Paul Mirengott:

This Washington Post obituary of Henry Kissinger includes the following passage:

In his comprehensive biography of Dr. Kissinger, journalist Walter Isaacson came to the conclusion that he “had an instinctive feel for power and for creating a new global balance that could help America cope with its withdrawal syndrome after Vietnam. But it was not matched by a similar feel for the strength to be derived from the openness of America’s democratic system or for the moral values that are the true source of its global influence.”

(Emphasis added)

Does Walter Isaacson really believe that America’s moral values — not its military and economic might — are the source of our global influence? To me, the notion is absurd.

Foreign countries rarely act the way we want them to because we hold the right moral values. They act the way we want them to only to the extent that doing so is in their interests.

Our interests normally align with those of our close friends. But for most nations, acting the way we want will be in their interests only if we have economic or military leverage over them.

We once had a president who believed as Isaacson apparently does, that our moral values are the true source of our global influence. When that president, Jimmy Carter, ran for office, he liked to say that America needs a foreign policy as virtuous as its people.

Who says flattery will get you nowhere? It helped get Carter elected president.

The result? The takeover of Iran by America-hating Islamists; “American held hostage” by these Islamists; and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.

Henry Kissinger is known as a foreign policy realist. Think of Carter and Isaacson as foreign policy unrealists.

The Post’s article continues:

Dr. Kissinger, responding to his critics, ascribed to realpolitik a moral imperative of its own.

“History presents unambiguous alternatives only in the rarest of circumstances,” he wrote in “Ending the Vietnam War,” published in 2003. “Most of the time, statesmen must strike a balance between their values and their necessities, or to put it another way, they are obliged to approach their goals not in one leap but in stages, each by definition imperfect by absolute standards. It is always possible to invoke that imperfection as an excuse to recoil before responsibilities, or as a pretext to indict one’s own society.”. . .

Thomas A. Schwartz of Vanderbilt University, who interviewed Dr. Kissinger late in life for his 2020 biography, found that even after decades of criticism, the former policymaker adhered to “his own philosophy of international relations, [which] held that in a tragic world, a statesman was not able to choose between good and evil but only among different forms of evil.”

The second sentence of the second paragraph strikes me as incontestable. Only a child would believe otherwise.

The third paragraph overstates things. There will be times when, as tragic as the world is, a statesman can choose what’s clearly good over what’s unambiguously evil.

But note that the Post is quoting Schwartz here, not Kissinger. The passage it quotes from Kissinger includes the qualifier “most of the time.”

So far in this post, I’ve discussed Kissinger’s realism and the unrealism of Carter and Isaacson. Now, let’s look at a third approach, the surreal foreign policy of Barack Obama.

I want to focus on the centerpiece of Obama’s foreign policy — the grand bargain he wanted to strike with Iran. The idea was that Iran, in exchange for favorable treatment by the U.S., would stabilize the Middle East in ways beneficial to the region and America. This is also the policy of Joe Biden.

The Obama-Biden grand bargain shares with Carter’s unrealism a reliance on wishful thinking. But here, the wishful thought isn’t a reliance on American goodness. Instead, it’s a reliance on the fantasy that Iran, run by America-hating religious fanatics, can be influenced to act in our interests, not because of our goodness, but because of our economic power.

Ultimately, though, the wishful thinking consists of the fantasy that a foreign policy amateur and his amateur sidekicks (one of whom couldn’t wait until Kissinger had been dead for more than a day to attack the guy) saw an opportunity that everyone else missed.

From a superficial point of view, Obama’s Iran policy reminds one of Kissinger’s approach to China. Kissinger saw an opening to China; Obama thought he saw an opening to Iran. China helped the U.S. in the short term by moving away from our main adversary, the Soviet Union. Iran was to help the U.S. by bringing stability to the Middle East.

But the similarity resides entirely on the surface. Kissinger understood that it was in China’s interest to tilt away from the Soviets and establish relations with America. China gave up no ambitions by doing so — a point driven home by developments ever since.

By contrast, for Iran to bring stability to the Middle East would entail giving up core ambitions, including the destruction of Israel and the toppling of Sunni and non-jihadist Arab regimes throughout the region.

The Iranian regime was never going to give up these ambitions.

Obama’s cockamamie vision was the product of a second-rate mind that mistakes itself for genius. It was the fantasy of someone smart enough to get big things horribly wrong.

It reminds me of an idea I had back in the 1980s. Back then, I thought a U.S. rapprochement with Cuba could bring stability to Latin America and the part of Africa where the Cubans were then influential. I even thought about writing this clever idea up and trying to get it published. But a little bit of research sufficed to show me how foolish the idea was.

Obama, surrounded by yes-men, never had a similar awakening — not even when Iran used the assets that were supposed to bring it into the fold to unleash additional terror in the Middle East.

Joe Biden, one of Obama’s yes-men (except when “yes” was the right answer), persists with the surreal fantasy of his ex-boss. Richard Goldberg presents the sorry details in an article called “Biden’s imaginary Iran.”

Hours before nearly 300,000 Americans gathered on the National Mall to show solidarity with Israel and condemn Hamas terrorism, the Biden administration sent a notification to Capitol Hill that upwards of $10 billion would be made available to Iran, the chief sponsor of that terrorism and the ultimate culprit behind the October 7 massacre. . . .

How could any American president think it wise — at this very moment — to open the money spigot for the financial sponsor behind so much mayhem? The answer goes back to 2015, when President Barack Obama attempted to reset the strategic paradigm of the Middle East by ceding power and influence to the Islamic Republic of Iran. . . .

The Obama administration believed that offering an olive branch and thawing relations would moderate the regime. And by increasing Iran’s access to resources and its power projection in the Middle East, an equilibrium could be achieved between Shiite and Sunni rivals that would lead to an era of stability and U.S. withdrawal from the region.

This, of course, proved a strategic disaster, increasing the threat of military conflict throughout the Middle East instead of decreasing it. Lifting sanctions, shutting down Justice Department operations, and persuading the Defense Department to make itself more dependent on a sworn enemy of America that sponsors terrorism and seeks nuclear weapons leads to what you might expect — more terrorism, greater nuclear advances, and a vulnerable military-force posture. . . .

[Yet] Biden [has] removed the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, rescinded the American snapback of U.N. sanctions at the Security Council, relaxed sanctions to free up cash for Iran to pay some debts and increase oil exports to China, pulled European allies back from censuring Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, and allowed Iran’s proxies in Iraq and Syria to attack U.S. forces with near impunity.

In the hope of brokering a deal quickly, Biden appointed Robert Malley (who has since been placed on indefinite unpaid leave pending a federal investigation into the mishandling of classified information) to be his special envoy despite Malley’s dovishness on Iran and its terror proxies. Maximum pressure had been replaced by deference.

Iran’s response to America’s taking its foot off the sanctions pedal was escalation on all fronts. . . Throughout it all, Team Biden could never take “No” for an answer.

It still can’t.

This isn’t Kissinger’s realism. Nor is it Carter’s unrealism. Even Carter could reverse course when his wishful thinking came a cropper.

But not Joe Biden. Surreal!