Weakness’ Invitation

If there is one thing President Obama made clear about his foreign policy when he took office is that it would be the antithesis of his predecessor’s. Convinced that the Bush Administration had gratuitously alienated America’s friends and antagonized our enemies for eight years, the president has pursued a clear policy of multilateral engagement with countries previously hostile to the United States.

The clearest iteration of this is the administration’s relations with the mullahs of Iran. Through a firm commitment to sustained dialogue on an even plane, the Obama administration has hoped to achieve a level of understanding between the two parties that will permit both to realize common interests and that will ultimately diffuse the threat of a nuclear Iran.

To that end, the administration has left no doubt as to their commitment to beginning and preserving dialogue with the mullahs. When thousands of Iranians took to the streets last spring protesting a fixed presidential election, President Obama went out of his way not to say anything that might be construed as sympathetic or supportive of the dissidents. Instead he called for moderation from both sides in diffusing a crisis that threatened to derail bilateral negotiations.

A few weeks later the president presided over a meeting of the UN Security Council and refused to divulge intelligence of a nuclear facility that Iran had been concealing for years. This revelation, as clear a sign as any of the regime’s malfeasance and duplicity, could have created momentum within the Council for stricter international sanctions. Indeed, it was what a handful of America’s allies on the council were calling for. Yet landing such a bombshell would have run the risk of derailing a round of discussions that the American administration had committed to. This was unacceptable to the president, who used the Council meeting instead to express his hopes for a nuclear free world generally while conspicuously ignoring the world’s most imminent nuclear problem specifically.

Unfortunately these painstaking efforts over the past year have all been for naught. Far from stepping back from their nuclear development, Iran has become even more emboldened going forward. Not only have they demurred at the basket of carrots offered to them to ship their nuclear material abroad, but late last year the regime brazenly announced that they were going to build a handful of new nuclear facilities, a massive embarrassment for the United States.

The conclusion brought home from this is that the failure of President Obama’s engagement initiative is as complete as it was predictable from the beginning. In believing that dialogue will lead to the United States and the mullah’s finding common ground, President Obama has assumed that there are interests common to both sides that can enable such a consensus.

This is a fallacy.

The President’s fundamental goal is a nuclear free world and by extension a more peaceful world. Iran’s unyielding interest is nothing of the sort. It is regional domination, which in its specific expression has invariably included the destruction of Israel. The means towards this end is a nuclear arsenal that will allow the Islamic Republic to throw its weight around in the region to an extent that other countries in that sphere cannot match or effectively check.

This obvious cross-purpose has led to a dynamic where the United States engages in dialogue for one purpose and Iran agrees to participate for another, as a play for time. The longer the mullahs can keep the United States (and by extension the international community) occupied in dialogue the more time they have to develop their nuclear program unencumbered. They are using the United States and our misplaced credulity to their own advantage, and given that the Obama administration has done nothing so far to hold Iran accountable for its steady malfeasance the mullahs can also rest assured that their ill-behavior will continue to go on without any negative consequences whatsoever. The message conveyed to them has not been one of American forbearance and equanimity, but of American timidity and spinelessness.

The danger in this weakness should be self-evident. Though the president has the laudable goal of a peaceful, nuclear-free world, the misguided manner in which he has pursued that goal has ironically made it less attainable. By unwittingly allowing the Iranian regime the time they need to culminate their nuclear designs, the future peace of the Middle East has become increasingly jeopardized, for a variety of reasons.

Unnerved by nuclear arms in the hands of Iran’s Shiite theocracy, the Sunni nations in the region will undoubtedly move to protect themselves and reinstate balance in the region by going nuclear. Should this happen American policy will not only have failed to fulfill its goal of reducing nuclear weapons but will have actually resulted in an exponential increase of nuclear arms in one of the world’s most volatile regions.

Additionally, the abject failure of the United States to implement an effective policy to prevent Iran from going nuclear will quite possibly lead to war. Israel, feeling existentially threatened by a regime that has contemplated its extermination and that now has the means to do so, will certainly execute a military strike on the country’s nuclear facilities. That such an act will result in an escalated war between the two countries is a distinct possibility, if not a complete inevitability.

Worst of all, at least from the perspective of the United States, a regime that has remorselessly sponsored terrorism against us and the civilized world will be in a position to provide its clients with the means to perpetrate a level of murder, carnage and terror that we have heretofore only contemplated in our worst nightmares.

These consequences are unacceptable, nay unconscionable. Yet they are precisely the guests America’s deliberate weakness has invited. The president’s policy of engagement has failed as it was condemned to do from the beginning. Going forward his and everyone else’s hopes for world peace and stability demand that his administration dramatically alter course, and that it do so immediately.

Futile engagement without any mechanisms to insure meaningful participation from the Iranian regime must end. The United States should instead begin engaging its allies, who have become increasingly bewildered at the administrations’ fecklessness. These are entities who do share common interests with us (preventing a nuclear Iran) and with whom we can plausibly hope to craft some kind of effective initiatives with. (For all the talk about how diplomacy is needed to find a solution to the crisis with Iran it is diplomacy that has been sorely lacking in and among the civilized world.)

Most importantly though, the mullahs must be disabused of the notion that they can continue to act wantonly without fear of consequence. If we want to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons we must first convince them that we will not only do something to prevent it, but that we will do anything and everything necessary to prevent it. As ugly a reality as this certainly is, the costs of doing what must be done pale in comparison to the costs of persisting in our current approach, which is to effectively acquiesce in Iran going nuclear.

Unless something is done quickly we will come to understand just how true this really is.

The Constitution & Representative Government Confounded

In recent years it has been the argument of the Left that the Constitution is in places indefinite in its meaning and that the courts must therefore assign a meaning where a self-evident one is absent. Along these lines, legal professor Sonja West writes that "eventually the law runs out and it is the justices [of the Supreme Court] who are tasked with filling in the missing parts."

This statement is astounding first and foremost because it confutes the text, framework, and over-arching logic of the Constitution. Where the law "runs out," so to speak, there is an absence of law. To fill that void necessarily constitutes the creation of law, a power expressly provided to the legislative branch by the Constitution in a host of explicit realms and to the states in all others. Article II and the 10^th Amendment are quite clear on this.

The notion that the judiciary is to fill "in the missing parts" (create new law) is anathema to that framework, indeed it is a direct contradiction of it. As declared in the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison, the Constitution clearly iterates that it "is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is" (emphasis added), not to create law. It is the express province of the legislative, states and people to make law and the province of the federal judiciary to say what that law is, not create new law in itself.

Beyond this Professor West's conception of the judiciary's role flies straight into the face of the very idea of representative government. The declaration that it is up to the courts to create new law where there is none simply isn't reconcilable with the idea of a form of government in which laws are made by representatives who are selected by the popular consent of the citizenry. The people create the laws they are governed by through their designated representatives. The United States of America is no longer a government of, by, and for the people if it is not the people themselves, but what Lincoln dubbed "that eminent tribunal" that is "tasked with filling in the missing parts." Such a foreign conception of government flouts the will of the people and transforms them from their own rulers into the subjects of a robed oligarchy.