Democrats Sabotage Obama’s Chief Foreign Policy Accomplishment
Last night, hours after Trump signed the Russia/North Korea/Iran sanctions bill that Congress had voted overwhelmingly to approve, Agence France-Presse reported that Iran had declared the Iran Deal violated:
It’s worth repeating the astonishing fact that not a single Democrat — out of 194 total — voted against this bill in the House of Representatives. Only one, Bernie Sanders, voted against it in the Senate. The lack of dissension or even consideration of the easily-predictable adverse consequences of this sanctions package was glaring. It wasn’t as if it was impossible to discern that the Iran sanctions component of the bill could jeopardize the Iran Deal; Sanders, for one, had voiced concerns in this vein dating back to his No vote against an earlier iteration of the legislation in June.
And the leading organization providing information on Iranian-American affairs, the National Iranian American Council, had been sounding the alarm:
Buried within the Russia and North Korea sanctions are dangerous and controversial Iran sanctions that will likely backfire against us. These Iran sanctions are a threat to the nuclear agreement and give Donald Trump new tools to significantly escalate tensions in the Middle East…
The alarm bells should be ringing but instead of restraining Trump’s reckless inclinations on Iran, Congress appears to be actively encouraging him…
“The Iran sanctions also risk pushing the U.S. into violation of the nuclear accord by obligating the Trump administration to redesignate entities scheduled for sanctions relief.
But Democrats ignored these warnings in service of furthering short-term political goals. It’s not an exaggeration to say that in complete unison and with virtually zero contestation, the party decided to blow up Obama’s foreign policy legacy because they wanted to inflict short-term damage on Trump. That’s the definition of petty, pathetic politics, made all the more pathetic by Democrats’ mindless conformity on the issue. And Republicans are hardly any better: only three members of the House, all from the GOP Liberty Caucus, voted against the bill. (Rand Paul voted against it in the Senate.)
But of course Democrats and their media allies spent the entire day Wednesday not warning about the potential harmful effects of the bill, but attacking Trump for not being sufficiently enthusiastic about its passage. This despite… Trump signing the bill. So Trump signs a bill, but he doesn’t satisfy Russia conspiracy obsessives because he registered some minor complaints about how the bill restricted executive power — something virtually all presidents have complained about at one point or another.
Because Democrats and kindred media luminaries’ brains are so irreparably warped by nonstop Russia furor, they can’t see foreign policy debate through any lens other than “WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE COLLUSION ANGLE.” It’s pathetic, craven, and unbelievably short-sighted. The Iran Deal wasn’t just the result of painstaking diplomatic efforts over a span of years, it was Obama’s premier foreign policy achievement by a long shot. And Democrats were willing to just throw it down the garbage chute — for what? The thrill of embarrassing Trump for a few news-cycles? Pure spite? Sincere fear of “Russian aggression”? (Most likely, some unseemly combination of the three.)
The Iran Deal was a genuinely impressive diplomatic accomplishment by Obama and John Kerry, and it significantly reduced the likelihood of catastrophic military conflict. Obama took genuine political risk in brokering the deal, which resulted in him incurring furious backlash from various “pro-Israel” factions, and which culminated in Benjamin Netanyahu excoriating his policy before a Joint Session of Congress and invoking the specter of the Holocaust to scare legislators against supporting the Deal. Even, evidently, elements of the current Administration — despite Trump’s scattershot hardline anti-Iran rhetoric — have determined that the Deal yields enough benefit to be worth preserving in the short-term.
In consideration of this recently-passed sanctions bill, where was the sustained, serious discussion about what it would mean for the future of the Iran Deal? Such discussion was almost entirely absent. And any apprehension about its effects on the Iran Deal was not evident in congressional Democrats’ votes, because not a single one of them other than Sanders opposed the legislation.
The primary reason for this incredible failure by Democrats is that their conception of politics has been utterly distorted by the unyielding dominance of the Trump/Russia story.
Voting against the sanctions package would have been a political nightmare for the average Democrat. It’s not out of the question that that vote alone could’ve spurred a primary challenge — just imagine the ads: “Congressman So-And-So Voted To Protect Trump And Putin.” The climate is just so obviously toxic, and nobody seems to care that of course this is eventually going to have a downstream effect on policy, even policy which ostensibly has nothing to do with Russia, such as the Iran Deal.
And in another predictable dereliction of duty, US media was too busy heralding the bipartisan triumph that this bill supposedly represented to sort out the real-world implications of its passage… such as wrecking the Iran Deal, thereby making war vastly more likely. They’re so eager to situate the sanctions bill into the What Will Happen Next With Regard To This Trump/Russia Thing mega-narrative that any substantive discussion was either drowned out or never existed.
It’s a sick political culture when something like this could happen in plain view, with virtually nobody raising any objections until it’s too late.
