Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden’s Incoherent Iran Nuclear Policy

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Antony Blinken, Biden, Donald Trump, Iran, Iran nuclear deal, Israel, Jake Sullivan, JCPOA, Middle East, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Persian Gulf, Sunnis

In case you dismiss most or all statements during campaigns by office-seekers and their aides as complete baloney, you should take a look at some transcripts recently released by the Hudson Institute of interviews last year with then Joe Biden foreign policy advisers Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan – who have gone on to become President Biden’s Secretary of State and national security adviser, respectively.

The trouble is that these transcripts make plain as day, among other points, that the Biden view of handling Iran and its nuclear weapons ambitions makes little sense from a standpoint of simple common sense.

The Sullivan transcript – recorded last May – is by far the more thoughtful and serious of the two, but mainly in terms of revealing the fundamental confusion of the Biden outlook.

The central questions surrounding the Iran nuclear issue stem from the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (JCPOA) signed during the Obama years by the United States, Tehran, China, Germany, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom, which obliged Iran to accept limits on its nuclear research program in return for relief from longstanding international economic sanctions. The Obama administration insisted that even though the Iran nuclear limits would end in 2025, the agreement valuably put off the day when Tehran could produce a bomb on very short notice, and therefore in theory until then defused the greatest potential Iranian threat to American and Middle Eastern security; that a calmer atmosphere could help diplomatic efforts to deal with Iran’s other belligerent behavior; and that the deal represented the best outcome Washington could achieve jointly with other great powers – which were always capable of frustrating unilateral U.S. Iran strategies they considered too confrontational.

Critics (like, eventually, me) countered that the deal left open too many loopholes that could enable Iran to keep making substantial progress toward nuclear weapons capability; that the sanctions relief would give Iran the economic wherewithal to intensify its efforts to gain hegemony over much of the Middle East and Persian Gulf; and that the United States on its own had ample power to cripple Iran’s economic ability to wage proxy wars and sponsor terrorism. And because he basically agreed with the critics, Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018.

The results have been mixed. Unilateral U.S. sanctions have indeed ravaged Iran’s economy – and possibly put at least some constraints on its aggression and subversion, along with other dangerous weapons programs like its drive to create ever more effective, longer-range ballistic missiles. But this behavior has by no means stopped, and the Trump administration’s belief that the pain would foster regime change has been totally far-fetched so far. Further, to protest these sanctions – which Iran calls a violation of the JCPOA – Tehran has said that its own commitments are now null and void, and has taken a series of steps that JCPOA supporters charge demonstrate the failure of the Trump approach, and that deal opponents say Iran was taking clandestinely anyway – or was bound to.

Like his boss (who of course served as Barack Obama’s Vice President), Sullivan is a JCPOA supporter, and the new President has made clear his determination to return to the deal in the belief that Iran will slow down its nuclear research once again. But Sullivan’s remarks also reinforced the case against the deal by unwittingly acknowledging that the Obama-Biden hopes for the kind of changed Iranian behavior that would bring lasting benefits to the region are thoroughly in vain.

Here’s one of two key passages:

“[T]o me, the real issue with Iran, the real limitation on Iran in the region, has not been the availability of cash [i.e., the effectiveness of sanctions]. It’s been the availability of opportunity. And where opportunities have arisen, they’ve taken them. And that was true in the ’80s. It was true in the ’90s. It was true in the 2000s. It was during the 2010s. It remains true today. And even under massive sanction, the Iranians have gotten more aggressive in the Gulf, have remained just as aggressive in Syria and Lebanon, have increased their activities in respect to the Houthis in Yemen, and all of that while under massive economic sanction from the United States.”

I agree with Sullivan’s observation that Iran is so determined to achieve in the Middle East objectives considered dangerous by a broad bipartisan U.S. consensus that it’s pursued this agenda despite paying a major economic price. But does this kind of Iran sound like a country likely to reform in the slightest by the time the JCPOA runs out? Worse, the failure of sanctions to bring Iran to heel, by no means renders inconsequential the resources they’ve denied the country. It’s all too reasonable to conclude that permitting Iran to do business normally with the rest of the world will simply make an aggressive regime much wealthier, and thus able to act more aggressively. As political scientists would say, the result would be a country whose malign intentions haven’t changed but whose malign capabilities are have greatly increased.

The second key passage:

“[M]y view is, if you can take one of the big threats off the board, the Iranian nuclear program, take it off the board, and then use the tools available at your disposal, none of which were stripped from us by the JCPOA, to go after Iran in the region. And to the extent you want to make diplomacy, the central feature of stopping Iran’s malign activities, get the regional actors at the table with the Iranians and stand behind them with some pressure to try to produce a deescalation, say between Iran and Saudi Arabia.”

Here the problem is Sullivan’s apparent belief that, faced with the prospect of being “gone after” by the United States and its other bitterest rivals, Iran will dutifully comply with the JCPOA for the entire length of its duration – which will leave it highly vulnerable to “pressure” to abandon goals that the previous Sullivan passage identified as positively foundational.

It’s far more likely – and I’d call it a virtual certainty – that Iran will do everything possible to prevent this kind of vulnerability/ As a result it can be expected to take every opportunity in the foreseeable future to make the fastest possible progress toward the nuclear weapons threshhold whether the nuclear deal is resumed or not, devoting many of resources made available by sanctions removal to that effort, and continuing even faster (and eventually building a nice sized stockpile) once the JCPOA expires.

Not that there’s no reason for optimism from an American standpoint. For the above scenario makes a U.S. military pullout from the terminally dysfunctional Middle East/Persian Gulf region more appealing than ever. Another reason for optimism for those still worried about Iran despite decisive recent reasons to disengage, like substantial American energy independence:  Trump’s oft-voiced (but only partly-at-best fulfilled) desire to exit had clearly prompted Iran’s Sunni Arab and (nuclear armed) Israeli foes to kick into the next gear their own tacit alliance, which seems more than capable of countering Iranian threats.

