Category: Daniel Serwer
Don’t throw me in that briar patch
The New York Times is exercised about the “reckless” legislation approved in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday that would give Congress an opportunity to vote on an Iran nuclear agreement, which is supposed to be concluded by the end of June. The American Iranian Council is also uncomfortable. The Administration is “not thrilled” but the President won’t use his veto, which likely would be overridden.
I think Congressional review of the nuclear deal is a good thing, for several reasons.
The process is unlikely to derail an agreement, since the President could exercise his veto if the Congress disapproves. Mustering a two-thirds majority to override such a veto on a deal that verifiably stalls Iran’s progress towards nuclear weapons for 10 years or more is going to be difficult. I can hope that at least a third of the Congress will look objectively at the situation and consider carefully the alternatives, though I won’t be surprised if someone writes to remind me of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s influence and Woodrow Wilson’s failure to get approval for the League of Nations.
Without a Congressional vote, the deal would be entirely dependent on executive action. As my SAIS colleague Eric Edelman points out, it would be odd indeed if the Iranian Majles and the UN Security Council got to vote on the deal and not the US Congress. Can a democracy not match those two less than fully democratic institutions in allowing a vote? Of course it is precisely because they are not democratic that they can be relied upon to approve the deal. But that is the trouble with democracy: it needs to live up to its own standards.
There is certainly no constitutional requirement for Congress to act. Presidential authority over foreign relations is strong. Executive agreements are the rule, not the exception. But if a deal runs the Congressional gauntlet without too much damage, it would then become nigh on impossible for a future president to undo it, as Republican presidential nominees are promising to do. This is important. Why would Iran’s Supreme Leader take the risk of signing on if there is a 50/50 chance, more or less, that the next president will renege? This legislation makes the odds more like 80/20, which strengthens the hand of our negotiators and enables them to insist credibly on an agreement that can pass muster in Congress.
Dan Drezner hopes for parallels between the nuclear agreement and NAFTA, which in 2008 Democratic candidates were promising to renegotiate. That was a campaign promise quickly forgotten. I don’t find that particularly comforting. Marco Rubio seems a lot more determined and consistent in opposing the nuclear deal than Democrats were in opposing NAFTA. Being older than Dan, I might recall the 1977 Panama Canal treaty, which was the subject of even greater hyperbole. None of the dire consequences predicted have come to pass. We have continued to use the canal, which is now being widened to accommodate its customers.
I hope I can be forgiven for the title of this piece. But it does strike me that the Republicans have inadvertently put the Administration in precisely the place it should want to be.
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Stabilizing Syria
Fred Hof, Bassma Kodmani and Jeff White want to set the stage for peace in Syria by creating a 50,000-strong Syrian National Stabilization Force (SNSF). Ideas of this sort have been bandied about for years, but this is a more in-depth look than I have seen elsewhere.
Objective
Its objective would be a political one: to establish legitimate state authority, which has collapsed in the current multi-party civil war, on Syria’s entire territory. Ten times the size of the force supposedly being trained yearly by the US and other countries, Hof, Kodmani and White expect the SNSF to be able to confront both the Islamic State and the rump regime of Bashar al Asad as well as protect Syrian civilians, starting in protected areas but eventually expanding to the whole country.
So far, so good, in theory. Military experts will have to judge whether a force of the size, training and equipment they propose will be sufficient to the task. My own guess is that even at these expanded dimensions, the SNSF would find the fight the expanded mission a difficult one, but the authors think it might be sufficient to induce the regime to come to the negotiating table and cut a deal. The SNSF would then be able to expand further as the army of a new Syria and focus its full attention against the Islamic State and other extremist forces.
Will it fight extremists?
Therein lies one problem. It is not clear that Syria’s more moderate rebel forces are prepared to fight the Islamic State (ISIS), which many Syrians dislike but still regard as vital to the fight against the Asad regime. Civil war favors radicalization. Syrians are not immune. Moderates tend to leave. Extremists stay to fight. The Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al Nusra (JN), appears to have a good deal of support among Sunnis inside Syria. Its personnel is largely Syrian, it has a reputation for honesty, and it fights regime forces with vigor.
