Tag: United States
Taking political risks and settling for less than you want
Mohammad Lotfollahi of the Iranian newspaper Etemad asked questions. I replied on Thursday:
Q: Iran, the P5 + 1 and the United States will begin talks on reviving the nuclear deal in late November. What do you think is the main reason for the ineffectiveness of the previous six rounds of talks?
A: Iran has wanted firm guarantees that the US would never again leave the agreement. No US government can guarantee that, except by ratification of an agreement in the Senate, which political circumstances do not permit. The US has wanted Iran to agree to talk about regional issues, which Tehran has been unwilling to do.
Q: Many in the media have criticized Iran for delaying its return to talks, but while Biden continues to pursue of maximum pressure policy, everyone has forgotten about Trump’s withdrawal from the deal. Isn’t America to blame for the current situation?
A: Yes. I don’t think anyone doubts that Trump’s withdrawal is the cause of the difficult current situation.
Q: One of the stories often repeated by opponents of the JCPOA is that it offered “maximum concessions” and led to a “bonanza” for Iran. How do you see JCPOA? Is this still a win-win agreement for everyone?
A: Iran did get serious benefits from the deal, which were cancelled when the US withdrew. The EU, US, Russia, and China also benefited. I believe it was a win-win.
Q: The United States wants Iran to be flexible in its negotiations. But in practice, it does not show any flexibility under the pretext of democracy and separation of powers in America. Doesn’t this hurt the negotiations?
A: It may, but you can’t convince the US to give up democracy and separation of powers.
Q: Is there basically an agreement that both major US parties agree on?
A: No, not so far as I can see. The Republicans are mostly committed to maximum pressure, which hasn’t worked. The Democrats liked the original deal, which was working.
Q: How much does the element of time affect the success of future negotiations? Are the concerns about losing the JCPOA non-proliferation benefit if the negotiation process is prolonged real and serious?
A: Yes. Iran is acquiring know-how, especially for enrichment of uranium, that it will be impossible to erase. Delay is the enemy of nonproliferation.
Q: What is your proposal to get out of the current impasse? Is there a way to defuse tensions and reach an agreement?
A: Sure there is. Both sides will have to settle for less than they want and take political risks in doing so.
Q: Israel threatens to launch a military attack on Iran. Israel even has nuclear weapons and is not a member of the NPT. Isn’t the West’s attitude towards Iran and Israel an example of a double standard?
Q: The entire nonproliferation regime is based on a distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states. Iran chose to sign the Non Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapons state. Israel has not signed it. Both exercised their sovereign rights, presumably because the choices they made best served their national interests. Tehran continues to say it will never develop nuclear weapons. The main issue is ensuring verification of that commitment. Israel has no obligation to verification one way or the other.
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Deterrence is absurd and risky, disarmament difficult but necessary
Pantelis Ikonomou, a former IAEA nuclear inspector, writes:
The use of nuclear weapons is at the core of NATO security policy. At the same time, their role continues to increase in the national strategy of all nine nuclear-armed states, both the five Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) (USA, Russia, China, UK and France), as well as the four non-NPT de facto nuclear weapon possessors (India, Pakistan, North Korea), and allegedly Israel. They all appear committed to retaining nuclear capacity for the indefinite future by adding new nuclear weapon systems or modernizing the existing ones, pledging at any opportunity that they retain a strong nuclear deterrence.
The rationality of nuclear deterrence is based on two fundamental characteristics of today’s advanced nuclear weapon systems: a) the capability of instantaneous counterattack and b) the immense destruction power they possess.
Thus, an intentional nuclear first strike should not be launched as a pre-emptive surprise attack to destroy the adversary’s nuclear weapon arsenal because the attacker would not survive either. The logical consequence of this reality is that the nuclear capacity of each nuclear weapon possessor establishes the definite deterrence to an adversarial nuclear first strike.
However, as in mathematics so in the nuclear world, there is no second without a first. The No-First-Use nuclear postures of the five NWS plus India include a critical footnote: the right to a pre-emptive nuclear first strike against any armed attack that would threaten their vital security interests, whether nuclear or conventional.
