Cuba Deal Portends Obama Surrender on Nuclear Iran

One of the most important problems with the Cuba deal announced by President Barack Obama on Wednesday is that the favorable terms handed to the Castro regime will encourage Iran to be even more assertive in ongoing nuclear negotiations. The talks between Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., France, Britain, China, Russia, and Germany) have been extended twice, in spite of evidence that Iran is cheating on the interim deal. The new deadline for a final agreement is the end of June 2015.

Iran’s own success in stonewalling the world is reason enough for it to continue. Originally, the UN Security Council was nearly unanimous in banning any nuclear enrichment by the Tehran regime. Now, thanks largely to President Obama’s desperation for a deal at any price, Iran has already convinced the world to allow it some degree of enrichment. The Cuba deal, which grants the Castros “normalization” in exchange for absolutely nothing, will reinforce Iran’s successful strategy.

Conservative blogger Allahpundit at HotAir observes:

One of the momentous but less remarked upon consequences of the deal with Castro is that it makes a nuclear deal with Iran much more likely, no? One striking thing about it, as a million different people have already observed, is how little Obama got in return for it….If legacy-building is job one for his foreign policy then a terrible deal with Iran on nukes becomes more feasible….even a bad deal is the best option now open to him.

The liberal Aaron David Miller writes:

What we’re witnessing is a president who has now done a three-for–climate change; immigration reform; and Cuba–basically on his own, and gotten away with it. And he’s received kudos from the media, his own party, and much of the public….Obama is now unchained and determined to score his biggest legacy yet–a deal with those savvy Iranian mullahs. Let’s just hope that the president gets a lot more from the Iranian deal than he got from the Castros.

Senior Editor-at-Large Joel B. Pollak edits Breitbart California and is the author of the new ebook, Wacko Birds: The Fall (and Rise) of the Tea Party, available for Amazon Kindle.

Follow Joel on Twitter: @joelpollak