Command and control
Another problem with the SNSF is command and control. The US and other countries have recognized the Syrian National Coalition (aka Etilaf or SNC) as the legitimate political representative of the Syrian people, but the authors of this report accept the US Government assessment that it is too fragmented and disconnected from realities inside Syria to function effectively as a command and control authority.
So in its stead they propose formation of an ad hoc advisory group. This is awkward. How do you accept the SNC as the sole political representative of the Syrian people, then deny it authority over the military forces expected to win back the country in their name? How do you get away with picking your own favorites to form the advisory group? SNC itself is the product of US-led diplomacy, which may be a source of its problems. What makes us think another iteration will improve Syrian cohesion or representativeness?
Washington issues
Perhaps the biggest problem with this SNSF proposal lies in Washington DC, not in Syria. It would require expansion of the US mission in Syria beyond countering terrorist groups like the ISIS and JN as well as commitment to combat support, as the authors discuss extensively. The Obama Administration has been reluctant to go down that road. Congress is not pressing in that direction. Reluctance to get involved in trying to fix yet one more Middle Eastern country is palpable.
I suppose there is someone in the bowels of the Pentagon and perhaps the State Department who is hoping that the precedent of US/Iran parallel efforts against the Islamic State set in Iraq can be repeated in Syria, where Hizbollah and Iranian Revolutionary Guards are now a mainstay of the Asad regime, even if claims of Iranian “occupation” of Syria seem to me hyperbolic. Restoration of autocracy is working in Egypt, some may think, why shouldn’t it also work in Syria? If we can fight on the same side against the Islamic State in Iraq, why not also in Syria?
The short answer is that the government in Iraq is a legitimate one that represents the will of its people. Syria’s government is not, despite Asad’s pretend “election” last year. SNSF has virtues, if only because it would end such daydreaming by positioning the US unequivocally in opposition to the Asad regime. Protection of civilians in a few liberated areas, in the north along the Turkish border and in the south along the Jordanian border, would itself be a great virtue and give Iran, Russia and the regime pause. Neither Russia nor Iran is likely to stick with Bashar al Asad until the bitter end, if only to protect their equities in what comes next.
Bottom line
To make a long story short: SNSF is not likely to march triumphantly into Damascus any time soon. But committing to something like it would allow the US to engage in Syria more effectively than it has done so far.
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The case against the nuclear deal
I spent lunch listening to a panel of bright people at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs discuss the Iran nuclear deal, about which they have posed some good questions. Questions are the right approach to any agreement with ramifications as wide and as important as those of the proposed “framework” agreement.
SAIS colleague Eric Edelman underlined that there is no agreement yet. That is clear from the divergent “fact sheets” emerging (and not) from the P5+1 deliberations with Tehran. Nothing is agreed until it is written down (and I would say signed). Particularly important points that are still unsettled include what will be done to “neutralize” the low enriched uranium (LEU) above 300 kilos that will remain in Iran (rather than being shipped abroad as Eric said Iran had previously agreed), the precise arrangements for IAEA verification, and clarification of Iran’s past military nuclear activities. Extending the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA)–the temporary agreement under which Iran’s nuclear program is stalled at the moment–would be better than the “framework” agreement.
Congressional approval is vital. Otherwise, Iran will not find the agreement credible, because any subsequent American administration may want to change it. It would be anomalous if the Iranian Majles and the UN Security Council got to vote on the agreement but not the Senate.
Ray Takeyh focused on the Supreme Leader’s speech last week, which was harder line on immediate sanctions relief and other issues than Iran’s hardliners have been, even if it appeared to leave the door open a crack for a more general rapprochement with the US. This raises a difficult question: on whose behalf are the Iranian negotiators negotiating? If Foreign Minister Zarif represents only President Rouhani and not the Supreme Leader, then what validity will an agreement have? There is reason to doubt the cohesion of the Iranian regime. The Supreme Leader’s primary political objective is preservation of the regime’s ideology, which is an ideology of resistance. His successor can be expected to have the same view.
