Former US secretary of state Antony (Tony) Blinken’s critique in The New York Times regarding President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb some of Iran’s nuclear facilities is a valuable reminder of how the United States arrived at this critical moment in history after decades of debate about how to fulfill its pledge to prevent Iran from acquiring nukes.
Unfortunately, Blinken omits important facts about the negotiating process that led to a flawed 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement – one that slowed, but did not stop, Iran’s tireless efforts to possess nuclear weapons.
Blinken is a superb public servant who has devoted his life to his country. I know this personally, as I worked closely with him for years when he was staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under its chairman, then-senator Joseph Biden, and I was the senator’s communications director and spokesman for the committee.
Even during this period of the early and mid-2000s, when the country was overwhelmingly focused on Afghanistan and Iraq in the immediate post-9/11 period, Iran was never far from the minds of foreign policy decision-makers. Its constant bellicosity toward the American “Big Satan” and the Israeli “Little Satan,” and accompanying chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” during massive rallies on the streets of Tehran, left no doubt about Iran’s intentions.
More important than what it said, was what it did: using its oil riches not to make its country prosperous but to invest in missile development while sponsoring and funding global terrorism and to build a police state to oppress and tightly control its own citizens.
When then-president Barack Obama and vice president Joe Biden undertook the difficult effort of bringing Iran to the negotiating table, a significant majority of Americans supported the idea of exploring diplomatic means to halt Tehran’s aims.
To many observers – the United States and the West, which had imposed sanctions that damaged Iran beyond an already mismanaged economy – had the upper hand. In multiple international venues, the regime of the ayatollahs complained bitterly about the unfairness of the financial handcuffs.
Obama employed weak negotiating tactics with Iran
What Blinken’s essay leaves out is that Obama employed weak negotiating tactics that allowed Tehran to evade several key issues. At the outset, Iran insisted that the talks would cover one subject and one subject only – the nuclear file.
Iranian negotiators were able to set the terms of discussion precisely as they wished. The US caved with respect to addressing both Iran’s regional hegemonic ambitions and its program to continue developing missiles that could reach Israel and into Europe.
It didn’t have to be that way. If Iran wanted meaningful sanctions relief, the United States should have taken a tougher stance to tackle the entirety of Tehran’s malign activities. Instead, we willfully chose to allow Iran to build and empower the so-called Axis of Resistance, the rogues gallery of terrorists spread across the Middle East, holding the same violent, annihilationist ideology as their puppeteers.
We willfully chose to ignore Iran’s expansion of ballistic missile technology, the very weapons the US had to spend billions of dollars to detect and try to shoot down when they fell not only on Israel but also on the heads of US servicemen and women who sustained serious injuries.
Those who favored the negotiations but expressed concerns that the US was not driving a hard enough bargain were vilified, mocked, and accused of being “warmongers.” Obama spokespeople like Ben Rhodes argued repeatedly that there were only two positions: support the narrow approach that became the JCPOA agreement or oppose it and go to war.
The administration refused to listen to the many voices who simply wanted a better agreement, one that recognized we held the high cards given Iran’s sinking economy and their desperation for sanctions relief.
A stronger JCPOA would have been much more difficult for Donald Trump to attack and ultimately abandon. Regrettably, the long history of wishful thinking and failures by both parties helped create the conditions that made military intervention more likely. This is why there inevitably was wall-to-wall consensus among Israelis of all stripes that neither partial sanctions nor less than robust diplomacy had worked to deter Iran from seeking to nuke Tel Aviv.
Blinken is right that Trump should not have walked away from the JCPOA, as a bad deal was better than no deal at all, but the choices made in 2015 to forego a larger, comprehensive agreement were one of the great missed opportunities of our time.
The writer served as senator Joe Biden’s communications director and spokesman for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2000-2006.