Is it possible that Jeb's foreign policy could actually be worse than his brother's? His recent reflections on the Iran deal—before the details were even disclosed—lent a preview. Max Fisher
reports on Bush's comments at a fundraiser Monday night:
Bush's case was simple: Negotiating with dictators is appeasement and never works. Here's the quote, which his campaign tweeted with the message "we should walk away":
"History is full of examples of when you enable people or regimes that don't embrace democratic values, without any concessions, you get a bad result. It's called appeasement."
Forget for a second that the tweet doesn't exactly make sense. The point of his knee-jerk reaction to the deal amounts to: negotiating with dictators = appeasement, which is categorically bad. Pretty fascinating given that both his father and his brother have done exactly that—negotiating to reduce the nuclear arsenals of both the Soviet Union and Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
And those nuclear agreements all worked out quite well. The Soviet Union did not surrender nearly as much of its nuclear program as Iran did this week, but it did dismantle thousands of nuclear weapons, which was pretty great. Qaddafi gave up his entire nuclear program, more than Iran did, but he also didn't submit to the kind of rigorous verification procedures Iran will go through. Later in his time in office, the George W. Bush administration actually put forward a crazy idea: that the US should negotiate a nuclear deal with the dictators of Iran as well.
So apparently Jeb! is intent on turning his back on the foreign policy successes of both his father and brother. Instead, he's hewing to the worst of his brother's foreign policy instincts: poorly considered, ideologically driven, neoconservative responses.
So in short, yes, it could get worse.