Tag: Saudi Arabia
Stevenson’s army, August 13
– Axios has a great piece listing voting rules and deadlines for all states.
– Defense News reports how key members of Congress have blocked arms sales to Turkey through their informal powers.
– Both Kori Schake and Fred Kaplan criticize the Nagl-Yingling letter urging CJCS Milley to prevent Trump from challenging an electoral defeat. I agree with the criticism.
– To try to get UNSC approval of Iran sanctions, US has cut its draft resolution from 35 paragraphs to four.
– SAIS honor grad Akshai Vikram is key author of report on US-Russia nuclear arms race.
– HuffPost says Trump has basically stopped taking intelligence reports.
– Politico has unredacted copy of State IG report on Pompeo and arms sales. Note: it’s “Sensitive But Unclassified”.
– WSJ says Xi is shifting Chinese economy inward.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Stevenson’s army, August 12
– Politico explains Kamala Harris’ clever campaign for the VP slot.
– State IG report clears Pompeo on arms sales action, but redacted sections raise doubts.
-Berkeley prof sees real strategy in administration moves on technology & China.
– Law prof hits Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.”
– Census count matters to state and local governments.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Stevenson’s army, August 7
So I’m back from a few days by a river, relaxing and canoeing. What did I miss?
– The Saudis may be developing nuclear capability.
– CIA isn’t helping GOP investigation of the Bidens. But the real issue it seems to me is to preserve exclusive responsiveness to the intelligence committees.
– Congress may block Trump drone sale policy.
– Provocative US official’s visit to Taiwan.
– We are trying to get Syrian oil.
– Esper may move US troops from Germany to Romania, Baltics, Poland.
– New book by CNN reporter says Pentagon withheld military options from Trump.
– Fred Kaplan has a good piece on Hiroshima,
AEI’s Norm Ornstein laments changes in the GOP over the decades.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Biden will have his hands full
Time for a summer update on President Trump’s diplomatic initiatives, more or less in his priority order:
- Trade with China: importing less than half of what is called for in the “first phase” agreement.
- Re-initiating nuclear talks with Iran: Trump said more than a year ago he would talk with no pre-conditions. Tehran won’t, despite “maximum pressure.” Iran wants sanctions eased first.
- Getting rid of North Korea’s nuclear weapons: Kim Jong-un has in effect said “no.”
- Ending the war in Afghanistan: The withdrawal is proceeding, but progress in intra-Afghan talks is minimal.
- Removal of Venezuelan President Maduro: He has weathered the challenge and remains firmly in power.
- South China Sea: The US has rejected China’s sovereignty claim but is doing nothing about its military outposts.
- Helping Ukraine force the Russians out of Donbas: The Administration has provided lethal weapons to no avail.
- Reducing Saudi oil production to jack up world prices: Saudi production is down, but world prices are still in a trough.
- Initiating a democratic transition in Syria: Congress has beefed up sanctions, but Trump can’t even begin to get Assad out.
- “Deal of the century”: Not going anywhere but into the shredder. Even Israeli annexation of part of the West Bank is blocked.
This skips a lot. For example:
- the President telling Chinese President Xi that it was fine to put (Muslim) Uighurs into concentration camps,
- withdrawing from the Paris Climate accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and several favorable arms control agreements with Russia,
- moving US troops out of Germany to the delight of Moscow,
- failing to counter Russian bounties for Taliban who kill US soldiers in Afghanistan,
- saying the right things about Hong Kong and withdrawing its trade preferences, but with not discernible impact,
- not responding to foreign initiatives to undermine the US elections, and
- withdrawing from the World Health Organization in the midst of a pandemic.
American foreign policy has rarely been so ineffectual, never mind whether the priorities are right. The Administration doesn’t think past its own next move. The President is incapable of it and won’t let others do it for him. He behaves as if the adversary has no options. Much of what the Administration does is for show, without considering however how most of the rest of the world sees the situation. The only customers for this foreign policy are the domestic audience of China hawks, Russia doves, oil and coal producers, and evangelical Christians, along with President Putin, Prime Minister Netanyahu and a few other would-be autocrats around the world.