Unfortunately, even though in his interview, Blinken stated that a Biden administration would seek to deemphasize the region in U.S. grand strategy in order to focus more on East Asia, President Biden seems bent on keeping the U.S.’ armed regional presence impressively sized.  Can anyone say “Tar Baby” – again?

Following Up: Still No Biden Learning Curve in Sight on the Middle East or China

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America First, China, energy revolution, Following Up, fossil fuels, globalism, Iran, Iran nuclear deal, Israel, Joe Biden, Middle East, oil, Phase One, Saudi Arabia, Sunnis, tariffs, The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, Trade, trade war, Trump

Talk about great timing! Just two days ago, I analyzed New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s new offering warning Joe Biden not to rush back into the Iran nuclear deal because this step could undo lots of the progress made by President Trump’s America First foreign policy approach in greatly improving the prospects for advancing and protecting U.S. interests in the region.

And just this morning, Friedman has published a piece based on lengthy interview with the apparent President-elect making clear that he has no interest in learning these valuable lessons of the recent past. In addition, Biden confirmed that his China policy plans are just as dominated by cynical doubletalk these days as during the 2020 election campaign.

As Friedman argued on November 29, Mr. Trump’s message that Israel and the Arab world’s Sunni Muslim monarchies (mainly Saudi Arabia) should no longer count on the United States to fight their battles accomplished this critical objective: It

“forced Israel and the key Sunni Arab states to become less reliant on the United States and to think about how they must cooperate among themselves over new threats — like Iran — rather than fighting over old causes — like Palestine. This may enable America to secure its interests in the region with much less blood and treasure of its own. It could be Trump’s most significant foreign policy achievement.”

But as Biden made clear in his conversation with Friedman, he either can’t or refuses to understand the key development that validates the Trump approach – the U.S. fossil fuel production revolution that has eliminated America’s overriding reason for treating the Middle East as a vital national security interest, and enabled Washington to adopt a Trump-ian take-it-or-leave-it approach safely.

Not that domestic energy independence means that completely ignoring Middle East affairs is always the best response. But it certainly does mean much greater scope for Washington to advance objectives with varying degrees of importance (notably, preventing a nuclear-armed Iran from dominating the region) in ways far less risky and costly than the lengthy wars and immense military commitments that have dominated globalist strategy.

And as Friedman has indicated, the President has started lifting the United States off its dangerous hook by leaving its Middle East allies no choice but to stop quarreling over trifles (like the fate of the Palestinians) and work together to take responsibility for their own genuinely critical and shared interests.

Biden, however, still believes that America remains so dependent on “getting some stability” in this long-unstable region that deep entanglement in Middle East affairs is unavoidable. Just as worrisome: He’s laid out a genuinely Rube Goldberg-esque rationale for treating the Iran nuclear deal as his strategy’s linchpin. As Friedman describes his blueprint (based on this interview and other conversations with top Biden aides):

“[O]nce the [nuclear] deal is restored by both sides, there will have to be, in very short order, a round of negotiations to seek to lengthen the duration of the restrictions on Iran’s production of fissile material that could be used to make a bomb — originally 15 years — as well as to address Iran’s malign regional activities, through its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

“Ideally, the Biden team would like to see that follow-on negotiation include not only the original signatories to the deal — Iran, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union — but also Iran’s Arab neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”

To which the only reasonable response is “Good luck with that” – especially given the lack of consensus on Middle East goals among this highly diverse group of countries, and, equally important, the wildly varying stakes in success between governments inside and outside of the Middle East,

On China, the big and encouraging news is that Biden has decided not to remove the steep, sweeping Trump tariffs “immediately.” That position of course makes at best little sense given how disastrous he called these levies’ impact.

Otherwise, the former Vice President showed that his China policy statements could be even more thoroughly dominated by doubletalk and cluelessness than they were during the campaign.

Most troubling was how Biden contended (correctly) that “leverage” is the make-or-break factor in negotiating with China, and then quickly added “in my view, we don’t have it yet.” Even leaving aside Beijing’s at-least-suggestive decision to sign a Phase One trade deal whoppingly one-sided in favor of a country whose markets it needs desperately to secure adequate levels of prosperity, why did the apparent President-elect go out of his way to advertise supposed American weakness? Indeed, this perverse practice looks like an emerging habit of the Biden foreign policy camp.

As Biden told Friedman, he continues insisting that this leverage can be created in large measure by creating a “coherent strategy” behind which the United States and its European and Asian allies can unite. But as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, many of these countries (notably, Germany, Japan, and South Korea) have made too much money trading with China at the U.S.’ expense to support any position but a complete return to the pre-Trump era of actively coddling and enabling the People’s Republic.  (See, e.g., this analysis.)

At the same time, the apparent President-elect deserves credit for recognizing that gaining sufficient leverage to deal with China successfully requires (in Friedman’s words) “developing a bipartisan consensus at home for some good old American industrial policy — massive, government-led investments in American research and development, infrastructure and education to better compete with China.”

Finally, however, Biden still accepts the completely unjustified pre-Trump view that, without the kind of one-sided, pro-U.S. enforcement mechanism at the heart of the Phase One agreement, Washington can negotiate away most of China’s wide-ranging trade predation with precisely enough worded paper agreements. As I’ve explained, the only genuine hope for progress along these lines is the kind of dispute-resolution system set up in Phase One – in which Washington serves as judge, jury, and court of appeals. 

A few days before he spoke with Friedman, Biden told another journalist that he knows the nation and world are “totally different” from his Vice Presidential days and that therefore his administration would not be “a third Obama term.”  His conversation with Friedman, though, strongly indicated that he meant “except for the Middle East and China.”  

