Steve Apfel is an economist and former director and founder of the School of Management Accounting. He is a veteran authority on anti-Zionism.
The article is adapted from one posted on American Spectator
What is it about Switzerland? Three Presidents have tried their luck at dealing with blatant insanity. Obama played his cards in Lausanne in 2015 and Biden after five years bet on Vienna. Under President Trump Geneva’s turn came.
His golf pal Steve Witkoff seemingly playing off a higher handicap when acting to stop wars, went through the motions of giving the Mullah team another chance. I’m sorry, but I struggle to give the real estate developer the time of day as an authentic broker of global peace. Take the latest exchange he had with Trump’s daughter-in-law:
“He's curious as to why they haven't...I don't want to use the word capitulated, but why they haven't capitulated. Why under this sort of pressure with the amount of naval power that we have there, why they haven't come to us and said, ‘We profess that we don't want a weapon, so here's what we're prepared to do.’ And yet it's hard to sort of get them to that place."
In any event, Witkoff grasped they were in no deal-making mood. Far from it.
“In that first meeting, the (two) Iranian negotiators said to us, with no shame, that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60 percent, and are aware they could make 11 nuclear bombs, and that was the beginning of their negotiating stance."
Of all murky lunacies, redoing nuclear talks with born liars and lunatics is the most comic, the most stupid, the most perilous. What could possibly make Obama reckless enough to think of trying? Not merely try: literally to beg, bribe, borrow and - yes, defeat the ends of justice - to keep the l’s and l’s skylarking in the meeting room.
Two motives scrambled the only black President’s grey matter. One motive was ending his term of office with a signature legacy, capped by the Nobel Peace Prize. The second was not a human failing at all. The 44th President said he meant to empower the madcap theocracy, not bring it down. Iran, hitherto America’s number one foe, was going to be, in the world’s number one hotspot, America’s number one ally. A detente brewed between the world’s powerhouse and the world’s sour pickle jar.
Biden his sidekick was no more than a clockwork buffoon. But the 47th President is a different proposition. His triumph over the evil regime was not the art of the deal but the art of the dupe. ‘Diplomatic solution’ was the Trump card. “The president prefers them greatly", his Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters; even when the terrorists in suits were bragging about a nuclear breakout to Witkoff’s face.
Trump’s serial ultimatums accompanied by frantic appeals for talks were more such diversions.
Never mind the MAGA movement. Most American adults began to doubt Trump's judgment, if a February 19-23 poll conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs is accurate.
As for the isolationist crowd, a military escapade in the Middle East scares the hell out of it. Zionists getting America to fight their wars are not the flavour of the day. Bait clicks for populists such as Tucker Carlson are as likely as the risk of Iran’s ballistic missiles to de-escalate.
Many in the MAGA movement looked askew at the President’s involvement in Ukraine, Venezuela, Gaza as a betrayal of his vow to put “America first." It would all have blown up in his face had Trump not bombed the terrors of Tehran to smithereens but cut a deal which froze rather than dismantled their nuclear program, declaring it better than Obama’s excuse for a deal.
The week before he struck, Trump like a pettish boy told Iran it had "better negotiate a fair deal." It followed February’s uprising when 33,000 unarmed protesters were gunned down. He had not stood his word: in January he announced the US would come to the rescue of protesters if the regime resorted to violence to quell uprisings. That’s exactly what they did - locals told the BBC it was unlike anything before. Trump now promised Iranians that "help is on the way". They waited. We waited.
Resorting to real signal scrambling, Trump narrowed the mindset, telling the Mullahs they must do two things to avoid being bombed:
"Number one, no nuclear. Number two, stop killing protesters. They are killing them by the thousands" he exclaimed. On CBS Evening News he warned about "very strong actions" if public executions occurred. "They were going to hang 837 people, and I gave them the word, if you hang one person, even one person, that you're going to be hit right then and there. I wasn't waiting two weeks and negotiating. And they gave up the hanging. They didn't hang 837, supposedly they didn't hang anybody."
Of course it’s not the way Jew-hatred works. Threat of punishment is unlikely to impact it. Obama misunderstood this very thing. He once lectured The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg about the behaviour of monster Mullahs.
“There are deep strains of anti-Semitism in the core regime, but they also are interested in maintaining power." Goldberg begged to disagree.
“It’s my belief that it is difficult to negotiate with parties that are captive to a conspiratorial anti-Semitic worldview; not because they hold offensive views, but because they hold ridiculous views… I don’t believe that the regime can be counted on to be entirely rational."
The truth lies deeper. Yes, there’s nothing calculated in verbal attacks of the kind that Iran makes. Like a volcano they seem to emanate from some deep superheated disturbance. But when anti-Semites spew vitriol at Israel they do more than distort facts or recite a miscellany of canards. Seldom do anti-Semites react to provocation, to what Jews have done.
When a core figure warns that Iran needs only 24 hours and an excuse to wipe Israel off the map, he’s not mad at Israel’s deeds. He’s passionately in love with hating Jews. Anti-Semites are not, as the phrase goes, in their right minds. In a real sense they are out of their minds. A passion can do that. And the passion that collects around Israel is like no other. It consumes whole countries, even distorts trade. Quite sane leaders lose their minds over Israel.
Walter Russell Mead illuminates the phenomenon.
“Nations and political establishments warped by this hatred tend to make one dumb decision after another - starting at shadows, warding off imaginary dangers, misunderstanding the nature of problems they face."
It’s what Goldberg was getting at, and what pulled him up short. Debriefing Foreign Policy Journal afterwards he bemoaned the President’s obtuseness.
“Obama doesn’t seem to fully understand that anti-Semites actually believe the dangerous and idiotic things they say." Had he not been a died-in-the-wool Democrat, perhaps Goldberg would have paid closer attention to the President’s own ‘take’ on the subject. Had he done so Obama would not have slipped the most cardinal error past him:
“The fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power; and so the fact that (Iran’s) supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations."
But it does: ergo the fatal move which ultimately cost the Third Reich victory. No one taught Obama that the extermination of Jews was not a means to an end but an end in itself? He doesn’t know that the Final Solution was not a part of the war effort, it was fully equal to the whole war effort? He’s not aware that resources needed for winning the war were diverted to the higher priority of putting Jews to death?
He never read about the failure of Operation Barbarossa, a turning point in the fortunes of the Third Reich, in no small measure caused by the diversion of trains for Hitler’s genocide project? Hitler condemned his own troops to the pitiless Russian winter so that trains to death camps would continue to run and oven chimneys would continue to smoke.
Trump was testing voter patience to the limit. More than his support for Israel, more than displaying empathy for the Iranian people, he had to stand by his word. He’d publicly vowed to rescue the Iranians. Operation joint attack was late for tens of thousands of freedom-crazed Iranians who lost their lives.
But “Epic Fury" demonstrated that the President was not an Obama who drew a red line but recoiled from keeping it. ‘If you dare cross this line I shall draw a new one.’