It was left to John Hannah to state the hardline US case against the agreement. At best, it would postpone by 10-15 years an Iran just a screwdriver’s turn away from nuclear weapons, leaving it free at the end of that period to accelerate its enrichment rapidly and turn the screwdriver whenever it wanted. There is no reason to believe Iran will have moderated its stances on the US and regional issues during that time. Sanctions relief will necessarily come much sooner than most Americans will want. The agreement will precipitate a nuclear arms race in a region where confidence in US support has been damaged beyond repair in this Administration.
The alternative to the “framework” agreement is a better agreement, Hannah averred. John Kerry just doesn’t know how to negotiate, using US military power and economic leverage to the maximum. What is needed is a concerted US effort to counter Iran throughout the region, starting in Syria.
But it is also arguable, he said, that a military attack that sets the Iranian nuclear program back by two or three years would be better than anything we can get from the “framework.”
Panel concluded, the retired lawyer sitting next to me asked whether China wouldn’t just leave the sanctions regime and start unrestrained imports from Iran if an agreement is not reached. Well, yes, I agreed, it could and it would (though it would have to buy the oil in a currency other than dollars). That is precisely the point: there is no way the sanctions regime can be kept functioning unless the US demonstrates maximum effort to get an agreement. You may think John Kerry a dufus, but he has taken America’s best shot. And if you want America to bomb Iran’s nuclear program, doing so in response to Iranian violations of an agreement is a far better way than just doing it.
That does not, however, mean that any agreement will do. The questions Eric asks about LEU, verification and military nuclear activities are good ones that need answers. I don’t know how John Hannah knows that the Iranian regime will be just as hardline in 10 or 15 years as it is today, but I am pretty sure it will be hardline and accelerate its nuclear program after bombing. Nor do I know how he knows about the timing of sanctions relief, though I think he has a point on Syria: a stronger stand there against the Assad regime would give the Iranians something to think about. Ray Takeyh’s suggestion that the Iranian regime lacks cohesion is to me a positive sign, not a negative one, though in a quick chat afterwards he suggested it will be temporary, with the Supreme Leader’s hardline winning the day.
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An announcement
The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies announced today that starting July 1 I will administer the Conflict Management Program founded by Bill Zartman and directed in recent years by Terry Hopmann, who will now have more time for research. This is the program in which I have been privileged to teach post-war reconstruction and transition for the last five years, in addition to my research, writing, consulting, training and public commentary. I am pleased to take on this additional responsibility, which will occupy the bulk of my time while I continue to try to make a difference both in how we think about international conflict and what we do about it.
Alumni and current students will wonder what my plans are for the program. I do not intend to make big changes, at least initially. SAIS Conflict Management is in my view among the very best programs in the field in the United States, if not the best, so my job is first and foremost to keep it that way, improving its performance and amplifying its impact where I can under tight resource constraints. Bill Zartman and Terry Hopmann have both agreed to continue teaching, as have other faculty, which is an enormous plus in my book. I’ll want to talk with both current students and alumni about their perceptions of market needs and intellectual requirements before moving to adjust or supplement the offerings, subject of course to resource constraints.
Negotiation has been the intellectual mainstay of the SAIS program. We will continue to support publication of the Journal of International Negotiation, run the Workshop on International Negotiation and join with others to sponsor the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Forum. At the same time, I’ll hope we branch out as resources allow: countering violent extremism and negotiating (or not) with terrorists are obvious areas we might want to beef up.
In my other activities, I’ll continue to do what I can to further peace, security and prosperity in the Balkans while spending more of my time on the frighteningly destabilized Middle East. That will include publication of www.peacefare.net, though I’ll hope to fulfill my ambition to get more people, including SAIS students and alums, writing for it. I’ll also look for synergies with others at SAIS and beyond to cover important conflicts in Europe (Russia/Ukraine), Asia (China, Burma, India/Pakistan), Africa (Nigeria, DRC, Mali, Mozambique) and Central America.
