Beating Swords Into Fountain Pens
If today's liberals cannot support bloodless B-2 strikes for nuclear non-proliferation, they cannot support American military action at all
Nuclear nonproliferation has been a tent pole of the American Left for 80 years, yet this week almost none of them celebrate the most dramatic advancement of this cause in history.
I refuse to believe this is only because they hate President Donald Trump, who pushed the button to stop Iran’s nuclear program. I think it’s that they hate the button.
The senior Democrat most complimentary to Trump’s bold act to make the world safer was stodgy Rep. Steny Hoyer. But even he could not resist taking a swipe at Trump’s first-term decision to withdraw from the JCOA nuclear agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama. That’s the tell. In what was a positive statement overall about the strikes, Hoyer’s only mention of Trump’s name was this:
“Sadly, the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran became this dire because the Trump Administration chose to back out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018.”
Democrats do not love the JCPOA because it would have worked, or even because it was Obama’s. They love it because it represented American and European sophisticates validating the sovereignty of a regime that arose from righteous indignation against western meddling.
In the JCPOA, an America still big enough to bully was beating its swords into fountain pens and trusting bloodthirsty savages to act like continental aristocrats. The JCPOA was affirmation the mullahs of Tehran are really our brothers, that holding hands and singing kumbaya is America’s only moral option, and that swapping humble deference for paper promises is the coin of the realm.
What today’s Democrats really want is not a world with fewer nuclear weapons; it’s a world with less American muscle.
Let’s not brook any illusions the JCPOA had even a casino chance to work. It was a fraud from the start. Iran needed civilian nuclear power less than almost anyone on earth; the mullahs are not worried about climate change and would burn raw crude oil forever. They chased nuclear enrichment for one reason only: to blackmail the civilized world.
Second, let’s set aside the nonsense there was ever an intent to cooperate with the international community. Sen. Chuck Schumer himself, in opposing JCPOA in 2015, flagged that its inspection provisions were toothless and would be bought off cheaply by new Iranian oil trade with France.
“Even more troubling is the fact that the U.S. cannot demand inspections unilaterally. By requiring the majority of the 8-member Joint Commission, and assuming that China, Russia, and Iran will not cooperate, inspections would require the votes of all three European members of the P5+1 as well as the EU representative. It is reasonable to fear that, once the Europeans become entangled in lucrative economic relations with Iran, they may well be inclined not to rock the boat by voting to allow inspections.”
The Iranian nuclear enrichment program has been deemed non-compliant by the IAEA since 2021, chock full of unsanctioned actions and unreported nuclear material the mullahs long lied about. The IAEA – an arm of the United Nations, for God’s sake, hardly stooges for Trump – censured Iran for its nuclear malfeasance just four weeks ago. How’d I find that out? In an Australian news article. Good luck finding that context in papers here.
There is no coherent argument that murderous jihadis were going to cease being murderous jihadis if only we treated them like legitimately sovereign equals. All this fuss and bluster is about something else.
It’s the same motivation that made a not-quite-yet-President Obama tour the world in 2008 to apologize for his predecessors and promise a humbler un-superpower to come. And today’s lefties have moved further that direction: de-emphasizing American military power, the diminution of American shot-calling, and the subjugating of American leadership.
The thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall now amounts to a whole generation’s career span in politics and foreign affairs. A 54-year-old today, I watched communism end in 1990 on a console TV in my college dormitory’s social room. So did Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. John Fetterman, Sen. Martin Heinrich, Sen. Chris Murphy, and Sen. Raphael Warnock – not to mention Marco Rubio, Sen. Joni Ernst, Sen. Ted Cruz, and others. Our parents had a shared bipartisan consensus for bold American leadership in the world that disintegrated with that concrete at Brandenburg Gate.
With our generation in charge, the parties have mutated into polarity, each with a pessimistic underside when it comes to globalism. Republicans have decided foreign trade is all a conspiracy to scam Americans. Democrats, meanwhile, have decided that America oppresses when it uses its armed forces for anything rougher than disaster relief.
Democrats cannot be happy when the military, under command of a muscular President, uses force to do what diplomacy could not. The objective is less important to them than the means. Aside from its Zionist Jews, exiled Persians, and a few urbane capitalists, the Democratic Party in the United States is now so captured by the radical campus lens that an oppression/oppressor interpretation of any conflict is irresistible, true or not.
It’s hard to comprehend how an Iranian regime that hangs gay people from cranes, tortures journalists, imprisons academics, bankrolls rape brigades and arrests women who expose a few locks of hair can be considered the oppressed portion of any narrative. But somehow, some way, American leftists have decided the butchers of Tehran are oppressed by Trump and the B-2s he unleashed on the Fordow enrichment site.
I dispense political advice for a living. I usually only give it to Republicans, in exchange for a reasonable fee. But today, I’m going to give expert advice to every elected Democrat, for free. When you get asked about the strikes in Iran, your answer should be simple: “It’s a good day for peace. It’s a good day for America. And I’m proud of the guts shown by President Trump.” Throw a few caveats in if you must, but stop telling us the problem with this non-proliferation is just our lying eyes.