A Harris presidency...would be a fourth Obama term of rapprochement with Iran

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or anyone who cares about the physical survival of Israel’s seven million Jews, there is one, and only one, issue in the upcoming election: Iran. Israel is currently surrounded by a “ring of fire” of Iranian proxies on every front: Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis; Shiite militias in Iraq; and Iranian-armed terrorist groups in the West Bank. And behind them, Iran itself, which is now estimated to have enough enriched uranium to build three or four nuclear weapons.

In an interview with the Free Press’s Bari Weiss on July 30, Haviv Rettig Gur, one of Israel’s sharpest commentators, put the matter succinctly: “Until you solve Iran, nations will continue to be demolished.... Everybody’s lives in the Middle East depend on ending the Iranian regime’s crusade that has so far conquered and destroyed, or is in some state of destroying, four different Arab countries, and wants to destroy my country....”

Rettig Gur goes on to conclude that there is no hope from the Democratic Party of addressing the Iranian threat: “[The Democrats] cannot, will not, don’t know how. They don’t have a vocabulary of foreign policy that allows them to seriously take up that challenge.”

Would a second Trump administration do better? If by better, one means attacking Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, no one can say. But a future Trump administration would surely adopt a far more aggressive stance toward Iran. When Trump came into office in 2017, he immediately imposed secondary sanctions on countries doing business with Iran, which dramatically reduced Iran’s oil revenue and therefore the operational capabilities of its various proxies. In addition, he withdrew from the JCPOA, under which Iran was free to obtain nuclear weapons in the not-to-distant future, and which placed no restrictions on its ballistic missile program.

All those steps were immediately reversed when the Biden administration entered office. Secondary sanctions were removed, and, as a consequence, Iran’s annual oil income has ballooned to close to $100 billion. Whereas there were no flareups between Israel and Hamas during the Trump presidency, within months of Biden’s entry into office, Hamas had once again launched rocket attacks on Israel.

There is no reason to doubt that Trump would revert to his previous policies or fill his administration with Iran hawks. Two weeks ago, Senator Tom Cotton and Congresswoman Elise Stefanik launched an investigation of ties between the Iranian government and Kamala Harris’s senior foreign policy advisor, Philip Gordon (see below). Cotton is widely tipped to head the Defense Department in a Trump administration.

I ALSO THINK RETTIG-GUR is too generous in his assessment of the Democrats’ motivation. In his telling, the Biden administration is obsessed with “stability [to a degree] it simply cannot imagine any other interest.” And for that reason, it has labored mightily to restrain Israel from attacking Hezbollah in a manner that would deter its constant rocket, drone, and anti-tank missile fire since October 7, and it has even more vehemently opposed Israel attacking Iran.

And with respect to the Gaza Strip, senior administration officials have repeatedly stated that “honesty” requires the admission that Hamas cannot be eliminated, and they have put forward cease-fire proposals that would effectively leave Hamas in power, in return for the remaining hostages (or more likely, in many cases, their bodies).

True, a desire for stability and to avoid a wider regional war, underlies, in part, America’s Middle East policy. But President Obama had something much grander in mind when he came into office in 2008 determined to “put distance” between Israel and the United States.

He sought a rapprochement with Iran that would require America to recognize Iranian “equities” in the region. As he told the New Yorker in 2014, he sought to create an equilibrium in the region between Iran, on the one hand, and traditional American allies, the Sunni and Gulf States, on the other, in which they might regard one another with suspicion, but would not go to war.

That vision of Iran as a hegemonic stabilizer was beyond far-fetched. Iran is the antithesis of a source of stability — a theocratic regime bent on the spread of Islam. Jacob Siegel offers a metaphor in the June 4 Tablet magazine (“Biden’s secret support for Iran: America is far from Israel’s best friend”): “Secretly funding the Iranian empire on the premise that it would make the world more peaceful is the equivalent of secretly funding gain-of-function research to engineer secret deadly viruses at a Chinese bioweapons laboratory on the premise that it would make Americans safer.”

In practice, the “great realignment” imagined by Obama was effectively pro-Iranian, despite Iran’s oft-expressed theological devotion to killing Americans and annihilating Israel. (Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute and Tony Badran of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies have outlined the contours of this “great realignment” in a series of articles in Tablet magazine over the past decade.)

Recognition of Iranian “equities” included refraining from action in the Syrian civil war, even after Assad crossed President Obama’s previously announced redline and used poison gas. It also included Secretary of State John Kerry intervening to prevent the FBI from arresting Iranian agents in the United States, according to whistleblowers. And most dramatically, it resulted in the United States dropping, one by one, each of its announced requirements in the negotiations over the JCPOA.

Four years later, the Biden administration came into office similarly kowtowing to Iranian concerns. Within its first days in office, it ended secondary sanctions on nations doing business with Iran and removed the Houthis from its list of terrorist organizations. Most recently, the administration expended great effort restraining European allies from rebuking Iran, after the International Atomic Energy Agency assessed that Iran had increased its stock of enriched uranium to 30 times that permitted under the JCPOA.

AT EVERY STAGE, the administration’s first concern has been to restrain Israel from responding forcefully. In his first call with Prime Minister Netanyahu on October 7, President Biden instructed Israel not to attack Hezbollah. And on October 8, when pockets of Hamas fighters were still roaming in Israel, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken already called for a Hamas-Israel cease-fire.

The United States has been generous in building up Israel’s defensive capabilities, and provided active defense itself against Iran’s April 13 attack, which featured over 300 missiles and drones directed at Israel. But that assistance has come at great cost: Israel has been forced to largely refrain from countering ongoing Hezbollah attacks, which have left Israel’s north uninhabitable. Even after Iran’s direct attack, President Biden told Prime Minister Netanyahu to “take the win” and refrain from responding. (Reuters reported that Iran also cleared the magnitude of its strike with the United States in advance.)

