Same old, same old

President Barack Obama's drive for a nuclear agreement with Iran conveys an unsettling sense of desperation. After each concession, the mullahs slap him around and demand more, consistent with both the logic of bargaining theory and the historical consequences of appeasement.

Obama's approach seems to be guided by three dubious assumptions.

First, that the only means that might prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons--the use of military force--should be taken off the table because it will produce even worse consequences than a nuclear Iran would.

Second, that, with the use of force discarded, we have no effective means of preventing Iran from going nuclear in the not too distant future.

Third, and finally, that the best we can do, bargaining as we are from the weaker position, is to buy time in the hope that political liberalization or even regime change in Tehran renders the concern moot.

Undergirding all of this is the broader desire to use the negotiations to bring about a strategic realignment in the Middle East in which Iran becomes friend rather than foe, thereby overcoming 35 years of virulent hostility between the Islamic Republic and what Ayatollah Khomeini called the "Great Satan."

Inherent in the Obama approach is also both a political desire and a diplomatic model.

The political desire is Obama's search for some kind of historic accomplishment to justify his presidency. There isn't much to offer along these lines on the domestic front--"Obamacare" remains both troubled and unpopular, the economy continues to limp along (a tepid 2.2 percent growth last quarter); and the national debt has nearly doubled since Obama took office; hence the turn, amid these disappointments, to foreign policy.

After all, even Jimmy Carter, the quintessential "failed president," had Camp David.

Obama therefore sees an historical realignment in the region brought on by rapprochement with Iran as his last chance to carve out a legacy.

The model Obama seems to be following in his approach is the Nixon administration's opening to China of the early 1970s; a diplomatic breakthrough that put the United States in a commanding position vis-à-vis both China and Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union. After decades of unremitting hostility, the United States and Red China made amends, despite the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, but only because of a threatening common foe, Russia.

Adding all this up--the administration's assumptions regarding its limited options regarding Tehran, the desire to score a foreign-policy coup that will secure Obama a more significant place in the history books, and the idea that Iran is now ready for conciliation in the same way Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were back in 1970--and you get the relentless pressing for an accord, any accord, with the details not mattering much (at least to Obama).

And therein is found the fundamental problem with the administration's approach: It seeks to use a treaty as a means of transforming a regime which can't be trusted, by definition, to adhere to the provisions of this (or any) treaty. Obama has therefore embraced a strategy which requires that we trust an untrustworthy regime as a means of making it more trustworthy.

As Michael Rubin of the Naval Postgraduate School argues in his illuminating book, Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engagement with Rogue Regimes, these are precisely the kinds of circumstances in which our side gets taken to the cleaners.

Obama stands in a long line of well-intentioned Western leaders who have sought to get the better of tyrants in negotiations, despite the fact that such negotiations invariably feature asymmetries in the tyrants' favor. "Supreme Leaders" don't seek historical legacies, at last not the kind democratically elected leaders do, and don't feel compelled to achieve diplomatic breakthroughs with their enemies before their terms in office end. Victory is their goal, not peace through conflict resolution.

Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier made war more, rather than less, likely by trying to appease Hitler at Munich. Franklin Roosevelt was played like a fiddle by "Uncle Joe" Stalin at Yalta despite all his charm and obsequiousness. Nor should we forget the consequences of the "agreed framework" negotiated with North Korea during the Clinton administration (which had the effect of accelerating rather than retarding its nuclear program).

Even those most cynical of operators, whom Obama seeks to emulate in his Iran gambit, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, seriously underestimated both the expansionist tendencies of the Soviet regime when pursuing détente and the ultimate goals of Ho Chi Minh's successors when signing the Paris Peace Accords (the communists would conquer Saigon barely two years later, with extensive Soviet assistance, but Henry still got his Nobel Peace Prize; Obama already has one, proving the utter worthlessness of such).

Remarkably, Obama, with little to no grasp of history, and media sycophants every bit as earnest and delusional as those who cheered on Chamberlain when he landed at Heathrow with his umbrella and scrap of paper promising "peace in our time" (none other than FDR sent him a congratulatory cable with only two words: "good man"), is now making, step by step, every mistake that Rubin's book documents.

Do we ever learn? No, we don't.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 04/27/2015

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