Iran and the American Middle Class

Over the past several months, Iran has violently lashed out at the United States and other western nations in response to highly effective economic sanctions imposed by the United States. These sanctions were a response to Iran’s restarting it’s nuclear weapons program, which was a response to the 2018 United States withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama Administration in 2015.  This horrible 2015 deal preserved Iran’s ability to export terror to the region which it has done with impunity, deploy ballistic missiles and returned $150 billion in Iranian funds frozen because of it’s cheating on prior nuclear treaties going back decades. This tit-for-tat game is just the most recent version of a longer chronology that includes Iranian proxy-terror responsible for hundreds of American deaths since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which was a response to US support for a corrupt Iranian monarchy that that ruled from 1956 to 1979.  The larger regional competition between the two major subdivisions of Islam, Sunni and Shia, itself began in 652 A.D. with the contested succession to the prophet Muhammad.

Are your eyes glazing over yet? This is just one example of the swamp that has been Middle East foreign policy for decades. Whether Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia or Iran, the US has spent trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives trying to solve centuries-old intractable problems and attempting to install democracy in places that will never accept it. Enough.  A key component of President Trump’s election platform was disengaging the US from fruitless and expensive foreign conflicts and it’s time for him to deliver on that.  The killing of Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s architect of it’s state-sponsored terrorism, was a strong message to a regime that understands only power. In my opinion, Iran’s launching ballistic missiles against US bases in Iraq was a relatively weak response by a regime that is under serious duress from economic sanctions and domestic unrest. All of this indicates to me that the stage is set like never before for a grand bargain that would include a total verifiable cessation of Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, cessation of its state sponsorship of terrorism in exchange for lifting of economic sanctions and hard guarantees that the US not seek Iranian regime change. Are you paying attention North Korea?

By now, I’m sure you’re wondering how all of this relates to the title of this article and the American middle class.  For those of you who read my posts, you may recall my last article, China and the American Middle Class, where I made the case that our foreign policy going forward should be predicated on how it helps our middle class which is the strength of our republic. We cannot maintain our position as the indispensable nation if we continue to let our middle class erode. For over two decades, US policy has enabled China to cheat on world trade rules to dump cheap goods into the US that have effectively destroyed entire industries and the good middle class jobs that go with it.  Like Iran, China is an authoritarian regime that only changes its behavior when faced with displays of superior power.  I think there is mounting evidence that our current China tariff strategy is effective and will lead us to a strong trade deal that supports American middle class jobs from farmers to manufacturers.

For most of the last six decades, events in the Middle East were very important to the health of the American economy and middle class jobs because the US was a big importer of foreign oil and Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq were the biggest global suppliers.  However, ten years ago things changed in a big way when American innovation unleashed the fracking boom that has made the United States the worlds largest oil supplier. The importance of this in terms of fundamentally changing geopolitics cannot be overstated.  We simply don’t rely on Middle East oil to keep our economy humming because we have our own.  That gives us tons of leverage to methodically disengage and let the regional stakeholders in Middle East solve their own problems. The Sunni regimes of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, along with Israel are more than enough of a military counterbalance to compel Iran into being a good neighbor. This change in foreign policy would allow military money to be repatriated to fund much needed domestic infrastructure projects without having to incur more federal debt.  All of this is good for Americans of every class, especially the middle one. So, Mr. Trump and Mr. Khameini, let’s stop the saber rattling and get to the negotiation table ASAP. I love Persian food and the Iranian people and cannot wait to safely enjoy them both on my maiden voyage to Tehran next year.