Campaigning for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul el Sayed on Saturday, former President Barack Obama falsely claimed that Iran is in a stronger strategic position now than it was before President Donald Trump launched the Iran war in February. But Obama correctly observed that the U.S. is in a weaker strategic position due to the war.
Let’s start with what Obama got wrong.
First up is his claim that “Iran now has veto power over the Strait of Hormuz, where oil goes through to get to the world. So, they’re in a stronger strategic position now than before the war started.”
This is plainly inaccurate. Iran’s missile, nuclear, and leadership infrastructure has been seriously degraded, and its economy is suffering a severe crisis. The U.S. Navy blockade of Iranian energy exports is denying Iran access to basic goods and, with time, will prevent the regime from paying off its security forces (who, like everyone else in Iran, are laboring under soaring inflation). As things stand, Iran is in a manifestly weaker position vis-à-vis its ability to project power than it was prior to the war. Crucially, export transits through the Strait of Hormuz have now increased above prewar levels. While this is happening only at significantly higher transit and insurance costs, and thanks to an extensive U.S. military protective umbrella (a problem I’ll explore in a minute), Iran plainly is not in a stronger strategic position than it was eight months ago.
Obama’s second invention was his claim that “I put a [nuclear] deal in place that everybody acknowledged kept [Iran] from getting nukes.”
Everybody? Really? This is vintage Obama. It’s the foreign policy equivalent of “If you like your health plan, you can keep it.”
While it’s true that Iran did not construct a nuclear weapon under Obama’s 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement, it engaged in extensive, covert weaponization research. In addition, the JCPOA provided wholly inadequate inspection safeguards regarding what Iran was doing behind closed doors. In return, it granted vast sanctions relief that allowed Iran to heavily bolster its terrorist activities and other activities targeting the U.S. and its allies across the Middle East. Put simply, it put a temporary, leaking lid on Iran’s nuclear threat while dramatically boosting the regime’s broader strategic challenge. It was neither a sustainable nor a credible long-term solution.
On the flip side, however, Obama is correct that the war has put the U.S. in a weaker strategic position.
Obama’s contention that “we’ve run down our stock of missiles dangerously low” is the key. As some of us noted prior to the war, missile interceptor depletion was entirely predictable. That depletion has greatly reduced the United States’s means of defending against the onslaught of Chinese missile attacks that would target U.S. bases at the outset of any war over Taiwan. And that war would be of far greater consequence to U.S. interests than the Iran war.
The willful prewar failure by many on the political Right to recognize these concerns is made worse today by the fact that it will take years to reconstitute these interceptor stocks. The war has also severely stretched the U.S. military. The redeployment of U.S. aircraft carriers out of the Pacific has been closely observed, for example, both by America’s Pacific allies and by China.
It needn’t have been this way.
DISRESPECTED BY TRUMP, DENMARK KEEPS PROVING ITSELF A TOP ALLY
Instead of focusing military action on keeping Iran’s nuclear program bottled up, Trump gambled with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that airstrikes would quickly collapse the Iranian theocracy. Instead, that gambit led Iran to embrace full-scale retaliation, which caused months of soaring energy prices for America and its allies and numerous damaging attacks on U.S. forces and allies in the Middle East. The U.S. has thus endured very significant strategic costs in return for only a temporary restraint on Iran’s nuclear threat.
Yet, on Iran, as on all things, it is a mistake to listen to what Obama says and take him at face value.