In his second term, Richard Nixon had Watergate, but also the rescue of Israel in the Yom Kippur War.
In his second term, Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra, but also a treaty eliminating U.S. and Soviet missiles in Europe, his "tear-down-this-wall" moment in Berlin and his lead role in ending the Cold War.
In his second term, Bill Clinton had Monica, but also came close to a peace treaty between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat.
Obama's second-term scandals — IRS, Benghazi, wiretapping The Associated Press and Fox — are in the low-kiloton range compared to the resignation of Nixon or the impeachment of Clinton.
And as Obama is going to get nada from a Republican House on guns, amnesty, cap-and-trade or a second stimulus, he should look for his legacy — as Nixon, Reagan and Clinton did — to foreign policy.
Two opportunities beckon. First, the mirage — a Middle East peace. Essential to any treaty, however, is a withdrawal of Israeli "settlers" from the West Bank, a sharing of Jerusalem, Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a "Jewish state" and Arab repudiation of the "right of return."
Good luck. Bibi Netanyahu, who calls Jerusalem our "eternal capital" and Judea and Samaria our ancient lands, is not going to divide Jerusalem or uproot Jewish settlers from the West Bank — not when he opposed their removal from Gaza by Ariel Sharon.
Bibi will not do it, cannot, if he wants his Likudnik coalition to survive. And Obama lacks the clout in Congress or this capital city to force Bibi to do anything he does not wish to do.
Hence Obama's legacy hopes lie not in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Washington this week, but in what is happening in Iran — the inauguration of the president who replaces Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Hasan Rouhani was elected with 51 percent of the vote by the constituency that voted against Ahmadinejad in 2009. His triumph was due to his endorsement by former presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. Both had been kept off the ballot by Ayatollah Khamenei.
Rouhani is a founding father of the Islamic Republic and was a close ally of Ayatollah Khomeini. But he was elected on a pledge to revive the economy, get sanctions lifted, and re-engage with the West.
He won on a promise of better times for the Iranian people and an end to Iran's isolation.
Yet the only way he can achieve these goals is to come to terms with Obama on Iran's nuclear program.
And as he was once Iran's lead negotiator on that program, Rouhani knows exactly what is required.
Despite the decades of acrimony between us, the basic elements of a Washington-Tehran deal are there.
Iran wants its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — to peaceful nuclear research and nuclear power — recognized by the United States. And it wants U.S.-UN sanctions lifted.
The United States wants more than verbal assurances that Iran is not building a bomb. We need intrusive inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities to assure us that she is not building an atom bomb.
As Reagan said, trust but verify.
Yet this seems not beyond the realm of possibility.
Despite the hysteria about Iran's "mad dash" to an atom bomb, Tehran has never tested a bomb and never produced the 90-percent-enriched uranium needed for a bomb, and does not have sufficient 20-percent uranium to further enrich for a bomb test.
Netanyahu's initial prediction that Iran was "three to five" years away from a bomb came — in 1992. Since then we have been getting monthly updates on the imminence of the Iranian bomb, but no bomb.
Moreover, Khamenei has declared nuclear weapons anti-Islamic, and U.S intelligence agencies have never retracted their declarations of 2007 and 2011 that Iran has made no decision to build a bomb.
Rouhani's political future, the continued allegiance of his Iranian followers who want to re-engage with the West and the world, hangs on whether he can get a deal on Iran's nuclear program and a lifting of sanctions. He knows this.
What Rouhani cannot do is surrender Iran's rights to nuclear power and research. On this his nation is united. But he may be able to give the West what it requires, intrusive inspections, to prove that what Iran claims to be true is true — that it has no nuclear weapons program.
If we can get that, we should be able to get a deal, and America can lift her sanctions, their objective having been achieved.
That would be the crown jewel of Obama's second term.
Who would be against such a deal? Bibi and the War Party that wants Iran smashed, as we smashed Iraq, even if that means another trillion-dollar unnecessary war.
Obama can, however, defeat the War Party coalition. He should congratulate Rouhani on his inauguration, declare his readiness for direct talks with Tehran, and appoint as negotiators national security hawks who want no war with Iran, but no Iranian atom bomb either.
