America on a New Collision Course for War?

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, alongside U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, participates in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) meeting at the United Nations in New York City, New York on September 22, 2016. [State Department Photo/Public Domain]

Daniel Larison, reporting in The American Conservative, tears apart a recent op-ed by Bret Stephens, formerly The Wall Street Journal’s lead neoconservative, now working for The New York Times. Larison writes that dumping the JCPOA (better know to most as simply “the Iran deal”) would put America back on a collision course to war with Iran. Larison writes (abridged):

Bret Stephens writes a predictably unpersuasive attack on the JCPOA:

So much, then, for all the palaver about the deal providing an unprecedented level of transparency for monitoring Iranian compliance. So much, also, for the notion that Iran has honored its end of the bargain. It didn’t. This should render the agreement null and void.

Stephens once declared the interim nuclear deal of 2013 to be “worse than Munich.” That should tell us everything we need to know about how seriously we should take his analysis of any agreement with Iran. Someone so mindlessly hostile to the very idea of an agreement with Iran is bound to use anything to declare that the deal should be voided because he never thought an agreement should have been made in the first place. If you ask an ideologue to assess an agreement made with people that he hates, he isn’t going to offer a fair assessment of it. Stephens’ column is an example of the most tendentious version of the argument against the deal.

Reneging on the deal because of old and irrelevant information would be an exceptionally stupid thing to do, and it would put the U.S. and Iran back on the collision course we were on a decade ago. That is exactly why Iran hawks want to wreck the deal, and they all but admit it in their own arguments.