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Another (Really) Surprising Endorsement of America First

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Afghanistan, allies, America First, Gaza, globalism, Golan Heights, Iran, Iran deal, Iran nuclear deal, Israel, Jerusalem, Joe Biden, Middle East, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Palestinians, Saudi Arabia, Sunnis, The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, Trump, West Bank

It’s one thing for globalists in politics and the think tanks and the media and even appointees of apparent President-elect Joe Biden to admit tacitly that the kind of America First-y strategy unevenly pursued by Donald Trump is the only sensible approach to U.S. foreign policy. (As I’ve noted recently here and here.)

It’s something else entirely for a major cheerleader for pre-Trump policies (and an outspoken Never Trumper) explicitly to credit such Trump-ism for constructively realigning the geopolitics of a region best known lately for spawning major threats to U.S. interests and epically failed official American responses in dramatically favorable ways.

This shock was delivered yesterday by New York Times pundit Thomas L. Friedman, who holds a special place in the globalist pantheon.  For decades, he’s touted the virtues of an increasingly globalized and benign world that was rapidly leaving the United States no choice but to stop clinging to national sovereignty, and to leave the big decisions impacting the safety and prosperity of the American people to the private sector visionaries spearheading such progress in technology and finance, and to the disinterested supposed experts, foreign and American alike, who staffed international bureaucracies.  (See here and here in particular.)   

It was amazing enough to see Friedman warn apparent President-elect Joe Biden not to rush the United States back into an Iran nuclear deal lauded by the Obama-style Never Trumpers (including the former Vice President) who negotiated it as the crowning glory of global diplomatic history. Perhaps that’s because one subject in which Friedman’s expertise is truly genuine is the Middle East, where his decades of coverage include many years on the ground. So quite sensibly, he noted that the region has changed dramatically in the years since Biden was in power.

But more amazing still was Friedman’s contention that the main agent of this change – which “may enable America to secure its interests in the region with much less blood and treasure of its own” – has been Mr. Trump’s transformation of U.S. policy.

Friedman focuses on the President’s Trump’s decisions in the fall of 2019, when Iranian aggression against U.S. ally Saudi Arabia threatened to spark yet another regional conflict into which America could well be dragged.

But rather than order the U.S. military to jump to Saudi Arabia’s defense, the President announced in October, “We are sending troops and other things to the Middle East to help Saudi Arabia. But — are you ready? Saudi Arabia, at my request, has agreed to pay us for everything we’re doing. That’s a first.”

And as Friedman makes emphatically clear, it was a first based on a revolutionary (by hidebound pre-Trump U.S. foreign policy standards) insight, and one for which Americansshould be deeply grateful. In the author’s words, the President’s announcement sent the following message:

“Dear Saudis, America is now the world’s biggest oil producer; we’re getting out of the Middle East; happy to sell you as many weapons as you can pay cash for, but don’t count on us to fight your battles. You want U.S. troops? Show me the money.”

And the results? According to Friedman:

“In effect, Trump forced Israel and the key Sunni Arab states to become less reliant on the United States and to think about how they must cooperate among themselves over new threats — like Iran — rather than fighting over old causes — like Palestine. This may [as noted above] enable America to secure its interests in the region with much less blood and treasure of its own. It could be Trump’s most significant foreign policy achievement.”

Actually, Trump’s departure from the dangerously stale globalist conventional wisdom began a good deal earlier, with decisions like his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and movement of the U.S. Embassy to that historic city, endorsement of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and support for Israeli settlements on the long-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River.

Combined with Mr. Trump’s determination to keep the United States an oil production powerhouse, these moves also revealed that Washington was no longer going to permit Arab regimes in effect to have their cake and eat it, too at America’s expense — using the threat of Arab public opinion exploding and radicalizing over the West Bank and equally occupied Gaza to both (1) sustain open-ended U.S. military support, and (2) thereby continue indulging their ideological determination to keep their embryonic ties with Israel as covert as they were limited.

Something else Friedman should have mentioned: All these Trump decisions have been strongly opposed not only by most American globalists, but by the European allies that Biden is so determined to woo.

I personally still can’t give Mr. Trump an “A” on Middle East policy — not while he still hasn’t put his foot down and pulled nearly all American troops out of Afghanistan over his own military advisers’ objections, and while the United States still maintains way too any forces in the region overall.  But he’s at least pointed U.S. policy in the right direction — as even a committed globalist like Friedman has just told the nation, and the likely next President.      

Following Up: On the Middle East, the “Serious” Candidates are Less Serious Than Ever

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2016 elections, air strikes, allies, burden sharing, coalition, Defense Department, Following Up, free-riding, Iran, Iraq, ISIS, Kurds, Middle East, Pentagon, Saudi Arabia, Sunnis, Syria, terrorism

A recent RealityChek post explained why the label “serious” shouldn’t be used for presidential candidates (in either party) who claim that the United States can create a meaningful anti-ISIS military coalition. More recently, a report from the Pentagon itself further mocks the idea that office-seekers – or anyone else – believing that America’s allies will share much of the burden of defeating the terrorist group have any significant knowledge of the Middle East or world affairs generally. As my post noted, most of the presidential hopefuls in both parties fall into this category – including all of the “mainstream” or “establishment” figures, along with President Obama .

The Defense Department report tallied by country the number of air strikes carried out against ISIS as of January 19, and here are the findings. Overall, of the 9,782 such attacks conducted on targets in Syria and Iraq, the United States has been responsible for 7,551, or more than 77 percent. By target countries, U.S. war planes have carried out nearly 69 percent of the anti-ISIS strikes in Iraq, and just under 94 percent of these operations in Syria. (These counts don’t include Russian activity, or the more than 65,000 “sorties in support of operations” in the two countries, like reconnaissance and targeting missions.)