Today’s world is one ripe for the kinds of civilian engagement that I have long advocated. Military power will remain important in framing and enabling what the United States can do in the world, but unless we get better at the civilian side of things it will be hard to keep the world moving in a more stable and peaceful direction. I look forward to working with colleagues and students at SAIS in Washington and Bologna and alumni around the world to improve the prospects for peaceful resolution of even heartfelt and too often lucrative disputes. We owe it to the world and to ourselves.
Veritas vos liberabit,
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What’s wrong, and not, with the nuclear deal
I don’t know any honest analysts who don’t credit the “framework” agreement outlined in a White House fact sheet with going further than in restraining Iran’s nuclear program than most expected. It is truly unprecedented in several respects: it would reduce the amount of enriched uranium in Iran, limit the production (and prohibit the reprocessing of) plutonium, and put out of commission most of Iran’s enriching centrifuges for 15 years. It would also provide for intrusive inspections beyond those any other state is obligated to.
But there are still aspects to be questioned. It is at best unclear who has signed up to the items in the fact sheet. The Iranians deny they have, and the French have their differences as well. In light of the controversy following its publication, it is best to regard the White House version as an American wish list, based on the current state of the negotiations. I imagine the American negotiators had some basis for believing the Iranians would sign up to these things, because otherwise the White House has made John Kerry’s job extraordinarily difficult. But it is also fair to say that the fact sheet was intended to fend off calls in Congress for tighter sanctions and Congressional approval of any final deal. We’ll just have to wait and see whether the American negotiators can deliver what they have promised.
The single most glaring weakness in the fact sheet is the failure to make any visible progress on “possible military dimensions” (PMDs). The International Atomic Energy Agency has been asking for explanations of these apparently nuclear-weapons-related activities for years, without making significant progress. The Iranians are stonewalling, presumably because the explanations will suggest that Iran really did have a nuclear weapons program at one time. Proving that it no longer does is difficult. The IAEA questions are the nuclear equivalent of “have you stopped beating your wife? Can you prove it?”
It is difficult and embarrassing to reply, but the answers are important, as no nuclear weapons state has achieved that status in an overt, IAEA-safeguarded program, or by diversion of material from such a program. Clandestine is always the preference. Why would Iran be different? Secrecy is far more difficult if you have admitted cheating once before.
A third shortcoming of the framework agreement outlined in the fact sheet is time frame. The unprecedented constraints would expire, even if verification provisions do not. But this critique doesn’t hold up. Surely it is better to face an Iran that is unconstrained in a decade or more rather than one that is unconstrained right now and could produce the material for a single nuclear weapon within two or three months.
But critics of the framework don’t want to compare the agreement with no agreement. They want to compare it with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s imaginary “better agreement,” which would eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure entirely. I admit it is possible John Kerry and his team could have negotiated a better agreement, but there is no reason to believe that anything like Netanyahu’s dream could come true. Iran has only amped up its nuclear program during the many years in which we insisted on its giving up its nuclear program and imposed sanctions. If the framework agreement fails, I expect them to continue in that direction.
Tightened sanctions are Netanyahu’s answer. What he and his supporters fail to explain is how sanctions can be tightened. Will Russia, China and the Europeans go along? Sanctions brought Tehran to the table because they were multilateral. Any unilateral sanctions move by the US at this point would destroy the negotiations and push the other members of the P5+1 in the direction of ending the existing sanctions, or at least failing to enforce them as fully as has been the case in the recent past.
Domestic critics want President Obama to threaten use of force. But overt threats of force don’t always help at the negotiating table, because they elicit responses in kind. Iran is already doing harm to US interests in the Gulf, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. Even the threat to do more would cause oil prices to rise (to Tehran’s own benefit and to the detriment of the US economy).
Even if the Iranians don’t believe Obama would ever use force, they can be pretty sure his successor (of either political flavor) will be more likely to do so. The US will be far better off if force is triggered some day by Iranian violations of something like the framework agreement, not by a unilateral decision undertaken in desperation as sanctions fray.
