Tag: Nuclear weapons
Confusion and distrust
The Trump Administration is in a remarkable period of serial failures. Denuclearization of North Korea is going nowhere. Displacement of Venezuelan President Maduro has stalled. The tariff contest with China is escalating. Even the President’s sudden shift to backing Libyan strongman Haftar’s assault on Tripoli seems to have fizzled.
The domestic front is no better: Trump is stonewalling the House of Representatives but must know that eventually the courts will order most of what the Democratic majority is requesting be done. Special Counsel Mueller himself will eventually testify and be asked whether his documentation of obstruction of justice by the President would have led to indictment for any other perpetrator. A dozen or so other investigations continue, both by prosecutors and the House. These will include counter-intelligence investigations, which Mueller did not pursue, with enormous potential to embarrass the President and his close advisers.
The result is utter confusion in US foreign policy. Secretary of State Pompeo today postponed a meeting with President Putin and is stopping instead in Brussels to crash a meeting the UK, Germany, and France had convened to talk about how to preserve the Iran nuclear deal. This is happening on the same day that President Trump is meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán, whose anti-democratic maneuvers have made him unwelcome in London, Berlin, and Paris.
Pompeo will be pitching hostility to Iran, based on the presumption that it is responsible for attacks on tankers over the weekend off the coast of Fujairah, one of the (United Arab) Emirates located outside the Gulf of Hormuz. Tehran has denounced the attacks, which may or may not indicate something. The perpetrators are unknown. While concerned about the attacks, the Europeans will want the US to tone down the hostility towards Iran, with which they want to maintain the nuclear deal from which the US has withdrawn.
Germany is likely to be particularly annoyed with the Americans, not least because Pompeo last week canceled at the last minute a scheduled meeting with Chancellor Merkel in order to go to Iraq, where he failed to convince Baghdad to join the sanctions against Iran. She has become the strongest defender of liberal democracy and the rules-based international order that President Trump has so noisily and carelessly abandoned, while at the same time displeasing the US Administration by continuing the Nord Stream 2 natural gas deal with Russia.
In diplomacy, holding on to your friends is important. Washington under Trump has elected not to accommodate the more powerful Europeans and Iraq but rather to support the would-be autocrats in Hungary and Poland, as well as the Brexiteers in the UK and the Greater Israel campaigners who also advocate war with Iran. All of this was completely unnecessary, since it would have been possible to pursue additional agreements with Iran on regional and other issues without exiting the nuclear deal.
The Administration has thrown away the friends it needs and acquired a few it does not. It has lost the key Europeans and has nothing whatsoever to show for it. It has gotten nowhere with Putin, despite the President’s obsequious fawning. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which are both crying foul about the tanker attacks, are unreliable. They have been known to purvey fake news in the past (especially in initiating their conflict with Qatar), so might they be doing so again?
The result is monumental confusion and distrust. America’s friends are offended. Her enemies are encouraged. Elections have consequences.
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Advantage Iran
President Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo are both begging for talks with Iran and have been for months. Now they are ratcheting up the pressure by deploying a carrier battle group (which had been slated to head for the Gulf a bit later) and toughening sanctions against Iran’s oil and metals industries. Washington’s theory of the case is that more pain will bring Tehran to its senses, maybe even to its knees.
Meanwhile Iran is heading in the opposite direction. It is planning to begin a phased withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that the US left a year ago. Without the economic benefits of the deal, there is little reason for Tehran to stick with it. The harder-line voices there never liked the constraints on the nuclear program and view the US withdrawal from the agreement as an opportunity, not a disincentive. It proves the hardliners correct in their assertion that the Americans can’t be trusted and gives them momentum in seeking to restart the nuclear weapons program that the JCPOA rolled back and suspended.
Washington and Tehran are engaged in a classic turn toward what conflict management folks call their “Best Alternatives to a Negotiated Solution” (BATNAs). Each is trying to demonstrate that it has a better one. The escalation is of course dangerous, but it could eventually lead towards a mutual recognition that the situation is ripe for a negotiation. If, as both assert, neither wants to go to war, which could have catastrophic outcomes, the escalation might generate the incentive each side needs to negotiate.
