A traitors opinion…
John Kerry: Diplomacy Was Working Until Trump Abandoned It
•The president put us on a path toward conflict and turmoil with Iran•
By John Kerry
•Mr. Kerry was secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
Jan. 9, 2020
President Trump says that on his watch, Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. But if he had wanted to keep that promise, he should have left the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement in place. Instead, he pulled the United States out of the deal and pursued a reckless foreign policy that has put us on a path to armed conflict with Iran.
After Mr. Trump authorized the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani last week, Iran announced it was no longer obligated to follow the agreement, which had reined in its nuclear ambitions, and it launched ballistic missiles at two Iraqi bases housing American troops, to little effect. Adding to the turmoil, the Iraqi Parliament approved a largely symbolic resolution to expel American troops who have been fighting the Islamic State.
Though Mr. Trump has since walked back from the brink of war, I can’t explain the chaos of his presidency as it lurches from crisis to crisis, real or manufactured. The president has said he “doesn’t do exit strategies.” Clearly he doesn’t do strategies, period.
This moment was nothing if not foreseeable the moment Mr. Trump abandoned the 2015 agreement, which was working, and chose instead to isolate us from our allies, narrow our options in the region and slam shut the door to tackling additional issues with Iran through constructive diplomacy.
Now the drone strike that eliminated General Suleimani has almost certainly nailed that door shut. President Trump had the right to jettison an agreement he disliked. But we’re witnessing the consequences of that heedless act in a region that is today significantly more volatile than when his administration began in 2017. Strategies have consequences — and so does the lack of a strategy.
Let’s get one straw man out of the way. General Suleimani was a sworn, unapologetic enemy of the United States, a cagey field marshal who oversaw Iran’s long strategy to extend the country’s influence through sectarian proxies in the region. He won’t be mourned or missed by anyone in the West. Occasionally, when American and Iranian interests aligned, as they did in fighting ISIS, we were the serendipitous beneficiaries of his relationships and levers, as were the Iraqis. But this was a rare exception.
That underscores the tragic irony of Mr. Trump’s decision to abrogate the nuclear agreement: It played into General Suleimani’s hard-line strategy by weakening voices for diplomacy within the Tehran regime. What Iranian diplomat would be empowered by a skeptical supreme leader to explore de-escalation with a country that broke its word on a historic agreement and then, in their words, “martyred” arguably Iran’s second most powerful figure?
Presidents make lonely, difficult decisions about the use of force to protect our interests — usually with the solace of knowing at least that diplomacy had failed. The tragedy of our current plight is that diplomacy was succeeding before it was abandoned….
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/john-kerry-trump-iran.html#click=https://t.co/yY3NPCZ7Q6