Iran's self-proclaimed negotiating strategy is modeled after North Korea's, which acquired nuclear weapons while "negotiating" with the United States, former Pentagon official and American Enterprise Institute Middle East expert Michael Rubin said Thursday on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
"North Korea was the state which achieved nuclear weapons against the backdrop of negotiating not only with the U.S., but some of the same individuals who are negotiating with Iran right now," Rubin said.
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Israel knows what many of the United States' Arab allies know, according to Rubin, which is that "the Obama administration would rather have a bad deal than no deal" with Iran.
Israel has been strident in maintaining that it will not allow Iran to become a nuclear nation. That position complicates the Obama administration's efforts to involve Iran in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS).
"Ultimately, the Israelis are going to approach this with a great deal of realism," Rubin said, while "unfortunately, the Americans are approaching this with anything but."
He says the
Obama administration's desperation to cut a deal with Iran, which would permit Iran to keep all 19,000 centrifuge machines and some other items necessary to build nuclear weapons, is frightening.
"What really scares me, and it's indicative of this administrations hostility to the U.S. constitution, is that as we negotiate a bad deal, a deal that will never get congressional approval, the Obama administration seems intent on bypassing the constitutional role of the Senate to approve any such treaty that we would strike with Iran," he said. "That ultimately is very dangerous. If the administration knows that it can't get the deal passed the Senate that the Senate simply doesn't trust the Obama administration's negotiators. Ultimately, the conclusion there should be negotiating a better deal, not scrap the U.S. constitution."
In the ongoing
battle between Israel and Hamas, Rubin said that Obama's failure to deal with Hamas' "radical extremists" and to effuse "moral equivalency" between the two factions only emboldens Hamas to take more radical positions.
"Whenever you have the State Department effusing moral equivalency, then what you have is the empowerment of extremists because extremists will figure so long as President Obama is going to cut things down the middle, we might as well stick out a much more extreme position," Rubin said. "Hamas was defeated in this recent war, but by pushing for a ceasefire, Hamas right now is actively in the stage of rearming."
Regarding the fight against ISIS, Rubin said the airstrikes are tantamount to ineffective symbolism.
"We're playing whack-a-mole with the airstrikes," he said. "They're a lot more symbolic than effective. We need to ask is that going to be enough to defeat ISIS. If not, what do we need to do to achieve that goal? President Obama may be looking at the polls on this, but we should have one commander-in-chief, not 300 million of them."
He cautioned the U.S. not to be optimistic about
Turkey possibly joining the coalition against ISIS, saying that while Turkey is renewing its authorization to use force — implemented two years ago — it has done nothing in those two years.
"Turkey's goal may be less defeat of ISIS and more prevention of the rise of the Kurds," he said.
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