Getting out of the foreign policy hole Trump has dug will be a big challenge. President Biden, if there ever is one, will have his hands full even if he pays attention only to the first three of the items above. Let’s hope he can somehow save us from the consequences of four dreadful years.
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Stevenson’s army, June 22
– While the national security adviser writes in WSJ that “no formal announcement has been made,” he then explains that US troops will leave Germany and why.
-NYT explains the lapses in vetting that allowed the Saudi pilot to kill in Pensacola.
— NYT also explains how Amb. Grenell seized control of Kosovo policy.
-Bolton blames many policies on “the split between Trump and Trump.”
–Bolton has more harsh words in ABC interview. Transcript here.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Nuclear reminders
Former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Pantelis Ikonomou writes occasionally for peacefare.net. We have never met in person, or even spoken on the phone, but his unequivocal commitment to containing and reducing nuclear risks, combined with his technical expertise, has been more than enough reason for me to open the blog to his always welcome contributions.
He has now written and published with Springer a wonderful comprehensive volume modestly titled Global Nuclear Developments: Insights from a Former IAEA Inspector. It is a first-rate primer on:
- the technology required to make a nuclear weapon,
- how the current international regime to control nuclear weapons evolved and how it functions,
- how major nonproliferation crises have been handled in North Korea, Iran, Syria, Libya, Romania, and the former Soviet Union,
- possible future proliferators, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Japan, and South Korea,
- nuclear incidents/accidents, and
- the nuclear weapons states, both within the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty–US, Russia, China, UK, and France–and outside it–India, Pakistan, Israel, and South Africa.
Throughout, Pantelis demonstrates his excellent and dispassionate command of the details while also offering practical and well-founded guidance for the future. North Korea, he thinks, will not be giving up nuclear weapons but its program might be frozen, given the right incentives. The US, he thinks, made a colossal error in withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal (the JCPOA) and thereby shortening the time required for Tehran to obtain the material needed to build a nuclear weapon. He understands that the deal in which Libya gave up its military nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief was a good one, but Qadaffi’s ultimate end will have strengthened North Korean resolve not to do likewise. I found his discussion of the South African and Israeli pursuit of nuclear weapons particularly interesting.
Pantelis is proud of the work of the IAEA, but blunt about the shortcomings of the regime it administers. He regards its Additional Protocol as adequate to limiting the possibility of hiding a military nuclear program within a civilian one, but he also notes that it is not universally and unconditionally accepted, most notably by Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran (which accepts it only within the context of JCPOA) as well as Israel, which remains outside the NPT. He also underlines the tensions between nuclear weapons and non-nuclear weapons states over the reluctance of the former to deliver on nuclear disarmament, which contributed to the failure of the 2015 review conference and what he feared would be the likely failure of the 2020 edition before it was postponed this spring.
In the end, Pantelis speculates on the emergence of a new “tetra”-polar equilibrium among nuclear weapons states:
- US and UK;
- Russia and India;
- China, Pakistan, and North Korea;
- Israel and France.
I am not sure how he comes to this conclusion. Even if 1. and 3. are historically well-rooted, I’m not convinced that India will ally with Russia or that today’s France is interested in allying with Israel, even if Pantelis is correct that France helped Israel develop its nuclear weapons in the past. Nor do I see why this configuration should be stable. It seems to me that two-party nuclear standoffs (US/USSR, India/Pakistan, US/China) are far more likely to be stable than anything with four corners to it.
Pantelis reserves his final enthusiasm for an epilogue in which he pleads with the world’s scientific community to convince the nuclear weapons states, especially the US and Russia, to engage seriously in nuclear disarmament rather than their current race to modernize and proliferate nuclear weapons, which is intensifying. I wouldn’t fault him there at all. The craziness of pursuing weapons that can never be used without sealing your own country’s destruction has not been lost on most of the world’s states. Lowering the level of mutual assured destruction could free up a lot of resources for more useful things. It is fortunate we have well-informed observer/participants like Pantelis to remind us of what we should be doing.
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