History beckons. Obama should seize the moment.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"
Wednesday, John Kerry told the Senate not to worry about the cost of an American war on Syria.
The Saudis and Gulf Arabs, cash-fat on the $110-a-barrel oil they sell U.S. consumers, will pick up the tab for the Tomahawk missiles.
Has it come to this – U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen as the mercenaries of sheikhs, sultans and emirs, Hessians of the New World Order, hired out to do the big-time killing for Saudi and Sunni royals?
Yesterday, too, came a stunning report in the Washington Post.
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has joined the Israeli lobby AIPAC in an all-out public campaign for a U.S. war on Syria
Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League have invoked the Holocaust, with Hier charging the U.S. and Britain failed to rescue the Jews in 1942.
Yet, if memory serves, in ’42 the Brits were battling Rommel in the desert and the Americans were still collecting their dead at Pearl Harbor and dying on Bataan and Corregidor.
The Republican Jewish Coalition, too, bankrolled by Sheldon Adelson, the Macau casino mogul whose solicitude for the suffering children of Syria is the stuff of legend, is also backing Obama’s war.
Adelson, who shelled out $70 million to bring down Barack, wants his pay-off – war on Syria. And he is getting it. Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor have saluted and enlisted. Sheldon, fattest of all fat cats, is buying himself a war.
Yet, is it really wise for Jewish organizations to put a Jewish stamp on a campaign to drag America into another war that a majority of their countrymen do not want to fight?
Moreover, this war has debacle written all over it. Should it come, a divided nation will be led by a diffident and dithering commander in chief who makes Adlai Stevenson look like Stonewall Jackson.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey is having trouble even defining the mission. While Obama says it will be an in-and-out strike of hours, a “shot across the bow,” John McCain says the Senate resolution authorizes robust strikes, lethal aid to the rebels and a campaign to bring down Bashar Assad.
If the Republican Party backs this war, it will own this war.
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And U.S. involvement will last not for days, but for the duration. And if our power is unleashed, our prestige and superpower status go on the line.
If the rebels then lose, we lose. And if the rebels win, who wins?
Is it the same jihadists who just shelled that Christian village and terrorized that convent of Christian nuns?
Is it the same rebels seen on the front page of Thursday’s New York Times about to execute, Einsatzgruppen-style, captive Syrian soldiers, forgetting only to have the victims of their war crime dig their own graves first?
Does the Republican Party really want to own a war that could end with al-Qaida in power or occupying sanctuaries in Syria?
Does the U.S. Jewish community really want to be responsible for starting a war that ends with 2 million Christian Syrians facing a fate not unlike that of Poland’s Jews?
About the debate on this war, there is an aspect of the absurd.
We are told we must punish Assad for killing Syrians with gas, but we do not want Assad’s regime to fall. Which raises a question: How many Syrians must we kill with missiles to teach Assad he cannot kill any more Syrians with gas? Artillery, fine. Just no gas.
How many Syrians must we kill to restore the credibility of our befuddled president who now says he did not draw that “red line” on chemical weapons; the world did when it outlawed such weapons.
Yet this statement may offer Obama a way out of a crisis of his own making without his starting a war to save face.
Iran and Russia agree chemical weapons were used. Vladimir Putin has said Russia will back military action against those who did it. The Russians have put out a 100-page document tracing the March use of chemical weapons to the rebels. The Turks reportedly intercepted small amounts of sarin going to the rebels. We claim solid proof that Assad’s regime authorized and used chemical weapons.
Why not tell the Russians to meet us in the Security Council where we will prove our “slam-dunk” case?
If we can, and do, we will have far greater support for collective sanctions or action than we do now. And if we prove our case and the U.N. does nothing, we will have learned something about the international community worth learning.
But the idea of launching missiles based on evidence we will not reveal about Syria’s use of chemical weapons, strikes that will advance the cause of the al-Qaida terrorists who killed 3,000 of us and are anxious to kill more, would be an act of such paralyzing stupidity one cannot believe that even this crowd would consciously commit it.
In the fall of 1956, Nikita Khrushchev threatened to rain rockets down on London for the British invasion of Suez and sent his tanks into Budapest to drown the Hungarian Revolution in blood.