Additionally, two more nuclear first-strike possibilities arise from:
- The First-Use doctrines of North Korea (DPRK), Pakistan, and Israel. For DPRK, to pre-empt a regime decapitation. For Pakistan, as a desperate necessity against India’s Kashmir policy, and for Israel, as the strategic national survival choice.
- The probability of launching a nuclear weapon by accident, miscalculation, or a malicious/terrorist act. This probability is steadily increasing, as the nuclear arsenals are maintained, modernized, and eventually growing.
The continuously existing possibility of a nuclear first strike, for whatever cause, will instantaneously trigger a counter response. This makes the possession of nuclear weapons for deterrence only, i.e. for a forced second strike, a dangerous absurdity.
This situation fully reflects a dead-end reality, described in the game theory as the Nash equilibrium. Solving the Nash equilibrium in the nuclear deterrence analogy would require cooperation of the antagonists (an oxymoron condition) yet the only solution: lowering all armed-raised-hands before shooting at each other. In other words, abstaining from the absurdity of being the first attacker, the necessity of being the responder, or the danger of either side committing an error.
Moreover, maintaining weapons for strengthening states’ geopolitical objectives inspires would-be proliferators. While the NPT was in force since 1970, proliferation took place successfully in four non-NPT states: India, Pakistan, DPRK, and allegedly in Israel. Additionally, four more NPT states attempted proliferation: Romania (by 1989), Iraq (by 1991), Libya (by 2003), and “very likely” Syria (by 2011) [re: “Global Nuclear Developments”, by P. F. Ikonomou, Springer 2020, 4.4 Syria 2011-2020, page 55].
History also suggests that nuclear deterrence was again and again ineffective. Common irony: nuclear weapon holders after World War II lost several wars they entered; the UK at Suez (Egypt), France in Algeria, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the US in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Likewise, the UK and France could not hold on to their colonial possessions despite having nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union collapsed while sitting on the world’s largest ever nuclear arsenal.
In conclusion:
Nuclear deterrence is dangerous. It does not establish strategic stability, but rather prolongs global uncertainty, maintaining the possibility of two-party nuclear standoffs, single acts of despair and survival, or an accident, error, or terror. Pursuing weapons that can never be used without destroying your own country is irrational, dangerous, wasteful, and pointless.
Maintaining nuclear weapons for attaining geopolitical objectives inspires would-be proliferators.
Nuclear deterrence without attempting global and complete nuclear disarmament is nothing but a nebulous political stalemate. Global nuclear disarmament is not an easy process. It cannot be quick, quiet nor cheap. It is an extremely complex task, but it must be pursued before the last human error occurs.
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Here is what Bosnia needs
I don’t think I know any of the signatories of this paper, but what they say makes sense to me (I’ve made a few minor editorial amendments to the English):
Changes to the highest legal act of a state – the Constitution, represent the most complex social political endeavor. In BiH, this process is even more complicated because it is an integral part of our constitutional legal order and the OHR, that is the “international community”, made up of representatives of the world’s most influential forces united in PIC, which do not have the same political views towards Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It is undeniable that the BiH Constitution must be changed. Amendments to the BiH Constitution are no longer a matter of will, desire or compromise of domestic political parties, but an international legal obligation of Bosnia and Herzegovina resulting from the final judgments of international courts adopted from 2007-2020., as well as judgmenta of the Constitutional Court and the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
For more than two decades, our NGOs have held the position that all citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, that is, all nations and minorities must have equal rights and obligations on the territory of all of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This principle is contained in the Dayton Constitution of BiH, which also contains as its integral part the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which is directly applicable and takes precedence over any other law in BiH.
The existing ethno-national concept in BiH, which is particularly exemplified through the role of the houses of peoples at the level of BiH and the entities, is unsustainable because the institutution of vital national interest is abused in most cases. This institution is mainly not used for the vital national interest of a people but for the “vital interests” of nationalist political parties. It also completely suppresses civil rights guaranteed by BiH’s existing Constitution, leading to complete ethnic segregation.