It is not clear however that both sides do in fact want to avoid war. The Americans are simply unpredictable: National Security Advisor Bolton has long advocated war to end Iran’s nuclear program, but President Trump seems reluctant and in any event is unreliable. The Iranians also have a divided command structure, but in the end it will be the Supreme Leader who decides whether to go to war, likely by attacking Americans in Iraq or Syria and possibly even using terrorist sleeper cells in the US. Pompeo and other American officials have warned as much and claimed that is why they are accelerating the deployment of the carrier battle group. Quid pro quo strikes could escalate quickly.
If I had to guess, Trump will flinch before the Supreme Leader does. A new war in the Middle East isn’t what he should want to try to sell to the American people. It would disrupt a growing economy and belie the President’s many declarations of intent to leave fighting in the Middle East to others. Even a flim-flam man knows his limits. Iran is a country of 81 million people long hardened by war (with Iraq) and sanctions. While discontent is rife, the Supreme Leader can be certain that the Americans won’t invade. A carrier battle group, plus some bombers, does not an invasion make. A cruise missile strike on elements of the nuclear program would set it back but free Iran from any JCPOA constraints.
The Americans served first by withdrawing from the JCPOA and reimposing sanctions without lining up multilateral support. The Iranians are responding with their own phased drawdown from their commitments under the agreement, while trying not to drive either the Europeans or the Chinese into the arms of the Americans. Some sort of mutual accommodation could still be possible, but if this were a tennis match, the score would be “ad out.”
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Right move, wrong reasons
President Trump’s walking away from his summit with Kim Jong-un has won praise from many, including Democrats and me. Trump was unwilling to give Kim the sanctions relief he wanted for the limits Kim was willing to accept on North Korea’s nuclear program. All eminently reasonable. Certainly Kim was offering far less than what the Iranians agreed to, in a deal Trump condemned and from which he withdrew.
But there is a problem. Trump is still thinking he can get Kim to give up all his nuclear weapons, in exchange for economic benefits, especially foreign investment. Neither proposition is credible.
Nuclear weapons are Kim’s guarantee of regime survival. That’s why the US intelligence community has been doubting he would ever give them up. South Korea and the US need to be extra cautious in dealing with him so long as Kim has the capability of using them. Precisely what Kim was offering is unclear, but it definitely was not the surrender of all his nuclear capabilities. He hasn’t even provided the inventory of his nuclear infrastructure required to begin a serious conversation.
Just as important: Kim has no interest in opening the Hermit Kingdom to the kind of foreign investment Trump has been offering. He doesn’t want Trump-style hotels, American tourists, or sharply increased standards of living for the North Korean worker. His is a totalitarian regime that demands loyalty above all, not economic development or free media. His visit with the Vietnamese after the Hanoi summit signaled his real interest: maintaining his personal monopoly on politics while allowing limited private enterprise. It’s the Chinese model, more or less, of authoritarian capitalism, but without foreign direct investment.
The US needs to keep Kim’s goals in mind as it gets ready for another try at an agreement. He has his red lines. While Kim still holds absolute power in North Korea, we are not going to get the complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization (CVID in the trade) we ultimately seek. At best we’ll get some limits on future production of nuclear weapons and missiles in exchange for limited sanctions relief, in the context of a process that has more far-reaching goals.
Even that may be more than we can hope for unless the sanctions regime is restored to its previous strength and tightened further. That would require Chinese and Russian cooperation that has been evaporating. Beijing isn’t going to get back on board until the tariff war is ended. Trump will soon be accepting much less than he hoped for on that front. Moscow is a tougher case: Putin will want a price for any enhanced cooperation on North Korea. Relief from sanctions on Russia will surely be on the table in that negotiation, but the Congress stands in the way of the loosening Trump would like to provide to Putin.
