Over at National Review Online they asked experts to weigh in on the situation with Iran and Heritage Expert Peter Brookes was asked to share his thoughts.
Hey, Mr. President, how’s that engagement policy with Iran working out for you? Not so well, from what I can tell.
While you were busy hoping for a breakthrough, holding fast to the Pollyannaish foreign-policy notion that “if we’re nice to them, they’ll be nice to us,” the situation in Iran has only gotten worse over the last year — and precipitously so.
The Iranians are kicking up uranium enrichment beyond what is needed for reactor fuel; their ballistic-missile programs, which could carry dangerous payloads, are advancing; Tehran is re-arming Hezbollah; and the regime continues to hammer the opposition movement — one which could have changed the dynamic in Tehran but which you failed to support.
Despite missing many opportunities to get tough with Iran since you took office — were you expecting the regime to see the longstanding errors of its ways? — it’s still not clear today whether we have a policy for dealing with Tehran other than hoping for the best.
By the way, hope is no basis for a national-security strategy.
Unfortunately, allowing the Iranian regime to believe it can act with impunity — at home or abroad — will only lead to bigger, more serious problems as Tehran gains confidence and asserts itself in ways inimical to American interests.
It’s likely that the 31st anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, set for February 11, will give us a fresh look into just how bad things have gotten — and will, in all likelihood, keep getting.
Cross-Posted at NRO’s Symposium
Iran’s Green Movement opposition has proven to be a stronger and more persistent political force than many advocates of diplomatic engagement with Iran’s dictatorship had expected. This development, as well as the regime’s continued duplicity and foot-dragging on the nuclear issue, has led some to revise their thinking about supporting regime change in Iran. For example, Richard Haass, a self-professed “card-carrying realist” who formerly opposed the Bush Administration’s support for regime change, now has changed his mind. He has written an essay in the current issue of Newsweek that assesses that “Iran may be closer to profound political change than at any time since the revolution that ousted the Shah 30 years ago.”
Unfortunately, the Obama Administration remains wedded to its engagement policy, which unrealistically seeks to strike a deal with the implacably hostile regime, whose self-defined ideological legitimacy is based on unceasing hostility to the United States. Even if a diplomatic agreement could be reached on the nuclear issue, against all odds, it would be foolhardy to expect Iran’s unscrupulous dictatorship to permanently abide by such an agreement. Yet the administration continues to seek such a deal over the bloodied heads of Iran’s opposition forces. Because it continues to define its foreign policy in large part as the opposite of President Bush’s, regime change in Iran is not change that the Obama Administration can believe in.