From this perspective, we can see why John Kerry’s statement on Iran is so important. The point of the Iran deal is to put America in the position of being the bad guy who needs to be reined in, the rogue nation, the dishonest deal-breaker, the one who will be blamed if the deal falls apart and who will be responsible for every bad consequence that follows.

We’re the ones who are assumed to “not negotiate in good faith,” and who will “set in motion a series of inevitables about what would happen with respect to Iranian behavior.” Isn’t that last part great? We will be responsible for “Iranian behavior.” This is a regime motivated by a fanatical, totalitarian ideology, for which they have imprisoned, tortured, and killed their own citizens; they’re one of the world’s leading state sponsors of terror, from Lebanon to Gaza to Iraq and even all the way to Argentina; they routinely issue genocidal threats against Israel, and they’re practically running Bashar Assad’s brutal war of extermination in Syria. But no, no, no. If Congress doesn’t vote for a deal that accomplishes nothing, then we will be responsible for everything that happens from here on out.

It’s an insolent inversion of reality, of course, but it’s consistent with the worldview from which Kerry and President Obama emerged. Kerry is the man who launched his career by accusing his fellow veterans of war crimes in Vietnam, as if we were the oppressors and mass-murderers in Southeast Asia, rather than the totalitarian Communists. And notice that in his speech defending the Iran deal on Wednesday, President Obama began by reciting a selective, myopic history of the region that basically blamed all of the problems in the Middle East on George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. He went on to offer an idiosyncratic history of the Cold War in which the most important and admirable component of American strategy was our willingness to negotiate arms control treaties. And he closed by accusing all opponents of the deal of recklessly setting the Middle East on the path to war. So the root of all foreign policy problems is America’s own tendency toward warlike belligerence, which is what we must suppress in order to reassure our opponents.