Category: International relations

Charles Krauthammer:

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 theIranian 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?

When asked Wednesday at his news conference why there is nothing in the deal about the American hostages being held by Iran, President Obama explained that this is a separate issue, not part of nuclear talks.

Are conventional weapons not a separate issue? After all, conventional, by definition, means non-nuclear. Why are we giving up the embargoes?

Because Iran, joined by Russia — our “reset” partner — sprung the demand at the last minute, calculating that Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were so desperate for a deal that they would cave. They did. And have convinced themselves that they scored a victory by delaying the lifting by five to eight years. (Ostensibly. The language is murky. The interval could be considerably shorter.)

Obama claimed in his news conference that it really doesn’t matter, because we can always intercept Iranian arms shipments to, say, Hezbollah.

But wait. Obama has insisted throughout that we are pursuing this Iranian diplomacy to avoid the use of force, yet now blithely discards a previous diplomatic achievement — the arms embargo — by suggesting, no matter, we can just shoot our way to interdiction.

Moreover, the most serious issue is not Iranian exports but Iranian imports — of sophisticated Russian and Chinese weapons. These are untouchable. We are not going to attack Russian and Chinese transports.

The net effect of this capitulation will be not only to endanger our Middle East allies now under threat from Iran and its proxies, but also to endanger our own naval forces in the Persian Gulf. Imagine how Iran’s acquisition of the most advanced anti-ship missiles would threaten our control over the gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, waterways we have kept open for international commerce for a half-century.

The other major shock in the final deal is what happened to our insistence on “anytime, anywhere” inspections. Under the final agreement, Iran has the right to deny international inspectors access to any undeclared nuclear site. The denial is then adjudicated by a committee — on which Iran sits. It then goes through several other bodies, on all of which Iran sits. Even if the inspectors’ request prevails, the approval process can take 24 days.

And what do you think will be left to be found, left unscrubbed, after 24 days? The whole process is farcical.

The action now shifts to Congress. The debate is being hailed as momentous. It is not. It’s irrelevant.

Congress won’t get to vote on the deal until September. But Obama is taking the agreement to the U.N. Security Council for approval within days . Approval there will cancel all previous U.N. resolutions outlawing and sanctioning Iran’s nuclear activities.

Meaning: Whatever Congress ultimately does, it won’t matter because the legal underpinning for the entire international sanctions regime against Iran will have been dismantled at the Security Council. Ten years of painstakingly constructed international sanctions will vanish overnight, irretrievably.

Even if Congress rejects the agreement, do you think the Europeans, the Chinese or the Russians will reinstate sanctions? The result: The United States is left isolated while the rest of the world does thriving business with Iran.

Should Congress then give up? No. Congress needs to act in order to rob this deal of, at least, its domestic legitimacy. Rejection will make little difference on the ground. But it will make it easier for a successor president to legitimately reconsider an executive agreement (Obama dare not call it a treaty — it would be instantly rejected by the Senate) that garnered such pathetically little backing in either house of Congress.

It’s a future hope, but amid dire circumstances. By then, Iran will be flush with cash, legitimized as a normal international actor in good standing, recognized (as Obama once said) as “a very successful regional power.” Stopping Iran from going nuclear at that point will be infinitely more difficult and risky.

Which is Obama’s triumph. He has locked in his folly. He has laid down his legacy, and we will have to live with the consequences for decades.

How do we know that the U.S. “deal” with Iran asking Iran to pretty please not develop nuclear weapons is a bad deal?

Let us count the ways, beginning with the Daily Signal:

Although the administration entered the negotiations pledging to cut off all pathways to a nuclear weapon, the agreement amounts to little more than a diplomatic speed bump that will delay, but not permanently halt, Iran’s drive for a nuclear weapons capability.

The agreement in effect legitimizes Iran as a nuclear threshold state.

Once key restrictions on uranium enrichment expire in 10 to 15 years, Iran will have the option to develop an industrial scale enrichment program that will make it easier for it to sprint cross that threshold.

Iran used red lines and deadlines to wear down the administration, which played a strong hand weakly.

The administration undermined its own bargaining position by making it clear that it wanted a nuclear agreement more than Tehran seems to have wanted one, despite the fact that Tehran needed an agreement more for economic reasons.

The administration’s downplaying of the military option and front-loading of sanctions relief early in the negotiations reduced Iranian incentives to make concessions.

This gave the Iranians bargaining leverage they have used shrewdly.

Iran dug in its heels on key red lines proclaimed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, while the administration’s red lines gradually became blurred pink lines.

Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is left largely intact. Centrifuges will be mothballed but not dismantled.

Iran’s illicit nuclear facilities Natanz and Fordow, whose operations were supposed to be shut down under multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, have now been legitimized, despite the fact that they were built covertly in violation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

Iran is essentially rewarded for cheating under the agreement.

It gained a better deal on uranium enrichment than Washington has offered to its own allies.

Taiwan, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates were denied enrichment arrangements that Iran now has pocketed.

Instead of dismantling Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, the agreement dismantles the sanctions that brought Tehran to the negotiating table in the first place.

This fact is not lost on our allies, friends and “frenemies” in the region.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who understandably sees Iran’s potential nuclear threat as an existential issue, denounced the deal as “a historic mistake.”

Sunni Arab states threatened by Iran are likely to hedge their bets and take out insurance by working to expand their own nuclear options.

Saudi Arabia already has let it be known that it will demand the same concessions on uranium enrichment that Iran received.

The Saudis have begun negotiations to buy French nuclear reactors and this civilian program could become the foundation for a weapons program down the line.

Other Arab states and Turkey are likely to tee up their own nuclear programs as a prudent counterweight to offset to Iran’s expanding nuclear potential, after some of the restrictions on its uranium enrichment program automatically sunset.

The end result could be accelerated nuclear proliferation and a possible nuclear arms race in the most volatile region in the world.

Another major problem is verification of Iranian compliance.

