Promoting the “deal” he claims he has made with Iran, President Obama is trying to cast himself as heir to a tradition of “peace through negotiations” followed by US presidents for decades. In that context he has named Presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as shining examples.

To start with, those who oppose the supposed “deal” with Iran never opposed negotiations; they oppose the result it has produced. Obama pretends that the alternative to the “deal” that he is marketing is war. Needless to say, that is not a serious argument.

Allegations related to Iran’s nuclear program have been around for two decades, prompting six resolutions of the UN Security Council. Iran and the major powers have been engaged in negotiations on the topic since 2003. What prompted Obama to press the accelerator was his desire to score a diplomatic victory before he leaves office.

He wanted something, anything, and to achieve that he was prepared to settle for one big diplomatic fudge. Is Obama the new JFK? Hardly.

Kennedy did negotiate with the USSR but only after he had blockaded Cuba and forced Nikita Khrushchev to blink and disband the nuclear sites he had set up on the Caribbean island. In contrast, Obama obtained nothing tangible and verifiable.

JFK also had the courage to fly to West Berlin to face the Soviet tanks and warn Moscow against attempts at overrunning the enclave of freedom that Germany’s former capital had become. In contrast Obama is engaged in an epistolary courting of the Supreme Guide and instructed his administration in Washington to do and say nothing that might ruffle the mullahs’ feathers. No, Obama is no JFK. But is he heir to Nixon?

Though he hates Nixon ideologically, Obama has tried to compare his Iran “deal” with Nixon’s détente with China. Again, the comparison is misplaced.

Normalization with Beijing came after the Chinese leaders had sorted out their internal power struggle and decided to work their way out of the ideological impasse created by “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”

At the time the Chinese elite, having suffered defeat in border clashes with the USSR, saw itself surrounded by enemies, especially after China’s only ally Pakistan had been cut into two halves in an Indo-Soviet scheme that led to the creation of Bangladesh.

China needed the US to break out of isolation. Even then, the Americans drove a hard bargain. They set a list of 22 measures that Beijing had to take to prove its goodwill; chief among them was abandoning the project of “exporting revolution.”

It was only then that Nixon went to Beijing to highlight a long process of normalization.

In the case of Iran, Obama has obtained none of those things. In fact, his “deal” has encouraged the worst tendencies of the Khomeinist regime as symbolized by dramatic rise in executions, the number of prisoners of conscience and support for terror groups not to mention helping Bashar Assad in Syria. No, Obama is no Nixon.

But is he a new Reagan as he pretends? Hardly.

Reagan was prepared to engage the Soviets at the highest level only after he had convinced them that they could not blackmail Europe with their SS20s while seeking to expand their empire through so-called revolutionary movements they sponsored across the globe.

Unlike Obama who is scared of offending the mullahs, Reagan had no qualms about calling the USSR “The Evil Empire” and castigating its leaders on issues of freedom and human rights.

Obama has made no mention of Jimmy Carter, the US president he most resembles. However, even Carter was not as bad as Obama if only because he was prepared to boycott the Moscow Olympics to show his displeasure at the invasion of Afghanistan. Carter also tried to do something to liberate US hostages in Tehran by organizing an invasion of the Iran with seven helicopters. The result was tragicomic; but he did the best his meager talents allowed. No one is suggesting Obama should invade Iran if only because if he did the results would be even more tragicomic than Carter’s adventure. On a more serious note, it is important to remember that dealing with the Khomeinist regime in Tehran is quite different from dealing with the USSR and China was in the context of detente. Neither the USSR nor the People’s Republic regarded the US as “enemy” in any religious context as the Khomeinist regime does.

The USSR and China first cured themselves of their version of the anti-American disease before seeking normalization. That did not mean they fell in love with the US. What it meant was that they learned to see the US as adversary, rival, or competitor not as a mortal foe. Iran has not yet cured itself of that disease and Obama’s weakness may make it even more difficult for that cure to be applied. Détente with the USSR and China came after they modified important aspects of their behavior for the better. There is one other difference between the cases of the USSR and China in the 1960s to 1990s and that of the Khomeinist regime in Tehran today.

The USSR had been an ally of the US during the WWII and its partner in setting up the UN in 1945. Although rivals and adversaries, the two nations also knew when to work together when their mutual interests warranted it.

The same was true of the Chinese Communist Party, which had been an ally of the US and its Chinese client the Kuomintang during the war against Japanese occupation. In the 1970s, Washington and Beijing did not find it strange to cooperate in containing the USSR, as they had done when countering Japan. In the case of Iran there is no sign of any positive change and certainly no history of even tactical alliance with the US. Unless he knows something that we do not, Obama is responding positively to his own illusions.