He blew up the Paris summit in 1960, banged his shoe at the U.N., and warned Americans, "We will bury you!"
He insulted John F. Kennedy in Vienna, built the Berlin Wall, and began secretly to place missiles in Cuba capable of annihilating every city in the Southeast, including Washington.
Those were sobering times and serious enemies.
Yet in the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, living under a nuclear Sword of Damocles unlike any the world had ever known, we Americans were on balance a cool, calm and collected crowd.
How then explain the semi-hysteria and near panic in circles of this city over the possibility President Obama might meet with President Hassan Rouhani and hold negotiations over Iran's nuclear program?
We hear talk of Hitler in the Rhineland, of a new Munich, of America failing to act as Britain failed to act, until, back to the wall, it had no choice but to fight. The old Churchill quotes are heard once again.
But is the Ayatollah Hitler? Is Rouhani von Ribbentrop? Is Iran the Fourth Reich? Should we be very very afraid?
Iran, we are told, is the most dangerous enemy America faces.
But is this true?
Depending on one's source, Iran's economy is 2 to 4 percent of ours. After oil and gas, its big exports appear to be caviar, carpets and pistachio nuts. Inflation is unbridled and Iran's currency is plummeting.
Here is the New York Times last month:
"Rouhani's aides describe Iran's economic situation as the worst in decades. ... The signs of woe abound.
"Lacking money, Iran's national soccer team scrapped a training trip to Portugal. Teachers in Tehran nervously awaited their wages, which were inexplicably delayed by more than a week. Officials warned recently that food and medicine imports have stalled for three weeks because of a lack of foreign currency."
Should Iran start a war, the sinking of its coastal navy would be a few days' work for the Fifth Fleet. Its air force of U.S. Phantoms dating to the Shah and few dozen MiGs dating to the early 1990s would provide a turkey shoot for Top Gun applicants.
In 30 days, the United States could destroy its airfields, missile sites and nuclear facilities, and impose an air and naval blockade that would reduce Iran to destitution.
And Iran is not only isolated economically.
She is a Shia nation in a Muslim world 90 percent Sunni, a Persian nation on the edge of a sea of 320 million Arabs. Kurds, Azeris, Arabs and Baluch make up close to half of Iran's population. War with America could tear Iran apart.
Why then would Tehran want a war — and with a superpower?
Answer: It doesn't. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has attacked no nation and gone to war once — to defend herself against Saddam Hussein's aggression that had the backing of the United States.
In that war, the Iranians suffered the worst poison gas attacks since Gamal Abdel Nasser used gas in Yemen and Benito Mussolini used it in Abyssinia. Iran has thus condemned the use of gas in Syria and offered to help get rid of it.
Last year, Iran's departing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who frightened so many, made a simple logical point about Iran's supposed bomb program:
"Let's even imagine that we have an atomic weapon, a nuclear weapon. What would we do with it? What intelligent person would fight 5,000 American bombs with one bomb?"
Yet, still, the beat goes on. "There is no more time to hold negotiations," says Israel's Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, Iran is only six months from developing an atom bomb.
Yet the New York Times reports Monday, "American intelligence experts believe Iran is still many months if not years away from having such a weapon." Time to clear this up.
Congress should call James Clapper, head of national intelligence, and pin him down publicly on these questions:
Has Iran made the decision to build an atom bomb? Does Iran even have all the ingredients for a bomb? If Iran made a decision to build a bomb would we know about it? And how long would it take for Iran to build and test a nuclear device?
Americans were misled, deceived and lied into one war. Let's not follow the same crowd into another.
Obama is being urged not to meet with Rouhani, as the man has a checkered past. Yet U.S. presidents met three times with Stalin, three with the Butcher of Budapest, once with Chairman Mao.
Compared to these fellows, Hussein Rouhani looks like Ramsey Clark.
Query: If Iran has the scientific and industrial capacity to build a bomb — and all agree it has — what could conceivably be the reason Iran has not yet done so?
Perhaps, just perhaps, Iran doesn't want the bomb.
Talk to the man, Mr. President.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"
