Month: January 2018

Rouhani’s moment of truth

Posted in Daniel Serwer - January 4, 2018 - 1 Comment
Ed Joseph, having asked some questions Tuesday, answers today: 
So now the true cause of the Iran protests emerges: an unprecedented release, possibly by President Rouhani himself and possibly due to new regulations, of secret parts of the Iranian budget revealing expenditures for pet hard-line projects like the country’s religious institutes.  This much more plausibly explains the intense anger of the protesters than vague, ‘disappointed expectations.’  Here’s how one protester recorded his reaction to the budget: “It made me angry,” said Mehdi, 33, from Izeh, a town in Iran’s poor Khuzestan Province, who asked that his family name not be used out of fear of retaliation. “There were all these religious organs that received high budgets, while we struggle with constant unemployment.”
 
Unfortunately for Rouhani, public anger appears equally distributed at him and the hard-liners.  A popular chant making the rounds is, ‘Reformers, Hardliners, the game is now over!’  So, even if the protests eventually fizzle out, some damage is likely permanent: the end of the dominant paradigm of an Iran caught in a struggle between ‘reformers’ (Rouhani, Zarif and their associates) and ‘hardliners’ (Khamenei, the religious establishment, the IRGC and their associates and henchmen.)  It certainly appears as if Iranians from across the country, even from rural areas thought to be bastions of support for the regime, discern little difference between the two erstwhile factions — indeed, see them as co-conspirators in a corrupt governing enterprise that impoverishes the people.
This means that it’s now Rouhani’s moment of truth: either stand up and distinguish himself from the hardliners, or die a death of irrelevance.  Yes, Rouhani would risk the wrath of those hard-liners, but now is the time to incur that risk, gambling that he can get the public on his side at this dramatic moment.
Here’s an imperfect historical precedent.  In 1968, widespread student protests rocked Communist, dictatorial Yugoslavia.  The usual police response failed to subdue the protesters.  Tito, rather than intensify the crack down on the students, watched for a bit and then sided with them.  “The students are right,” he famously said.  This took the wind out of the protests.  Some time later, Tito jailed the instigators or otherwise banned them from the Communist party, a course of action that Rouhani need not follow.  True, Tito was ‘supreme leader’ and Rouhani is not.  But given the stakes for Rouhani — and for his country — perhaps this could be inspiration.  What does he have to lose except his tattered reputation?
If Rouhani fails to find his patriotic mettle, then what replaces our guiding paradigm for understanding Iran?  After all, it was the hope for evolutionary change guided by reformers like Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif that undergirds the ten-year time limitation on enrichment technology development in the Iran nuclear deal. The idea was that the lifting of sanctions and improvement of the economy under the deal would create space for Rouhani, Zarif and others to wean Iran away from isolation and regional destablization, and ultimately, from the need to pursue nuclear weapons.  Up to now, the need to ‘support the reformers’ has restrained US policy on Iran.
This month is the deadline for Congress to act on President Trump’s October decision not to certify Iran’s compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA)  How will the protests influence how Republicans approach the issue?  Predictably, Trump and Pence are already seizing the opportunity to impugn the Obama Administration, which stayed quiet, out of caution, during the widespread 2009 protests.  Will Republicans take their anti-Obama obsession to the next level, and imperil the JCPOA itself?  Another question is how the protests will color the views of Democrats and Europeans who don’t want to kill the nuclear deal, but now have a weaker basis to sustain belief in it.  Without the Rouhani moderate vs. Khamenei paradigm, the core arguments left are tactical and tentative: ‘if we kill the deal, then we make the protests about us’ and ‘the deal still beats the alternative.’  That could embolden the JCPOA’s opponents and wreck Rouhani’s most important achievement.

 

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Size doesn’t matter

Posted in Daniel Serwer - January 3, 2018 - 0 Comment

President Trump outdid The Onion yesterday, tweeting:

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

Apart from the obvious stupidity of engaging in a fourth-grade ego contest with a nuclear-armed dictator, this tweet alone demonstrates how unfit Trump is to be president. Let’s consider the reasons why:

  1. Kim’s warning that he now had nuclear capability (and implicitly could hit the US mainland with it, not only US troops in South Korea and Japan) had been issued two days earlier, not just before this tweet. Trump is often criticized for acting too quickly, but one has to wonder whether his TV schedule is allowing enough time for intel briefings, never mind reading a newspaper.
  2. North Korea is a lot less “depleted and food starved” than once it was. Kim has improved its economic performance notably, even if the benefits are largely swept up by a small elite. Does that sound familiar?
  3. American nuclear weapons are unquestionably more powerful than whatever Kim has got, but the real issue is whether Trump is willing to risk loss of Los Angeles or New York (never mine Washington DC). Any US threat or attack, conventional or nuclear, could escalate in that direction.
  4. The world sees tweets like this one as demonstrating that the President is not rational. Who wants to be allied, or even friendly, with a nut?

