Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 1 September 2022. © Richard Kemp
As Western governments quake in the face of Russian nuclear threats, they are on the verge of striking a deal that will give Iran that same power over them.
Even after six months of war in Europe, they cannot seem to grasp the parallels between the two. Putin risked invading Ukraine because of Western weakness and appeasement, naively welcoming Russia back into the family of nations after it devoured large parts of Ukraine in 2014, while at the same time filling its war chests with ever more billions of euros from energy exports to Europe.
Iran has been waging war non-stop on the West and its allies in the Middle East since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Appeasing Tehran by endorsing its nuclear programme and handing it billions of dollars from sanctions relief will likewise empower and encourage the ayatollahs to greater aggression even than hitherto. These are the effects of the proposed nuclear deal brokered by the EU, Russia and China. Why is it brokered by the EU, Russia and China? Because the United States was outrageously banned from direct negotiations by Tehran. It is not outrageous that Iran demanded it, but that the US tolerated its own exclusion.
The feeble mantra of the apologists for President Joe Biden’s JCPOA 2.0, a desperate attempt to revive President Barack Obama’s failed agreement from 2015 that paved the way to an Iranian nuclear bomb, is ‘a bad deal is better than no deal’. Well, no it is not, and the deal that is about to emerge will be even worse. The argument of the ‘bad’ dealers is that it buys time for the West, with Micawberish optimism that ‘something will turn up’. This thinking is clear from Biden’s preposterous hope that he can ‘lengthen and strengthen’ the deal once it has been struck. But optimism is not a strategy and it certainly is not a strategy for dealing with a violent and volatile revolutionary regime dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state, which it sees as the proxy of its ultimate enemy, America.
As Western governments quake in the face of Russian nuclear threats, they are on the verge of striking a deal that will give Iran that same power over them.
Even after six months of war in Europe, they cannot seem to grasp the parallels between the two. Putin risked invading Ukraine because of Western weakness and appeasement, naively welcoming Russia back into the family of nations after it devoured large parts of Ukraine in 2014, while at the same time filling its war chests with ever more billions of euros from energy exports to Europe. Continue reading →