DoD doesn’t break down the non-U.S. figures by country; according to CNN, one reason is that these various governments define and count “air strike” in many different ways. But given the focus in the United States on local Middle East countries, and the expectation that their own gut level self-interest in will motivate them to practically lead the fight against a group they say is a literally mortal threat, it seems reasonable to surmise that Saudi Arabia et al are dropping the ball.

It’s important to point out that one reason that the United States has dominated the air war against ISIS is that the United States is the world’s dominant military power. At the same time, the U.S. air power is deployed all around the world in order to handle threats in nearly every region. America’s Middle East allies have no military responsibilities beyond their neighborhood.

Moreover, if these countries aren’t all-in for the air war, how realistic is it to expect them to charge into a major ground war against ISIS? The answer: It’s the height of inanity – and ignorance. And the reason is pretty simple: As has repeatedly been the case since the end of World War II, the United States needlessly has made itself vulnerable to the free-rider phenomenon. Under Democratic and Republican presidents alike, Washington has been so infatuated with exercising “global leadership,” and has so loudly advertised its conclusion that America’s own security depends on the security of every corner of the globe, that its European NATO allies, Japan, and South Korea have understandably assumed that the United States would protect them no matter how modest their own efforts.

In the impossibly byzantine Middle East, the free-rider syndrome has been exacerbated by all the other items on the security agendas of countries ranging from Saudi Arabia (like countering Iranian ambitions in the region, and supporting lots of Islamic radicalism itself) to Turkey (like preventing Iraq’s anti-ISIS Kurds from becoming strong enough to create an independent state that would attract Turkey’s own Kurdish minority).

The failure of the “serious” presidential candidates to recognize the coalition delusion shows that accumulating “experience” in making national security policy in Washington by no means proves that they’ve accumulated wisdom or even developed simple common sense. The same of course holds for the establishment media, which keeps clinging to and parroting the same off-the-mark convictions.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Signs that Obama is Getting It on Islam and Terrorism

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gun control, Iraq, ISIS, Islam, Middle East, Muslims, No-Fly List, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pakistan, profiling, radical Islam, Rand Paul, refugees, Republicans, Sunnis, Syria, terrorism

President Obama’s prime-time address on terrorism last night shows that he’s deeply conflicted about the role played by Islam in fostering these attacks. Which is good news, and not only because it’s a complicated issue. It’s good news because, as the president’s critics have been insisting, “words matter” in America’s efforts to counter this threat. That’s true whether you believe, like me, that the key to success versus ISIS and similar groups is securing the nation’s borders because they are eminently controllable. And it’s true whether you believe, like Mr. Obama and almost everyone else (including his critics), that the key is some form of improved intervention in the Middle East.

His most recent presidential statement on the terror threat shows that the president is still trafficking in the largely straw man argument that “We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam” and that “ISIL does not speak for Islam.” Of course, relatively few Americans believe that an entire religion and all of its adherents should be stigmatized.

More encouragingly, however, the president also specified that a refusal to condemn all Muslims and their faith “does not mean denying the fact that an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities. This is a real problem that Muslims must confront, without excuse.” Moreover, it’s consistent with remarks he made in his otherwise petulant press conference following the G20 economic summit in Turkey last month. They’re worth quoting in full:

“…I do think that Muslims around the world — religious leaders, political leaders, ordinary people — have to ask very serious questions about how did these extremist ideologies take root, even if it’s only affecting a very small fraction of the population. It is real and it is dangerous. And it has built up over time, and with social media it has now accelerated.

“And so I think, on the one hand, non-Muslims cannot stereotype, but I also think the Muslim community has to think about how we make sure that children are not being infected with this twisted notion that somehow they can kill innocent people and that that is justified by religion. And to some degree, that is something that has to come from within the Muslim community itself. And I think there have been times where there has not been enough pushback against extremism. There’s been pushback — there are some who say, well, we don’t believe in violence, but are not as willing to challenge some of the extremist thoughts or rationales for why Muslims feel oppressed. And I think those ideas have to be challenged.”

So however reluctant he is to cast matters this way, the president has accused the world’s Muslim community of failing to counter extremist variants of Islam vigorously enough. And other than fear for their own lives (which would be understandable, if not praiseworthy) what else could explain this unwillingness, especially on the part of Muslim clerics and Muslim theocratic governments, than their conviction that the religious pitches being made by ISIS and similar groups contain important elements that they find neither entirely alien nor entirely repellent?

As just implied, acknowledging that Islam in particular, as opposed to violent extremism as such, presents special problems in the fight against terror means that America’s current anti-ISIS campaign will need at least one major change of emphasis. After all, today’s strategy relies heavily on the belief that the Sunni Arab world (including those theocracies) will (eventually) contribute the bulk of the ground forces needed to defeat ISIS militarily. If many of these putative allies, and the populations they rule, have mixed feelings about what the terrorists stand for, then something dramatic will need to be done to convince them that their stakes in the fight warrant assuming major commitments and risks. The only other option is to send into the fray enough U.S. ground troops to accomplish the mission, a step that even most of Mr. Obama’s hawkish critics are reluctant to endorse. (This explains much of their enthusiasm for the Sunni option).

Of course, a more realistic take on Islam’s responsibility for ISIS-style terrorism would involve recognizing how fatally it undermines the case for the Sunni option and other interventionist-centered approaches, and strengthens that for a borders-focused anti-ISIS strategy. But the importance of acknowledging Islam-related problems doesn’t stop there. Most important, it also militates for concentrating restrictions on entry into the United States on the Muslim world, or at least certain parts of it.

Which countries justify the most concern is legitimately debatable. But certainly it’s hard to understand why any American not affiliated with a legitimate international aid organization or the U.S. government should want to or be able travel to Syria nowadays (and come back), and similar questions need to be raised about Iraq and Pakistan (though commerce with those countries so far is much more extensive). Another possibility: tighter curbs on travel to theocracies.