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Bridging the Gulf
Cinzia Bianco, an analyst for the “Mediterranean and Gulf” programme at NATO Defence College Foundation whom I met on a recent visit to Rome, offers this guest post, based her “The Changing US Posture in the Gulf as an Opportunity for Regional Cooperation. The role of the EU,” paper presented at the Fifth Gulf Research Meeting (GRM), University of Cambridge, 25-28 August 2014. Her full paper will be published with others from the GRM by the Gerlach Press.
The commitment of the United States in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) as well as Al Qa’eda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has silenced rumors about imminent American disengagement from the Gulf in order to pivot to the Asia Pacific. This commitment stems chiefly from the proliferation of terrorist groups in the Middle East and North Africa, which poses a threat to the US national security.
Nonetheless it has become clear that the US shows fatigue in managing unilaterally this ever-boiling, resource-consuming region. In favoring a “leading from behind” approach, the Obama administration has demonstrated a lack of coherent leadership in navigating the regional challenges, which include state failures in Syria, Yemen and Iraq as well as the consequences of a nuclear agreement with Iran. The US needs to find a way to prevent leaving a hazardous vacuum by relying on an ally to try and build a more stable, long-term strategic outlook in the Gulf. Despite all of its well-known weaknesses, that ally might be the European Union (EU).
The EU has the the potential and interests to step forward. Despite ups and downs, the EU has been involved for decades in direct dialogue with the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), made a big commitment in post-war Iraq and has almost uninterruptedly maintained communication open with Iran. Conflicts in the Gulf would directly affect Europe, whose geographic proximity raises the stakes. Europe is much more dependent than the US on the Gulf for oil and gas supplies. Its trade and investments volume could be hugely disrupted, as Gulf ports are Europe’s gateways to Asia. EU-GCC investments are far more significant than that involving the US.
These motives should be sufficiently compelling to encourage the EU to take on a more proactive role in the region, which would also consolidate its place as a global strategic player.
The presence of a heavy-weighted American military umbrella has not sufficed to protect the region from the emergence of the unconventional threats that are tearing it apart. The regional problems are, at their roots, not military but political and require courageous political responses. Since grievances and conflicts in the Gulf are mushrooming along sectarian fault lines – empowering Sunni and Shi’a extremism in a way that endangers internal as well as external stability of almost all regional countries–it is sectarianism that needs to be addressed head-on, by putting all Gulf countries around the same table. A truly effective dialogue on security in the Gulf needs active participation from Saudi Arabia, and cannot be built without or in spite of Iran and Iraq. Given the considerable distrust between the Sunni and Shi’a in the region, only the EU and the US together have enough political capital to entertain such a challenging enterprise.
The approach in the Gulf should start with limited cooperation on practical issues, in an incremental process of confidence-building focusing on many shared challenges and opportunities. All parties share critical resources, not only oil and gas fields but also water, whose management is strategic in such an arid region and needs to be coordinated. Joint patrolling of regional waters, under the umbrella of existing international initiatives, to fight the transnational criminal networks that engage in illicit trafficking and piracy, might be one step towards normalization.
Nothing can be done without a structured regional dialogue on the sociopolitical front, supporting existing fora of inter-sectarian dialogue and fighting extremist narratives. Tuning down the sectarian narrative at all levels, from leadership to population, might be the only way to prevent spillover from Syria, Iraq and Yemen into the broader region. The most concerned countries should in fact be Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Frameworks of this sort have failed to prosper in the past, but always in the presence of huge level of hostility between the US and Iran. The main GCC fear is that Iran always works to extend its influence in the Gulf, by playing the Shia communities against the Sunni rulers. Arguably, however, critical engagement rather than classic deterrence would the most effective approach to prevent this behavior.
As much as this idea may seem daunting, neglecting the challenge of sectarian-based extremism and allowing deep-seated conflicts to escalate would put national and international strategic interests at great risk. In order to return the Gulf to long-lost stability, bold steps are required, as well as the ability to adapt quickly to a changing strategic outlook, that might soon include the rehabilitation of Iran in the international arena. A visionary plan for a regional rapprochement based on shared challenges and shared opportunities might in the upcoming future become the best possible option.
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