The administration’s initial insistence on “anytime/anywhere” inspections was downgraded to “sometimes/some places.”

Iran has up to 14 days to weigh the requests of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. If it decides to object, its objections would be relayed to an arbitration committee that would have 7 days to rule. If it rules against Iran, Tehran would have another 3 days to arrange an inspection.

This gives Iran up to 24 days to move, hide or destroy materials sought by inspectors. This is far from a foolproof system, particularly in light of Iran’s long history of cheating.

Sanctions relief is another potential headache. Tehran would benefit by the release of about $150 billion of its money frozen in overseas accounts.

Ultimately the Iranian economy would be boosted by tens of billions of dollars more through a surge of oil revenues as oil sanctions are lifted.

This could help Iran reshape the regional balance of power and establish hegemony over Iraq, Yemen, important oil resources and oil supply routes.

Much of this money will go to fund the Assad regime, Hezbollah, Yemeni Houthi rebels, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups funded by Iran.

This would rapidly lead to escalation of the wars, shadow wars and civil wars already taking place around the Middle East.

That part about Obama’s wanting a deal more than Iran is key. Recall SALT II, Jimmy Carter’s nuclear-arms surrender to the Soviet Union in the late 1970s? The only reason that didn’t take place is because even the Democrats who controlled the U.S. Senate saw it was a bad deal and rejected it. Ronald Reagan replaced Carter, tried to negotiate a nuclear arms reduction deal with the Soviets, and walked away from a bad deal. A few years later, the Soviet Union died.

David French points out what Iran is:

Yesterday, in the immediate aftermath of the Iran deal announcement, I posted a short comment noting that Iran is responsible for more than 1,000 American military deaths since 9/11. That’s just a number, but for many of us those numbers have names — the names of men we knew. I will never forget the horrible days in March and April 2008, when Iranian-made IEDs periodically closed even the main supply route into our small forward operating base. I’ll never forget the hero flights, standing at attention as brothers carried the still bodies of their fallen comrades to waiting Blackhawk helicopters. And I won’t forget about the people who are even now learning to walk, and eat, and live again — recovering from horrific wounds. Yesterday, I got an angry message from a friend from my Iraq deployment, a man whose vehicle was destroyed by an Iranian-made IED. Some of the blood on Iran’s hands is his own.

The American people need to clearly understand what their president has done. He’s granting billions of dollars in sanctions relief to a nation that put bounties on the heads of American soldiers. Iran isn’t ending its war against America. It’s still working — every day — to kill Americans, including the Americans Barack Obama leads as commander-in-chief of our armed forces. There is no honor in this agreement. Moreover, there is no honor in leaving innocent Americans behind — to rot in Iranian prisons — so that President Obama can declare peace in his time. Compared to rewarding killers and turning its back on innocent American prisoners, the Obama administration’s lies about the negotiations are a small thing indeed. After all, dishonorable people do dishonorable things.

Every member of Congress should be made to answer this question: Do you believe in rewarding regimes that place bounties on the heads of American soldiers? If so, then tell the American people. But don’t tell them that this agreement brings peace, because no reasonable definition of the term includes Iran’s deadly, 36-year-long terror campaign against America and its allies.

Fred Fleitz adds that Obama is a liar as proven by his own statements:

In 2007, when he was beginning his run for president, Senator Obama told a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that “the world must work to stop Iran’s uranium-enrichment program.”

On October 22, 2012, during a presidential debate with Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama said: “Our goal is to get Iran to recognize it needs to give up its nuclear program and abide by the U.N. resolutions that have been in place. … But the deal we’ll accept is — they end their nuclear program. It’s very straightforward.”

In December 2013 at a Brookings Institution forum, President Obama said: “They don’t need to have an underground, fortified facility like Fordow in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. They certainly don’t need a heavy-water reactor at Arak in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. They don’t need some of the advanced centrifuges that they currently possess.”

This is what the president said about the Iran nuclear program to get elected. This is what the president told the American people to reassure them about the Iran talks. The agreement announced today does not come close to meeting these statements and promises. …

Some of the worst U.S. concessions concern Iran’s eleventh-hour demand to lift embargoes on conventional arms and ballistic missiles. The conventional-arms embargo will stay in place for five years, and the ballistic-missile embargo will be in place for eight years but will be lifted sooner if the IAEA definitively clears Iran of any current work on nuclear weapons. The IAEA is very unlikely to find evidence of current nuclear-weapons work, as it won’t be allowed to inspect non-declared nuclear sites where this activity is taking place. This means these embargoes could be lifted much sooner.

To defend an agreement that legitimizes Iran’s nuclear program, President Obama could possibly claim that Iran can be trusted because it has begun to act like a responsible member of the international community. However, we know it hasn’t. A State Department report from last June found that Iran’s sponsorship of worldwide terrorism has continued and did not decline in 2014 during the nuclear talks. Iran also is stepping up its efforts to destabilize the Middle East and continues to back the Assad regime and an insurgency in Yemen.

Here’s another sign, reported by the Globe and Mail:

Canada will keep its sanctions in place – at least for now – despite the nuclear agreement Iran has reached with major world powers.

Foreign Affairs Minister Rob Nicholson issued a statement saying that Canada “will continue to judge Iran by its actions not its words,” and that the government in Ottawa will examine the agreement carefully before making any policy changes.

“We will examine this deal further before taking any specific Canadian action,” Mr. Nicholson said in the statement.

That means Canada is refusing to follow the course set by its major allies, including not only the Obama Administration in the U.S., but Britain, France, and the European Union. They negotiated the deal with Iran as part of the “P5+1” group that also included China and Russia, and have agreed to lift economic sanctions in return for Tehran’s nuclear concessions.

But Prime Minister Stephen Harper was caught between two allies on this deal. While Washington pushed for a deal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned against it. So far, Mr. Harper is sticking with Mr. Netanyahu’s doubts – though Mr. Nicholson said that Canada appreciates the “efforts of the P5+1” to negotiate an agreement.