Interestingly, the President and Congressional Republicans reportedly will both back legislation containing some such country-specific restrictions on travel – though not on refugees. Even Kentucky Republican Senator and presidential candidate Rand Paul, a libertarian stalwart, recently introduced a bill that would suspend the resettlement of refugees from 34 “high-risk” countries – mainly from the Muslim world.

And as I tweeted yesterday, it’s not too difficult to imagine a compromise that handles the refugee – and a related – matter: Mr. Obama and his party agree to suspending the admission of Middle East refugees until vetting and screening procedures have been acceptably tightened, in exchange for Republicans agreeing to bar anyone on a government No-Fly List from legally buying a gun once the process of creating these lists gets more precise.

No doubt these decisions and proposals will be greeted with cries of “profiling!” from both political fringes. But the country’s reasonable middle has clearly been roused and the above are signs that it is pulling a critical mass of Democrats and Republicans toward a common sense consensus on domestic security. As Winston Churchill reportedly said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.”

Im-Politic: About Those “Serious” Presidential Candidates

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2016 election, Arabs, Bashir Al-Assad, Chris Christie, Im-Politic, Iran, ISIS, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Middle East, Muslims, Obama, Qatar, Republicans, Saudi Araabia, Shiites, Sunnis, Syria, terrorism, Yemen

According to the nation’s mainstream political and media classes, this year’s Republican presidential hopefuls are divided into two main categories. One is comprised of the “serious” candidates who, whether you agree with them or not, clearly know the issues inside out thanks to their experience in government which has exposed them both to the complexities of America’s leading challenges and to the community of – mainstream of course – experts, many of them former policymakers themselves, who constantly fill them in on critical details and new findings. The other is comprised of the candidates who are manifestly non-serious – who can’t possibly know what they’re talking about because they lack both that governing experience and those connections with experts.

It’s a seductive typology – until you realize that all of their experience hasn’t prevented the supposedly serious candidates, and their galaxies of experts, from backing ideas that are completely whacko. Here’s just one prominent example: The belief that America has reliable allies in the Sunni Muslim world and that all that’s been preventing them from banding together into an effective anti-ISIS coalition is President Obama’s lack of resolve.

Propounders of this view have been Republican candidates Jeb Bush and Chris Christie – who the mainstream media has allowed to portray themselves as foreign policy authorities even though they’ve mainly been state governors with no direct background in the field. It’s also been a staple of Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich, who at least can boast of having legislative responsibilities in national security. All of which goes to show you that experience is no guarantee of knowledge and common sense, let alone wisdom.

None of these ostensible diplomatic geniuses seem to know that the Sunni Muslim governments preside over fragile and sometimes failing states that are simply too divided internally and peopled with deeply anti-Western, scapegoating-happy movements and populations to go all-in on any military campaigns in which the United States – the leading symbol of historic Western success (and Arab Muslim failure) – plays any meaningful role. Even more dangerous for Sunni Arab leaders’ survival would be joining with the West to wipe out a group that claims to seek the return of Islam’s glory caliphate days.

But that’s not the biggest obstacle to creating a regional alliance against ISIS. For among the leading anti-Western scapegoaters have been the Sunni Muslim governments themselves. As widely noted, it’s been a great way to divert their populations’ attentions from their own records of keeping their countries backward and oppressed – and in some cases poverty-stricken. In addition, the political and economic elites of countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar are filled not only with ISIS sympathizers. They’re filled with leading ISIS funders. More broadly, as The Economist (not known for iconoclasm) has observed:

“among observers of the Muslim world, it’s a commonplace that Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment has used its wealth to propagate, globally, its own puritanical school of Sunni Islam, one that despises more elaborate forms of worship and their practitioners. A catchall term for this kind of Islam is Salafism, a school that stresses the life of Muhammad and his immediate successors and distrusts any thinking or practice that emerged later. Salafism can be politically quietist, and it has some peaceful adherents, but it can also be ultra-violent. It can provide soil in which terrorist weeds can flourish.”

Finally, the Sunni Arab leaders are anything but united behind American geopolitical aims (which are pretty confused themselves). For example, the top Syria priority of conservative Persian Gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia isn’t defeating ISIS. It’s ousting dictator Bashir Al-Assad, a long-time ally of their arch-enemy Iran, the world’s leading Shiite Muslim power. Indeed, reports have multiplied that the Saudis have slacked off even their initial anti-ISIS military moves in Syria in order to concentrate more of their resources on countering Iranian influence in their southern neighbor, Yemen.

To be sure, the conventional wisdom isn’t always wrong, and experience doesn’t always produce disaster. But establishment Republican candidates’ infatuation with the fantasy of a powerful Middle Eastern anti-ISIS coalition just waiting to be created makes alarmingly clear that it often is and can. So does recalling that the major supporters of U.S. military intervention in Vietnam were considered “the best and the brightest,” and that almost no major economists predicted the last, almost catastrophic, financial crisis. By the same token, the unconventional wisdom and inexperience can’t guarantee success, or avert calamitous failure.

Instead, the real lesson here is that the word “serious” has been thrown around way too carelessly, and self-servingly, in this campaign season – especially considering the recent records of establishment politicians in both major political parties. Encouragingly, poll results so far are making clear that big portions of the public aren’t buying these labels. Is it too much to hope that the political and media classes might display comparable savvy? Are are these self-styled taste- and king-makers too conflicted?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Kissinger’s (Unwitting?) Case for a Middle East Exit

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Bashir Al-Assad, energy, Henry Kissinger, Iran, Iran deal, ISIS, Middle East, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Shiites, Sunnis, Syria, terrorism, Vladimir Putin

I’m pretty sure that Henry Kissinger doesn’t view his latest op-ed column as an explanation of why the United States needs to refocus its Middle East strategy on the goal of strategic withdrawal. Nonetheless, that’s exactly what it is.

