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Russia should be job 1

Far be it from me to in any way align myself with John Bolton, but there are things he could get the Administration to do consistent with at least some of his stated positions that would be preferable to the hodge-podge of contradictory signals Washington is currently sending on foreign policy.

For the moment, President Trump has prioritized the Iran nuclear deal. He is trying to use his threat to withdraw as leverage to get the Europeans to agree to amend the deal in order to gain access to Iranian military sites, restrain Tehran’s missile program, and end the “sunset” (expiration) clauses. His self-imposed deadline is May 12, when Congress requires him to certify once again that the deal is in the US interest. He didn’t do that last time around and said he would withdraw if the agreement wasn’t fixed by the next deadline.

Withdrawing from the deal is patently not in the US national interest. Either Iran will also withdraw and re-initiate its nuclear program, giving it the potential for nuclear weapons within a year or so. Or Tehran and Brussels will decide to proceed without the US, splitting the Western alliance on a vital issue. US withdrawal would also spell the end of any distant hope (but see below) for a deal with North Korea, as Pyongyang would be correct to conclude that the US can’t be trusted to hold up its end, and strain relations further with China and Russia (who helped negotiate the agreement with Iran and continue to support it). There are simply no gains from withdrawal, only losses, unless you want to provide yourself with an excuse to go to war. That means risking the Sixth Fleet as well as numerous US bases and troops in the Gulf and Iraq, as well as attacks elsewhere in the Middle East and even inside the US.

Another apparent priority is North Korea. It already has nuclear weapons and credible if not certain means to deliver them, at least against US forces and allies in South Korea, Japan, and Guam. The odds of successfully negotiating “denuclearization” with Pyongyang are risible. There simply is no better protection for North Korea against an American attempt at regime change than Kim Jung-un’s nukes. Once again, the only real option to “denuclearize” is war. The consequences would be worse than catastrophic: at the very least a massive artillery barrage by the North against Seoul, killing tens of thousands, if not a nuclear exchange.

A third priority for Trump has been trade, in particular the North American Free Trade Agreement, (that is, Canada and Mexico) as well as China’s intellectual property expropriation and excess capacity in steel and aluminum. There is little hope of anything good coming of Trump’s unilateral measures (tariffs on steel and aluminum as well as on Chinese products), beyond the agreement already reached with South Korea (which has lots of reasons to be nice to the US these days). Tariffs are a blunt tool that has nothing to do with intellectual property theft, and the US doesn’t import much steel or aluminum from China. It does from Canada and Mexico, which have already been exempted from the tariffs, whose main impact will be to raise prices to American consumers (not only for steel and aluminum but for all the products in which they are used).

The remaining priority is Russia, which has distinguished itself in recent years by defying the norms of the liberal international order: murdering its opponents abroad and at home (including with nerve gas in a public place!), refusing to leave parts of other countries (Moldova and Abkhazia), annexing Crimea, invading Ukraine, threatening the Baltics as well as Sweden and Finland, meddling in democratic elections while making its own non-competitive, and intervening to slaughter the relatively moderate opposition as well as thousands of civilians in Syria while launching a mercenary attack on US troops and allies there. Moscow is the capital of a state that has gone rogue.

Bolton is no friend of Russia. He recognizes and has denounced most if not all of the offenses listed here. The problem is the President. While the Administration rightly boasts that it has done more against Russia (in expulsion of diplomats and sanctions) than Obama did (partly because Russia has done more against the US than in Obama’s time), President Trump has still not uttered a word of criticism against Vladimir Putin. Such consistency is not his normal habit and raises the question worldwide whether the US really speaks with one voice. That incoherence limits the impact of the modest moves made so far to counter Russia’s troublemaking.

It seems to me the right order of priorities is this:

1. Russia: pushback worldwide, with a view to reaching a new, more balanced, modus vivendi
2. Iran: no withdrawal from the nuclear deal but instead get it and its proxies out of Syria, where they pose a threat to Israel
3. Trade: by using the WTO and other well-established multilateral mechanisms, not unilateral tariffs and exceptions that will shift imports but do little to limit them
4. North Korea: deterrence is really the only option

More in a future post on how to accomplish at least 1 and 2.