Iran apparently thinks it’s a great deal, as London’s Daily Mail reports:

Just eight minutes after President Barack Obama wrapped up a White House press conference he called on Wednesday to defend a day-old nuclear deal with Iran, the Islamic republic’s supreme leader used Twitter to tweak him.
In a short letter to Obama that he posted on Twitter, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wrote that it’s partner nations like China and Russia who should be watched carefully – not Iran – to make sure they honor the terms of the landmark bargain.

‘You are well aware that some of the six states participating in negotiations are not trustworthy at all,’ Khamenei wrote in a stunning rhetorical act of jiu-jitsu.

The agreement, signed by Iran, the U.S., Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and the European Union, seeks to limit Tehran’s aggressive nuclear program in exchange for dropping a series of crippling economic sanctions. …

Khamenei and his social media pranksters may have been responding to Obama’s observation during his East Room presser that distrust of Tehran is the only legitimate basis on which his opponents might disagree with the deal’s outcome.

‘Really the only argument you can make against the verification and inspection mechanism that we’ve put forward is that Iran is so intent on obtaining a nuclear weapon that no inspection regime and no verification mechanism would be sufficient,’ the president told reporters, ‘because they’d find some way to get around it, because they’re untrustworthy.’

‘And if that’s your view, then … that means, presumably, that you can’t negotiate,’ he continued.

‘And what you’re really saying is, is that you’ve got to apply military force to guarantee that they don’t have a nuclear program.’

Still, outraged Republicans and cautious Democrats protested after the deal was announced on Tuesday, saying Iran suffers from a trust deficit – making Khamenei’s pronouncement a day later drip with irony.

Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn said in a statement that ‘Iran has done nothing to demonstrate to the American people that we should trust them.’

He was joined by Maryland Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin, whose bottom line was that ‘there is no trust when it comes to Iran.’

About that news conference, the Gateway Pundit demonstrates that Obama’s motivations do not include his own country:

Barack Obama told reporters today that 99% of the world community agreed with him on his historic nuclear agreement with Iran.

I’m hearing a lot of talking points being repeated that this is a bad deal. That this is a historically bad deal. This will threaten Israel and threaten the world and threaten the United States. There’s been a lot of that. What I haven’t heard is what is your alternative. If 99% of the world community and the majority of nuclear experts look at this and say ‘This will prevent Iran from getting the bomb,” and you are arguing either that it does not, or even if it does it’s temporary, or because they are going to get a windfall of their accounts being unfrozen they’ll cause more problems, then you should have some alternative to present.

Here’s another highlight from the news conference, reported by BizPac Review:

With Obama all but making a victory lap in the wake of this week’s announced nuclear deal with Iran, CBS News’ Major Garrett rained on the president’s parade when he asked why four Americans being held by the Persian Gulf country were not part of the deal.

“As you well know, there are four Americans in Iran, three held on trumped-up charges according to your administration and one, whereabouts unknown,” the CBS White House correspondent said at an extended news conference on Wednesday.

“Can you tell the country, sir, why you are content with all the fanfare around this deal to leave the conscience of this nation, the strength of this nation unaccounted for in relation to these four Americans?”

The president was not pleased, scolding Garrett for how he crafted the question.

“Major, that’s nonsense, and you should know better,” Obama added, after a long, dramatic pause.

And apparently a few of Garret’s media colleagues felt the same way.

“There’s a fine line between asking a tough question and maybe crossing that line a little bit and being disrespectful, and I think that happened here,” said CNN’s Dana Bash, adding that it was an “embarrassment to journalism.”

And she was not the only one at CNN who felt that way. Don Lemon and Gloria Borger agreed that Garrett went too far with his question — Lemon said it “was a little out of school.”

Garret did find one ally at the network in White House correspondent Jim Acosta.

“Well, [Obama] can get testy at times, and clearly this question got under his skin,” Acosta said of the exchange. “And I don’t think slamming reporters will solve any problems for the president.”

Former Marine Montel Williams, a fierce defender of fellow veterans, posted this remark on Twitter:

So because Major Garrett asked a question many of us have been frustrated about for months he’s “disrespectful?” Let’s not patronize POTUS.

— Montel Williams (@Montel_Williams) July 15, 2015

Can you imagine any Republican presidential candidate not named Donald Trump acting like that at a presidential news conference? Remember when the media aggressively questioned politicians? Apparently that only takes place when the politician has an R after his or her last name.

Daniel Greenfield gets the last word about whether Obama is a coward or a traitor, as if that’s an either/or choice:

The last time a feeble leader of a fading nation came bearing “Peace in our time,” a pugnacious controversial right-winger retorted, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” That right-winger went on to lead the United Kingdom against Hitler.

The latest worthless agreement with a murderous dictatorship is being brandished by John Kerry, a man who instinctively seeks out dishonor the way a pig roots for truffles.

John Kerry betrayed his uniform and his nation so many times that it became his career. He illegally met with the representatives of the North Vietnamese enemy in Paris and then next year headed to Washington, D.C. where he blasted the American soldiers being murdered by his new friends as rapists and murderers “reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”

Even before being elected, Kerry was already spewing Communist propaganda in the Senate.

Once in the Senate, Kerry flew to support the Sandinista Marxist killers in Nicaragua. Just as Iran’s leader calling for “Death to America” didn’t slow down Kerry, neither did the Sandinista cries of “Here or There, Yankees Will Die Everywhere.”

Kerry revolted even liberals with his gushing over Syria’s Assad. Now he’s playing the useful idiot for Assad’s bosses in Tehran.

For almost fifty years, John Kerry has been selling out American interests to the enemy. Iran is his biggest success. The dirty Iran nuke deal is the culmination of his life’s many treasons.

It turns America from an opponent of Iran’s expansionism, terrorism and nuclear weapons program into a key supporter. The international coalition built to stop Iran’s nukes will instead protect its program.

