America Can't Drop Guard Against Fanatical Oppressors

Those Not Embracing Freedom as We Do Still Pose a Very Real Global Threat

The world can draw a brief breath of relief over Israeli-U.S. setbacks of Iranian nuclear threats, but we should take extreme caution not to imagine that a "once and done" strategy will prevail for long.

Our national blindness to this realization is rooted in the inability of those of us who enjoy the luxury to take for granted benefits of living in a country rewarding positive contributions of free thought and constructive labor.

With such benefits, we are enabled to place ourselves in alien mindsets of those who seek control over others out of self interest in power or ideological religious rewards of martyrdom.

Add a confusing mix of political goals and ambitions in which very good individuals seek and gain public offices wishing, and determined to accomplish, socially and economically worthwhile achievements.

Reality, though, soon sets in.

Getting elected to carry out such meritorious deeds requires lots of money and approval of special interest enablers, including media sponsors, who increasingly facilitate the erosion of core principals; in doing so they place political risk avoidance priorities over national security imperatives when it comes to tough decisions.

And yes, let’s apply this example to policies and actions of President Barack Obama in championing a feckless 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement between Iran, the U.S., China, EU, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom.

Better known as the "Iran Nuclear Deal," it was Obama’s kick-the-can-down-the-road no Iran nuclear weapons on my watch.

The JCPOA granted Tehran oil export sanctions relief in exchange for promises to limit nuclear enrichment for energy purposes while leaving ICBMs to deliver nuclear warheads off that road entirely.

We've since learned that in 2018, the Israelis stole an Iran archive revealing that Obama’s JCPOA appeasement deal offered them sanctions relief on nuclear activity limits in exchange for a secret agreement to cut back their program for 10 years, after which they could rebuild the whole thing again.

Israel hated the deal, and for good reason. Iran has gone from a nuclear weapons priority, known as AMAD (a scientific project in Iran, with the goal of developing nuclear weaponry), which began after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, to a recent ability to accomplish this in days.

Trump despised it.

He pulled out of JCPOA in 2018 charging that "the Iran Deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into."

The Biden administration restored JCPOA and enlisted Russia to broker an extended agreement on our behalf at the same time Tehran was and is supplying them weaponized drones for their war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Biden and/or his puppeteer handlers ignored Trump’s Iran sanctions and released $6 billion of frozen Iranian funds in exchange for releasing five U.S. prisoners with much of that bounty assuredly going to fund Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist proxies.

Even incessantly anti-Trump Wall Steet Journal editors finally got it right, declaring, "The Obamaites of the left, and lately the right, counselled that the world had to bow to Iranian intimidation. . . The best we could hope for was a flimsy [Iran nuclear deal] that bribed Iran with billions of dollars and left open its path to a bomb."

Think what you will about Trump’s presidential persona and leadership style, but it’s arguably very difficult to challenge his commitment to put the country above personal ambitions and his life on the line as an example.

Evidence of success has restored America’s humiliatingly tattered Biden administration cut-and-run Afghanistan reputation with regional and world recognition of our nation as being genuinely capable and committed to exercising peace through power.

Nevertheless, this is not the time for complacency.

While the current cease-fire between Iran and Isreal is a welcome prelude to historic progress towards larger Mideast peace — one hopefully dismantling anything that is left of its nuclear program and ending its proxy warfare across the region — this threat remains far from over.

Alternatively, the cease-fire can also buy time for Tehran to rebuild and retool nuclear weapons and delivery capabilities for yet another round of war.

Last Tuesday, Iran’s nuclear chief announced that his agency is assessing Israeli and U.S. damage to its nuclear industry and making arrangements to restore it.

For starters toward lasting peace, America and our allies must demand that Iran’s leadership formally recognize Israel’s right to exist.

As President Trump candidly observes, "We basically have two countries that are fighting so long that they don’t know what the F***K they’re doing: Israel fights because it’s devoted to not being destroyed."

Any lasting peace agreement will also demand granting International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors full "anytime, anywhere" access to all former (and perhaps current) nuclear sites.

Continued vigilance built on and tied to warranted distrust is essential to secure and advance costly preventative gains against fanatical oppressors driven by self-enrichment priorities, social control obsessions, and the radical ideologies of those who don’t think as we do.

Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.