Leon Wieseltier, established voice of Jewish American liberal intellectualism, published a blistering analysis of what he sees as President Obama’s naïve and arrogant foreign policy that produced the Iran Deal.
Pointing out President Obama’s oft-stated desire to avoid the “rut of history,” Wieseltier argues that Obama’s whole foreign policy, but especially in regard to Iran, ignores established historical realities in favor of hope-centric experiments.
The rut of history: It is a phrase worth pondering. It expresses a deep scorn for the past, a zeal for newness and rupture, an arrogance about old struggles and old accomplishments, a hastiness with inherited precedents and circumstances, a superstition about the magical powers of the present. It expresses also a generational view of history, which, like the view of history in terms of decades and centuries, is one of the shallowest views of all.
This is nothing other than the mentality of disruption applied to foreign policy. In the realm of technology, innovation justifies itself; but in the realm of diplomacy and security, innovation must be justified, and it cannot be justified merely by an appetite for change. Tedium does not count against a principled alliance or a grand strategy. Indeed, a continuity of policy may in some cases—the Korean peninsula, for example: a rut if ever there was one—represent a significant achievement. But for the president, it appears, the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Wieseltier continues to expose President Obama’s philosophy toward the Iranian negotiations, based on the idea of guilt for decades of American foreign policy “sins.” The article points out myriad flaws in the negotiated deal with Iran and predicts that it will accomplish the opposite of its intended purpose. Iran’s nuclear program will not be dismantled or effectively frozen, and meanwhile Iran will grow stronger from the lifting of sanctions and international legitimacy the deal provides.
The full article from the The Atlantic is available here.