And none of this would have happened without Obama.

Obama began his rise by pandering to radical leftists on removing Saddam. He urged them to take on Egypt instead, and that’s what he did once in office, orchestrating the takeover of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and across the region. The Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, but Obama had preserved the Iranian regime when it was faced with the Green Revolution. Now Iran is his last best Islamist hope for stopping America in the Middle East.

Obama and Kerry had both voted against designating Iran’s IRGC terrorist ringleaders who were organizing the murder of American soldiers as a terrorist organization while in the Senate. Today they have turned our planes into the Air Force of the IRGC’s Shiite Islamist militias in Iraq.

Throughout the process they chanted, “No deal is better than a bad deal.” But their deal isn’t just bad. It’s treason.

Obama isn’t Chamberlain. He doesn’t mean well. Kerry isn’t making honest mistakes. They negotiated ineptly with Iran because they are throwing the game. They meant for America to lose all along.

When Obama negotiates with Republicans, he extracts maximum concessions for the barest minimum. Kerry did the same thing with Israel during the failed attempt at restarting peace negotiations with the PLO. That’s how they treat those they consider their enemies. This is how they treat their friends.

A bad deal wasn’t just better than no deal, it was better than a good deal.

Obama did not go into this to stop Iran from going nuclear. He did it to turn Iran into the axis of the Middle East. After his failures in the rest of the region, this is his final act of spite. With the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood and the decline of Islamists in Turkey, supporting Iran is his way of blocking the power of his successors in the White House to pursue a more pro-American foreign policy.

Obama made this deal to cripple American power in the Middle East. …

Obama and Kerry have not made this deal as representatives of the United States, but as representatives of a toxic ideology that views America as the cause of all that is wrong in the world. This is not an agreement that strengthens us and keeps us safe, but an agreement that weakens us and endangers us negotiated by men who believe that a strong Iran is better than a strong America.

Their ideology is that of the screaming anti-war protester denouncing American forces and foreign policy anywhere and everywhere, whose worldview has changed little since crying, “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh. NLF is going to win” in the streets. The only difference is that he now wears an expensive suit.

Their ideology is not America. It is not American. It is the same poisonous left-wing hatred which led Kerry to the Viet Cong, to the Sandinistas and to Assad. It is the same resentment of America that Obama carried to Cairo, Havana and Tehran. We have met the enemy and he is in the White House.

 

Kevin D. Williamson has today’s example of irony:

The curious task of the American Left is to eliminate “white privilege” by forcing people to adopt Nordic social arrangements at gunpoint. Progressives have a longstanding love affair with the nations of northern Europe, which are, or in some cases were until the day before yesterday, ethnically homogeneous, overwhelmingly white, hostile to immigration, nationalistic, and frankly racist in much of their domestic policy.

In this the so-called progressives are joined, as they traditionally have been, by brutish white supremacists and knuckle-dragging anti-Semites, who believe that they discern within the Nordic peoples the last remnant of white European purity and who frequently adopt Nordic icons and myths, incorporating them into an oddball cult of whiteness. American progressivism is a cult of whiteness, too: It imagines re-creating Danish society in Los Angeles, which is not full of Danish people, ascribing to Scandinavian social policies certain mystical tendencies that render them universal in their applicability.

Call it “Nordic Exceptionalism.”

The Left occasionally indulges in bouts of romantic exoticism — its pin-ups have included Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Mao Zedong; we might even count Benito Mussolini, “that admirable Italian gentleman” who would not have been counted sufficiently white to join Franklin Roosevelt’s country club — but the welfare states that progressives dream about are the whitest ones: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc. The significance of this never quite seems to occur to progressives. When it is suggested that the central-planning, welfare-statist policies that they favor are bound to produce results familiar to the unhappy residents of, e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, or Bolivia — privation, chaos, repression, political violence — American progressives reliably reply: “No, no, we don’t want that kind of socialism. We want socialism like they have it in Finland.”

Translation: “We want white socialism, not brown socialism!”

The real differences between relatively homogeneous northern European societies and the sort of society we have here in the United States is rarely if ever seriously addressed by our democratic socialist friends. The unspoken assumption — that all of us will either learn to behave like good little Scandinavians or be enemies of the state in this new metaphysically blond utopia — is, as our feminist friends like to say, problematic.

Set aside for a moment the conflation of socialism with high-tax welfare-statism — Sweden, with its entrepreneurial, trade-driven economy and very little in the way of state-owned enterprises constitutes anything but centrally planned socialism — Nordic practice is what self-described socialists such as Senator Bernie Sanders generally have in mind when they talk about socialism. (We can ignore, for the moment, the old Castroite holdouts and youthful Chavistas writing for Rolling Stone; everybody else does.) The racial aspects of Nordic welfare-statism are studiously not talked about, even when Stockholm burns while members of its unassimilated Muslim minority riot.

Sweden is the most diverse of the Nordic countries, and its immigration history has been a start-and-stop affair. The most dramatic immigration episode in Swedish history is, of course, the dramatic emigration of Swedes to North America in the early 20th century, when grinding poverty and famine sent one in four Swedes packing to the United States and Canada. It is estimated that there are today more people of Swedish ancestry living in the United States and Canada than in Sweden. Political and economic realities encouraged Sweden to recruit labor immigrants for many years, and its formal and informal relationships with other Scandinavian countries — as well as the veto power over immigration policy held by its trade-union confederation, which made familiar Buchananite noises about the peril of cheap foreign labor — ensured that the vast majority of Swedish immigrants were other Nordic people. When Jews fleeing National Socialism sought refuge in Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s, “the majority were rejected due to anti-semitism and discriminatory racial ideology prevalent in Sweden at that time,” as Charles Westin puts it.

