One Year Later: The Iran Nuclear Deal

Victor Davis Hanson

Iran Nuclear Deal, Middle East

An Iranian change of heart, not U.S. acquiescence, prompted the rapprochement.

The July 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to limit Iranian nuclear proliferation is now nearly a year old. Until recently, the urgency to complete the “Iran deal” had been explained by the Obama administration as an effort to capitalize on a new group of Iranian reformers who came to power with President Hassan Rouhani in August 2013.

The so-called moderates—labeled as such by pro-administration journalists and Middle East analysts—wished to send signals that they were ready to cease pursuit of a nuclear bomb in exchange for an American effort to end embargoes, to release long impounded funds, and to allow Iran to reenter the world community. In other words, an Iranian change of heart, not U.S. acquiescence, prompted the rapprochement. And the Iranian “reformers” (apparently unlike the pro-Western Green Revolutionaries who hit the streets of Tehran in spring 2009 and were ignored by the Obama administration) apparently needed something tangible from the U.S. to empower their efforts to recalibrate Iran.

That storyline of the genesis of the talks proved a complete fable concocted by the White House. In a recent New York Times interview, assistant National Security advisor and presidential speechwriter Ben Rhodes gloated that Iranian moderates and their new outreach were false narratives—an “echo chamber”—salted by the administration in a field of obsequious analysts and supposedly know-nothing, twenty-something journalists: “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing…We created an echo chamber…They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say…In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this…We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project, and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked…We drove them crazy.”