Size really doesn’t matter. Kim has what he needs: enough credibility for his nuclear and missile capabilities to deter the US from either attacking or pursuing regime change. Nor does he need to turn to those capabilities in the first instance. He has also got a more than credible conventional threat to rain artillery shells on Seoul and much of South Korea, killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, wrecking the world’s 11th largest economy, and ending the long peace in East Asia.

Kim’s problem is that he can’t be sure Trump is rational. The Administration likes to advertise this uncertainty as an advantage. No one really knows what the President will do, which he presumes will make them think twice before crossing him.

That however is not how things really work. Uncertainty in international relations makes people hedge. South Korea is doing that already by trying to open an “Olympic” dialogue with the North, which Kim has accepted. If he can open some space between US war threats and South Korean jaw-jaw, Kim will have achieved a great deal. The US will be marginalized from issues on the peninsula and reduced to a second-rate player in the Asia Pacific, where Trump has already ceded trade (by withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership) and the South China Sea to Beijing dominance. Kim will hedge too, turning to Russia to replace the support he has traditionally received from China, and trying to work something out on the economic front with the detente-seeking administration in Seoul.

Trump’s blustering and bullying is self-defeating. The Administration has been successful in tightening UN Security Council sanctions on Pyongyang. The President’s tweet will undo a good deal of the benefit from that significant achievement. He is isolating and weakening the United States, not to mention risking nuclear war. When will the Republicans in Congress wake up to their responsibilities?

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Excellent guide to a decaying enterprise

Posted in Daniel Serwer - January 2, 2018 - 0 Comment

My friend Harry Kopp and his co-author John Naland have encountered a perfect storm in launching their third edition of Career Diplomacy: Life and Work in the US Foreign Service just as interest in State Department careers collapses and the institution itself goes through unanticipated trials in a new Administration that took office after the manuscript was finalized. It’s a shame the likely market of Foreign Service aspirants has contracted, because this book is a fine testament to the glories and challenges of Foreign Service life. It really is a life, not just a career.

Caveat emptor: I spent 21 years committed to it, moving my family every few years and occasionally risking life and limb in service to the United States. Mine were admittedly great posts: Brasilia once and Rome thrice, plus being Sarajevo’s most frequent visitor during the last year of the Bosnian war and two stints at the State Department working on global energy and later European issues. Harry Kopp was my deputy chief of mission in Brasilia. We also went to the same big high school but didn’t know each other then.

You won’t find a better or more readable account of the US Foreign Service as an institution, profession, and career than this. I’ve delayed publishing this review because I found the book so interesting I read it all with some care. You’d think 21 years would suffice for me to become my own expert and able to skip a few things, but I still found this book put things in a structure that enlightens. It also includes vignettes based on interviews with active duty and recently retired diplomats that illustrate in personal terms important themes.

Harry and John Naland, whom I don’t know, are keenly aware of the Foreign Service’s not always illustrious history and try to keep it in focus as they discuss its present and possible future. Even without the Trump Administration, there were already a big question marks:  what is to become of an institution, profession and career in the digital age of wide open access to information, an age when women and minorities are claiming their rights and everyone is expecting better and more equal treatment? How does diplomacy deal with civil war, insurgency and terrorism, all of which are a far cry from the state-to-state relations that traditionally dominate diplomatic discourse?

Those questions have become enormously more complicated with the advent of the Trump Administration. Diplomats thrive on objectivity, accuracy, and reliability. They seek to strengthen the country’s position internationally, or at least protect its vital interests and slow its relative decline. What is the fate of the Foreign Service in an age of Fake News, when America’s president thinks the country has to be made great again and tries to upend its alliances and the norms-based international order America constructed so assiduously after World War II?

I won’t pretend to have the answers. What I’m sure of is this: as presently constituted and in this Administration, the Department of State and the Foreign Service that staffs so much of it are not today well-equipped to meet these challenges. As Kopp and Naland suggest, the Foreign Service needs more training and less conformity, more risk-taking and less reliance on tradition, more innovation and less continuity. Instead, our diplomats are being ensconced in well-protected fortresses that prevent them from doing what many of them joined the Service to do: get out and talk to foreigners, understand other cultures and countries in depth and on their own terms, and use that knowledge to further US interests.

