Foreign desk: A Warning Worth Recalling

With the Biden team looking to cut a fresh version of the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, Peter Berkowitz at RealClearPolitics recalls a 2015 warning about that earlier accord: an open letter from Tom Cotton and 46 other GOP senators arguing against “an executive agreement not approved by Congress.” In the event, the Obama deal “played into the ayatollahs’ hands,” since its “verification protocols were fatally flawed” and it didn’t limit “Iran’s ballistic missiles program,” “its funding of terrorism” or “its supplying of rockets and missiles to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip for terrorist attacks on Israel.” Worse, “it injected into the hobbled Iranian economy tens of billions of dollars, empowering Tehran to intensify its pursuit of regional hegemony.” That’s “the larger lesson of Tom Cotton’s letter: Toothless, legally nonbinding agreements with Iran invite aggression, endanger friends and partners, and undermine international order.”