To his credit, the former Secretary of State acknowledges that U.S. policy is “on the verge of losing the ability to shape events” in the region. And the last quarter or so of his article presents what at first glance looks like a six-point plan for restoring American influence. The trouble is, it doesn’t add up to much of a strategy. To be sure, he does argue clearly for making ISIS’ defeat Washington’s top priority – to the point of of both dropping the aim of ousting Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad and even acquiescing in a Russian military role in the anti-terrorist campaign.

Kissinger’s arguments about Russia are especially interesting, diametrically opposed both to the prevailing Republican and conservative outrage over Vladimir Putin’s intervention, and also to the Obama administration’s weaker protests. In fact, Kissinger portrays Moscow’s involvement as mainly defensive (to prevent Islamic radicals from creating a base from which they could foment unrest among the large Muslim populations of Russia’s southern regions). Therefore, he contends that allowing the Russians to play a role in defeating ISIS is better than leaving the field open for “Iranian jihadist or imperial forces” to claim major credit for victory – and therefore will help contain Iran’s future influence.

The former Secretary also endorses President Obama’s policy of supplementing his Iran nuclear weapons agreement with “assurances” to help protect the region’s Sunni states, like Saudi Arabia, resist Tehran’s designs. But he also appears to agree with Mr. Obama that it’s worth trying to persuade the Iranians to stop destabilizing the region.

After that, though, the Kissinger approach gets pretty fuzzy: “The reconquered territories should be restored to the local Sunni rule that existed there before the disintegration of both Iraqi and Syrian sovereignty”? “The sovereign states of the Arabian Peninsula, as well as Egypt and Jordan, should play a principal role in that evolution”? “After the resolution of its constitutional crisis, Turkey could contribute creatively to such a process”? What on earth do those statement mean?

Ditto for “A federal structure could then be built between the Alawite and Sunni portions. If the Alawite regions become part of a Syrian federal system, a context will exist for the role of Mr. Assad, which reduces the risks of genocide or chaos leading to terrorist triumph.” Especially given Kissinger’s own (correct) judgment that a central challenge facing current U.S. Middle East policy is that “two rigid and apocalyptic blocs are confronting each other….”

In fact, the “Kissinger plan” dissolves into gauziness precisely because, as he makes so clear, that Sunni-Shiite conflict barely begins to describe the complexity and intractability of the region’s dysfunction. As he writes, the Middle East order that prevailed since 1973 “in shambles,” and four local states having literally fallen apart (Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen). Therefore, what’s left of the Sunni world (which includes America’s dubious allies, notably Saudi Arabia, “risks engulfment by four concurrent sources: Shiite-governed Iran and its legacy of Persian imperialism; ideologically and religiously radical movements striving to overthrow prevalent political structures; conflicts within each state between ethnic and religious groups arbitrarily assembled after World War I into (now collapsing) states; and domestic pressures stemming from detrimental political, social and economic domestic policies.”

More important, “The U.S. is now opposed to, or at odds in some way or another with, all parties in the region: with Egypt on human rights; with Saudi Arabia over Yemen; with each of the Syrian parties over different objectives. The U.S. proclaims the determination to remove Mr. Assad but has been unwilling to generate effective leverage—political or military—to achieve that aim. Nor has the U.S. put forward an alternative political structure to replace Mr. Assad should his departure somehow be realized.”

If he really is an archetypical realist, Kissinger should recognize that not all international problems are fated to be solved peacefully, and that geography has given the United States the priceless gift of distance from this hopeless mess. As I’ve repeatedly explained, because terrorist attacks remain all too possible, and because Middle East tumult continually endangers access to its energy supplies, America is not yet in a position simply to walk away. But as I’ve also repeatedly explained, the United States is eminently capable of addressing these issues predominantly through domestic policies like securing its borders better and stepping on the energy production revolution gas.

Henry Kissinger has all but accepted that the United States cannot become safe from Middle East dangers by manipulating the region’s players and societies. Indeed, moreover, his article, intriguingly, is titled, “A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse.” Is he still hoping against hope that the regional diplomatic circle can be squared?  Or do those first three words constitute his real message?  

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: What Does Obama Really Think About the Iran Military Option?

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Arab Street, Bashir Al-Assad, Council on Foreign Relations, Iran, Iran deal, Iraq, ISIS, John Kerry, Middle East, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Shiites, Sunnis, Syria

I’ve suggested that the less President Obama and his top advisers say about their new Iran nuclear deal, the better its chances of Congressional approval, and Secretary of State John Kerry recently provided a great example that somehow escaped even the critics’ notice.

The president plainly thinks that one of the strongest arguments on behalf of the deal is that it’s America’s best option for keeping Iran nuclear weapons-free short of war. And most of his critics plainly agree with his assumption that such a conflict would be terrible. Otherwise, why would they keep insisting despite all the evidence that tougher sanctions, or a prolonging of current sanctions, can get the job done?

I agree that a military strike could be very dangerous. It’s anything but clear that the U.S. government knows where all of Iran’s key sites are, and secret facilities would almost by definition survive American bombs and missiles. Moreover, military actions have a nasty habit of producing unexpected and harmful consequences.

But here’s the funny thing: According to Secretary of State John Kerry, the president actually isn’t so worried. And Kerry’s stated views could legitimately be interpreted as agreeing – at least if you take seriously some July 24 remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.

The Council, just to remind, is a combination foreign policy education and discussion group and research organization, and its members include many of America’s top private business and financial leaders as well as current and former government officials (along with, less impressively, chattering class types like think tank staffers and journalists). So Kerry (a member himself) presumably was choosing his words even more carefully even than usual. It’s worth quoting at some length what he said about the military option:

“Now, I know there’s been a lot of railing through the years over their [Iran’s nuclear] program, and people rant and rave. And we know we’ve seen the prime minister with a cartoon of a bomb at the UN and so on and so forth. But what’s happened? What has anybody done about it? Anybody got a plan to roll it back? Anybody got a plan that’s viable beyond bombing them for one or two days or three days that might slow their program down for two years or three years? To which, as most of you as practical human beings, you know what the response will be.