On the other hand, the practice showed that entity voting had a much more disastrous effect on BiH’s (non)development than protecting vital national interest. The main problem lies in the fact that Annex VII, that is, the return of expelled and displaced persons has not been complited and, therefore, we have a situation that the entity voting has simultaneously become the ethnic voting.
In February 2007, a verdict was delivered by the UN International Court of Justice in The Hague in the case of BiH vs. Serbia and Montenegro, which found Serbia responsible for not preventing genocide against Bosniaks in Srebrenica, and then a series of judgments by the European Court of Human Rights. The European Court of Human Rights is in five separate judgments (2009 in favour of Sejdic-Finci vs. BiH, 2014 judgment in favour of Azra Zornic vs. BiH, 2016 judgment in favour of Ilias Pilav vs. BiH, Samir Slaku vs. BiH, and 2020 judgment in favour of Svetozar Pudaric vs. BiH) found the BiH Constitution discriminatory, practically towards all BiH citizens, from all peoples and the Others , despite the guarantee of all the rights under the United Nations General Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. It is important to point out that since 1st January 2009, the European Court of Human Rights has adopted 395 judgments against Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), with the lawsuits being brought by both individuals and groups. The ruling parties, even after more than a decade, have not implemented the verdicts.
The adopted judgments, which are obligatory for the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, represent the international legal basis for amending the BiH Constitution. The ethnic principle has been imposed by the flagrant violations of all human rights, aggression, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
We have no ambition or pretension to propose concrete solutions or texts of constitutional amendments, however, we want to offer principles that should be the starting basis for drafting a proposal for amendments to the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The principles should be minimal common denominator for all progressive political forces of BiH, which can be presented as a common interest to friendly states and signatories of the Dayton Agreement who are jointly responsible for BiH’s state-of-affairs and the future. This primarily concerns the U.S. administration, which played a decisive role in establishing peace in our country 25 years ago. It is important to emphasise that in December 1995 we did not have judgments of the international courts.
In the context of what has been stated above, we propose the following principles for the changes to the BiH’s Constitution:
- The elimination of systemic discrimination that is widespread throughout the constitutional regulation. The enumerated judgments of the European Court of Justice oblige the state to remove existing constitutional provisions because of which all citizens who do not declare themselves members of constituent peoples are denied elementary civil and political rights. Those rights are also denied to members of the constituent peoples if they do not live in the “appropriate” entity. Discrimination is widespread also on other bases, such as gender, religious affiliation, social status, level of education received and so on.
- The entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as administrative forms, were established on the basis of the “facts on the ground” caused by the international armed conflicts and as such are overcome today, as stated by the Venice Commission in 2005, while the biggest problem in practice has been, it has been shown, the entity voting in the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In its 2005 opinion, the Venice Commission states, at point 34: “.:. This veto, which in practice seems potentially relevant only for the RS, appears redundant having regard to the existence of the vital interest veto.”.
- Failure to implement final court judgments by international and domestic courts clearly shows that in BiH there is a suspension of the rule of law, and in this regard it is necessary to insert all needed amendments in the Constitution to establish the rule of law and ensure the full political independence of BiH’s judicial institutions. Four separate atunomous legal and judicial systems operate in Bosnia and Herzegovina – at the level of BiH, in both entities and in Brcko District of BiH. This leads to uneven and even conflicting legal solutions and uneven case-law, and thus to inequality of citizens. Therefore, constitutional solutions must be created so that this does not happen.
- Define the principle of sanctioning the denial of holocaust, genocide and crimes against humanity by the Constitution.
- It is necessary to precisely determine the rights protected by the institution of Vital National Interest/National Veto in the legislative bodies of the State and lower levels of government.
- The amendments to the Constitution must specify the disabling of the paralysis of its institutions and affirm the civic character of society and the strengthening of a democratic state modelled on all democratic states in Europe and the world.
