Find Someone Who Looks at You Like Rob Malley Looks at Iran

T here is a grotesque absurdity in the fact that, even as Joe Biden strikes a tough pose against Russia, he is working with Vladimir Putin to empower the Islamic regime in Iran, a nation that is just as nefarious, as illiberal, and as antagonistic as Russia is to American interests. The only thing that stops Iran from acting like the Russia of the Middle East has been its inability to procure nuclear weapons.

Yet the United States and other Western nations — as well as Russia — are reportedly close to reaching a deal to restore the toothless Obama-era nuclear agreement with Iran. The one holdup, it seems, is Russia’s demand for a “written guarantee” that sanctions “will not in any way damage [Russia’s] full trade, economic and investment cooperation and military-technical cooperation with the Islamic State.” If history is any gauge, Biden will capitulate.

One wonders: Will Biden and Putin congratulate each other when it’s done, as Obama and the Russian dictator did after they forged the original deal? Will there be a joint press conference with negotiators from the two world powers even as Putin crushes a sovereign nation?

If anyone deserves to bask in the glory of the Iran deal, it will be Rob Malley, Biden’s lead envoy in negotiations. When Biden appointed Malley, it was widely reported that “conservatives” and “hawks” opposed the pick. While that’s true, it’s also true that the choice was cheered on by virtually every antagonist of the Jewish state, from Code Pink’s Ariel Gold, to Peter Beinart, Ben Rhodes, Matt Duss, the National Iranian American Council, and Mullah-lobbyists at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, for starters. And for good reason.

Entering deals with bad people can serve legitimate national interests. We make such deals all the time. But the obsession with an Iranian rapprochement is a mystery unless understood as an effort to create a counterweight to Israeli power. And while Antony Blinken, Wendy Sherman, and Jake Sullivan seem to embrace this tactic, Malley’s positions aren’t even propelled by realpolitik or your average left-wing hostility toward Israel. Much like his “anti-imperialist” dad (Egyptian-born Simon Malley, one-time champion of communist and antisemitic regimes throughout the Middle East and confidant of terrorists such as Yasser Arafat), Rob Malley is far more likely to see Israel as the enemy.

The most generous proposal ever made to the Palestinian people, by perhaps the only nation ever willing to create a new hostile state on its border, included an autonomous West Bank and Gaza Strip, the establishment of a capital in eastern Jerusalem with sovereignty over the Muslim and Christian neighborhoods of the old Jerusalem, massive infusions of cash, among a slew of other gifts. Bill Clinton had brokered the deal, and after Arafat rejected it, at Camp David in July 2000, Clinton laid the blame squarely on the Palestinian leader.

Malley took the opposite stance and blamed the Israelis. In 2001, after Fatah and Hamas unleashed a wave of violence, Malley argued in the New York Times that the Israelis hadn’t offered enough at Camp David. (Malley was good enough not to co-write the op-ed with his regular collaborator, former Arafat adviser Hussein Agha.) Malley posited that Israelis were at fault for the collapse of the peace deal because, among other reasons, they’d failed to embrace the Palestinians’ “right of return,” a suicidal policy, based on a largely fictitious narrative, that would obliterate the Jewish and liberal character of Israel.

It was clear that Arafat had been posturing, anyway. Any deal would have meant hard-liners toppling his dictatorship. And those are the hard-liners whom Malley would be most interested in fêting.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, then still feigning pro-Israel inclinations, severed ties with Malley because the academic had met with sometime–Iranian proxy Hamas, a group designated as a terror organization by the Justice Department for targeting Jews worldwide. “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad,” reads the Hamas charter. Malley and other Obama allies would meet again with Hamas in 2010. “This administration is different from the previous administration,” Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Ahmed Yussuf, noted at the time. “We believe Hamas’s message is reaching its destination.” It would, soon enough.

As soon as Obama won reelection — proving that animus toward Israel was no longer a detriment to Democratic Party politics — Malley was back on the team as a special assistant to the president and as the White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region. Malley led U.S. negotiations on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the Iran deal — until it was signed in 2015. This is tantamount to Biden’s tapping former Trump adviser Douglas Macgregor to make a deal with Russia over Ukraine.

The Iran deal, it’s worth remembering, is probably the only international accord the United States has ever entered into where it offered extensive concessions to a nation that continued to destabilize its interests, kill its soldiers, and threaten its allies, and where America asked for nothing in return other than a promise that the other side would uphold preexisting obligations. Iran is a signee to the nonproliferation pact.

When you remember how far Obama was willing to go to appease Iran to get a deal, the Biden position makes more sense. The Obama administration refused to support an Iranian popular uprising — a move that Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky called the biggest failure to help human rights in modern history. Obama released Iranian spies tagged by the Justice Department as threats to national security, and the White House refused to pressure Europeans to hand over a Hezbollah operative named Ali Fayyad, who had been indicted in U.S. courts for planning to kill government employees and who was thought to report to Putin. Team Obama looked the other way when Hezbollah funded its operations through criminal enterprises in the United States. In Syria, Obama appeased and empowered Russia. In an effort to keep the Iran deal on track, the White House secretly airlifted more than $400 million in hard cash (the first installment of a $1.7 billion payment to Iran) as ransom for the release of four Americans held in Iranian prison. The move was so above-board that the administration sent an unmarked cargo plane to Tehran, filled with wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs, and other currencies.

But the Iran deal’s biggest accomplishment was allowing the Islamic Republic to get as close as possible to obtaining nuclear weapons without having them. It hampered Israel’s ability to undermine the weapons program, because Iran was, perversely, now under an umbrella of American protection. President Trump withdrew from the Iran deal and reimplemented intense economic pressure. But if the deal had remained in place, Tehran today would be closer to producing deliverable nuclear weapons. It’s difficult to believe this isn’t what Malley wanted.

Iranians continue to develop a ballistic-missile program, an issue the Obama administration caved on at the behest of Putin, who was, and is, the mullahs’ top arms provider. The International Atomic Energy Agency would never find that the Islamic state was violating the nuclear agreement because, from the start, Iran prohibited inspections on its military sites.

Today, the Biden administration claims that it is merely renewing the JCPOA, in its effort to unconstitutionally circumvent Senate approval. It is reportedly willing to lift sanctions against terrorists who have mass-murdered hundreds of Americans. It is willing to use a Russian envoy as its chief intermediary, even as Putin crushes Ukraine, to forge a deal that it hopes might alleviate some of the energy-price pressures at home, rather than increase domestic energy production. And it is willing to let an Iran-appeasing, anti-Israel radical forge the deal.