In Brasilia more than 35 years ago, I was the science counselor of the US embassy. Brazil has forsworn nuclear weapons and its barriers to computer imports have changed, though I suppose the Amazon is still a sensitive issue. I would have new tools available: access to the internet and much better and cheaper communications. But I would still want to do what I did more than three decades ago: visit laboratories, climb over and around nuclear facilities, attend a missile launch, speak at universities, take a small boat with Brazilian scientists to the meeting of the waters at Manaus.

Terrorism has made that kind of outreach perilous, and “Benghazi” has made the State Department more nervous and risk-averse than ever. The Trump Administration is cutting both staff and budget. The Pentagon, used to running risks and endowed with far greater and rapidly expanding resources with which to meet them, is taking over large swathes of diplomatic work, making State every more beholden to military priorities and perspectives. The diplomatic career is appealing less, others are encroaching on the profession, and the institution is enfeebled. The Foreign Service this book so ably describes is in trouble.

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Six questions about Iran’s protests

Posted in Daniel Serwer - January 2, 2018 - 0 Comment
Edward P. Joseph, a lecturer at SAIS, sent me this after I posted mine on Iran:
News often catches us off guard.  Once we recover from our initial astonishment, we typically spot reasons why developments were predictable all along.  The collapse of the Soviet Union is one example.  The Arab Spring (and subsequent Winter) is another.
Iran’s incipient wave of sometimes violent protests demand better explanation than those on offer.  Here’s why:
Explanation 1: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’
Yes, Iranians appear to be fed up with longstanding economic deprivation.  But typically it isn’t the absolute economic standing of a country that drives protest — particularly violent protest — but rather the trend lines.  With the lifting of sanctions, the opening of Iran to foreign trade and investment, and the infusion of frozen assets, how is it possible that the economic trend lines in Iran are worse than when Rouhani entered the scene or when the nuclear deal was signed in the summer of 2015?  Yes, corruption has no doubt siphoned off some or much of the anticipated benefit, but all of it — to the point that the public discerns virtually no improvement?  That’s not straightforward at all; it would take hard work and skill to mismanage an economy to that degree.  Is that what’s going on Iran?
Explanation 2: ‘Rouhani raised public expectations with lofty rhetoric.’
Again, a seemingly straightforward expectation that defies common sense.  Sure, when he was running for re-election, it is likely that Rouhani — like politicians anywhere — inflated expectations.  But that election took place last May.  Why would any political leader continue to inflate expectations that he knew — and Rouhani surely knew this — were unlikely to be met?  To the contrary, the Iranian President has had seven months to dial back public expectations.  Why wouldn’t he do that?  How would that earn him the ire of his hard-line opponents, which is widely seen as his greatest constraint?
Explanation 3: ‘Rouhani was going to cut subsidies to the poor, raise fuel prices, introduce fees including a departure tax.’
This is a more plausible explanation.  Even as astute a politician as Margaret Thatcher got whacked for introducing an unpopular tax.  The baffling thing here is why Rouhani — whose hold on power, we are told, is tenuous due to those hard-line opponents — would make deficit-cutting and structural reforms a near-term priority.  Why not wait for the public to realize some of those ballyhooed benefits before taking away the punch bowl?  Surely, Rouhani and his advisers knew that there would be risk of public push-back; Iranians are not quiescent.  Iranians defied even the hardliners with massive protests in 2009 and have shown their mettle at times since.  What on earth was Rouhani thinking with these austerity measures?  Why didn’t he look to the infusion of long-frozen Iranian assets — up to $50 billion worth according to former US Treasury Secretary Lew — to address deficits?  If the answer is that the funds haven’t arrived, or that Khamenei or the IRGC siphoned them off, or Rouhani thought he could get away with only austerity and no progress, then that all needs to be explained.
In addition to these inadequate, question-provoking ‘explanations’, there are several other head-scratching puzzlers:
4.  Why haven’t Rouhani, Khamenei and the IRGC been able to distract public attention from economic problems given the perfect foil they have in Donald Trump?
It’s the go-to move for any beleaguered leader: distract the public by pointing to a foreign enemy.  And Donald Trump is a central casting, made-to-order foil:
— he spews anti-Iranian invective at a rate and intensity that would offend the national pride of even moderate Iranians.
— he refused to certify Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal, putting the Iranian economy in jeopardy.
— he has slavishly embraced Iran’s arch-rivals, the Saudis.
— he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, implicating an issue on which Iran (with its aptly named Al-Quds force) has utilized to expand its influence.
It would be different if Trump were somehow ‘winning’ on these issues, but they have left Washington — not Tehran — isolated.
We know that Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif routinely tweet about Trump.  Indeed, Iran’s Foreign Minister has already chided Trump for his expression of Schadenfreude on Twitter.  It’s stunning that Tehran cannot better exploit this walking, talking caricature of the overbearing American foe to engage the public’s passions.  This would be true in any country; it’s particularly puzzling given that Iranians have been exposed to nearly four decades of enmity with/from the US.
5.  Why can’t Rouhani deflect criticism?
 
