Sharansky raps US for ‘loss of moral self-confidence’ on Iran
Former Soviet political prisoner says America 'lost the courage of its convictions' by not requiring Tehran change its behavior as condition for a nuclear deal
Former jailed dissident Natan Sharansky came out against the Obama administration in a Washington Post op-ed, chastising what he considers the White House’s concessions to Iran, which he attributed to America’s “tragic loss of moral self-confidence.”
In the opinion piece titled “When did America forget that it’s America?” published Friday, Sharansky contrasts the US’s engagement with the Soviet Union during the Cold War with Washington’s dealings with Iran in recent years.
Sharansky, currently chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, criticized what he described as Washington’s drive to reach a deal with Iran despite Tehran’s atrocious human rights record and refusal to curb its regional aggression.
With no pressure from Washington to change, Tehran, he wrote in the op-ed, “feels no need to tone down its rhetoric calling for the death of America and wiping Israel off the map.”
During the Cold War, he said, the United States would make no such concessions to the Soviet Union.
Sharansky was a human rights activist in the Soviet Union who was jailed for nine years for allegedly spying for the US. After immigrating to Israel in 1986, he served as a member of Knesset, and in various ministerial posts from 1996 to 2005.
“The Obama administration apparently believes that only after a nuclear agreement is signed can the free world expect Iran to stop its attempts at regional domination, improve its human rights record and, in general, behave like the civilized state it hopes the world will recognize it to be,” Sharansky said.
He upbraided President Barack Obama for declaring that the US would prioritize engaging Iran over changing its theocratic regime after the ayatollahs quashed a democratic uprising in 2009.
Sharansky attributed the shift away from US willingness to stand up to rogue regimes such as Iran to “a tragic loss of moral self-confidence,” saying this change “threatens not only the United States and Israel but also the people of Iran and a growing number of others living under Tehran’s increasingly emboldened rule.”
“But in today’s postmodern world, when asserting the superiority of liberal democracy over other regimes seems like the quaint relic of a colonialist past, even the United States appears to have lost the courage of its convictions.”