Tuesday, August 18, 2015

There are good reasons to hate the Iran deal, they just aren't our reasons

I'm with JMM on this. The best arguments against the deal with Iran have little to do with Iran's nuclear program and are more about how increased normalization of relations between the rest of the world and how that affects the strategic interests of various countries in the region. Iran's rapprochement with other world powers, especially the U.S., has major down sides for countries like Saudi Arabia, and (although I think it's more debatable) Israel. Those liabilities are not liabilities for the U,.S. (at least not directly), and moving towards a normalized relationship with Iran has all kinds of up sides for the U.S. that countries like KSA and Israel will not directly benefit from.

In the background of the debate over the Iran deal is the simple idea that the American and Israeli interests are not always identical, and can even sometimes be at odds with one another. Some things will just be in the U.S.'s interest and not Israel's and vice-versa. That is okay. When interests are adverse to one another and cause the countries to act differently,, that doesn't mean that one is betraying the other. It doesn't even mean that the two countries aren't still bestest friends. It just means that they really are different countries. That should be an obvious point. But a lot of people cannot seem to comprehend that basic truth.

That is why the whole "no daylight" idea is so absurd. You can't really have no daylight between the U.S. and Israel unless the U.S. is willing to sometimes act against its clear national interests, or unless Israel is nothing more than an American colony rather than a real independent nation.