“I wouldn’t say that it’s damning,” Harf said of Kissinger and Shultz’s damning verdict on the Iran deal. “And I didn’t hear a lot of alternatives. I heard a lot of big words and big thoughts in that piece, and those are certainly – there’s a place for that – but I didn’t hear a lot of alternatives of what they would do differently.”

The notion that no one has submitted any alternatives to the administration’s terrible Iran deal is a convenient but baseless straw man that it trots out whenever confronted with an incontrovertibly accurate critique of the deal. It is, of course, not true. It doesn’t take a genius to identify in those “big words” deployed by these two former statesmen to identify alternative proposals.

“Absent the linkage between nuclear and political restraint, America’s traditional allies will conclude that the U.S. has traded temporary nuclear cooperation for acquiescence to Iranian hegemony,” Kissinger and Shultz write. Some possessed with even modest rationalization skills would have to assume that these two would have preferred coupling rewards for Iranian compliance with concessions regarding Iran’s support for terrorism, its extreme position vis-à-vis Israel’s right to exist, and it’s backing for regional proxies like the Yemeni Houthis, Hezbollah, and the Shiite militias in Iraq.

Others would have liked to have seen a reversal of Iran’s enrichment capabilities rather than a freeze on them. The idea that the fortified, underground nuclear site at Fordow, a site that Iran refused to disclose and was only uncovered as a result of the West’s clandestine activities, would remain intact as a nuclear university insults the West’s intelligence; precisely the kind of intelligence characterized by the use of “big words.”

In the twilight of this administration, it’s unlikely they will be able to find better spokespeople to sell this awful accord. But it’s clear they could use a few.