financialsense.com / By JR Nyquist / 03/04/2013
The Atlantic headline from 2009 reads, “Netanyahu to Obama: Stop Iran – Or I Will.”Four years later we can see that nothing happened. The Israeli prime minister huffed and puffed, and the U.S. president remained unmoved. There has been no Israeli attack on Iran, and there probably won’t be. By some accounts Iran already has a nuclear weapon and will soon be producing more. President Obama wants a diplomatic solution, and there is no end to negotiations and meetings. In fact, Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed to meet and discuss the Iran problem during the upcoming G-8 summit in Northern Ireland. So what are we to make of further Israeli threats?
There is an unspoken rule in politics: One should never threaten. Nothing exposes weakness more readily than a series of empty threats. If you can do something, then do it. Don’t talk about it. In this respect, talk without action makes everyone suspect that you are impotent. Talk is cheap, as the saying goes. Actions are something entirely different. If actions follow closely upon your words, then people will be genuinely moved by what you say. If four years pass without action, people will conclude you are a wind bag.
The Times of Israel ran the following headline on Sunday, “Nuclear talks only gave Iran more time.” On the American side, talk is a medium for wasting precious time. The five power (plus one) talks in Kazakhstan have served Iran well. For while the five powers talk, Iran is getting the bomb. And once Iran has the bomb, nobody will dare to act. For who would attack a nuclear power? Prime Minister Netanyahu is quoted in the article as saying that Iran is “continuing to defy the international community…. Like North Korea, it continues to defy all the international standards and I believe that this requires the international community to ratchet up its sanctions and make clear that if this continues there will also be a credible military sanction.”
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