Sweden had virtually no non-European immigrants, and few non-Nordic immigrants, until the 1970s. In popular usage, the modern Swedish word for “immigrant” does not mean “foreign-born person,” but “non-Nordic person in Sweden.” Socialism and welfare-statism, like nationalism and racism, are based on appeals to solidarity — solidarity that is enforced at gunpoint, if necessary. That appeal is more than a decent-hearted concern for the downtrodden or the broad public good. It is, rather, an exclusionary solidarity, a superstitious notion that understands “body politic” not as a mere figure of speech but as a substantive description of the state and the people as a unitary organism, the health of which is of such paramount importance that individual rights — property, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom of association — must be curtailed or eliminated when they are perceived to be insalubrious. If the nation is an organism, it’s no surprise to find Donald Trump describing foreigners as an infection. Thus the by-now-familiar xenophobia prevalent in Democratic rhetoric (and the Trumpkin anti-capitalist Right’s rhetoric) about Asians and Latin Americans “stealing our jobs.” The Swedes, the Swiss, and the Germans often are in direct competition with key American industries, but there is never any talk about the Swedes “stealing our jobs.”

Funny thing, that. As is the curious fact that the socialism you might read about in The Nation is cosmopolitan and liberal, whereas the socialism presented to the voters by Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Donald Trump, etc., is nationalistic and xenophobic, us-and-them stuff that would have warmed the heart of Father Coughlin or Henry Ford.

Solidarity, as it turns out, is not evenly distributed, nor is it color-blind. None of those denunciations of wicked “foreign oil” ever end with an accusatory finger pointed north toward Canada, our largest foreign supplier. When Barack Obama wants some solar-energy subsidies to pay off his crony-capitalist backers, he doesn’t rebuke the Canadians, but those damned dirty brown people in the Middle East. (Middle Eastern people seem destined to take the eternal brunt of American economic stupidity: It used to be the scheming Jewish bankers, now it’s the nefarious awful Arabs who want to sell us crude oil that we need at market prices.) You’d need a microscope to find a substantial philosophical difference between the economic views of Democrat Ted Strickland, the boobish former Ohio governor who likes to go around denouncing “economic traitors,” and those of, say, Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front, who fears “wild and anarchic globalization.” Even “liberal” is becoming a term of abuse for the Left, with denunciations of “neo-liberalism” becoming almost intense as those of “neo-conservatism.” The anti-trade rhetoric prevalent in the recent TPA/TPP debate assumes, without ever quite saying so, that economic interactions with foreigners — especially dusky, poor foreigners — is inherently destructive.

In reality, economic xenophobia and ordinary xenophobia always end up colliding. The nastier of Europe’s anti-immigrant and ethno-nationalist movements argue that ethnic solidarity is necessary to preserve the welfare state. Among ordinary Swedes, the topic of immigrants’ — non-Nordic people’s — relatively high rates of unemployment and welfare dependency is politically charged. The same is true in the other Nordic countries; see Jørgen Goul Andersen and Tor Bjørklund on “welfare chauvinism.” Nordic welfare chauvinists often point to Finland as enjoying the ideal social situation: 99.6 percent of the population is either ethnically Finnish (93.5 percent) or Swedish (5.9 percent), and 80 percent of them are nominal members of the same church (Lutheran). The largest single non-European immigrant community in Norway is composed of Somalis; there are 35,000 of them, approximately the population of Bettendorf, Iowa. “We’d like to make America more like Norway or Finland” is, among other things, a way of saying, “We’d like to make America more like a virtually all-white society.”

Is everything wrong in the country and the world the fault of liberals, or is every liberal answer to every problem automatically the wrong answer?

Read Victor Davis Hanson and decide for yourself:

ISIS took Ramadi last week. That city once was a Bastogne to the brave Americans who surged to save it in 2007 and 2008. ISIS, once known at the White House as the “Jayvees,” were certainly “on the run” — right into the middle of that strategically important city.

On a smaller scale, ISIS is doing to the surge cities of Iraq what Hitler did to his neighbors between 1939 and 1941, and what Putin is perhaps doing now on the periphery of Russia. In Ramadi, ISIS will soon do its accustomed thing of beheading and burning alive its captives, seeking some new macabre twist to sustain its Internet video audience. We in the West trample the First Amendment and jail a video maker for posting a supposedly insensitive film about Islam; in contrast, jihadists post snuff movies of burnings and beheadings to global audiences. We argue not about doing anything or saving anybody, but about whether it is inappropriate to call the macabre killers “jihadists.”

When these seventh-century psychopaths tire of warring on people, they turn to attacking stones, seeking to ensure that there is not a vestige left of the Middle East’s once-glorious antiquities. I assume the ancient Sassanid and Roman imperial site at Palmyra will soon be looted and smashed.

What is unique about American foreign policy today is not just that it is rudderless, but how quickly and completely the 70-year postwar order seems to have disintegrated — and how little interest the American people take in the collapse, thanks to the administration’s apparent redeeming message, which translates, “It’s their misfortune and none of our own.” As long as we are not involved at the center of foreign affairs and there is no perceptible short-term danger to our security, few seem to care much that western North Africa is a no-man’s-land. Hillary Clinton’s “lead from behind” created a replay of Somalia in Libya. The problem with Turkey’s Recep Erdogan is not that he is no longer Obama’s “special friend,” but that he was ever considered a friend at all, as he pressed forward with his plan to destroy Turkish democracy in the long march to theocracy.

There was never much American good will for the often duplicitous Gulf monarchies, so the general public does not seem to be worried that they are now spurned allies. That estrangement became possible because of growing U.S. self-sufficiency in oil and gas (thanks to fracking, which Obama largely opposed). Still, let us hope the Gulf States remain neutral rather than becoming enemies — given their financial clout and the availability of Pakistani bombs for Sunni petrodollars. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has it in for Israel. Why, no one quite knows, given that the Jewish state is the only democratic and liberal society in the Middle East. Perhaps it resembles the United States too closely, and thus earns the reflected hypercriticism that so many leftists cultivate for their own civilization.

