His — history will tell. We missed the Persian spring. The president failed on that front. We go into Libya, where, to my mind, we don’t have any definable American interests. We’ve got Syria now on the horizon, where we do have American interests. It’s called Israel. We’re a friend and ally. They’re a friend and ally. And we need to remind the world what it means to be a friend and ally of the United States.
And we have nuclearization in Iran. Centrifuges spinning. At some point, they’re going to have enough in the way of fissile material out of which to make a weapon. That’s a certainty.
We had a discussion earlier tonight about sanctions. Everybody commented on sanctions. Sanctions aren’t going to work, I hate to break it to you. They’re not going to work because the Chinese aren’t going to play ball and the Russians aren’t going to play ball.
And I believe Iran has already — the mullahs have already decided they want to go nuclear.
Why?
They have looked at North Korea. They’ve got a weapon. Nobody touches them. They like at Libya. Libya gave up their weapon in exchange for friendship with the world. Look where they are.
So I say let’s let history be our guide. We saw the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1919. We saw the region transform and make itself into something different. We saw changes in 1947.
I think we do our national interests a disservice by jumping in too soon and taking up sides with people we don’t fully understand, Islamist groups, pan-Arab groups.
Our interest in the Middle East is Israel. And our interest is to ensure that Israel — that Iran does not go nuclear.
”Jon Huntsman on foreign policy in the Middle East, making me give up on my mystical belief that he might be a crypto-Democrat, or at least crypto-pal-to-the-not-right-wing, in the same way that Obama was a crypto-not-socialist. In response to the question,
So many people view the Arab spring as a good thing. Given the recent violence in Egypt, do you worry this can go bad?
as posed in the CNN National Security Debate.
