Republicans are dead set against a deal to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon because it would only make the enemy stronger. This sounds insane until you realize the enemy they mean is President Obama.

Of course they say Iran can’t be trusted, but you rarely negotiate to avoid war with people you trust. They argue Iran would cheat, that inspections won’t work. But surely, after doing everything in their power for six years to roadblock every initiative by this White House, it is not unduly cynical to suppose a similar motive is at work here.

We are familiar with laments that politics used to stop at the water’s edge. In foreign policy, it is alleged, we all used to stand as one in long-gone, better days. But it’s a myth. Plenty of other presidents trying to make a deal abroad have faced a rearguard action at home, particularly when the opposition party had considerable power. Always the opposition is couched in high principle, but just as often it is based on low considerations of political advantage.

I am presently meandering through Jonathan Daniels’ “The Time Between the Wars.” He was a North Carolina newspaper man in the era described and briefly FDR’s last press secretary. In the book, I ran across a description of the Republican opposition to Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to make America a leader in a League of Nations that he hoped would prevent a future catastrophe on the scale of the Great War.

In Europe, the victors were not out to build a utopia but to practice realpolitik, to take revenge on the losers and redraw the map to favor their economic and political interests. There was a moment when Wilson was a savior who had won the war and had public support for his idealistic design. He might conceivably have modified the demands by his allies with support from the public and his countrymen.

Instead, his foes abroad were given aid and comfort by his foes at home, led by Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge. He hated Wilson in part because he was president and Lodge wasn’t. Lodge was a scholarly Boston Brahmin who had contempt for everything about Wilson — his plebeian origins, his unimpressive pedigree by
Massachusetts standards, his religion, his southernness and the scholarly accomplishments of the former president of Princeton University.

Lodge was proud that 40 years earlier as editor of “International Review” he had refused to publish a paper by Wilson and had also caught Wilson in a faulty allusion to classical mythology.

Worst of all, Wilson has been slow to get America into war when Republican firebrands like Theodore Roosevelt were gung-ho, and now he was too weak, idealistic, gullible and soft to be trusted to engineer a peace favorable to the United States.

Lodge tried to undercut the consensus in Europe by meddling abroad. He encouraged Italians to demand more territory than the Covenant allowed, and his henchmen demanded the peace conference take up the inflammatory and unrelated issue of Irish independence.

Daniels tells us other foes of the League on Lodge’s side warned that “the Pope might rule America through Catholic countries in the League; losing its sovereignty under world organization, America might be overrun by a new, unrestricted immigrant horde; a domination of the league by ‘dark’ peoples could impose racial equality in the United States.”

Sound familiar? Then, as now, the forces of reaction were powerful and not wedded to rational analysis when opposing the initiatives of the other party. Wilson failed, the peace was punitive, the League weak, America declined a central role, and the seeds were sown for a second, even worse world war.

Historical analogies are unreliable, but much in the opposition of the attempt to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions seems to have little to do with actually accomplishing that end. The preference for simple solutions — isolationism on the one hand or bloody intervention on the other — rather than a complicated arms reduction regime seems hard to defend intellectually or pragmatically. The reliance on personal animus and political opportunism rather than reasoned argument or strategic analysis is shoddy.

Obama’s gambit may fail, and a worse option may be forced on the nation, but it is surprising so many reject trying it with no better option to offer. Other than the kind of reflexive neo-con answer to every world problem articulated by conservative rabble-rouser William Kristol. He has offered this brilliantly thought out alternative: “What’s the harm of bombing them at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens?”