Theocratic Iran has won more sympathy from the Obama administration. No neutral observer believes that the current policy of lifting sanctions and conducting negotiations will not lead to an Iranian bomb; it is hoped only that this will be unveiled on the watch of another president, who will be castigated as a warmonger if he is forced to preempt its rollout. The current American foreign policy toward Iran is baffling. Does Obama see the theocracy as a valuable counterweight to the Sunni monarchies? Is it more authentic in the revolutionary sense than the geriatric hereditary kingdoms in the Gulf? Or is the inexplicable policy simply a matter of John Kerry’s gambit for a Nobel Peace Prize or some sort of Obama legacy in the eleventh hour, a retake of pulling all U.S. peacekeepers home from a once-quiet Iraq so that Obama could claim he had “ended the war in Iraq”?

Hillary Clinton has been talking up her successful tenure as secretary of state. But mysteriously she has never specified exactly where, when, or how her talents shone. What is she proud of? Reset with Russia? The Asian pivot to discourage Chinese bellicosity? The critical preliminary preparations for talks with Iran? The Libyan misadventure? Or perhaps we missed a new initiative to discourage North Korean aggression? Some new underappreciated affinity with Israel and the Gulf monarchies? The routing of ISIS, thanks to Hillary’s plans? Shoring up free-market democracies in Latin America? Proving a model of transparency as secretary? Creating a brilliant new private–public synergy by combining the work of the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, and Bill’s lecturing –as evidenced by the Haitian renaissance and nation-building in Kazakhstan?

Meanwhile, no one seems to much care that between 2009 and 2017, we will have borrowed 8 trillion more dollars. Yet for all that stimulus, the U.S. economy still has staggering labor non-participation rates, flat GDP growth, and stagnant household income. As long as zero interest rates continue, the rich make lots of money in the stock market, and the debt can grow by $500 billion a year and still be serviced. Financial sobriety is now defined as higher taxes bringing in record revenues to service half-trillion-dollar annual additions to an $18 trillion debt.

The liberal approach to the underclass continues as it has been for the last 50 years: The elites support huge, unquestioned redistributionist entitlements for the inner city as penance for avoiding it. Minorities are left to run their own political affairs without much worry that their supposed benefactors live apartheid lives, protected by the proof of their caring. The public is left with the lie “Hands up, don’t shoot” as a construct that we will call true, because the made-up last-seconds gasps of Michael Brown perhaps should have happened that way. As an elite bookend, we have a Columbia coed toting around a mattress as proof of society’s insensitivity to sexual violence, which in her case both her university and the New York City police agree never occurred. In theory, perhaps it could have and thus all but did.

As far as scandals go, no one much cares any more about the implosion of the Veterans Administration. In the public’s defense, though, how does one keep straight the multitudinous scandals — Lois Lerner and the rogue IRS, the spying on and tapping of Associated Press journalists, the National Security Agency disclosures, Fast and Furious, the serial lying about needless deaths in Benghazi, the shenanigans at the General Services Administration, the collapse of sobriety at the Secret Service, the rebooting of air-traffic controllers’ eligibility to be adjudicated along racial and ethnic lines, and the deletions from Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, which doubled as her government server Always there is the administration’s populist anthem of “You didn’t build that”; instead, you must have won the lottery from President Obama. If his economic programs are not working, there is always the finger pointing at those who are too well off. Michelle Obama lectured a couple of weeks ago on museum elitism and prior neglect of the inner city, in between recounting some slights and micro-aggressions that she has endured, presumably on jumbo-jet jaunts to Costa del Sol and Aspen. I think her point is that it is still worse to be rich, powerful, and black than, say, poor, ignored, and non-black.

Then there is the strange populism of Hillary Clinton. It is hard to know why she rails about growing inequality and the lack of fairness in American life. After all, Barack Obama has been president for over six years, an administration in which she served for four. Did she ever visit the Oval Office to decry her own administration’s failure to use its House and Senate majorities in 2009–2011 to help the poor?

Is she now running against Obama’s economic policies, which she never publicly objected to before? And how can an unjust country be so fair to Bill and Hillary, who just made $30 million in the last 16 months, or about, on average, $62,500 per day — their speaking fees predicated on the likelihood that she would soon be a candidate for president and, as secretary of state emerita, had already enhanced the pay-to-play modus operandi of the Clinton Foundation? The Foundation currently pays young Chelsea — who bragged in bohemian fashion that money had no hold over her inner self (but only after achieving a net worth of a reported $15 million from various hedge-fund sweetheart billets) — $600,000 a year and provides her with a staff of five. At some point, to paraphrase Barack Obama, might the Clintons have confessed that making, say, $15 million was enough? Or might Chelsea now agree to work for her parents for the discount rate of $499,999 per annum to free up more money for the Haitians? Or might Hillary have talked to her son-in-law about paying a little more in taxes on his hedge-fund profits? …

The center of this culture is not holding. Even a few Democrats are worried that Hillary Clinton’s mendacities are unsustainable. More Americans privately confess that American foreign policy is dangerously adrift. They would agree that the U.S. no longer has a southern border, and will have to spend decades and billions of dollars coping with millions of new illegal aliens. Some Americans are starting to fear that the reckless borrowing under Obama will wreck the country if not stopped. Racial tensions, all concede, are reaching dangerous levels, and Americans do not know what is scarier: inner-city relations between blacks and the police, the increasing anger of the black underclass at establishment America — or the even greater backlash at out-of-control violent black crime and the constant scapegoating and dog whistles of racism.

Whatever liberalism is, it is not working. Our country’s policies overseas are falling apart, while at home our society stagnates and turns tribal — with a growing and embittered underclass, a shrinking and angry middle class, and a plutocratic and apartheid elite who, as absolution for their privilege, are desperate to praise in the abstract what they so studiously avoid in the concrete.

