Opinion: President Obama, Khamenei is not Khrushchev

U.S. President Barack Obama deserves to be complimented for the timing of his speech (the day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s) and the location. But the content? He was already working against market trends: Obama convinced the believers, but not the skeptics, who are not fear-mongering, as he claimed, but simply understand what is going on around them.

Obama, who has not properly read the international map since he entered the White House, handed out a failing grade to Netanyahu on Wednesday (“I believe he is wrong”), just because he disagrees. Must we remind the president that the two leaders also disagreed about Muslim Brotherhood rule in countries like Egypt and Tunisia after “the Arab Spring”? And who was right then, Mr. President?

“And because it’s such a strong deal, every nation in the world that has commented publicly, with the exception of the Israeli government, has expressed support,” Obama said. And why should that surprise us, considering that Israel is the only country in the world that Iran wants to destroy? Obama does not realize that for him, the deal is a gamble, but for us, it is an existential issue. That is also why the comparisons between the American and Iranian military budgets are outrageous. $600 billion for the U.S., as compared with $15 billion for Iran. That may be, but thanks to the deal, the Iranian budget will change dramatically. (The $150 billion that will be flowing into the Iranian economy will obviously not go toward planting trees.) And if that were not enough, this huge difference between the countries’ military capabilities could have been used as deterrence. But he preferred to offer sweeping concessions.

Obama wanted to give us a history lesson on Wednesday. We really liked the references to John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. However, Obama is forgetting one fundamental difference between the Soviet Union then and today’s Iran: the religious, radical Islamic element, and the question of rationality in the Iranian revolutionary Shiite regime.

Former superpower

Obama forgot to tell his audience on Wednesday how then-leader of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev was rattled by America’s strength and Kennedy’s toughness in handling the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Obama also forgot to talk about how Reagan’s toughness with the Soviets (as with the air traffic controllers crisis) led to Mikhail Gorbachev’s submission and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And Iran is not even like the Soviet Union. The latter was a world power that saw itself as a direct opponent of the United States, while Iran is a regional power that enjoyed a status boost thanks to Obama.

The American president is promising us increased military assistance. That is the minimum he could do after considerably heightening the Iranian threat. If only he could tell us exactly what kind of Iron Dome he plans to provide us with at the moment that Iran’s breakout time — as he said in a radio interview a few months ago — reaches nearly zero, in “year 13, 14, 15” of the deal.

And which Obama should we believe? The one from the radio interview, or the one from Wednesday’s speech? It’s possible that the deal is so unclear, even the administration doesn’t understand it.

Obama was presented as a hero on Wednesday, as if he had, at the very minimum, signed a peace treaty with Iran. He didn’t change the Iranians, and that’s the story. His deal essentially recognized the Islamic revolution, allowing Iran to join the family of nations and opening it up to significant economic gains.

A deal “or some form of war. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not three months from now, but soon,” Obama said on Wednesday. But he didn’t understand that the major power gap between America and other countries means that the U.S. does not need to go to war against Iran, it just has to apply pressure until Iran submits. But for that, Obama would need to stop dwarfing his country in relation to other nations.

Too bad Kennedy or Reagan weren’t around, as they could have told Obama: “We don’t doubt your sincerity. But we believe you are wrong.”