Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khāmenei, Superme Leader of Iran. Photo: Sajed.ir.

The Atlantic Council, a think tank chaired by defense secretary nominee Chuck Hagel which last month published a column titled “Israel’s Apartheid Policy,” during the same month predicted that Iran “should be viewed as a potential natural partner” for the U.S.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that the think tank’s December policy paper titled “Envisioning 2030: U.S. Strategy for a Post-Western World,” which was not written by Hagel himself, predicted the following of an Iranian regime that continues to forge ahead with its nuclear program and bankroll both Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism: “A post-mullah dominated government shedding Shia [Muslim] ideology could easily return to being a net contributor to stability by 2030.”

The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) has called President Barack Obama’s Hagel’s nomination of Hagel “a blow to U.S.-Israel relations, to the President’s relationship with the American Jewish community, and to U.S. security in the Middle East.”

Glenn Kessler, author of the Washington Post‘s “Fact Checker” column, noted that Hagel told the Associated Press after his 1998 Middle East visit that the Israeli government “essentially continues to play games.” Commenting on Palestinian terrorism, the former Nebraska senator said “Desperate men do desperate things when you take hope away.”

Additionally, in 2002, Hagel told CNN regarding Yasser Arafat that he would not “single out the Palestinians and Arafat as the real problem” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because “it doesn’t help when we take public sides on this and castigate and assign all of the responsibility and all the blame to one side.”