I doubt though that Trump will be looking any time soon for an agreement on the North Korean nuclear program. More likely he’ll hope that we forget Pyongyang has nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them to the US. He hyped that threat when he thought doing so could give him an easy win. Now that Kim is happy with the domestic and international legitimacy he achieved by meeting twice with the President of the United States, it will be much more difficult to achieve any agreement. Trump made the right move but for the wrong reasons. Kim outplayed him.
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Failure is what he does best
I agree with Susan Rice. President Trump did the right thing to walk away from his talks with Kim Jong-un in Hanoi:
The problem is Trump shouldn’t have been in Hanoi at all. Kim got what he needed, the photo-op that shows his people he can deal with he President of the United States on an equal basis:
Trump claims Kim has promised to continue his moratorium on nuclear and missile testing, but development efforts will certainly continue without international inspections or even an inventory of materials and equipment. The US will keep the sanctions in place, but they have been fraying. Neither Russia nor China is likely to be maximally cooperative on sanctions against North Korea given their parlous relations with the US.
But the problems with the deal Trump is trying to cut go deeper. Trump has been dangling economic development based on foreign investment as bait for Kim to give up his nuclear program. Kim knows that foreign investment would require far-reaching judicial and economic reforms impossible in a totalitarian state. He is doing far better on his own by allowing the gradual evolution of private economic activity while maintaining the repressive apparatus that keeps him in power. Even small moves like allowing private gardens have had a dramatically positive impact on food supply.
Kim also returned home from Hanoi with a presidential reprieve for the murder of a US citizen:
Did Trump press Kim on holding someone responsible for Warmbier’s death? Not at all.
Trump is once again reduced to distracting us from failure: he claimed before leaving Hanoi that the US had somehow intervened to cool escalating tensions between India and Pakistan and that Jared Kushner’s phantom Middle East peace plan would emerge soon, because the US has cut off aid for the Palestinians. Neither claim is credible.
Yesterday was a bad day for Trump not only in Hanoi but in Washington, where his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen made all to clear who and what the President is: racist, conman, and cheat. Republicans are busily attacking Cohen’s credibility, as he has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress previously. But they are not discussing the merits of Cohen’s charges, which would require a defense of Trump that would be difficult to mount.
Trump will now try to cut a trade deal with China. The tariff war he triggered is causing real pain in rural America, where part of Trump’s base lives. He also needs Beijing’s help with Pyongyang. He will cave on the tariffs and claim victory, then try to distract attention, maybe with an effort to begin to build his unneeded but much wanted wall on the southern border, triggering a raft of lawsuits and screams from whichever department of government he takes the money from. That effort too will fail, but Trump will move on to something else. Failure is what he does best.
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Good and bad news
The good news is that the UK Labour Party is signaling it will back a second Brexit referendum. The bad news is that Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif, partly responsible for negotiating the nuclear deal, has resigned.
Brexit: It has been apparent for some time now that the United Kingdom will be far worse off after it leaves the European Union. In fact, it is unlikely even to remain the United Kingdom, as Scotland and Northern Ireland could have good reasons for breaking up Her Majesty’s realm. Factories and financial institutions are fleeing. It is inconceivable that London can get a better trade deal with the US–or anyone else–acting alone rather than as a part of a more than 500-million person free trade area. Britain’s geopolitical weight is also vastly magnified inside the European Union compared to what it would be outside.
The problem has been how to cancel Brexit without defying the 2016 advisory referendum that launched it. Prime Minister May has been promising to deliver what the vote asked for by a margin of about 3.5 percentage points. Polls now indicate that Brexit might well be defeated in another referendum, if only because of demographic changes in the last three years. But a lot also depends on wording and the (unpredictable) political and economic circumstances in which a second referendum takes place. Nor is it clear yet whether Labour has the support in parliament to call a new referendum, though the defection of members from both Labour and the Conservatives in recent days increases the odds.
