Obama’s capitulation on Iranian nuclear deal leaves the world exposed

The purported nuclear program deal with Iran is a strategic error and a crushing defeat for the West.

US President Barack Obama in Panama City on April 9.

The deal US President Barack Obama claims to have sewn up with Iran over its nuclear program — though Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei irritatingly says there is as yet no deal at all — may truly be historic.

It could be an inflexion point in the story of our civilisation. It might be the point at which it became clear that, for the moment at least, Western civilisation could no longer deal with the proliferating security challenges around the world eating away at what was left of the global security order.

After six years in office, Obama remains an enigma. Author of luminous prose, master of soaring rhetoric, contemporary general of the ground war of Twitter and social media mobilisation in all manner of campaigns, but his actual beliefs and core principles on fundamental issues of security and global engagement are forever not quite visible, forever receding just over the horizon, just beyond the next bend.

Obama flows. His is a leadership of fluid movement. But as the Iran deal shows, there is in the end no point at which Obama will definitely stop. The movement is endless. Nothing is fixed, nothing resolved, nothing beyond negotiation. For Obama there are apparently never any red lines.

For the Iranians, who masterfully out-negotiated the Americans, Khamenei provided red lines from which their negotiators would never stray. But the Iranians won so much in the negotiations they are advancing well beyond their red lines. The deal, which has not been signed and which the Americans and Iranians already interpret in fundamentally different ways, is to be finalised by June 30.

It now looks as though Obama cannot walk away from a deal, whereas the Iranians, though their economy is battered and their society deeply discontented, were always willing to walk away if the deal wasn’t to their liking. Thus the Iranians were strong, the Americans were weak.

Three American presidents, Bill Clinton, George W, Bush and Obama, have declared that Iran must never possess nuclear weapons and that if it tries to acquire them the US will act, if necessary with military force, to stop them. We now know that Obama was just kidding.

This agreement guarantees Iran will acquire nuclear weapons eventually.

Iran’s nuclear program has always been about acquiring nuclear weapons capability. It is drenched in oil and does not need nuclear energy. The nuclear power reactor it has comes with a lifetime supply of fuel from Russia, where many other nations with nuclear power stations get their nuclear fuel. So it has no need to enrich its uranium. But it has built massive enrichment facilities plus a plutonium-producing facility. Both these routes lead to nuclear weapons.

Under the agreement Iran gives up two-thirds of its enrichment centrifuges for 10 years. But it doesn’t destroy any part of its nuclear infrastructure. They just go under temporary lock and key.

And it has a prodigious ability to cheat.

It was to export the vast majority of its stockpile of enriched uranium but now insists it will keep it and use a technical process to render it harmless. But the technical process can be reversed.

It keeps its deep underground nuclear facility, which is almost impossible to strike successfully from the air. It gets to undertake massive research into much more advanced enrichment centrifuges that will eventually make it much easier to produce uranium enriched to the extent necessary to produce nuclear weapons material.

And for the first time ever, Iran’s entire nuclear establishment will be accepted as legitimate by the UN and all the international nuclear regulatory bodies. It subjects itself to an inspections regime but nobody knows how this will operate or how intrusive it will be. This is one of many areas the US and Iran interpret in contradictory ways.

As well as all this, Iran will get rapid relief from the economic sanctions that have hurt it in recent years.

It’s possible, of course, that Obama may receive such a backlash against his deal in the congress that he will not be able to proceed with it by June 30. It’s possible the Iranians, whose anti-American rhetoric has not abated during these negotiations, will decide that a deal of any kind with “the Great Satan” is after all unnecessary and they will display their own strength by walking away from the deal.

Obama has been selling the deal on the basis that there is no other option and the only alternative is war. How would those words sit if Obama now walked away without a deal? Of course, it is seemingly impossible to overestimate Obama’s ability to say one thing and do the opposite, so the possibility cannot be wholly ruled out.

But from this point it looks as though the Iranians have achieved enormous strategic gains at very little cost.

This is immensely important in itself, but it also stands as a signal of the declining influence of the US in the Middle East and the broader crisis of global security.

Perhaps the key analytical question is this: is the fecklessness of present American policy entirely the fault of Obama, or does it reflect a deeper malaise in the US and in Western civilisation generally?

The West today confronts five profound security challenges.

They are: Iran; global terrorism as evidenced by Islamic State and al-Qa’ida; Russian territorial aggression in eastern Europe; Chinese military assertiveness in disputed territories in the South and East China seas; and the spread of nuclear weapons.

Each of these issues is complex, with many actors, and each has its own rich history of mistakes, aggression, misjudgments and the like. Yet each is also linked. In none of them is the West prevailing, or even playing much of a central role.

