The Iran Deal: Forcing a Square Peg into a Round Hole

Let’s understand something about the deal with Iran, it is not a good deal. Aside from the technical aspects which are very difficult to seriously critique here, this agreement is based on three important political and diplomatic assumptions.

The West, Israel, and the Gulf States can assume that there is now a larger margin of gap than currently exists before Iran at its current production rate could become nuclear. Instead of months the assumption is it could be as long as 10 years. This is significant.
Second, there never was any way to stop Iran from using resources to finance trouble, radicalism, and terror in the region with conventional weapons, etc. Abhorrent though that is, no deal could ever have restricted their use, development, sale, and spread.
The Obama-Kerry myth that the moderates are on the rise in Iran and within 10 years at the latest will successful replace the religious Islamic regime with a much more liberal one is pie-in-the sky. Aside from the fact this is totally unpredictable—according to almost any responsible analyst—diplomacy must never be conducted on a wish or a dream, but rather on a worst case scenario basis.

Finally this entire deal is based on a most critical and foolhardy assumption. In dealing with Iran, the U.S.Obama/Kerry believe that Iran—even as now governed—can be trusted to comply with the agreement. The President appears to believe that the Iranians will not suddenly change their minds; that IAEA will not suddenly discover a previously non-existent weapons development site; or the Supreme Leader will not wake up one day and announce he had a vision that the deal should be abrogated.

This type of thinking is based on Obama’s naïve assumption that deals made in the Middle East are made between rational actors like in the West. This is his fallacy and why all he has probably gained here—and it is not inconsequential—is a postponement for some years of the inevitable nuclear Iran challenging the West. The world then will have to engage a very different type of situation than it faces today; but today economics brought the Iranians to the table,

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