Let’s start with William Burns, Biden’s nomination for CIA director. Burns currently serves as president of the left-wing foreign-policy think tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, one of its donors is the Open Society Foundations network, established by George Soros.
Burns has decades of experience as a career diplomat under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Burns is a longtime associate of Biden. The two have worked closely together, most recently when the latter was Vice President and the former was Deputy Secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs, during the administration of former US President, Barack Obama.
Burns who had served as Ambassadors to Russia and Jordan, also had a key role in talks with the regime in Tehran in 2013. These led to the 2015 signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran and the 5+1 countries: the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia and China plus Germany. By that time Burns had retired, but his imprint lived on in the nuclear deal.
In this context, Biden’s statement about Burns – “[He] shares my profound belief that intelligence must be apolitical” – is not liked by his opponents. The cause of greater concern is Burns’s faith in the JCPOA from which outgoing US President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018.
In an 29th August 29 2020 opinion piece in The Atlantic titled “‘America First’ Enters its Most Combustible Moment,” Burns spelled out his objections.
“Any leverage against Iran produced by the UAE-Israel agreement [the Abraham Accords between the United Arab Emirates and the Jewish state that subsequently were signed on 15th September 2020 at the White House] is already being swallowed up in the serial diplomatic malpractice of the administration’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign – aimed more at toppling the Iranian regime than at changing its behavior,” he wrote. “Doubling down on failed policy is not a smart diplomatic prescription... but the Trump administration is not likely to see the light. Instead, it will continue to pretend that the United States can participate in only the punitive parts of the Iran nuclear deal... [a strategy that it] tried – and spectacularly failed at.”Nothing could be further from the truth. Trump’s “maximum-pressure campaign” is anything but “diplomatic malpractice.”
Antony Blinken, for instance – who, pending congressional confirmation, will replace Pompeo – is another JCPOA enthusiast. Blinken served under Obama, first as Deputy National Security advisor and then as deputy secretary of state. Like Burns, he was instrumental in formulating and promoting the deal. He also wants to lift sanctions against Tehran as one of those “goodwill gestures” that American multilateralists so love extending to the regimes.
He was clear about this in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA. In a thread of tweets on 9th May 2018, Blinken wrote, “By blowing up the Iran nuclear deal, President Trump puts us on a collision course with Iran and our closest allies. It gives Iranian hardliners the excuse to speed again toward the bomb without a united international coalition to oppose them or inspectors to expose them. Or if Iran and Europe stick with the deal, it forces us to sanction the latter to stop them from doing business with the former. Either way we lose.”
AS IF THIS weren’t an illustration of the degree to which Democrats misunderstand – or are willfully blind to – the mindset of the Iranian mullahs, Blinken goes on to make a ridiculous assertion. The cancellation of the JCPOA, he tweeted, “makes getting to yes with North Korea that much more challenging.
Cognizant of new reality, Israel is boosting its ability to combat Iranian forces and other proxy groups. The Democrats in the White House, State Department and Capitol building are lying in wait to lead the world, as Obama proudly did, “from behind.”
