An Obama and Biden State Department administration official who participated in the negotiations that led to the 2015 deal that gave Iran $700 billion in sanctions relief in exchange for promises of an unverifiable temporary pause in its nuclear weapons program is now complaining that President Trump doesn’t have enough expert advice.
Wendy Sherman, who was deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration and under secretary of state for political affairs in the Obama administration with a stint in between as a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, also criticized the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, saying, he “has led us down a road—and we have been part of it—that has, in essence, created a genocide in Gaza that has destabilized the Middle East.” Sherman made her comments in an interview with Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain, a British Muslim veteran of the BBC who spoke at Oxford in October 2025 about what she called “acute mass harm to civilians in Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine.” Husain also used the Oxford speech to denounce Israel for deliberately killing Palestinian journalists, without acknowledging that many of the so-called journalists were terrorists.
It’s a closer race between what’s more repugnant—Sherman, with her track record, crapping all over President Trump’s Iran policy and falsely accusing Israel and the U.S. of genocide, or former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg hiring Husain and providing her and Sherman with a platform to promote these falsehoods.
The Sherman interview is titled, apparently without irony or comic intent, “How to negotiate with Iran,” as if the person who negotiated the horrible 2015 deal that enriched Iran to support regional terrorist proxies were in a position to provide authoritative advice about anything other than mistakes to avoid repeating.
The Sherman interview is labeled “weekend interview” and elaborately presented similarly to the ones the New York Times magazine has been running—a video podcast along with a print transcript annotated with footnotes. When Husain launched it, Bloomberg issued a press release touting what it described as “a new flagship global podcast,” that “will launch the same week Husain delivers the prestigious annual public lecture of the University of Oxford. Previous Romanes Lecturers have included British Prime Ministers William Gladstone, Winston Churchill and Tony Blair.”
In the hands of an editor with more brains and background knowledge, footnotes might have offered an opportunity to fact check, or provide context for, some of Sherman’s more fantastic claims. Sherman says, “When the 1979 Iranian Revolution happened, it was really a reaction to what we and the British had done in 1953, when we knocked off a prime minister [Mohammad Mossadegh] because we were afraid that Iran was going to nationalize the oil industry, and we thought that would hurt us.” That is inaccurate on several levels. The prime minister wasn’t ousted by America but by clerics, and they and America were both less concerned about the oil than about Communist influence, as Ray Takeyh has explained in at least three fine articles, “What Really Happened in Iran,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2014; “The Coup Against Democracy That Wasn’t,” Commentary, December 2021, and “The Real Story of the 1953 Iranian Coup,” the Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2023.
Proving causation in history and in social science generally is complex, but the idea that an American action taken in 1953 is “really” to blame for the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran is such a blame-America-first oversimplification that undercuts Sherman’s credibility. Husain lets it go unchallenged. What’s the point of having footnotes to give context if they aren’t going to be used in a situation like this?
Sherman complains that Trump “has cost our alliances, American taxpayers, 13 American lives, our inventory of weapons, our ability to project power abroad.” Yet Iran’s decision to attack the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan has only pushed those countries further into the U.S.-Israel alliance. The net gain to U.S. military strength of the warfighting experience may yet outweigh the expended weapons. If, after the war, Iran ends up in the U.S. camp, with its oil and gas flowing in U.S. dollars, then our ability to project power will be significantly enhanced in comparison to the status quo of Iran aligned with Russia and China against America.
Sherman says Trump will be “in a weakened position” when he goes to meet Xi Jinping in China in May, but in fact the weakened party is China, an unfree country that is reliant on smuggled Iranian petroleum. Even the New York Times appears finally to be adjusting its view on this; back in March it was writing “How the war in Iran could help China,” but now the reality is setting in and the Times headlines are changing to, “The Iran War Is Starting to Expose Cracks in China’s Economy.” The Times reports, “Thousands of workers who lost their jobs took to the streets last week in southern China, staging daily protests to demand back pay and compensation from several toy factories that abruptly closed on April 20. The closures came as costs for plastic, which is made from oil and natural gas, surged after traffic slowed through the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to energy buyers around the world. … The shuttered factories are in Yulin City, a low-wage toy manufacturing hub about 260 miles west of Hong Kong. Workers draped banners across factory gates with slogans like, ‘Give me back my blood and sweat money.’” Imagine how the Chinese Communist tyrants will feel if the Iranian protesters for freedom succeed in toppling the dictatorial regime in Tehran, with American help?
