Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council continued his diatribe against John Bolton, the nominee to be the next U.S. national security advisor, in an article in Foreign Policy in which he gravely depicted the Iran nuclear deal as hanging “by a thread” with its demise a sure pathway to war with Iran.
It’s old, tired and a plainly incorrect assessment by Parsi, but truth was never a barrier to his histrionics or unhinged commentary.
Instead Parsi offers the line of reasoning tied to the upcoming talks with North Korea in which Parsi claims that “conventional wisdom” dictates that any potential deal with North Korea to de-nuclearize the peninsula would be jeopardized by a potential tearing up of the Iran deal on the basis that North Korea could not trust the U.S. to stick to any agreements.
“Trump may know bluster, be he does not know diplomacy. Strong-arming subcontractors may work in the Manhattan real estate market, but it won’t work in international diplomacy. Sovereign states don’t react like jilted architects and electricians,” Parsi claims.
What Parsi misses is that conventional wisdom hasn’t worked at all. North Korea took a nuclear agreement and tanked it to rapidly build and explode nuclear weapons and then rushed a ballistic missile program forward that it ended up selling to Iran to help launch its own ballistic missile program.
Yet, after failed efforts by the past three presidential administrations to rein in North Korea, only President Donald Trump is faced with an all-or-nothing opportunity to drag North Korea back to the bargaining table with de-nuclearization on the table for the first time.
One could legitimately argue that calling the head of a sovereign nation names and threatening to blast it back into the Stone Age is not “conventional wisdom” but it has yielded more progress than the past two dozen years combined.
It is also the first concrete proof that a similar approach with Iran may yield the same benefits since the prior administration’s efforts to appease the mullahs—aided and abetted by the NIAC and others in the Iran lobby’s “echo chamber”—failed to yield any restraint on the part of the regime.
“How will Iran react if Trump pursues this path? For Tehran, the JCPOA was never just about the nuclear issue. It was a test to see if the West could come to terms with the Islamic Republic and accept Iran as a regional power. By testing this proposition, the talks became a defining showdown between the two dominant schools of thought within the Iranian elite,” Parsi writes.
Offering another disingenuous line of reasoning trying to portray “hardline” vs. “moderate” forces within the Iranian regime, where there are no differences. Within the Iranian “elite” as Parsi likes to call it, there is only the fight between larger pieces of spoils resulting from the nuclear deal that returned billions in cash to the benefit of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the religious theocracy that controls it.
The one thing Parsi does get right is the notion that Iran wants to be recognized as a regional power.
Unfortunately, while Parsi tries to position as that desire as a diplomatic one, the mullahs view it at the end of a rifle or tip of a missile. For the Iranian regime, power is projected with force, not diplomacy.
If diplomacy was a legitimate factor in Iran’s ruling elite, the use of Hezbollah, Quds Force fighters in Syria, Shiite militia in Iraq and Houthi rebels in Yemen would not have been a diplomatic overture to settle differences.
“America was coming to terms with Iran. And the Islamic Republic was speaking of the United States not as the Great Satan, but as a negotiation partner,” Parsi adds.
It’s funny that while Parsi tries to conform the idea that Iran no longer viewed America as the “Great Satan,” he neglected to mention that the Iranian regime never stopped public demonstrations of “Death to America” nor did it stop the arrest and imprisonment of dual-national Iranian-Americans. If anything, the regime stepped up those activities.
Parsi is correct though that the nuclear deal is being viewed increasingly as a win for “hardliners” but not for the reasons he cites. For the mullahs, the deal was simply a means to an end, which was to pump billions in badly needed cash to save the Assad regime in Syria and resuscitate an economy on the verge of collapse.
President Trump and Bolton recognize that what got Iran to the bargaining table in the first place was a unified global approach to strangling the Iranian elites and putting pressure from a dissatisfied population grown weary of a wartime economy.
But instead of creating a deal that would empower true democratic reforms, what the world got was proverbial garbage.
Lastly, Parsi maintains that a decision by the administration to walk away from the deal would only incentivize Iran to proceed quickly with building a nuclear weapon. The problem with this idea is that Iran is already moving to build a bomb.
The nuclear deal was never designed to truly stop Iran’s efforts to nuclearize, only slow it down. In that sense, Parsi is completely and utterly wrong since the nuclear deal is largely irrelevant to Iran’s mullahs anyway.
They’ve already proceeded on a pathway to walk away from the deal in own right and blame it on the U.S.
The irony of President Trump threatening the deal is neither self-fulfilling prophecy or political machinations. It’s a clear recognition of what has already been plain to any outside observer for the last two years which is that Iran has used the nuclear deal to buy time for itself to rearm, rebuild and refocus its efforts after winning military conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen to cement a Shia sphere of influence stretching from the Mediterranean to Indian Ocean.
In this regard, Parsi demonstrates yet again who no news organization should ever believe a word he says.
John Lee, is a former campaign spokesman for President George H.W. Bush and currently founder and CEO of The Lee Strategy Group, Inc., a Los-Angeles-based strategic communications consultancy.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.