Bret Stephens is a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs journalist who is best known for being a former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post and for his columns in the Wall Street Journal. Stephens visited Toronto March 11 to speak at Beth Sholom Synagogue about Israel and the West. The CJN spoke with him in an exclusive interview.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the U.S. Congress March 3 was very impressive, although one could say it polarized relations between Israel and the U.S. even further. Did Netanyahu’s speech do Israel any favours politically?
I think the verdict is still out, quite frankly. I thought it was a tremendously effective speech. I think any fair-minded person listening to that speech would have heard perhaps the most powerful single case ever made against a prospective nuclear deal with Iran, for the various reasons that I think he laid out very effectively. It’s a negotiation that gives Iran an opportunity to race toward the bomb illicitly, but also gives it an opportunity to acquire a bomb at a slightly slower rate, illicitly, illegally and openly.
And I think he rubbished the conceit that intelligence agencies could know with any real accuracy that Iran was about to break out toward a nuclear capability. I think he also brought home the key point that diplomacy with dictatorships – especially a dictatorship like Iran – never works. In that sense, looking at the speech itself, it was a very effective piece of rhetoric.
The second part of the question is: what has it actually achieved? It’s too soon to say. Will it sway votes in Congress? Or will it harden and bring more Democrats into the president’s camp? How will it affect politics in Israel? How did it affect Israeli thinking? These are questions that will remain open.
In his speech, Netanyahu explained that more sanctions on Iran are needed to ensure a better deal. Would that realistically be enough to get Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions or stall the program?
To say the idea that sanctions, military threats and other coercive measures are antithetical to diplomacy is, I think, a mistake. They are handmaids to diplomacy. They are, in many ways, what makes diplomacy works. Diplomacy functions almost inevitably in the shadow of some implicit threat, especially when it’s a diplomacy with a dictatorship. We’re not negotiating a treaty with Canada or Holland, with responsible, democratic, law-abiding states. We’re negotiating a treaty with a state that demonstrates, time and again, why it can’t and shouldn’t be trusted.
It depends on the type of sanctions and it depends on the strictness with which it is applied. The president always boasted that it was only the tough sanctions that brought the Iranians to the table in the first place. Not surprisingly, as the threat of those sanctions has receded, the Iranians have become more intransigent, not less. Now, if you have serious sanctions, threats that would not only further cut off Iran from the world’s financial system, but would hit them where it hurts most – which is to say oil exports, at a time when oil is selling at roughly half of what it was a year ago – you might get Iran’s attention and their compliance in a way that you simply can’t if they sense that you’re prepared to give up everything anyway.
What do you now propose U.S. President Barack Obama do with these negotiations? Is it realistic at all for the Obama administration to reach a deal with Iran that eliminates all uranium enrichment?
It’s almost useless to propose anything to the Obama administration, because they’re so hell-bent on getting a deal. What I would like is for the United States to, quite frankly, walk back the offer that seems to be on the table in Geneva. It’s a terrible offer, as far as western interests are concerned, not just American interests. It’s an offer that gives Iran a robust nuclear infrastructure that does very little realistically to prevent them from acquiring the know-how, the means and the technology to acquire nuclear weaponry in a time of their own choosing. And it’s one that removes western pressure at the very moment when Iran is clearly trying to seize strategic opportunities throughout the Middle East – in Beirut, in Damascus, in Baghdad and in Sanaa. We are giving Iran not just the keys to a nuclear capability. We’re giving them the keys to the Middle East in a way that is almost certain to terrify and even radicalize the Sunni Arab world. We are not only giving up too much to Iran, but we are laying the ground for intensified sectarian conflict in the Middle East in a way that is scary to think about.
You recently wrote about the evaporating support for Israel among liberal Democrats. With so many pro-Israel American Jews disillusioned by the Obama administration, do you think Israel is going to be a more prominent issue in the 2016 election, as the party has to win back some goodwill?
Israel should be a liberal cause, because Israel has always defended and enshrined and enlarged core liberal values. I don’t simply mean democracy. I mean human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, concern for the environment and concern for minorities. The natural liberal position should be a strongly pro-Israel position. The reality is that that has withered in recent years, for a variety of reasons.
The Democratic party, or too much of the Democratic party, has been captured by a progressive wing that treats Israel as a pariah state or a quasi-pariah state, and that is more interested in peace at any price than it is in defending a liberal state against its enemies. That is something on which Democrats, Jewish or not, ought to reflect upon. It’s something that American Jews who have reflexively voted Democratic ought to reflect on, as well, not simply because of their pro-Israel sensitivities, but because of their liberal sensitivities.
During last summer’s war, self-identified liberal Democrats were split on the question of whether Hamas or Israel was more to blame for the war. When you’re a liberal Democrat who thinks that Hamas is the wronged party in a war, something is very wrong with your perception of events and your moral priorities.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has a very pro-Israel stance. What do you and other Americans engaged in pro-Israel advocacy think of him?
I think most American Jews, at least those who are remotely well informed, understand that the best western ally that Israel has today is Canada. The support has been well noted and well appreciated. I think the performance of Canadian foreign policy in the 9/11 era has been magnificent in terms of what it contributed to the effort in Afghanistan, the sacrifices the Canadian soldiers made in Kandahar. I remember the first time I ever had a Tim Hortons coffee was in the Kandahar air base – which was the best coffee on base, I might add.
Harper has brought a kind of clarity with him not just when it comes to Israel but when it comes to a real civilizational struggle that involves Canada as much as it does any other western nation. I think it was underscored with the attack on Parliament in Ottawa. All of that I think is well recognized in the United States. People look at Stephen Harper, I think, as a guy who’s punching way above his weight in international affairs, and that’s in a good sense. A lot of us, sort of in a throwback to the Vietnam era, we so admire the foreign policy of Canada that we want to leave the U.S. and move and be in a country where we actually like the foreign policy of the government. But we’ll see how long that lasts.
This interview has been edited and condensed for style and clarity.
