viewpoint: ben cohen

Kerry’s resounding Iranian ‘success’

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Here’s the latest episode of outreach to Iran from the lips of Secretary of State John Kerry. After condemning, during a press conference in Bahrain, the “destabilizing ac-tions” of Iran in the Middle East, he followed up with a plea. “Help us end the war in Yemen,” Kerry implored the Tehran regime. “Help us end the war in Syria, not intensify it, and help us to be able to change the dynamics of this region.”

What do you call this? Naiveté? Hard-nosed realism? The actualization of President Obama’s deeply held belief that American diplomacy must be humble and post-imperial? Or just the plain old enabling of a rogue state ruled by clerics who practice censorship and torture?

Perhaps the fairest way to adjudicate this would be to judge Kerry by his results. There is no chance that Iran is going to perform a 180-degree turnaround in its foreign policy, and Kerry knows it. In Syria, Iran has worked with Russia to stabilize the bloodstained tyrant Bashar al-Assad, while in Yemen and elsewhere in the Gulf, it is systematically baiting the conservative Sunni monarchies quivering in the face of rising Shi’a power. 

Still, one can only say that Kerry has failed if one believes that the Obama administration’s policy is aimed primarily at curbing Iranian provocations. Now, when you look at the administration’s policy on Iran, it becomes clear that Kerry’s expressed concern about Iran’s behavior was a sop to his Bahraini hosts. When it is remembered that current administration policy is to disengage from the region, thereby empowering Iran, it can be argued that Kerry’s results have actually been a resounding success in the context of that policy.

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