Take them one by one. Iran is now the dominant political and military force in Iraq. Its proxies have been successful in overthrowing a legitimate government in Yemen. It has established permanent control of a large slab of Lebanon through Hezbollah. It has kept its ally, Bashar al-Assad, in power in Syria. It has never had greater sway over the Arab world, or over the Arab world’s Shi’ite minority.

Its anti-Western rhetoric and purposes remain central. While the negotiations were ongoing, a Revolutionary Guards commander, Reza Naqdi, commented that “erasing Israel from the map’’ was “non-negotiable”.

Supreme leader Khamenei finished a big public gathering with the declaration: “Yes, death to America.”

It is worth googling Iran’s written constitution, with its commitment to “fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad” and its determination to forge leadership of all Muslims worldwide.

In the recent agreement, or framework, there is nothing about Iran’s international behaviour, nothing about its sponsorship of terrorism, no limitation on its missile program, nothing about threatening to wipe another nation off the map, as though it would be bad form to consider such language and behaviour relevant in assessing whether a nation should possess the ability to produce nuclear weapons.

Nothing has represented better the collapse of will among some of the American leadership than the continued fancy that this negotiation will “empower the moderates” and “sideline the extremists” within Iran’s leadership.

How often has that wretched formulation been used to justify walking away from hard policies?

Iran is a coherent and sophisticated nation with a long tradition of statecraft. It is a completely different entity from Islamic State or al-Qa’ida. Yet it is in competition with those bodies to define and represent the most pure and faithful form of Islam.

All of Iran’s recent strategic gains have come from hardline, strategic aggression and sticking with regional allies, no matter how unsavoury or how much trouble they’re in.

With the immense gift of this legitimisation of its nuclear program and freedom from sanctions, why would its leaders suddenly reverse course? They might — anything is possible — and if Obama draws from Iran the strategic change of course that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger drew from China when they made their strategic play for influence with Beijing, then Obama will go down in history as a strategic genius.

But don’t hold your breath.

Islamic State and al-Qa’ida have been extraordinarily successful on two levels: destroying the old Arab order of coherent states and recruiting tens of thousands of adherents, across the Middle East and North Africa, to their interpretation of jihad.

In Syria, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon, all of which were once coherent if often dictatorial states, the dominant role is now played by warring militias. Militias have replaced governments. The West has not helped Arab politics move beyond dictatorship and it has not prevented the disintegration of states.

Obama has been flayed in congress but does not suffer much real domestic pressure over the Iran capitulation, in part because Western electorates are no longer interested in foreign affairs or even security, except when they are directly hit by terrorist attacks. The Economist last week ran a series of articles lamenting the decline of Britain. Its military budget and capabilities are in severe decline. Its diplomatic budget is in decline. Foreign affairs is playing the smallest role in any general election for decades.

The same is true in Australia. The Abbott government has had undeniable success in foreign affairs, with free trade agreements, alliance management, emer­gency responses, regional relationships and much else. Yet this has afforded it not one speck of electoral fortune.

The decline of mass media in the West means that foreign policy specialists no longer have the mass audience they once had to interpret the world and adjudicate a nation’s foreign policy. The electorate is siloed into digital ghettos. What information it does get on international affairs is frequently highly fictional, the conspiratorial nonsense of the internet, celebrity tweets and new media fixations.

Australia is a classic case in point. Our national broadcaster, the ABC, gets much more than $1 billion from the taxpayer every year, representing by far the most serious media concentration in Australia. There have been countless government reports extolling the centrality of Asia to Australia’s future.

Yet when Lee Kuan Yew, arguably the most important statesman in the history of southeast Asia, died recently, neither of the ABC’s flagship current affairs programs, 7.30 and Lateline, could muster a single word about it. No analysis, no discussion, no Australian reflections. Nothing.

The analogous BBC program interviewed Henry Kissinger on Lee’s significance.

The ABC puts staff into developing websites for Chinese TV but grievously neglects its core duty within Australia. How can Australian politics and society possibly be expected to cope intelligently with crises in Southeast Asia, which will inevitably crop up, when the ABC, with its vast bounty of government money, cannot be bothered to cover its most seminal and historic events?

But Australia here is the West writ small.

We are bucking a Western trend in maintaining a reasonably decent defence budget. But this looks more and more like a function of Tony Abbott’s singular political personality and convictions. Will the defence dollars be low-hanging fruit for any prime minister other than Abbott?

The Western trend is for unsustainable social expenditure, entitlements that governments can no longer possibly pay while money is drained away from national security, even as the national security challenges grow ever more urgent.

The President of the US is inevitably more than just a national leader. He is the leader of the West, broadly defined. He is the leader of that coalition of nations and people committed to democracy and human rights, or at least towards trying to move in that ­direction.

The alternative to Obama’s Iran capitulation was not war but continued and intensified sanctions, and the rallying of allies towards preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

This path may not have been successful. But it would have been better than the collapse of will that Obama has displayed.

Would Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush be different?

We can only hope.