Decisions, Decisions
Joe Biden's handling of Iran's nuclear program has been a policy disaster; and as long as Americans are testing positive, being hospitalized, and dying from Covid we're not going to return to normal.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
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Biden’s Poor Iran Decision
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Today, I have a new piece for the New Republic on President Biden’s handling of the Iran nuclear deal … and I’m not a fan:
Late last year, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called the Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal “one of the dumbest, most poorly thought out and counterproductive U.S. national security decisions of the post-Cold War era.”
It’s not often that I find myself in violent agreement with Friedman, but when you’re right, you’re right. Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal (or JCPOA, in the argot) was a disastrous move that has put Iran within disturbingly close range of becoming a nuclear power.
But three and a half years later, the even bigger question is: Why has Joe Biden taken that grim situation and made it worse?
With nuclear talks between the United States and Iran currently at what Secretary of State Antony Blinken calls a “decisive moment,” there is still hope for an agreement between the two sides. But we are fast approaching a point of no return that risks sparking heightened tensions and a new round of conflict in the Middle East.
During the 2020 campaign, Biden promised to reenter the agreement, but upon taking office, he demurred. Instead, the administration “demanded that Iran account for and roll back the advances it had made in its nuclear program before the United States agreed to remove punishing sanctions reimposed by President Trump after he pulled out of the deal in 2018.”
Conversely, “Iranian officials demanded that the US make the first move—and lift sanctions as well as unfreeze Iran’s financial assets.”
Considering that the US pulled out of the deal, it should have been incumbent upon Biden to act first, and he refused — mainly for political reasons, I argue. The result is that today there is still no deal, and Iran is much closer to possessing the capability to build a bomb.
One of the more interesting arguments that I came across when reporting the piece is a point made by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, who is better known as the Arms Control Wonk (and will be a guest on this Friday’s Zoom Chat).
Lewis notes that Iran’s reluctance to take the first move in nuclear diplomacy with the US is a by-product of Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the agreement in 2018 (even as Iran was upholding its obligations) and also the legacy of American commitments to nuclear agreements.
The “U.S. never follows through on their word” when it comes to these types of deals, says Lewis. He has a point.
In 1994, the Clinton administration signed the Framework Agreement with North Korea to end its nuclear program. But the U.S. never fully lived up to its obligations under the deal, which included the construction of a light-water nuclear reactor and normalizing diplomatic relations, and Pyongyang walked away. Today, of course, North Korea is a nuclear power.
We now know that Saddam Hussein did not restart his weapons of mass destruction program after the Gulf War, and in 2002 he allowed U.N. inspectors back into the country. Yet that did nothing to prevent the US invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam’s regime. Likewise, in Libya, Muammar Qaddafi voluntarily gave up his nuclear program, but that didn’t stop the U.S. from actively supporting rebels who toppled his regime and savagely killed him.
And then there is Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran deal.
In short, the US has zero credibility when it comes to living up to its end of the bargain on nuclear agreements, and Iran’s reluctance to make the first move is not only understandable, it’s well-grounded. The failure of the Biden Administration to recognize this reality — and prize domestic politics ahead of the ability to achieve an actual agreement and limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions — is one of the president’s most significant failures a year into office. What’s worse is that the closer Iran gets to a bomb, the more the risks of war in the region will rise. For a president who has vowed to reduce the US focus on the Middle East, his policy toward Iran could end up bringing the opposite result.
Returning To Normalcy Is Easier Said Than Done
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Yesterday, on Twitter, I pointed out (as I’ve often done) that much of the commentary about schools and Covid is shrouded in myth:
As it turns out, school disruptions are falling and actually decreased by 38 percent last week. To the extent they are still happening, it’s primarily because of staffing shortages, not public health restrictions.
I was quickly inundated by angry tweets accusing me of playing down the deleterious impact on kids of remote learning and draconian measures like indoor mask-wearing. It’s one of these issues on which you truly can’t win. If I argue, as I repeatedly have, that kids should be in school during the pandemic, I am bombarded by tweets accusing me of ignoring the health risks to kids of Covid. Extremists on both sides are driving this debate to an incredibly frustrating degree.
Indeed, over the weekend, uber-generalizer Bari Weiss went on Bill Maher’s show to complain that she is “over” Covid and criticized liberals and their over-the-top adherence to public health restrictions that are preventing us from returning to normal.
Considering that the US is averaging more than 668,312 Covid cases a day, 156,019 hospitalizations, and more than 2,000 deaths a day, Weiss’s argument is not only misdirected, it’s deeply insensitive.
You want to see something that is truly going to blow your mind … look at this chart:
While it's true that cases are not necessarily the most crucial metric (because many of those testing positive are vaccinated), we're also at an all-time high for hospitalizations.
With all that in mind, I thought Michelle Goldberg nailed the point in her column for the New York Times today:
The desperate desire to get back to normal is understandable. What’s odd is seeing the absence of normality as a political betrayal instead of an epidemiological curveball. The reason things aren’t normal isn’t that power-mad public health officials went back on their promises. It’s because a new coronavirus variant emerged that overwhelmed hospitals and threw schools and many industries into chaos, and because not everyone has the luxury of being insouciant about infection.
If you’ve been a long-time reader of Truth and Consequences, you would know that I’m a loud advocate of returning to normalcy. But Omicron has undoubtedly changed my behavior. I now wear masks indoors pretty much all the time, even in places where it’s not required (like in the neighboring states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where I was this weekend). I skipped a concert last week, in part, because of the virus, and while I sympathize with my kids’ continued frustration over mask-wearing at school, I still think it’s probably the best thing for them to do.
Here’s the thing that I think “the return to normal crowd” is missing (my kids call them the “Covid anti-Karens,” as opposed to the “Covid Karens” who are obsessed with the virus). We are at an all-time high for cases and hospitalizations, and thousands of people are still dying. We’ve been living through this pandemic nightmare for nearly two years. You can make all the arguments you want about approaching Covid from a rational perspective. You can point out that young kids are at little risk of becoming seriously ill from Covid. You can correctly note that if you’re vaccinated and boosted, you’re unlikely to get seriously ill from Omicron. But what you can’t do is expect others to have the same tolerance for risk that you have. I am confident that even with the current Covid wave, life will eventually return to normal, and, as a society, we’ll figure out how to balance the health risks of Covid with the need for normalcy. But not all of us will get there at the same time, and we should, perhaps, be a bit more tolerant of how difficult this entire experience has been for many, even if we are rearing to go. It’s important to remember that everyone handles a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic a tad differently.
(The first reader who can identify why I chose the picture above for this section gets a shout-out in the next newsletter!)
What’s Going On
Tim Noah shares my skepticism that democracy in America is dying.
This is one of the best pieces I’ve read about the current situation in Ukraine.
Friend of the newsletter, Anthony Fischer, has his a new substack. Check out his inaugural piece on why David Ortiz belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame, along with all alleged steroid users — and subscribe!
Jeff Passan makes the case for Barry Bonds — and hopefully, by the end of the day, he’ll be in the Hall too.
Musical Interlude
Since I earlier referenced the title of this classic Talking Heads song, I figured it was an excellent video to post today:
Listen, this is the part that is making me wish I was able to ______ somebody. (Don't worry, not you). If you are young, or younger middle-aged with no comorbidities, you are probably just fine. The problem is that people, especially the Death Cult Hero Worshippers of a False Idol, fail to take into consideration the elderly and the immunocompromised. Give me a fucking break. Is this what we have come to, a Mengele-style COVID Darwinism? I sure hope not.
Warren G. Harding's campaign slogan was "Return to Normalcy." He issued a presidential pardon to one of his opponents in the election.