Joe Cirincione is president of Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation.

A devious president and his top aides trick the nation into a dangerous foreign entanglement with the help of a gullible press corps and complicit experts. George W. Bush and war with Iraq? No, Barack Obama and diplomacy with Iran. At least according to David Samuels’ telling in an instantly controversial article for this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about White House adviser Ben Rhodes.

Rhodes, whom I know, is very talented, but he is no modern-day Rasputin casting a spell over Obama, the press and public. The truth is that Samuels used his access to Rhodes to attack a deal he never liked and publicly campaigned against.


In his article, Samuels claims Obama was “actively misleading” the public about Iran. He says the president made up a story of how the 2013 election of pragmatic Iranian President Hassan Rouhani created a new opening with Iran. This, so Obama could win “broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime.” This, in turn, claims Samuels, allowed Obama to avoid a “divisive but clarifying debate of the actual policy choices” and eliminate the “fuss about Iran’s nuclear program” so that Obama could pursue his real agenda: “a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.”

Every element of this thesis falls apart under scrutiny.

Obama did not mislead the public about negotiations with Iran. Most of the talks the United States held with Iran under the previous, hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were widely reported. Even the secret talks that opened up the engagement with the more pragmatic Rouhani government were disclosed by the dogged reporting of Laura Rozen and others well before the congressional vote last year. And the imagined plot to sell out our Middle East allies to Iran is a common talking point of the far right, without any supporting evidence.

But one of Samuels’ biggest fallacies is his claim that the world’s leading nuclear policy and national security experts were duped by Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser whom Samuels portrays as a digital Machiavelli spinning gullible reporters and compliant experts into accepting a bad deal.

Samuels says this is the only way to explain “the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal.” He claims that in the spring of 2015, "legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters.”

This is utter nonsense.

In London, Paris, Berlin and Washington the deal was evaluated on its merits, not on spin. Nor did we wait for the White House to fire the starting gun. Ploughshares Fund, the group I head, began our campaign to shut down Iran’s paths to a bomb six years ago. We helped fund a network of experts, advocates, faith leaders, military leaders and diplomats who trade views and coordinate efforts.

Samuels takes a swipe at our work directly, quoting Rhodes as saying, “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this. … We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else.”

I have known Ben Rhodes for over seven years. He is a good man who has served his nation well. I asked him about this quote. He said that he was trying to convey the work the White House did with like-minded groups. “I did not think I was saying—nor do I believe—that you just said what I told you to.” In various meetings, outside experts would exchange views with officials. We would debate, often pushing the officials to modify their position. In the end, experts supported this deal because it was a damn good deal. We worked tirelessly to get it adopted.

Indeed, the overwhelming consensus of these experts closely mirrors the views of one key player who described it as follows:

“Without a doubt, the nuclear deal between Iran and the West is a historic turning point. It is a big change in terms of the direction that Iran was headed, and in the way that we saw things. It has many risks, but also presents many opportunities. … We are still keeping Iran high on our priority lists because we need to monitor its nuclear program. But this is a real change. This is a strategic turning point.”

These are the words of Israeli chief of staff General Gadi Eizenkot at a conference this January. He is the man in charge of Israel’s security. Dozens of Israeli military and intelligence leaders agree with his assessment: This deal makes Israel safer. To claim that Eizenhot and senior Israeli military leaders were swayed by Ben Rhodes’ Twitter account is ludicrous.

What about the American experts? Were they seduced by sweet words, clever tweets and briefings at the White House?

Samuels should know better. He was engaged in these debates back in 2009 when he argued for bombing Iran, advancing what he said was “the rational argument for an attack on Iran.” He joined fellow conservatives at a panel in April 2015 to discuss the topic “What’s wrong with the proposed nuclear deal with Iran?” and claimed that President Obama would “be responsible for the greatest surge in nuclear proliferation that we’ve seen since the Second World War.”

He should know that expert and official advocacy for an agreement to roll back and dismantle Iran’s nuclear program predates the Obama administration and this last set of negotiations. I, personally, have argued for the negotiated dismantlement of Iran’s program for over a decade. Arms Control Association Director Daryl Kimball argued in 2007 for a shift in U.S. strategy, including trading sanctions relief for a rollback to the program and engagement in “comprehensive and sustained direct dialogue with Iran’s leaders.”

The Obama administration’s views on negotiations with Iran were influenced as much by outside experts as the other way around. Different players saw the same opportunities and risks and played their respective roles.

Experts have long argued, for example, that there was no military solution to this problem. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in 2007 “it would be a strategic calamity to attack [Iran]” and that such an attack would only set back Iran’s program by at most two years. Former senior diplomats and experts in the Iran Project held a discrete, back-channel meeting with Iranian counterparts since 2002 to discuss ways to improve relations. They went public with their efforts in 2009 with the signed support of over 50 of the most respected national security experts in the United States, including former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Hardly a “freshly minted” group.

Similarly, in June 2013, just after Rouhani’s election and long before formal negotiations began, 131 members of Congress — both Democrats and Republicans — signed a letter urging Obama “to pursue the potential opportunity presented by Iran’s recent presidential election by reinvigorating U.S. efforts to secure a negotiated nuclear agreement.” They were pushing the president, not the other way around.

As Rhodes himself wrote in a response to Samuels, “The outside organizations who did effectively make the case for the Iran deal did so not because we told them to—they did so because they also believed in the merits of the deal.”

The list of expert support for this agreement is too long to include in its entirety. During the summer of 2015 alone, when the Iran debate was at its peak, 78 nuclear nonproliferation experts, 60 national security experts, five former ambassadors to Israel, 29 Nobel Prize-winning scientists, 36 retired generals and admirals, over 100 former U.S. ambassadors, over 500 Iranian-Americans, 340 rabbis, 53 Christian leaders and 75 former members of Congress signed letters supporting the historic agreement.

These scientists included the physicist who helped design the first hydrogen bomb, and former White House science advisers, many with top secret clearances. The nuclear experts supporting the agreement include former nuclear-weapons inspectors and former U.S. intelligence officials. In fact, there is an overwhelming consensus among the world’s experts that the agreement is the best and likely the only way to ensure that Iran never builds a bomb. The former military leaders include retired generals and flag officers from every branch of the service. “America and our allies, in the Middle East and around the world, will be safer when this agreement is fully implemented,” they wrote.

It is absurd to believe that all these officials and experts were duped. They supported the deal because it was the most promising path to preventing an Iranian bomb.

The experts were right. The deal is working. In the 10 months since the accord was signed, Iran has ripped out more than two-thirds of its centrifuges, shipped out all but a token amount of its formerly huge stockpile of uranium gas, and yanked out the core of its plutonium reactor, drilled it full of holes and filled it with concrete. The deal shrinks Iran’s program to a fraction of its former size and wraps it in an airtight inspection regime tougher than any ever negotiated. The deal blocks Iran’s every possible path to a bomb.

Samuels and his allies tried to kill the deal. They failed. The Iran agreement is in place and working. The world is a safer place for it. Deal with it.