Rubio’s Iran Tantrum and the Hawkish Loathing of Diplomacy | The American Conservative

Rubio’s Iran Tantrum and the Hawkish Loathing of Diplomacy | The American Conservative

To understand how degraded is our political situation remember this:
- Yesterday Sarah Palin proved that she cannot leave her 25 year old son home alone as she did when traveling to Iowa to embrace Donald Trump.
- Marco Rubio is the Republican Party's outstanding national-security candidate - and an embarrassment with no ascertainable respect for facts.
- GWC

Rubio’s Iran Tantrum and the Hawkish Loathing of Diplomacy | The American Conservative
by Daniel Larison
Marco Rubio’s response to the string of diplomatic successes with Iran is as foolish as one would expect:

By channeling this money to Tehran and giving the mullahs international legitimacy, the Obama administration is fueling the greatest growth in Iranian power since the Islamic Republic was established in 1979. What’s worse, for months Iran has telegraphed in word and deed how it plans to utilize this newfound power—namely, to dominate the Middle East and threaten American security.

Rubio is wrong or misleading in everything he says here. The money that has been freed up by sanctions relief are Iranian assets that had been inaccessible to them because of sanctions on their nuclear program. Now that Iran has complied with the terms of the deal, they are gaining access to their own money from which they had been cut off. As Fred Kaplan notes, this rewards Iran for doing what the U.S. wants it to do. The greatest growth in Iranian power in the region came when the U.S. toppled its hostile neighboring regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Compared to that, the so-called “windfall” from sanctions relief is a pittance, and in exchange for letting Iran have access to its own money the U.S. achieves a longstanding goal of limiting Iran’s nuclear program and making it practically impossible for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon for decades to come. Iran’s regional position has been steadily getting worse over the last five years, and it is in no position to dominate the region, and its ability to threaten our security is no greater than it was a decade ago.

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