To David French, and to people with a brain, the answer to the question posed in the headline is obvious:

Days ago, 19-year-old University of Nevada student Ivy Ziedrich … “made headlines around the world” when she confronted Jeb Bush about ISIS. Ms. Ziedrich had the gumption to confront Bush in the midst of a scrum of reporters and confidently recite leftist conventional wisdom about the current Middle East crisis, declaring: “Your brother created ISIS!” After all, according to accepted academic conventional wisdom, the war in Iraq is the source of all (recent) jihadist evil. …

And while Ms. Ziedrich is no expert, there is one thing she said that is all too true: “It’s frustrating to see politicians ignore the origins of our conflicts abroad.”

Yes, Ms. Ziedrich, it certainly is. And if you’re on the left or from some quarters of the right, it must be downright exhausting to not only “understand” those origins but also link them in some way to the failings of American, Israeli, or imperialist European policies. Here’s the current scorecard: ISIS is George W. Bush’s fault. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban exist because of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (through the Afghan war against the Soviets and then the Desert Storm-related American troop presence in Saudi Arabia, of course), with the various al-Qaeda franchises in Syria, Yemen, and North Africa merely the fruit of the same poisonous Reaganite tree. The jihadist destruction of ancient — pre-Muslim — world heritage sites? That’s just collateral damage in the war against Reagan and the Bushes. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the PLO are easy to peg — Israeli creations, one and all, existing solely because of the “Occupied Territories.” As for Libya, we actually put those jihadists in power. But what about Boko Haram? I’m sure any decent professor can tell me some way we’re responsible for their atrocities.

But that’s just the last few decades. What about tracing further back? To the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood or to the Ikhwan of the Arabian peninsula? The Ikhwan — as savage as ISIS — trace their origins back to 1913, before the Europeans dominated the Middle East. What about the centuries of conflict between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire? Vienna must have richly deserved its sieges. After all, Europeans launched the Crusades, right? And before the Crusades, when jihadist Muslim armies invaded and conquered the Christian lands of the Middle East and North Africa, capturing the Iberian Peninsula and threatening modern-day France, there’s little doubt that they were simply striking out at … something the Christians did.

No, Ms. Ziedrich, George W. Bush didn’t create ISIS. Islam did. Embedded within this faith is a concept called “jihad,” and no matter how many professors tell you otherwise, there are countless millions of Muslims throughout more than a millennium of history who’ve interpreted “jihad” not as a mandate for self-help and personal improvement but as a mandate for war and conquest, a mandate to purify and spread the faith at the point of the sword. The influence of militaristic jihadists waxes and wanes, but it is there, always.

To believe that American actions have created the jihad is to give America greater influence over the Muslim heart than Allah. The current jihad is an extension of the ancient jihad. The foes have changed (the Habsburgs are long gone, and the Holy League peaked at Lepanto in 1571), but the motivation is the same. Why did Osama bin Laden mention “the tragedy of Andalusia” (the more than 500-year-old reconquest of Muslim Spain) in his post-9/11 address? Because, for the jihadist, it’s all one war.

So, by all means, let’s not ignore “the origins of our conflicts abroad.” Regarding our conflict with Islamic terrorists, the origins lie in a religious imperative, one that predates the founding of the United States by more than ten centuries. George W. Bush is no more responsible for creating that conflict than he is for writing the Koran, passing down the Hadith, or establishing the first Caliphate. And in confronting that foe, our choices are the same choices faced by the great non-Muslim powers that came before us: convert, submit, die, or fight.

Let’s repeat that paragraph: “To believe that American actions have created the jihad is to give America greater influence over the Muslim heart than Allah.” What kind of religion is Islam if this country has “greater influence over the Muslim heart than Allan”?

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto compares Barack Obama, ObamaCare, Iran and Iraq:

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has a new interview out with President Obama, and here is how his write-up opens:

On Tuesday afternoon, as President Obama was bringing an occasionally contentious but often illuminating hour-long conversation about the Middle East to an end, I brought up a persistent worry. “A majority of American Jews want to support the Iran deal,” I said, “but a lot of people are anxiety-ridden about this, as am I.” Like many Jews—and also, by the way, many non-Jews—I believe that it is prudent to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of anti-Semitic regimes. Obama, who earlier in the discussion had explicitly labeled the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an anti-Semite, responded with an argument I had not heard him make before.

“Look, 20 years from now, I’m still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on this,” he said, referring to the apparently almost-finished nuclear agreement between Iran and a group of world powers led by the United States. “I think it’s fair to say that in addition to our profound national-security interests, I have a personal interest in locking this down.”

In the next two paragraphs, Goldberg restates the argument in his own (considerably more numerous) words. Clearly he finds it persuasive, or at least he wants to. By contrast, we find it rather terrifying.

The question at hand involves the proliferation of nuclear weapons by a regime that not only is anti-Semitic but also describes America as “the great Satan.” And the president of the United States wants to talk about . . . himself—his reputation, or, to use the political-class buzzword, his “legacy.”

This isn’t the only time of late that Obama has engaged in this sort of politics of narcissism. Last month, as Politico noted, he gave a similar answer to a question about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to his trade agenda:

“I love Elizabeth. We’re allies on a whole host of issues. But she’s wrong on this,” Obama said in an interview with Chris Matthews to air Tuesday night on “Hardball.”

Obama bristled at the suggestion that his trade agenda would hurt the middle class, a criticism he has faced from key union allies as well as Warren.

“Think about it. I’ve spent the last six and half years yanking this economy out of the worst recession since the great depression. Every single thing I’ve done from the Affordable Care Act to pushing to raise the minimum wage to making sure that young people are able to go to college and get good job training to what we’re pushing now in terms of sick pay leave,” Obama said. “Everything I do has been focused on how do we make sure the middle class is getting a fair deal.”

“Now I would not be doing this trade deal if I did not think it was good for the middle class. And when you hear folks make a lot of suggestions about how bad this trade deal is, when you dig into the facts they are wrong,” Obama said.

