Obama Administration Officials Undermine American Foreign Policy

Quivering in fear cowardly and weak-kneed former State Department official Wendy Sherman is calling on American Congresspeople to stop the Trump administration from going to war with Iran.

You recall Wendy Sherman. She was part of the negotiating team that gave North Korea access to nuclear weapons. She was part of the negotiating team that crafted the Iran nuclear deal-- deal that helped fund Islamist terrorism in the Middle East and that gave Iran eventual access to nuclear weapons.

If Wendy Sherman had the least sense of moral decency, she would shut the fuck up. She doesn’t, so she didn’t.

She is not alone. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, as weak and ineffectual as Wendy Sherman, has apparently been telling Iran to wait out the Trump administration. A new Democratic president will revert to the old Obama policies… and thus stop harassing and undermining the terrorist regime in Tehran.

And these people call themselves Americans. For the record our current Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, responded to John Kerry in an interview with Town Hall’s Guy Benson.

He said this:

It is ahistorical and completely unhelpful when previous secretaries of state are continuing to engage in the tasks that they engaged in when they were the secretary of state. I’ll leave it at that in the sense of it’s time to get off the stage for the previous administration. I understand they have different views than we have; they are entitled to those views. But talking with senior leaders around the world and suggesting to them somehow that waiting out this administration is the best course of action for those countries is something that is unheard of, it is fundamentally different than any previous administration has undertaken, and they ought to leave the foreign policy to us. And then do their best to give folks with foreign policy views that have appeased the Iranians, that allowed Chairman Kim Jong-Un to continue to advance his nuclear threat, that put us prostrate around the world -- if those are the policies they want, they should go fight for them at the ballot box.

It’s good to see someone from the administration call out the appeasers. It’s good to see Pompeo expose the Obama policy for what it was.

Today, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has joined the chorus, calling out Kerry deputy Wendy Sherman for her unhelpful contributions to the debate about Iran policy. One understands that Sherman’s comments, written for the New York Times, are not only unhelpful. They undermine administration policy by suggesting that Iran need but wait for the next election to see America return to appeasement.

The Journal highlights the aberration of Obama administration officials attacking the current administration policy:

When the U.S. withdraws its diplomats from a foreign country amid a security threat, the domestic reaction in a previous age would have been to show solidarity against an adversary. But this is Washington in 2019, so the loyal opposition is reacting to the threat from Iran by blaming—President Trump.

“Either the Trump administration is trying to goad Iran into war or a war could come by accident because of the administration’s reckless policies,” declared former Obama official Wendy Sherman Wednesday, after the State Department withdrew personnel from Iraq.

Obviously, self-defined members of a Resistance movement do not belong to the loyal opposition. The French Resistance, if you had forgotten, was a manifestly disloyal opposition.

Like other members of the Obama administration Sherman wants to blame America first. So says the Journal:

Ms. Sherman is sore that Mr. Trump withdrew from the failed nuclear deal that she helped negotiate with Iran, but even she must realize that Shiite militias in Iraq often act as proxies for Iran. Does she want another Benghazi? Yet she blames Mr. Trump for a “march to war with Iran” and wants Congress, Europe and business leaders to “stand in [national security adviser] John Bolton’s way.” Senator Bernie Sanders says he’s also worried about “provocations on the part of the United States against Iran.”

Sore losers who cannot stand being repudiated, even by American voters. So much for our sacrosanct democracy.

The problem, the Journal continues, is that Sherman has nothing bad to say about the Iranian terrorist leadership:

Who does Ms. Sherman want to stand in the way of Gen. Qassem Soleimani? He’s the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), that used the windfall from Ms. Sherman’s nuclear deal to finance terror and instability throughout the Middle East.

Even as the U.S. abided by the nuclear deal, Gen. Soleimani fed the war in Yemen against the Saudis, intervened to save Bashar Assad’s murderous regime in Syria, tried to establish a terror beachhead in southern Syria against Israel, expanded ballistic-missile production, and financed the terrorist militias of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Denying Iran the trade and money to finance this adventurism is a major reason Mr. Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal before Mr. Bolton was even in his current White House position.

What really bothers Sherman and Kerry and Co. is that the Trump policy of maximum pressure is working.

The real story behind the current Mideast tension is that Iran is acting out because Mr. Trump’s policy of applying maximum pressure is working. The U.S. recently designated the IRGC as a terrorist group, which will hurt its many business interests. Washington also has closed loopholes on the sale of Iranian oil and announced new restrictions on Iran’s metals exports. All of this has Tehran lashing out with anger and threats.

President Hassan Rouhani said last week that Iran will explicitly violate the 2015 nuclear deal by stockpiling low-enriched uranium and heavy water. Mr. Rouhani demanded that Europe find a way to work around U.S. oil and banking sanctions within 60 days, or Iran will ignore the deal’s uranium-enrichment caps and restart construction of its Arak nuclear reactor. Mr. Rouhani also threatened to unleash migrants, drugs and terrorists on Europe.

Everyone but former Obama administration officials knows that the Iranians are bad actors. Moreover, knowing that they have the support of American Democrats might very well embolden them. Why not attack American interests when half the country will blame Donald Trump. Consider recent acts:

Meanwhile, Iran’s allies in the region are acting in ways that suggest the hand of Gen. Soleimani. Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen appear to have used drones to attack a major oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia. Attempts to sabotage ships in and around major oil routes also may have been Iran’s handiwork.

But Gen. Soleimani likes to inflict casualties using proxies that allow for deniability. As careful followers of American politics, the Iranians will notice that Democrats like Mr. Sanders and Ms. Sherman are blaming Mr. Trump pre-emptively for any hostilities. This could encourage Iran to think it could get away with a reckless attack against Americans.

The Journal concludes:

The goal of U.S. strategy isn’t to start a conflict but to get Iran to stop its terror support and renegotiate the nuclear deal. Mr. Trump has invited Iran to talk anew, and the Europeans can help by joining the U.S. pressure campaign, rather than lobbying Washington to cave to Tehran’s threats. With Iran threatening to leave the nuclear pact, and its companies unwilling to defy American sanctions on Iran, Europe has no reason to mollify the regime.

Ms. Sherman and the Obama Administration gambled that a nuclear deal would cause Iran to change its revolutionary behavior and become a normal country. The bet failed. Mr. Trump’s alternative of sanctions and diplomatic pressure is now forcing the regime to make hard choices about its support for militias abroad even as it faces growing unrest at home. If Iran or its proxies react to this pressure by killing Americans, don’t blame Mr. Trump. Blame the state sponsors of terrorism in Iran.

And, of course, the last point is the most salient. The primary characteristic of Obama administration foreign policy was to blame America first. It blamed America for all the evil that was going on in the world. President Obama himself travelled around the world indicting America. He ended up making the world less safe and he ended up losing the respect of foreign leaders… with the notable exception of the weak sisters who are today running governments in Western Europe.

For more perspective, see Eli Lake’s article on why the Trump policy is working, from Newsmax.