Obama is hoping that the nuclear pact will lead to equilibrium in the Middle East. All the evidence points the other way.
In making the case for his nuclear-arms-control deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, President Obama has confronted Congress with a stark choice. “There really are only two alternatives here,” he declared at last week’s press conference. “Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation or it’s resolved through force, through war.”
This binary argument is so central to his administration’s case that the president provided a second formulation: Without the deal, he said, “we risk even more war in the Middle East, and other countries in the region would feel compelled to pursue their own nuclear programs, threatening a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region in the world.”
The president insists that the Iran deal is tightly focused on “making sure” that the Iranians “don’t have a bomb.” It is not, he says, “contingent on Iran changing its behavior” in any other respect—notably the funding of proxy armies and terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East. “The incremental additional money that they’ve got to try to destabilize the region,” according to Mr. Obama, is not “more important than preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”
WNU Editor:As an amateur historian I have always enjoyed historian Niall Fergusen's use of history in explaining current international trends/events. In this post he does not disappoint .... extrapolating correctly (in my opinion) Kissinger, the buildup of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal, and the pre-World War II era in explaining the current Iranian nuclear deal .... and why it will fail while the regions conflicts and wars continue to spread. To put it all in perspective ....
.... According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies’ Armed Conflict Database, total fatalities due to armed conflict increased world-wide by a factor of roughly four between 2010 and 2014. The Middle East and North Africa accounted for more than 70% of the increase.
So much for President Obama's outreach, policies, and initiatives in the region .... starting with his Cairo speech in 2009.