Obama gives up Iran diplomacy
My first thought when I saw that the Obama administration was readying a sale of F-35s to Israel on top of the multi-billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Araiba, was that Obama had finally found an economic stimulus plan that would work - another world war.
Kidding aside, I think this does mark the close of the Obama administration's "carrot" phase of Iranian diplomacy, such as it was. It's impossible now for the United States to convince Iran that it doesn't need a nuclear weapon when the U.S. is helping to massively boost other militaries in the region. From an Iranian perspective, U.S. arms sales will only reinforce the notion that they need a nuclear weapon to offset the large and growing imbalance of conventional military power in the Middle East.
The good news is that the balance of power in the Gulf is stacked overwhelmingly against the Iranian regime. It will be hard to take claims of Iranian "hegemony" seriously if more and more countries in the region belly up to the U.S. arms bar.
(AP Photo)
