Iran’s Arak heavy water facility. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A sick feeling ran through my veins as I watched Secretary of State John Kerry announce that the Iranian nuclear agreement had been implemented. He spoke like the programmed robot we used to see on old science fiction TV shows. As if the words had already been recorded, Kerry’s lips moved in sync, while his monotone cadence tried to sell us on this dangerous and impossible-to-enforce agreement. As the ghost of Neville Chamberlain hovered, Kerry tried assuring the world that ending sanctions and providing billions of dollars in relief, and paving the way for the largest state sponsor of Islamic terror to eventually possess nuclear weapons was — a good deal?

President Obama has achieved his greatest fantasy. We should now understand what he meant by his electioneering promise to “fundamentally change America.” He will leave office confident that America, once the powerful beacon of freedom, will be weaker, more divisive and vulnerable. His presidency will end with the world in chaos, where despotic maniacal dictators can purchase nuclear weapons on the open market, confident that America will do nothing about it. Mr. Obama has given them every reason to believe there are no “red lines.”

It is impossible to trust that Iran will adhere to an agreement designed to forestall and delay an apocalyptic goal. Obama’s is the same naiveté that assured us we could pay off North Korea to cede its nuclear ambitions. Just last week, that belligerent and isolated failed state may have test-fired a hydrogen bomb while forging ahead with the development and testing of ballistic missiles designed to hit the United States. Do you think Iran will have a different approach?

Whatever Iran may have temporarily put in storage units or shut down for the sake of the IAEA inspectors, it will have the finances to continue the pursuit of nukes offshore via its friends in North Korea. If Iran were to abide by this disastrous 15-year agreement (which it won’t), even Obama and Kerry and their band of leftist merrymakers admit the ayatollahs will eventually have zero break-out time to a nuclear weapon. Then what? At that moment in the very near future, Iran will be a far richer country with a vast nuclear infrastructure hidden and secured deep within the mountainous regions of the country, impervious to attack.

Obama and his supporters always argued the only choice was between diplomacy and war. He was wrong. Initially, sanctions got Iran to the negotiating table and would have eventually choked its economy into capitulation. Even if the US were the only country imposing economic sanctions, we would have had the influence and power to achieve a better outcome. Adversaries would have respected our determination. We lack leadership today; that is why the sanctions regime failed.

So here we are. As Kerry receives his Nobel Peace Prize and Obama sails off into the
sunset of his failed administration, history will one day record the Iranian agreement as a cataclysmic disaster, one that “fundamentally changed America” — and the world.