The White House and its supporters were set on two goals, one of them trivial, the other terrifying. The trivial objective was to give a failed presidency at least one foreign policy legacy item. That was to be expected, since the Obama administration, in permanent campaign mode since the day the president took office, has presided over the worst American foreign policy in the modern era.
The more stomach-churning objective is that the administration, as it turned out, really believed in its pledges to get America out of the Middle East, and decided early on that the only way to do this was to replace the United States in the region with a duumvirate of Russia and Iran. Here, the JCPOA was part of a huge gamble to transform the region, with nuclear weapons the secondary rather than primary issue. That’s why J Street and others were involved: they were far less concerned with notional Iranian nuclear weapons than they were with advancing President Obama’s Middle East legacy—without having to admit what it was.
Many of us who opposed the Iran deal suspected this was going on, but we could only reconstruct evidence for that suspicion indirectly. (One analyst who got it right early: Mike Doran, previously of the Bush 43 National Security Countil and the Brookings Institution, and now at the Hudson Institute.) But then Rhodes shot his mouth off to The New York Times, thus saving the rest of us any further detective work.
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