Obama's Inner Neocon

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Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP Photo The president's denunciation of the Iranian regime Tuesday showed his potential to get tough, writes Reihan Salam. But to deal with the mullahs, Obama must embrace the Reagan within.

After watching President Obama’s latest press briefing, I’ve reached a troubling conclusion: For the good of America and the world, the man badly needs a regular supply of nicotine.

Though smoking will undoubtedly put the president at grave risk of developing a serious illness, it also will keep him from lashing out at innocent reporters and, behind closed doors, any number of worshipful subordinates.

Rather than reassure the Iranians with a wink and a nod that we’re ready to do business, President Obama should be building an international coalition to isolate a recalcitrant Iran.

As America’s most beloved president in a generation, Obama has, you get the sense, grown accustomed to adulation. And when he doesn’t get it, he has a tendency to snap. Or he’s just going through nicotine withdrawal. Either way, it’s not pretty.

The heart of the briefing came at the start, when the president issued a blistering denunciation of the brutality of the Iranian regime. Like millions of Americans, Obama, celebrated for his Spock-like detachment, was moved by the harrowing last minutes of Neda Agha-Soltan’s life.

For those of who’ve wanted Obama to crank up the rhetorical temperature, this was a thrilling moment—a clear indication of Obama’s tremendous potential as a transformative foreign-policy president. As Chip Reid of CBS News gently suggested, this is exactly the kind of unambiguous message John McCain has been urging the president to send the mullahs.

And though Obama couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge McCain’s influence, or even that his script has changed at all as events have unfolded, it’s clear Obama has come around to a darker view of Iran’s rulers. Just as Obama was hilariously reluctant to concede that he might have been wrong to oppose the military "surge" in Iraq in 2006, he now insists that his statements have been utterly consistent.

Yet his statements haven’t been consistent for the good and understandable reason that the White House is trying to thread an unthreadable needle. No one doubts that the president wants to condemn the crackdown in Tehran, yet he’s also hoping to cut a deal with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The trouble is that Obama fundamentally misreads the Islamic republic, just as he once misread Iraq and Afghanistan. To his credit, however, the president eventually reversed course on both fronts, without ever saying so. On Iraq, he retained many of the architects of George W. Bush’s post-surge strategy. In Afghanistan, he abandoned early efforts to “lower our sights” in favor of a robust expansion of the American role in strengthening the country’s security forces, winning him praise from his erstwhile neoconservative enemies.

Slowly, the president’s embrace of crabbed realism is coming undone. Throughout the presidential campaign, the Obama foreign-policy team was quick to draw a contrast between the alleged messianism of George W. Bush’s first term with the sober realpolitik of Bush the Elder, which they enthusiastically embraced.

But though Bush 41 was in many respects a smashing foreign-policy success, he also made a number of egregious missteps, including the notorious “Chicken Kiev” speech, in which he essentially endorsed the survival of the multinational Soviet empire and not the nationalist aspirations of Eastern Europe.

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