If Congress Rejects Nuclear Deal, Would US and Not Iran Be a Pariah?

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush played down diplomacy in favor of isolation and military action – unilateral American action if necessary – for dealing with rogue states like Iraq and Iran.

The approach never won the broad support of global powers, instead leaving the United States essentially isolated and criticized, rather than supported, as it sought to address the regime of Saddam Hussein. When Mr. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, America was left to largely go it alone.

More than a decade later, the US could once again find itself on the outs with the rest of the world if, after years of painstaking negotiations with other world powers, it ends up rejecting the Iran nuclear deal, some foreign policy experts say.

But critics of the deal say it is actually Obama who is exposing his belief in “regime change” – by promoting a deal that counts on the Iranian government’s transformation over the coming decade.

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“You can’t understand the nuclear deal with Iran without believing that in the decade ahead, there will be regime change in Tehran – although they [the deal’s proponents] call it regime transformation,” says Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.

The “irony” that Mr. Dubowitz sees a decade after Bush’s “axis of evil” is that once again, it is “regime change” that the US would deploy to deal with Iran – although, he says, it’s in a form more palatable to the world.

“It’s regime change, but in a sense it’s being flipped on its head,” Dubowitz says.

“In the place of the right advocating force and coercion, you have the left saying, ‘Don’t worry about the details of this deal, because in 10 years’ time when some of the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program are gone, it won’t matter,’ ” he says. “They really believe the deal will have set in motion a chain of events that will change the nature and behavior of this regime.”

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