(JNS) You can always count on the media to give a platform to former officials from the Obama and Biden administrations to rant about the current administration while ignoring their record of policy failures. The latest is Wendy Sherman, who served as undersecretary of state for political affairs during the Obama administration and as deputy secretary of state under former President Joe Biden. Her claim to infamy was negotiating the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, and she now has the chutzpah to attack US President Donald Trump’s approach to Iran.

In this case, the forum was Bloomberg news, and while the interviewer let her fulminate, she did not ask the obvious question: Wendy, how did they play you?

Because that is the story. Not Sherman’s critique of Trump’s approach to Iran. Not her sage counsel about the importance of credible threats of force in diplomacy. The story is that Wendy Sherman sat across the table from the Iranian negotiators, gave away nearly everything, got almost nothing durable in return, and has spent the years since insisting this was a triumph of American statecraft. It is the diplomatic equivalent of the surgeon who botched the operation, demanding to scrub back in.

Sherman told her Bloomberg interviewer that credible military force is essential in negotiations. She is correct. The problem is that during the negotiations that defined her career, the Iranians knew with absolute certainty that Barack Obama had no intention of using force under any circumstances. He had telegraphed it. And so the Iranians did what any rational adversary does when it knows the other side will not walk away from the table: They held their ground and watched the Americans concede all the critical issues.

The result was an agreement that Obama himself acknowledged would reduce Iran’s nuclear breakout time “almost down to zero” by the time the key restrictions expired. In the same breath, he described the deal as one that “cuts off all of Iran’s pathways to the bomb.” Both statements cannot be true. One of them was a lie told to the American public to sell an agreement that even the Democrats who voted for it knew was dangerously inadequate.

The remarkable thing about the Iran nuclear deal is how many of its supporters admitted its failures, yet voted for it anyway. This was not a Republican talking point. These were the words of the Democratic senators who ignored the national interest to give Obama his deal.

Richard Blumenthal: “This is not the agreement I would have accepted at the negotiating table.”

Chris Murphy: It had “many unsavory elements.”

Gary Peters warned that it would allow Iran—under the same leadership that refers to the United States as the “Great Satan,” Israel as the “Little Satan” and calls for the destruction of the Jewish state—to enrich uranium on its own soil and become “a legitimized threshold nuclear state” within 15 years.

Cory Booker called it deeply flawed, said it legitimized “a vast and expanding nuclear program,” and described the duration of its key restrictions as “obviously and disturbingly short.”

Ron Wyden forecast almost exactly what has since come to pass: that when the key restraints expired—“a blink of an eye to a country that measures its history in millennia”—America would still be facing an Iranian regime determined to build an industrial-scale enrichment program.

They voted for it anyway. And Sherman helped convince them.

Former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who served Obama, was blunt: “The notion that betting that this regime is going to temper its behavior in the region because of this nuclear deal I think is mistaken.”

Gates was right. Sherman and the rest of the administration were not merely wrong. They were wrong in ways that armed terrorists, funded proxy wars, accelerated a nuclear program and helped set the conditions for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Iran received an estimated $150 billion in previously frozen assets. Within months, it had increased its annual funding to Hezbollah to $800 million and resumed payments of $60 to $70 million to Hamas. Former Secretary of State John Kerry had promised the world, the region and Israel would be safer with the deal in place. Instead, Iran used its restored financial resources to build up Hezbollah in Lebanon, destabilize Syria, arm and direct Shia militias across Iraq, fund the Houthis who attacked Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (and eventually threatened global Red Sea shipping), and accelerate its ballistic-missile program—the very program Sherman chose not to address.

David Albright, one of the world’s leading experts on nuclear proliferation and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, testified before Congress in 2017: “Those who argued that a key benefit of the nuclear deal would be a moderation of Iran’s behavior in the region have been sadly disappointed. Armed with substantial funds and a growing economy, Iran is challenging the United States in the region and appears as committed to maintaining the capability to pursue a nuclear weapons path as before.”

He, too, was right.

The head of the Mossad said in 2018 that he was “100 percent certain” Iran remained committed to developing a nuclear bomb. German intelligence reported that Iran was actively seeking materials for weapons of mass destruction. But we were told Iran had given up its nuclear ambitions.

Obama originally promised Iran’s compliance would be verified by unprecedented inspections, but that’s not what Sherman agreed to. The International Atomic Energy Agency was barred from military sites, precisely where violations were most likely to occur. It failed to confront Iran on suspected violations and was ultimately unable to account for Iran’s secret nuclear archive, which the Israelis discovered and exposed while the IAEA remained in the dark.

Iran sanitized sites before inspectors arrived. It destroyed evidence at Parchin, the site of nuclear research that was never inspected. It never admitted its prior weapons research. The IAEA found that Iran had observed the terms of the deal when it was caught violating the agreement. Its failures came as no surprise, given that it was unaware of the Iranian nuclear program in the first place and has no idea what secret facilities or activities may be going on today.

Recognizing and exploiting American weakness

Meanwhile, the Europeans proved entirely unwilling to enforce the agreement’s provisions, ignoring noncompliance in the hope of expanding commercial relationships with Tehran and ultimately refusing to activate the snapback sanctions that Obama had presented as the deal’s ultimate guarantee.

Russia, a signatory to the deal, opposed the agency’s enforcement of the ban on “activities which could contribute to the development of a nuclear explosive device,” such as using computer models that simulate a nuclear bomb, or designing multipoint, explosive detonation systems. By also including China as a party to the agreement, Sherman allowed two countries with veto power at the UN Security Council to protect Iran from punishment for noncompliance.

That was not a concern since Sherman insisted that Iran was complying before Trump tore up the deal.

Hence, the only enforcement mechanism that mattered was never used. The only inspections that would have been meaningful were never conducted. The only concessions that would have addressed Iran’s broader malign behavior—terrorism, missiles, regional aggression—were never sought. Sherman and her team decided that nuclear restrictions alone were worth the price of releasing $150 billion and legitimizing the Iranian regime as a threshold nuclear state.

While Sherman and Kerry were celebrating their diplomatic achievement, Iran’s ships were opening fire near US Navy vessels in the Persian Gulf. Iranian forces captured American sailors at gunpoint, forced them to their knees and coerced one into apologizing on camera—a brazen violation of the Geneva Convention. The Obama administration responded to this humiliation by thanking Iran for releasing the sailors and calling it a demonstration of the deal’s success. Kerry negotiated their release and described it as a great diplomatic victory. The Iranians had again recognized and exploited American weakness.

This is the record Sherman brings to her Bloomberg interview. This is the expertise she is offering. This is the foundation from which she criticizes the current administration’s approach to a problem her own negotiations helped create and significantly worsen.

Most revealingly, Sherman—a Jewish woman—chose to use her platform to lend her credibility to the slander that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. She also asserted that Palestinians deserve a state without a word about the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people in Israel that initiated the current sequence of events; without any acknowledgment of Palestinian obligations; and without any apparent awareness of how these talking points sound coming from the person who helped finance the organization that planned and executed the massacre by unfreezing funds for its primary state sponsor.

Sherman’s role in the Iranian negotiations didn’t make her an expert. It made her a cautionary tale. Her comments on Israel make her a disgrace.

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