Khamenei’s Response

As I write this, Iran, China, and Russia are conducting joint naval drills off the coast of Oman. These drills are seen by most foreign policy analysts as an autocratic response to the Western, liberal order in which the United States has led since the end of World War II.

On Friday, President Trump wrote to the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, of the Islamic Republic of Iran, asking him for a diplomatic treaty with Iran over their nuclear program.

In a Fox interview on Friday, the President said, “There were two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal.” “Hopefully, we can have a peace deal”, Trump said. “I’m not speaking out of strength or weakness, I’m just saying I’d rather have a peace deal than the other, but the other will solve the problem.”

Iran’s response was, “We do not accept bullying countries.”

Iran, Russia and China regard their alliance as a “zero-sum game” against the dominant relationship that the United States has engaged in within global politics since 1945.

The Western liberal order is not simply about a transactional relationship between the United States and nations that ally to it. It is about liberal and democratic values, about human rights, free trade and the rule of law. It is about the creation of international institutions, such as the United Nations, (which was founded upon good intentions, however corrupt it has become), and treaties that have reigned supreme in the world, such as The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has served as a counterbalance against tyranny in Europe.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, we saw that there was just one dominant superpower in the world, the United States. However, now we are beginning to see this is changing as G7 countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Italy, Japan and the European Union) have begun to decline in prosperity.

What we are witnessing now is the decline of the liberal world order, first laid out in the Atlantic Charter in 1941 and then enshrined in United Nations Charter in 1945. And now authoritarian rulers are engaging in a “winner take all” philosophy.

We know that President Trump is reluctant to engage in military action.

Yet, we are reminded of Ali Khamenei’s words, making reference to the first Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, calling Israel “a cancer.” Said the current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, “This cancer will definitely be eradicated, Allah willing, at the hands of the Palestinian people and the resistance forces throughout the region.”

However, with the International Atomic Energy Administration declaring that Iran has enough highly enriched uranium for six nuclear bombs, there is no time like the present for the United States to reassert itself, once again, into the dominant power in the world.

The stakes are simply too high not to.

Sarah N. Stern is Founder and President of EMET.