The festivities surrounding the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center this past week occurred as President Trump tries to find an “off ramp” from his ill-advised war against Iran.
Significantly, these events highlight how far this country has fallen under Trump as President.
The theme of the Obama Center proceedings seems to be a reclamation of “hope.” Eighteen years ago, many in this country were pushing the idea of hope as it looked like America was moving toward a multi-racial democracy, symbolized by the inauguration of a black president.
But as it happens, every time America moves toward a multi-racial democracy, opposition forces form to halt such progress. At that point, in 2009, it was the Tea Party, which appeared to be a grassroots movement opposed to the apparent direction the country was moving. Of course, it was not a grassroots movement. The Koch brothers contributed substantial funds to build the movement. Arguing against big government but building on the obvious racism behind much of the backlash against Obama, the folks behind the Tea Party worked to slow the trek toward a multi-racial democracy.
Then along came Donald Trump, building a campaign on the racist “birther” movement, a movement fabricated on the lie that Barack Obama was illegitimate as President, as he was not born in the United States.
The subsequent MAGA movement dropped the big government argument but kept the racism, which expressed itself in the replacement theory chants.
The “Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory” is a white supremacist conspiracy theory, falsely alleging that a covert coalition of global elites is deliberately orchestrating demographic changes to replace the white populations of Western countries, including the United States, with non-white immigrants. Thus, anti-nonwhite-immigration became a focal point of Trump’s MAGA movement.
And as he had promised during his first presidential campaign in 2016, Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in his second year in office. And he took up the racist anti-Obamacare fight.
Trump argued that he could negotiate a better deal with Iran, implying through thinly veiled racism that the deal could not be that good, as it was developed by Obama, this black guy. Throughout his political career, Donald Trump has frequently characterized Barack Obama as a failed or weak president whose policies harmed the United States, which would be laughable if these assessments were not made by someone way over his head in governing and diplomacy.
But let’s just consider the situation in Iran. President Trump’s “memorandum of understanding” with Iran has been criticized across the political spectrum. The New York Times Editorial Board says, “President Trump Lost This War.” The more conservative Wall Street Journal says, “Trump Stages an Iran Retreat.” And one political analyst said praising Trump for developing this memorandum of understanding is like praising an arsonist who sets the house on fire and then runs out.
Let’s look at JCPOA. The Iran nuclear agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was a landmark accord reached between Iran and the U.S., Iran, China, Russia, Germany, France, and the U.K. in July 2015. Under its terms, Iran agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear program and open its facilities to more extensive international inspections in exchange for billions of dollars’ worth of sanctions relief.
Between 2015, when the agreement was implemented, and 2018, when Trump canceled the U.S. participation, the International Atomic Energy Agency verified Iran’s compliance with the deal on at least 10 occasions and maintained daily access to the country’s nuclear facilities. So, Trump’s necessity for the war was created by him.
The intensive, multi-year diplomatic effort to negotiate the JCPOA involved key political leaders and diplomats from each participating country. America’s team was led by Secretary of State John Kerry and Under Secretary Wendy Sherman. Additionally, America’s leading nuclear experts at the Department of Energy were involved throughout these negotiations.
The current negotiating team for the United States suggests amateur hour or something worse. It is led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Neither is a person with significant diplomatic experience. Witkoff is a real estate businessman with no prior experience in diplomacy. Kushner, who has no formal position in the government, has the apparent experience of extracting huge sums of money from a foreign country that apparently wanted to do favors for Trump and his family.
This is a sorry state of affairs.