“I mean, we can do it, and we haven’t taken it off the table. Let me make that absolutely clear. This President is the only president who has actually developed something called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the MOP, which has been written about publicly. And not only has he asked it to be designed, he’s deployed it.

“…And when I became Secretary of State, when he called me into the Oval Office and I sat with him, I said, ‘Mr. President, if I’m going to be your Secretary of State, I want to know that if I’m going around and talking to countries in the Middle East and I say you’re prepared to use military action, I don’t want to be a Secretary of State for whom you’ve pulled out the rug.’

“…And he looked at me and he said, ‘John, let me tell you something directly. Iran will not get a nuclear weapon and I will do whatever is necessary, but I believe diplomacy has to be put to the test first.’”

So according to Kerry, although Mr. Obama is by no means anxious to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, his position that all options needed to remain “on the table” has not simply been talk. He gave the orders to develop a weapon needed to achieve success and to put it into service.

Kerry’s own views of using force and of its consequences are at least as interesting. He told Council members that “We can do it” and that between one and three days of strikes “might slow their program down for two years or three years.” To be sure, the Secretary did add, “you know what the response will be.” In fact, though, this matter is far from clear.

For example, what Kerry didn’t mention during this appearance was the possibility of such attacks triggering a region-wide Middle East war. Nor did he bring up the prospect that the so-called “Arab Street” might rise up in anger. Maybe that’s because, if anything, Sunni Arab public opinion could well welcome action against Shia Iran. Meanwhile, the region’s other Shiites – in Iraq and Syria – seem to have their hands full with ISIS and with embattled Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad’s remaining forces.

Kerry might be referring to a point he has made elsewhere – that Iran’s knowledge of the nuclear fuel cycle can’t be “bombed away,” and that Tehran could simply start all over again. At the same time, if this is Kerry’s point, it hardly proves that military action would be futile. After all, creating enough physical destruction to slow Iran’s weaponization plans by two to three years sounds pretty impressive – especially compared with a deal whose flawed verification and sanctions snap-back provisions could easily permit Tehran to continue progressing toward weapons capability with its remaining human and physical infrastructure intact. Moreover, if the Iranian nuclear program shows signs of attaining critical mass again, it could be attacked again.  

Again, none of the above means that I favor the military option. What it does mean is that the president himself might not believe one of the main arguments for his Iran deal.  If true, that could ironically hearten many opponents – but frighten many supporters.

 

 

Following Up: More Reasons for Iran Deal Concerns

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allies, Arabs, China, Congress, Democrats, energy boom, Following Up, Germany, Iran, Iran deal, Israel, Middle East, missile defense, Obama, Persian Gulf, Peter Beinart, Republicans, Richard Nixon, sanctions, Sunnis, The Atlantic, United Kingdom

One of my favorite political anecdotes concerns an exchange that looks like it resulted from a misunderstanding. Like many such stories, though, it’s so revealing that it’s worth recounting. And it’s incredibly timely in this immediate aftermath of the Iran nuclear deal announcement.

According to initial reports, during his first, historic visit to what we used to (and still should) call “Communist China,” former President Richard Nixon was talking history with Chinese Premier Zhou En-Lai – reputedly a world-class intellectual that the chronically insecure American leader surely wanted to impress. What, Mr. Nixon supposedly asked Zhou, was the impact of the French Revolution? Replied the Paris-educated Zhou, “Too early to say.”

Eyewitnesses say that Zhou mistakenly thought Mr. Nixon was referring to the student riots that had recently rocked France, but the impression reinforced in its retelling – of Chinese farsightedness and America’s persistent short-termism – remained vivid.

President Obama and his defenders have touted the new Iran deal and the president’s overall Iran approach as embodying just the kind of strategic patience America chronically needs. I wish I could be so confident. As I’ve written previously, Mr. Obama’s optimism that Iran’s broad foreign policy will moderate as it becomes reintegrated into the world economy strongly resembles badly mistaken and longstanding expectations that a China that traded more extensively would be a much safer China. While China remained much weaker than the United States, these predictions were arguably understandable. But the reintegration process was handled so recklessly, and so much wealth and defense-related technology have been showered on China, that its belligerence has been returning as the power gap has – largely as a result – narrowed.

Iran lacks China’s global potential. But the resumption of quasi-normal trade and investment with the west in particular, coupled with the return of major oil revenues, means at the very least that its leaders will feel much less of a “guns versus butter” resource squeeze than at present. Therefore, Tehran will become better able to have its cake and eat it, too – simultaneously capable of increasing living standards at home and boosting its influence across the Middle East.  So both the regime’s grip on power and its ability to continue threatening U.S. interests are likely to grow stronger, not weaker. As a result, just as with China’s leaders, the mullahs will feel that much less pressure to mend their ways.

There’s another problem with Obama’s concept of the long game. One of the hallmarks of foreign policy realism is recognizing that lasting solutions to even the most serious challenges are rarely possible short of war or some comparable event. And even the so-called military last resort is no long-term guarantee, either. Hence muddling through is often the best option diplomats face. But truly strategic muddling through doesn’t simply entail improvising from crisis to crisis and hoping for the best. It also involves actively trying to hedge – and especially to reduce risks and vulnerabilities

In other words, the same pragmatism that has convinced Mr. Obama that unattainable perfection is the enemy of this good deal should have also convinced him to come up with a Plan B. But there’s no evidence of one worthy of the name, other than vague references to using military strikes against Iran’s nuclear complex that even his senior advisers have warned him against. I’m not advocating such attacks. But how nice it would be to hear something from Mr. Obama about bolstering American missile defenses – assuming that a nuclear-armed Iran will eventually acquire intercontinental delivery vehicles.