Sherman says, “Some of our best allies — Canada, the UK — have said they can’t rely on us and have beaten a path to China.” She doesn’t mention, and Husain doesn’t either, that this raises questions about how reliable Canada and the U.K. are as allies. Where are they when we ask for help, and what capabilities do they have to bring to bear? Do they really want to be satellites of Communist China, with all that entails for political and religious freedom, for property rights, for rule of law, for freedom of the press?
Sherman lectures about humility: “yes, the US has unequal power, but we have to be humble about it.” Where is Sherman’s own humility when it comes to her responsibility and that of Presidents Obama and Biden for a deal that resulted in enriching and empowering Iran with sanctions relief money?
Sherman makes a prediction: “My guess is that Iran will still have some measure of control over the Strait.” Why would Trump leave Iran in a position to close the strait again, basically giving it the power to push gas prices to $4 a gallon, and thus interfere in American politics, at will? It’d be an American unconditional surrender after a war in which Iran has been militarily defeated.
Sherman complains that the Trump administration doesn’t have enough experts. “I was glad to see that Vice President [JD] Vance brought some experts with him [to talks in Pakistan], but I’m not sure any of them were in the rooms. I had nuclear physicists, sanctions experts, lawyers and Treasury folks on my team. I had people who spoke fluent Farsi. I had literally hundreds in the US government who were engaged in this. I don’t see any of that infrastructure here,” she says. I’m all for experts on Iranian culture and nuclear concealment, yet all of Sherman’s “experts” left in power and enriched a regime that killed between 32,000 and 45,000 protesters and that funded Hamas and Hezbollah. All the “experts” in the world are no substitute for a president or a prime minister with determination and values who see the issues with clarity.
As for Sherman’s preening about the supposed “genocide” in Gaza, even the Hamas-controlled health ministry’s estimates put the Gaza death toll at about 71,000. Some significant portion of those were terrorist combatants. The Syrian Civil War killed as many as 620,000. That war began in 2011 on Obama and Sherman’s watch and accelerated when Obama declined to enforce a red line against Syrian chemical weapons use, a decision that Obama later described by saying, “I’m very proud of this moment.” No one cares about the half-million dead Syrians because the Jews can’t be blamed for them.
Sherman declares herself “angrier and angrier.” The same could be said of readers who have the context and are fuming to see these emotional pronouncements go unchallenged.
Husain made news in May 2025 when she clashed with Elon Musk in an appearance at the “Qatar Economic Forum, Powered by Bloomberg,” an event that is “held in collaboration with Qatar’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry” and “Editorially curated by Bloomberg News.” Bloomberg is not registered with the Department of Justice as a foreign agent. Musk said, “it’s difficult when I’m conversing with someone who is trapped in the dialogue tree of a conventional journalist because it’s like talking to a computer.”
Husain’s Oxford lecture reads like a Saturday Night Live parody of Muslim self-aggrandizement. She faulted the British media for anti-Muslim bias and credited Islam with operating the world’s oldest university, inventing algebra and the concept of an endowed chair in a university, providing the intellectual foundation for the European renaissance, and serving as the architectural inspiration for Westminster Abbey and Notre Dame, including stained glass, the pointed arch, and the rose window.
According to Wikipedia, Husain’s maternal grandfather was the first director general of Pakistan’s intelligence service. Another interview Husain did earlier this month was with a former ambassador of Pakistan, Maleeha Lodhi. It was headlined “US Dominance in the Middle East Is ‘Basically Over.’” Lodhi claimed, “US dominance has been fading … the era of America’s dominance in the region is basically over.” Interviewer Husain mostly played along: “If there is one winner in all of this, would you say it’s China?”
As for Sherman’s “genocide” accusation, it was seized on by a former foreign policy aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders, Matt Duss, who used it to attack President Biden and Sherman. Said Duss: “It’s a dodge to say that Netanyahu ‘led’ the US. Yes, he’s a liar and a manipulator, but Biden made his choice, as did Trump. Still quite notable coming from the US’s former second highest-ranking diplomat and longtime proponent of the Democratic Party’s pro-Israel orthodoxy.”
For Duss and others in the Sanders-Zohran Mamdani socialist wing of American politics, even accusing Israel of genocide is insufficient. Sherman also says in the interview, “It is critical that Israel remains an ally of the US and we protect the right of a Jewish state. … Israel absolutely deserves security and peace. I’m a strong supporter of Israel and the right of a Jewish state.” It’s an open question whether someone with Sherman’s professed views could get nominated to a job in an Ocasio-Cortez presidential administration, or get confirmed in a hypothetical Senate with Chris Van Hollen as the Democratic leader. As exasperating as Sherman and Bloomberg and Obama were and are, there’s a real risk—not a certainty, but a risk—that the next Democratic administration, if there is one, would be even worse.