Iran Is the Issue

A Harris presidency…would be a fourth Obama term of rapprochement with Iran

In an interview with the Free Press’s Bari Weiss on July 30, Haviv Rettig Gur, one of Israel’s sharpest commentators, put the matter succinctly: “Until you solve Iran, nations will continue to be demolished…. Everybody’s lives in the Middle East depend on ending the Iranian regime’s crusade that has so far conquered and destroyed, or is in some state of destroying, four different Arab countries, and wants to destroy my country….”

Rettig Gur goes on to conclude that there is no hope from the Democratic Party of addressing the Iranian threat: “[The Democrats] cannot, will not, don’t know how. They don’t have a vocabulary of foreign policy that allows them to seriously take up that challenge.”

Would a second Trump administration do better? If by better, one means attacking Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, no one can say. But a future Trump administration would surely adopt a far more aggressive stance toward Iran. When Trump came into office in 2017, he immediately imposed secondary sanctions on countries doing business with Iran, which dramatically reduced Iran’s oil revenue and therefore the operational capabilities of its various proxies. In addition, he withdrew from the JCPOA, under which Iran was free to obtain nuclear weapons in the not-to-distant future, and which placed no restrictions on its ballistic missile program.

All those steps were immediately reversed when the Biden administration entered office. Secondary sanctions were removed, and, as a consequence, Iran’s annual oil income has ballooned to close to $100 billion. Whereas there were no flareups between Israel and Hamas during the Trump presidency, within months of Biden’s entry into office, Hamas had once again launched rocket attacks on Israel.