That argument, like the one he makes in the Goldberg interview, evades completely the substance of the dispute. It is a pure appeal to personal authority—not to Obama’s authority as president but to his ideological credibility as one who is “focused on how do we make sure the middle class is getting a fair deal,” that is, a liberal. In this context, the argument can be reduced to this: I’m a liberal, therefore liberals should trust me.

The logic is faulty—Warren is also a liberal, and Obama has offered no reason why liberals shouldn’t trust her—but at least the premise is true: Obama is a liberal, which is to say that he has been largely (albeit not completely) consistent in supporting liberal priorities.

The Iran argument, also an appeal to personal authority, is even less convincing than the trade one. It can be reduced to this: I am concerned about my legacy, therefore Americans should trust me. (In our mind, Goldberg’s awkwardly particularistic formulation, “many Jews—and also, by the way, many non-Jews,” amounts to “many Americans.”)

Obama’s argument here rests not on his ideology—he doesn’t mean to appeal only to liberals—or on his record. Rather, his claim is that he is trustworthy because as a future ex-president with a perhaps unusual preoccupation with his own legacy, he will spend his old age living with the consequences of his decisions—and thus he has an incentive to make wise ones.

One obvious objection is that making wise decisions requires more than incentives. It requires wisdom. Even assuming for the sake of argument that Obama is capable of making wise decisions, there is no reason to think his fixation on his legacy militates in favor of doing so. A president who takes a dramatic risk that pays off will stand out far more in history than one who prudently preserves the status quo. Thus Obama’s legacy-mindedness gives him an incentive to put America in peril and hope for the best.

Note further that the president frames his argument not in terms of how “history” will view him but how his future self will (“20 years from now, I’m still going to be around, God willing”). In other words, the putative incentive depends crucially on the expectation that Obama will acknowledge error or failure. To say the least, that is not his strong suit, on the evidence of his presidency—and of the Goldberg interview:

Goldberg: There’s this interesting conversation going on in Republican circles right now, debating a question that you answered for yourself 13 years ago, about whether it was right or wrong to go into Iraq. What is this conversation actually about? . . .

Obama: As you said, I’m very clear on the lessons of Iraq. I think it was a mistake for us to go in in the first place, despite the incredible efforts that were made by our men and women in uniform. Despite that error, those sacrifices allowed the Iraqis to take back their country. That opportunity was squandered by Prime Minister Maliki and the unwillingness to reach out effectively to the Sunni and Kurdish populations. . . .

It is important to have a clear idea of the past because we don’t want to repeat mistakes. I know that there are some in Republican quarters who have suggested that I’ve overlearned the mistake of Iraq, and that, in fact, just because the 2003 invasion did not go well doesn’t argue that we shouldn’t go back in. And one lesson that I think is important to draw from what happened is that if the Iraqis themselves are not willing or capable to arrive at the political accommodations necessary to govern, if they are not willing to fight for the security of their country, we cannot do that for them.

It’s fair enough for Obama to claim vindication for opposing the intervention in 2003. But note how he acknowledges no mistake of his own. The chaos in Iraq after Obama became president and withdrew all troops? Blame George W. Maliki.

Note too that Goldberg doesn’t think to ask the president if the 2011 withdrawal was a mistake. That’s a small example of a big problem that affects Obama’s argument about his legacy and the incentives it entails. He’s used to ideologically sympathetic journalists making it easy for him to feel good about bad decisions.

”It’s my name on that,” the president says, and that is true, colloquially if not formally, of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, known as ObamaCare. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a challenge to the administration’s extralegal tax subsidies; if the administration loses—that is, if the law President Obama signed is upheld as written—the consequences could be convulsive. As the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobinobserves:

Until recently, the perception has . . . been that the Democrats had the largest political stake in the case. After all, the A.C.A. is the signature achievement of the Democratic President. Suddenly, though, and paradoxically, it has come to seem that Obamacare’s Republican opponents are most at risk if the decision goes their way. They have the most to lose by winning. As Jonathan Chait wrote recently, “The chaos their lawsuit would unleash might blow back in a way few Republicans had considered until recently, and now, on the eve of a possible triumph, they find themselves scrambling to contain the damage.” In this view, the peril is especially great for Republicans, because, as Jonathan Cohn recently pointed out, the G.O.P. has failed to propose any kind of plan to address the loss of insurance for so many millions of people.

So that’s the theory: millions will suddenly be uninsured, and will blame Republicans. As Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, put it recently, “I don’t think they will [win the case]. If they do, that’s a problem that the Republicans have.”

No, it’s not. If the Obama Administration loses in the Supreme Court, the political pain will fall almost exclusively on the President and his Party.

We’re not sure we agree with Toobin’s prediction, but it seems to us that under normal circumstances, it would be the obvious one. If a law championed by a Democratic president and informally bearing his name passes Congress with only Democratic votes and then collapses because it turns out to have been sloppily designed, how could anyone other than Democrats be to blame?

Yet Toobin’s prediction is noteworthy because it is so unconventional. In part that’s because the Republicans today, unlike in 2010, hold congressional majorities and thus actually are in a position of responsibility for any legislative remedy. But it is also in large part because many in the press—including Chait and Cohn—have taken it upon themselves to act as propagandists for ObamaCare, and for Obama.

It’s not that there aren’t plenty of critics too. But Obama can dismiss them as partisan while imagining that the friendly ones are objective and reasonable. The criticism as well as the praise reinforces his own sense that ObamaCare is just peachy. If King v. Burwellgoes against the administration and ObamaCare collapses, Obama will blame others—the justices, the Republicans—and he’ll find the same sort of reinforcement for that view.

The same is true with respect to Iran. It probably won’t be in 2035, by which point partisans will long since have moved on to other disputes. If ObamaBomb or whatever the Iran deal is called turns out to be a failure, Obama’s supporters today may well be willing to acknowledge that the president screwed up back in 2015.

But the president’s legacy argument depends on his anticipating such an eventuality now. Is there anything in his experience that would lead him to do so?