In Venezuela (which is only to be compared because of its restive, much more seriously deprived population and its oil economy), the public has only one target: the regime of President Nicolas Maduro.  But in Iran, President Rouhani is not ‘the Supreme Leader.’  That makes the protests — which seemingly are aimed at both — all the more baffling.  Why can’t Rouhani effectively portray himself as ‘the good guy trying to do his best against an implacable, overly conservative foe’?  Yes, if he goes too far in that vein, he risks arousing Khamenei or IRGC ire; but surely Rouhani is deft enough to get away with distancing himself and doing a bit of scapegoating of his rivals.
6.  Where are all those French and German businessmen?
We are told that Trump’s non-certification puts US trade and investment with Iran at risk, i.e. gives the advantage to Airbus over Boeing and the like.  One of the reasons the Europeans look the other way on Iranian malfeasance in the Middle East is due to their economic interest in the country.
If that’s the case, then where are all those French, German and other European investors?  If they are present in the numbers suggested, then why on earth hasn’t Rouhani trotted out the images — photo-ops and ribbon-cuttings and the like that are the staple of politicians everywhere, even in much poorer, less sophisticated countries? If they are not present in such numbers, then why is that?  What is going on with investment and trade with Iran?

Unwise

Posted in Daniel Serwer - January 1, 2018 - 0 Comment

In response to protests in Iran, President Trump is calling for regime change:

The entire world understands that the good people of Iran want change, and, other than the vast military power of the United States, that Iran’s people are what their leaders fear the most….

Oppressive regimes cannot endure forever, and the day will come when the Iranian people will face a choice. The world is watching!

He is also suggesting that the United States might do something about oppression:

Big protests in Iran. The people are finally getting wise as to how their money and wealth is being stolen and squandered on terrorism. Looks like they will not take it any longer. The USA is watching very closely for human rights violations!

Iran is failing at every level despite the terrible deal made with them by the Obama Administration. The great Iranian people have been repressed for many years. They are hungry for food & for freedom. Along with human rights, the wealth of Iran is being looted. TIME FOR CHANGE!

Is this wise?

As regular readers will know, I am an enthusiast for civil resistance. Not only because people have the right to express their views, but also because nonviolent protests are the safest and best way to promote democratic reform. While Iran experts are still debating the character and significance of the last week of protests in Iranian cities, it is clear that at least some of them, while triggered by economic disappointment, are also seeking political change, targeting in particular the Islamic Republic and its Supreme Leader.

Supreme Leader Khamenei has so far been silent. President Rouhani has defended the right to protest but also warned against violence and disorder. The internet has been either blocked or slowed. At least a dozen people have been killed, apparently by the security forces. They could still react more forcefully. The last time widespread protests erupted in Iran, in 2009, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps rolled out the pro-regime paramilitary forces known as the basij, who beat and shot protesters into submission.

Former Obama Administration official Phil Gordon thinks Trump speaking out in favor of the protesters will do more harm than good. I agree. It tars them with an American brush that many Iranians despise: a president whom they perceive as unreliable and reprehensible, because of his opposition to the nuclear deal and his concerted efforts to deny Tehran the benefits of it. In order to be effective, the protests need to have an entirely indigenous flavor. The regime will rejoice if they come to be seen as instruments of American foreign policy, especially if the source for that impression is Trump.

No doubt the President figures he is a winner either way. If the protests succeed and lead to real change in Iran, he’ll claim credit and point to the contrast with President Obama’s restrained reaction in 2009. I can hear the chest thumping already. If they fail, he can complain bitterly about repression and heighten his rhetoric against the Islamic Republic.

But the truth is the President is undermining pillars of democracy at home and abroad by harsh attacks on the US press and independence of the US judiciary as well as his affection for would-be autocrats in Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Russia, and elsewhere. He has no standing at home or abroad for a pro-democracy Twitter campaign that lacks any serious follow-through. Rested from five or six days of golf at one of his own resorts, Trump is starting the New Year with the same lack of wisdom that has characterized his presidency since last January 20.

PS: Vice President Pence has now chimed in:

As long as is POTUS and I am VP, the United States of America will not repeat the shameful mistake of our past when others stood by and ignored the heroic resistance of the Iranian people as they fought against their brutal regime.

The bold and growing resistance of the Iranian people today gives hope and faith to all who struggle for freedom and against tyranny. We must not and we will not let them down.

This certainly implies that Washington will do something more than tweet. What is that? Where is the game plan? How will we not let them down?

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