The emerging deal with Iran will likely have the opposite effect of what President Barack Obama intended, spurring nuclear proliferation in the Middle East rather than curtailing it, former Secretary of Defense William Cohen told Bloomberg reporters on Wednesday.

“The administration’s intent was to have a counter-proliferation program. And the irony is, it may be just the opposite,” he told a meeting of Bloomberg reporters Wednesday morning. …

“Once you say they are allowed to enrich, the game is pretty much up in terms of how do you sustain an inspection regime in a country that has carried on secret programs for 17 years and is still determined to maintain as much of that secrecy as possible,” said Cohen, who was a Republican lawmaker from Maine before serving under President Clinton from 1997 to 2001. …

“Most people that I know believe that Iran will continue to be a revolutionary country, and that’s what bothers all of the others in the region, that this is going to continue the expansion of power, that they will be at a disadvantage, and they can’t count on the United States,” he said.

Cohen faults the Obama administration for its inaction in response to the use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. According to Cohen, America’s allies lost confidence in the United States when President Obama failed to act against such violations, “after telling Gulf allies he would do so, even though the Assad regime had crossed his ‘red line’ on chemical weapons.” More generally, Cohen faulted the administration for failing “to articulate a clear vision for America’s role in the world in the 21st century.”

Cohen is the latest former government official or expert to raise the concern that the emerging nuclear deal with Iran would spur nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Others who have warned about this consequence include Matthew Kroenig, a former Defense Department official; former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz; David Rothkopf, editor of Foreign Policy magazine; and former deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Olli Heinonen.

In 2013, former Israeli prime minister and defense minister, Ehud Barak, warned, that “[a] nuclear Iran will be the end of any conceivable non-proliferation regime.”

A recently released State Department report also called Iran a “proliferation concern.”

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