Zarif: The Iranian Foreign Minister resigned the same day he failed to appear in a video of Bashar al Assad meeting with the Supreme Leader. Whether that caused the resignation, or he had already resigned, is not clear, but Zarif was the relatively outward-looking face of the Iranian regime. His resignation will raise doubts about whether Iran intends to continue to comply with the nuclear deal, despite the American withdrawal and the failure of Europe to deliver the economic benefits anticipated. With Zarif out, a move by Tehran to abrogate the deal entirely is a step closer.
Some Americans would welcome that, as it might enable Washington to get the Europeans back in line and squeeze Tehran harder with sanctions. But it also opens the possibility of an Iranian push to develop nuclear weapons, sooner rather than later. Certainly anyone watching how well President Trump treats nuclear-armed Kim Jong-un could argue that Iran would be better off with a nuclear deterrent. The problem with that notion is Israel, which not only has nuclear weapons but might be inclined to use them to prevent Iran from getting close to a deployable nuclear weapon. Yes, it is possible that a deterrence relationship might emerge, but in the meanwhile the world could become a very dangerous place.
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Insincerity and mendacity
President Trump’s State of the Union address, delivered last night, was the opening salvo in his re-election campaign, as Mara Liasson put it on NPR this morning:
Trying to appear calm and “presidential,” Trump appealed for unity while doubling down on some of the most divisive issues in American politics: his proposed extension of the wall on the Mexican border, his appeal to the Democrats not to investigate his campaign and administration, and his attempt at rapprochement with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. The calm delivery from the Teleprompter won’t last past his next tweet.
Some of what he said was downright scary: he suggested the US could have peace only if the investigations stop. The logic is all too clear: if the Democrats and Special Counsel pursue wrongdoing, the President might respond by taking the country to war. Is this what he intended? Impossible to tell, since he is anything but logical. But lots of leaders do go to war to distract from domestic difficulties, and Trump is a master of distraction. He also often says what others never vocalize. Was he threatening war as a response to domestic political challenges?
Trump doubled down on some other bad ideas: he vowed to stick with the tariff war against China, he pledged to outspend Russia in developing intermediate range nuclear forces, and he announced 3750 more troops will be sent to the southern border to meet a non-existent flood of illegal immigrants. The tariff war is clearly a violation of America’s World Trade Organization commitments, a nuclear arms race with Russia is not where America needs to go, and the use of the US Army to roll out barbed wire (it is prohibited from law enforcement functions) is one of the most expensive and useless ways to protect the border, apart from the border wall. There is no sign whatsoever that Trump has moderated his radical and unfounded approaches to trade, defense, and immigration.
Syria and Afghanistan, America’s two biggest wars at present, got short shrift. Trump reiterated his commitment to bringing the troops home from Syria without however any idea of what will happen after they leave. In Afghanistan, he referenced the negotiations with the Taliban but also gave little idea of the strategy for what happens after withdrawal. Trump is in effect declaring victory and getting out of both wars–the uproar such an approach would have caused were a Democratic president pursuing it would be deafening. The Senate has objected on a bipartisan basis to these announced withdrawals, but there is little indication Trump is listening.
The misstatements and abuses of facts were legion. The most egregious surround his claim of credit for the reasonably good state of the US economy. In fact, average monthly job growth has declined slightly from President Obama’s second term. Ditto his claim of credit for the increase in US oil and gas production, which started under Obama. He even boasted that there are more women in Congress than ever before but failed to note that they are mostly Democrats. The number of Republican women in Congress has actually declined.
For me, perhaps the iconic mendacity of this State of the Union is contained in this sentence:
If I had not been elected president of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea.
There is of course no way of knowing how Hillary Clinton might have handled Pyongyang, but we do know that the only President who has loudly threatened war against North Korea is Donald Trump. And we also know that there is no sign whatsoever that Kim is giving up either his nuclear weapons or his intercontinental ballistic missiles, despite the blandishments Trump is offering. Trump failed to get anything substantial from Kim at, and since, their first meeting. So what is he doing? Scheduling another meeting late this month. Trump is a great flim flam salesman but a truly terrible negotiator.
Forty per cent of the American public is still fooled, even if the insincerity and mendacity are obvious.
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