Israel has not always done as instructed. It did strike near one of Iran’s major nuclear installations in response to the April 13 Iranian launch. And the killing of Hezbollah’s number two, Fuad Shukr, after the killing of 12 Druze teenagers in Majdal Shams, caught both Hezbollah and the United States by surprise. The Americans had previously declared the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut off limits to Israel.

Still, there is no doubt that Israel has been kept on a short leash. The cut-off of some arms shipments is another link in that leash. The provision of armaments and training to the Lebanese Armed Forces of the largely fictional Lebanese state, and their deployment south of the Litani River, places an “American asset” between Israel and Hezbollah, in the event of a future war.

The defensive posture forced on Israel by the United States is ultimately unsustainable. As Michael Doran points out, overwhelming offensive capabilities will in the long run always beat defense alone. There is no impermeable defense against Hezbollah’s 150,000 to 200,000 missiles, many of the precision-guided variety. Secondly, the long-term cost of defense is unsustainable, as every drone or missile costs a small fraction of what is needed to knock it out of the sky.

Ultimately, the only defense against the extensive offensive capabilities of Hezbollah and Iran is to cause them to fear a degree of destruction that they find intolerable. By restraining Israel from acting to deter Iran’s proxy warfare, writes Park Macdougald, in the June 7 Tablet, “the Obama-Biden team has placed a large bet on Israel’s taste for assisted national suicide.”

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION sold the JCPOA by creating a “media echo chamber,” as described by former deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes in excruciating detail in a New York Times Magazine interview eight years ago with David Samuels. With respect to the JCPOA, the Obama administration line was that anyone opposed was a dangerous warmonger who would lead America into a full-scale war with Iran.

Since October 7, the Biden administration has attempted to create a similar “echo chamber” about Israel. According to the administration, Joe Biden was Israel’s best friend ever. If there was any failure to his Middle East policy, it was that he “forgot” the Palestinians in order to push an expansion of the Abraham Accords by bringing in Saudi Arabia, and October 7 was, in part, a Palestinian response to being shunted aside.

While initially supportive of Israel, Biden and his team came to realize that Israel had abandoned “any winnable military strategy in order to brutalize the Palestinians like Old Testament fanatics.” That narrative, writes Siegel, is “comprehensively false” in every particular.

Far from entering office intent on supporting Israel, Biden unfroze billions of dollars of Iranian assets and removed sanctions on its oil exports. Far from ignoring the Palestinians, Biden restored $150 million in funding to UNRWA, which had been cut by the Trump administration. UNRWA, incidentally, now admits that at least nine of its employees participated in the October 7 rampage in Israel.

Far from seeking to expand the Abraham Accords, Biden administration officials were prohibited from mentioning the Accords in its first year. The Accords had thoroughly decentralized the Palestinian issue by demonstrating the willingness of Arab states to enter into peace agreements with Israel, even in the absence of a resolution of the Palestinian-Israel conflict through a two-state solution. The Biden administration tried to reverse the process by announcing that the Saudis would only agree to enter the Abraham Accords if Israel agreed to a two-state solution, effectively binding the Saudis, who had many reasons for seeking closer ties to Israel.

Far from having no military plan, Israel has systematically degraded 70 percent of Hamas’s capabilities, as reflected in the latter’s lack of response to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh. And by seizing the Philadelphi Corridor, Israel has gone a long way toward preventing Hamas from rearming. Far from wreaking vengeance on Palestinian civilians, Israel has succeeded in the most difficult conditions, against a deeply embedded enemy — which uses the Gazan civilian population as shields — in achieving unprecedented low ratios of civilian to combatant deaths. By every measure, Israel kept civilian deaths down in Gaza to a far greater extent that the US and its allies did while fighting ISIS in Mosul. And it did so against a far larger, more deeply entrenched enemy, with widespread civilian support.

Finally, by promulgating a conclusively false narrative of “too many” civilian deaths and of an Israeli-created humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the United States has contributed heavily to the growing international ostracism of Israel.

THE CHANCES OF KAMALA HARRIS breaking with the Obama-Biden approach to Iran are effectively zero. She has been the most outspoken administration official in criticizing Israel. In addition, she has expressed sympathy for those manning the pro-Hamas campus encampments. And the Jerusalem Post reports that prior to an August 7 rally in Detroit, she told two Arab-American representatives of the Uncommitted National Movement that she is “open” to discussing an arms embargo on Israel.

Most telling, her chief foreign policy advisor, Philip Gordon, has long been a member in good standing of the Obama-Biden pro-Iranian axis. He has co-authored several op-eds with Robert Malley, who headed outreach to Iran in the Obama administration and again in the Biden administration, until he was stripped of his security clearance and placed on unpaid leave by the State Department. Gordon has also written three op-eds together with Ariane Tabatabai, a protégé of Malley’s.

Tabatabai was a participant in Iran Experts Initiative, which tapped Western academics to promote the Iran nuclear deal, and which was run by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. She is known to have sought the guidance of the Iranian Foreign Ministry as to which conferences she should attend. Remarkably, she serves today in a senior position in the Department of Defense.

All of Gordon’s op-ed pieces with both Malley and Tabatabai advanced pro-Iranian positions and opposed any sanctions on Iran. During the Obama years, Gordon was also the first White House official to address the leadership conference of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a pro-Iranian lobbying group and a key player in the creation of the “echo chamber” in support of the JCPOA.

In short, a Harris presidency, staffed by holdovers from the Obama-Biden foreign policy teams, would be a fourth Obama term of rapprochement with Iran.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1024. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)