In testimony yesterday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, John Bolton said he fears many in the Obama administration believe a nuclear Iran can be contained and deterred by providing security guarantees to allies in the region. But security guarantees, he said, are not likely to provide much reassurance:
The United States’ broad retreat from the Middle East — from Iraq and now quite possibly from Afghanistan — is hardly reassuring to others seeking security assurances. And America’s disdain for Israel, its truest ally in the region, can hardly be comforting to those who have never enjoyed such close relations. If this is how the United States now treats close friends, how will it treat mere allies of convenience when convenience disappears? Our feckless and irresolute policy in Libya can hardly be helping either.
Yesterday Mark Steyn was asked by Hugh Hewitt how he thought jihadists perceived America after the President’s speech on Afghanistan. Steyn said he thought it validated their view of the U.S. as a “sort of late period, puffed up, Ottoman sultan” – “ostensibly extremely rich and powerful, but it’s gotten all soft and decadent, and plumped up on its cushions, and it doesn’t have the staying power.”
It reminds one of David Brooks’ report in 2007 on his conversation with presidential candidate Barack Obama:
If you ask him about the Middle East peace process, he will wax rhapsodic about the need to get energetically engaged. . . . When you ask about ways to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, he talks grandly about marshaling a global alliance. But when you ask specifically if an Iranian bomb would be deterrable, he says yes: “I think Iran is like North Korea. They see nuclear arms in defensive terms, as a way to prevent regime change.”
A supposed superpower that does not stand by its allies, withdraws from wars before they are won, gets mired for months in a kinetic military action it said would take days, focuses myopically on the “peace process” as if it were the key to the region, and does not understand — as Bolton explained in testimony worth reading in its entirety — that the projection of hegemonic Iranian power will not require actual use of its nuclear weapons, is not likely to find “security guarantees” respected by either allies or adversaries.
The guarantees will only create a false sense of security among those who tell themselves they can deter Iran with them.