Imagine that a jihadi breaks into your home and takes your family hostage while he constructs a bomb to blow them all to kingdom come. Courageously, you storm into the house, throw his gun down the toilet and punch him in the mouth. He grabs you by the testicles and refuses to let go.
What happens next? If you’re Donald Trump, you apologise, give him money to fix his teeth and buy a new gun, plus extra to arm his friends so he has options in the future. You then agree not to bother him again on condition he promises to stop building that bomb. He releases his grip. You scarper, ignoring your family’s cries.
You laugh, but it’s not all that different, is it? Over lunch today, I remarked to a friend that you genuinely could not dream up a more terrible deal than the one agreed with Iran by the, er, master of the deal. What would you add to make it worse? Obligatory seppuku by every American over the age of 18?
In effect, it may amount to the same thing. For heaven’s sake, Trump even closed the deal at Versailles, where a defeated Germany signed a treaty that would saddle it with the kind of heavy reparations and territorial losses that set the conditions for the rise of Adolf Hitler. Hardly an auspicious setting.
As the world comes to terms with the detail of a Memorandum of Understanding that emboldens the West’s enemies, dismays its friends and sets the stage for fractured alliances and more confrontation, here are the three main catastrophes it contains.
1. American surrender. Under the terms of the deal, the United States commits to a full military withdrawal, never to attack in the future, and not to foment regime change (refrain from “interfering” in “internal affairs”). Outrageously, the safety of Hezbollah in Lebanon will be secured. All naval blockades will be lifted.
2. Cash. Iran will be enriched beyond its wildest dreams. Oil sanctions will be lifted immediately, with all other sanctions permanently removed forthwith and no new ones ever introduced. In addition, $24bn of frozen assets will be released and at least – at least! – $300bn will be made available as a “rehabilitation fund”. How will this money be used? Put it this way: given that Hezbollah’s annual budget is around $1 billion, the Lebanese terror group could be funded for decades to come with huge quantities left over to rebuild stockpiles of ballistic missiles (at the G7, Trump said that Iran deserved to have them), buy new air defences, and even build new nuclear plants (the president also said a degree of enrichment was OK).
3. Nukes. All that Iran seems to have offered in return for this largesse is to “reaffirm” a commitment to non-proliferation that was made in the first paragraph of the JCPOA, which was agreed by Barack Obama in 2015. What significance did that hold? No significance at all. If Iran was genuinely only interested in civilian nuclear power, it could either buy ready-enriched uranium from overseas or enrich the material itself to a level of 3.67 per cent, which is all that is needed to generate power. Instead, it has pushed its stockpiles up to 20 per cent, 60 per cent and even higher, which can only be of use in an atomic bomb. Moreover, the Islamic Republic did not even commit to any concrete details of the supposed curtailment of its nuclear ambitions, instead – as usual – deploying strategic delay and kicking the can down the road.
All of this, of course, is the worst possible news for Israel, America and the West, and the best result ever for the enemy. What could have possessed Trump? This is a man who has been arguing since the very birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979 that the only way to deal with the Ayatollah is by force.
As long ago as 1980, Trump told NBC: “When you get the respect of the other countries, then the other countries tend to do a little bit as you do, and you can create the right attitudes. The Iranian situation is a case in point.” During the Obama years, he consistently lambasted the administration for signing a “weak” deal.
“The Iran deal was so bad,” he told crowds of adoring supporters at a rally. “We paid $150 billion to sign a horrible agreement.”
Well, Mr President, now you’ve paid much more than double that sum. For what? You’ve spent up to a trillion dollars on degrading the regime’s military capabilities, only to withdraw and hand them the money to replace them. In the meantime, none of your war aims – regime change, ending the nuclear threat, curbing Iran’s ballistic missile programme, stopping its support for proxy militia – have been achieved, and Israel has been thrown under the bus to boot.
Henry Kissinger was right. “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” Trump, once Israel’s best hope, has led the Jewish state, America and the West to the very brink of disaster. Now we can rely on nobody but ourselves.
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