Stronger efforts to offer such shields to allies would be welcome, too. The major role played by the United States – including under the current administration – in developing and funding Israeli missile defenses should not be overlooked, although few Israelis seem to consider even the most advanced systems deployed an adequate substitute for genuinely de-nuclearizing Iran. The president also held a greatly hyped summit with Persian Gulf leaders in May, but contrary to hopes harbored by these countries, no significantly greater defense assistance was on the administration’s agenda.

At the same time, leaving the special issue of Israel aside, the intrinsic domestic weaknesses of these Sunni Arab countries underscores Mr. Obama’s continuing failure to explore actively another promising major strategic option for America: capitalizing on the nation’s new potential, largely thanks to the domestic energy revolution, of marginalizing the entire Middle East in its security calculations. As a result of this presidential blind spot, the United States still finds its fate closely linked to a group of regional states that lack the internal cohesion to be reliable allies over any serious time span.

Meanwhile, another less explicit Obama assumption is also looking eminently challenge-able – that the United States and its western allies will hang closely enough together to put meaningful teeth in the deal’s monitoring and inspection provisions. Ironically, some alarming new evidence comes from Atlantic contributor Peter Beinart, who supports the Iran agreement.

As Beinart sees it, one main reason for accepting a flawed deal along its present lines is that the allies were unlikely to have continued supporting current sanctions if Washington held out for stronger terms.  For it was precisely the hope of negotiating an Iran solution sooner rather than later that persuaded them to incur the economic losses generated by sanctions to begin with.  Moreover, he quotes top British and German diplomats to this effect.

Yet if the Europeans are this money hungry, are they really likely to respond to anything but the most flagrant Iranian misbehavior by shutting the new trade off? I’m glad I don’t have to make that argument.

I’m still not willing to write off the Iran deal completely – as I believe many of Mr. Obama’s staunch conservative and Republican opponents are doing reflexively and prematurely. But if it turns out to be a bad one, I’m fully prepared to “walk away.” Here’s hoping Congress is, too – especially Democrats who will surely be tempted to back the president for their own purely partisan reasons.  

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Behind Obama’s Iran Sanctions Retreat

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Iran, Iran deal, Israel, JCPOA, Middle East, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, sanctions, Sunnis

Throughout this climactic phase of diplomatic efforts to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, two of the most damaging charges leveled at President Obama are that (a) he’s more interested in any deal than in a good deal, and (b) a main reason is that his overriding aim is reaching a broad-ranging rapprochement between Washington and Tehran – which he thinks will eventually take care of the nuclear problem.

The president has denied prioritizing such lofty ambitions, insisting that “the key here is not to somehow expect that Iran changes — although it is something that may end up being an important byproduct of this deal — but rather it is to make sure that we have a verifiable deal that takes off the table what would be a game-changer for them if in fact they possess nuclear weapons.” Previously, he maintained that “you could argue that if they are implacably opposed to us, all the more reason for us to want to have a deal in which we know what they’re doing and that, for a long period of time, we can prevent them from having a nuclear weapon.”

Yet his decision, announced last Friday, to instruct American diplomats to use “creative negotiations” to resolve a crucial disagreement over when international sanctions on Iran are lifted, cannot help but bear out the critics’ worst fears.

Right at the outset, I should confess that I don’t believe that anything worthy of the term “deal” or “framework” or “parameters” even exists to begin with. If Iran and the other negotiators can’t even agree on questions as fundamental as when and how sanctions end, or whether Iranian nuclear sites can be inspected, then any meaningful consensus seems purely a function of diplomatic hopes and imaginations. That’s not to say that a deal is impossible by the June 30 deadline (though it does mean that the April 2 announcements of progress were thoroughly misleading).

Nonetheless, the president’s retreat, without any apparent Iranian reciprocity on any front, from the official U.S. pledge (contained in a White House release) that “Iran will receive sanctions relief, if it verifiably abides by its commitments,” cannot logically be reconciled with his promise that “Iran will not get a nuclear weapon on my watch….” For his new position – “there are a lot of different mechanisms and ways to” lift sanctions – inevitably informs a regime with a record of hiding nuclear activity that it can not only keep doing so with impunity, but that it can expect to reap rewards while it continues clandestine work. A stronger incentive to cheat is hard to imagine, especially given the ongoing disagreements between Iran and its interlocutors over vital inspection procedures.

Yet Mr. Obama’s casual attitude toward mechanisms and obligations that are necessarily central to arms control agreements – and indeed to most agreements that need to be codified – can easily be reconciled with other comments he’s made about bright Middle East futures that he believes an Iran nuclear deal of some kind can foster. In this vein, an answer he gave to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in an April 6 interview appears particularly revealing. Asked how he would address Israeli concerns about Iran’s longstanding hostility, he contended (in part):

“[I] think the combination of a diplomatic path that puts the nuclear issue to one side — while at the same time sending a clear message to the Iranians that you have to change your behavior more broadly and that we are going to protect our allies if you continue to engage in destabilizing aggressive activity — I think that’s a combination that potentially at least not only assures our friends, but starts bringing down the temperature.”

This formulation indicates to me that the President believes that the Middle East can be pacified even if Iran goes nuclear provided the United States extends credible defense guarantees to all of Iran’s prospective targets – Israeli and Sunni Arab alike. More specifically, Tehran’s enemies will refrain from escalating a regional nuclear arms race or launching preemptive strikes on Iran, and Iran will moderate its actions, because American protection and imperfect restraints on Iran’s enrichment activity will jointly move the nuclear issue to the psychological back burner in all the capitols concerned.

If you’re thinking that this is a pretty muddled, even disjoint description of Mr. Obama’s ideas, you’re right – because I’m struggling to understand with any precision how and why any such scenario would unfold. I just wish I could feel confident that the president can.