took the US out of the deal and renewed those sanctions; the Biden administration is desperate to lift them again. Astoundingly, leaks suggest that it has agreed to give the Iranian regime everything it wants and more. Naftali Bennett, the Israeli prime minister, suggested the new deal may only be in place for two-and-a-half years. Even within that time, Iran could receive tens of billions of dollars to ramp up its its war on the West, and see sanctions lifted against a swathe of its terrorist operatives and proxies.

This was set to be announced when Russia, which is critical to Iran acceding to the deal, suddenly demanded exemption from US sanctions to allow Moscow to trade with Tehran. Putin was using America’s keenness to lift sanctions against Iran as a weapon to blackmail America into lifting its sanctions against Russia. So while the US believes sanctions are the way to stop Putin, it thinks lifting sanctions is the way to stop Iran.

The question is why the Biden administration is so desperate to surrender to a regime which has waged war against the US and its allies for four decades, and whose ballistic missiles that the US is now facilitating will be pointing at America and Europe. Iran has launched countless attacks against US and western interests. Many American, British and other allied soldiers were killed in Iraq by Iranian roadside bombs. Yet the West has never fought back. Now the US is intent upon total capitulation. Why?

There are several possible reasons. Obama, several of whose officials are now Biden staffers, wanted to “even up” the rival Shia and Sunni Islamic camps in the region and thus create a balance of power.

There’s also malice against Israel, which Iran repeatedly threatens to annihilate, among certain members of the Biden administration. Its Iranian envoy, Robert Malley, has a history of profound hostility to Israel and has reportedly been making the running in the Geneva talks.

But the main reason, embodied by the secretary of state Antony Blinken, is surely the dominant western liberal dogma that war never solves anything, and that the appropriate response to aggression is negotiation and compromise. As Blinken’s team have reportedly said, better a nuclear Iran than military confrontation. And as for Iran’s intended extermination of Israel, “the world would never let that happen”. Well, try telling that to Ukraine.

The Obama-Bidenites believe that if Iran is embraced by the world community it will modify its terrorist ways. This is the second great western fallacy, that all world leaders are governed by self-interest.

Charmed by urbane Iranians, the West has ignored the fact that the regime is dominated by the Shia “Twelver” sect which believes that bringing about an apocalypse will cause the Shia messiah, the “Twelfth Imam,” to descend to Earth.

With a messianic agenda of the end of days, the fanatics in Tehran don’t care if a very large number of Iranians are killed in battle or die of privation. Similarly, Putin’s fantasy of recreating imperial Russia means he doesn’t care if a very large number of Russians are killed in battle or die of privation. The cause is everything.

As a result, both Iran and Russia have played the West for suckers. In recent months, Tehran has been ramping up its attacks on American and allied interests. This rapidly brought more US concessions. But the Iranians view compromise as a signal of imminent surrender. So these concessions produced ever more brazen attacks.

America’s genuflection to Tehran surely helped in turn to embolden Putin. If the US was so desperate to surrender to a regime with American blood on its hands, Putin must have thought, it wasn’t going to stop him…..

This lethal feedback loop of western fearfulness and emboldened enemies explains “asymmetric warfare,” through which states like Russia and Iran that are militarily and economically weaker than the West nevertheless have it by the throat. Asymmetric warfare also means that “mutually assured destruction”, the theory of deterrence underpinning western policy, no longer works. For while the West flinches from using nuclear weapons, not to mention chemical or biological, its fanatical foes might well do so.

Faced with a new challenge from Russia to the world order and to liberal freedom and democracy – unprecedented perhaps since WW2, with the new Z sign replacing the swastika – the Biden administration looks all set to encourage another.