Was Obama’s retreat from Syria prompted, in part, by his desire to generate Iranian goodwill in the nuclear negotiations?

Was Obama’s retreat from Syria prompted, in part, by his desire to generate Iranian goodwill in the nuclear negotiations?HT: Scaramouchee. By Michael Doran.

One's evaluation of the nuclear deal depends on how one understands the broader context of US-Iranian relations. There are potential pathways ahead that might not be all that bad. But I am pessimistic. I see the deal as a deceptively pleasant way station on the long and bloody road that is the American retreat from the Middle East.

By contrast, President Obama sees this agreement as stage one in a two-stage process. Six months from now, he believes, this process will culminate in a final, sustainable agreement. In the rosiest of scenarios, the nuclear rapprochement will be the beginning of something much bigger. Like Nixon’s opening to China, it will inaugurate a new era in Iranian-American relations. Whether Obama himself is dreaming of such an historic reconciliation is anybody’s guess, but many commentators certainly are.

I, however, am not among them. On the nuclear question specifically, I don’t see this as stage one. In my view, there will never be a final agreement. What the administration just initiated was, rather, a long and expensive process by which the West pays Iran to refrain from going nuclear. We are, in essence, paying Ayatollah Khamenei to negotiate with us. We just bought six months. What was the price?

We shredded the six United Nations Security Council resolutions that ordered the Islamic Republic to abandon all enrichment and reprocessing activities. We exposed fractures in the coalition against Iran. And we started building a global economic lobby that is dedicated to eroding the sanctions that we have generated through a decade of hard, very hard, diplomatic work.

That's the price that we can see clearly before our eyes. But I also wonder whether there were hidden costs — in the form of quiet commitments to Iran by third parties. I assume that the Iranians demanded economic compensation for every concession that they made. Will all of the promised payments appear in the text of the agreement? Did parties less constrained than our president by US congressional oversight also offer up sweeteners on the margins? At this point we do not know whether there is, in effect, a secret annex to the deal. Only time will tell.

But a hidden cost that is more easily verified is the free hand that the United States is now giving to Iran throughout the region. This is the price that troubles me most.

In my view, that free hand was already visible in the chemical weapons deal that Obama cut with Syria’s Bashar al-Asad. I have long suspected that Obama’s retreat from Syria was prompted, in part, by his desire to generate Iranian goodwill in the nuclear negotiations. The evidence for that case is growing by the day. We now learn, for example, that the administration had opened a bilateral backchannel to Tehran well before the Syria crisis. I can only assume that the president backed away from the use of force against Assad because, in part, he saw the Syria challenge as a subset of the Iranian nuclear negotiation. Read the full story here.