In a Wall Street Journal op-ed dated April 14, former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry discusses what a good deal between the United States and Iran will look like if Iran is willing to reach an agreement with President Donald Trump.
Kerry’s hypothetical new Iran deal bears no resemblance to the disaster that he and then-President Barack Obama forced down the throats of Americans in 2015, despite overwhelming bipartisan opposition.
“Mr. Trump can seek an agreement that prevents Iran from ever possessing a potentially lethal nuclear program,” Kerry says in the op-ed, co-written by Thomas S. Kaplan, CEO of the Electrum Group. “First, he should prohibit uranium enrichment above the threshold for civilian use and require an end to hardened or buried nuclear sites. A strict cap on the amount of fissile material in Iran’s possession, coupled with a comprehensive inspections regime to ensure compliance, would be a mandatory corollary.”
The piece continues, saying “Tehran must also agree to stringent circumscription of its ballistic-missile program and outright termination of sponsorship of proxies and terrorism.”
Did this just dawn on Kerry? Is this the advice of a wise elder? These are the terms Obama and Kerry should have but failed to demand when the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was agreed to in 2015. In other words, these are the ravings of an old fool hoping to salvage his legacy. Too late for that.
Though it may have taken Kerry a decade to figure these things out, observers from across the political spectrum and around the world criticized the Obama-Kerry Iran nuclear deal precisely because it failed to adequately address any of the issues that Kerry now considers so crucial. In fact, the Obama-Kerry deal achieved the exact opposite.
Rather than prevent Iran from “ever possessing a potentially lethal nuclear weapon,” the agreement created a legal path for Iran to obtain and possess a nuclear weapon. When Obama became president in 2009, U.N. resolutions prohibited the Islamic Republic from enriching any uranium. Undaunted, Obama worked diligently to lift those restrictions. Incredibly, the Obama-Kerry nuclear deal allowed for unlimited Iranian uranium enrichment from 2030 onward.
Kerry’s op-ed trumpets his new insistence that limitations on Iran’s uranium enrichment must be “coupled with a comprehensive inspections regime to ensure compliance.” His assertion is as cynical as it is laughable.
Back in the day, Obama and Kerry agreed to Iran’s demand that its military bases be off-limits to inspectors. Since it is fair to say that neither Obama nor Kerry is stupid, it is safe to assume that neither particularly cared if Iran had an unsupervised nuclear-weapons program.
Equally pathetic is Kerry’s epiphany that an Iranian ballistic-missile program is an affirmatively bad thing. Why then did he and Obama work so hard to lift international restrictions on Iran’s ability to develop such a system when its only purpose is to deliver a nuclear warhead?
Sadly, it took the atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, for Kerry to learn that any deal with Tehran must include its “outright termination of sponsorship of proxies and terrorism.” Critics of the JCPOA wanted that language included in the text. Instead, the Obama administration responded to those concerns by giving more than $115 billion in sanctions relief to the Iranian regime. With the resulting flood of cash, the mullahs developed their nuclear-weapons program; funded their military; financed their international terrorist network; and further solidified their position as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
Obama and Kerry made up, out of whole cloth, the notion that there were “moderate” voices within the Iranian government in 2015 that were seeking compromise with America. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former assistant national security advisor, admitted to The New York Times in a May 2016 interview that the Obama White House lied to the American people to sell the deal: “We created an echo chamber,” he said, adding that the press “were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
If the Iran nuclear deal was so terrific, then why did they need to lie about it? They should have just defended it on its own terms. But the deal was indefensible.
Kerry implies in his op-ed that Trump has a freer hand to make a better and stronger deal for the United States than Obama ever did. As he writes: “The coalition that defined the opportunities and challenges of negotiation in 2015 is no more. Europe has relations with Tehran. The multilateral nuclear sanctions the world imposed to bring Iran to the negotiating table are long gone and not coming back. Relationships with Moscow and Beijing have been reshaped by disagreements over Ukraine and trade. In short, this leaves two parties, not eight, to strike a new agreement.”
What nonsense. Nothing forced Obama to agree to anything that did not advance the national security interests of the United States. Either the deal was good for America, or it was not. And it definitely was not.
Kerry tacitly admits that he and Obama agreed to compromise America’s national security to accommodate Moscow and Beijing. In 2015, Xi and Putin were working to protect Iran at America’s expense. Kerry now seems to be waking up to the fact that our interests and those of our enemies are not aligned.
Also instructive: Kerry’s utter disregard for the security needs of Israel and for the proposition that his ill-advised nuclear deal with Iran laid the groundwork for Oct. 7. Kerry’s enmity for the Jewish state and his efforts to undermine its national security continue unabated.
Finally, Kerry believes that if a new agreement is reached with Iran, it should be codified in a treaty. “The Senate should codify this revamped state of affairs with a legally binding treaty—thereby addressing a key Iranian concern about the possible reversal of any executive agreement.” How rich. He and Obama turned the U.S. Constitution on its head to ensure the JCPOA was never presented to the Senate for approval—and for good reason. It would have failed spectacularly with both Democrat and Republican senators voting against it.
Clearly, Kerry’s effort to rehabilitate his reputation is as big a failure as the Iran nuclear deal itself, which has visited so much harm on the United States, Israel and the world.