The decisions on constitutional changes must be brought back into the institutions of the system, into the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH which will include the NGO sector in the debate, academia, the media and the widest circles of citizens.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has been a multiconfessional and multinational country for hundreds of years, where the riches of diversity have been an advantage. Unity of diversity is still in the most part the way of life in it today. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s constitution must contain it, promote it and enable it.
| Stipe Prlić president Croatian People’s Council of BiH | Zoran Jovanović president Serb Citizens’ Council – Movement for Equality in BiH | Miro Lazović president Forum of 1992-1996 Parliamentarians | Nedžad Mulabegović president Council of the Congress of Bosniak Intellectuals |
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Stevenson’s army, October 28
– Taiwan confirms US troop training.
– Iran will return to nuclear talks.
– Iran complains of hacking attack on gas stations.
– NYT says Iran now worries about Taliban.
– Language: a professor says we need new language for national security issues.
– A journalist decries the use of “snowclones.”
– Think about this: Dan Drezner raises serious doubts that Havana syndrome is an attack by outsiders. It may be a psychogenic illness.
– UVa researcher describes GOP path to power.
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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Bosnia and Herzegovina: time to stop the nonsense
Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the tripartite presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been threatening withdrawal from the state’s army, its taxation authority, its intelligence and law enforcement apparatus, and its judiciary. Dodik also denies the authority of the international community’s High Representative, who under the Dayton agreements that ended the Bosnian war 26 years ago is responsible for their civilian implementation. If passed in the Republika Srpska (RS) parliament, or implemented without formal legislative approval, Dodik’s moves would amount to secession, even if no declaration of independence is issued. Dodik appears to have the support of both Serbia and Russia, though there is some dissent within Serb ranks inside the RS.
Last weekend in a visit to Belgrade Dodik ambiguously backed off his most extreme threats, as he has often in the past, but his overall goal remains clear: sovereignty and independence for Republika Srpska.
How should the US and EU react?
They should not be fooled. Dodik will be back with his threats. The West should not wait until Dodik gets the legislative approval he seeks or acts on his own. Prevention will be far better than cure when it comes to secession. Prevention requires a military move. The EU should move, as many have advised many times, all its 600 or so forces to Brcko, the northeastern Bosnian town that was the center of gravity of the last war and will be also of the next one. NATO should reinforce the EU with a few hundred US and UK troops, which in the Balkans is still an unequivocal signal of seriousness. Without Brcko, no RS move toward secession can succeed because the RS would be split into two disconnected wings and the land line of communication with Serbia cut.
Russia will try to prevent any move of this sort. Its best bet is to veto the UN Security Council authorization for the
“Althea” European forces in Bosnia required in November. The US, UK, and EU will need to be prepared to keep their forces in Brcko whatever happens at the Security Council. While Dodik over the weekend backed off from demands that the Althea operation end, that should not fool anyone: NATO needs to make it clear it will stay in Bosnia and Herzegovina no matter what happens at the Security Council, whether in November or in six months. This can be done under authority granted by the Dayton agreements.
But the military move to Brcko will not be sufficient to end secession or the threat of secession quickly. The notoriously corrupt Dodik, already sanctioned by the US, should also be sanctioned by the EU. So too should any and all RS parliamentarians who support his defiance of the Dayton agreements, the High Representative’s powers, or the authorities of the state (central) government. Republika Srpska owes its continued existence, after a war in which it faced imminent defeat, to the Dayton agreements. Its full cooperation with implementation of those agreements as well as the HiRep’s decisions should be a sine quo non.
The West will also need to be prepared to deprive the RS government of sustenance. A secessionist entity should not benefit from any sovereign financing, including money flowing from the IMF, the World Bank, the EBRD, the EIB, and other lenders. The IMF’s Rapid Financing Instrument, the IBRD, and the EU are providing upwards of $600 million to Bosnia and Herzegovina to deal with the consequences of the COVID epidemic. They need to be prepared to make the RS portion of those (and any other funds not yet transferred) evaporate. It will be especially important to zero out institutional budgetary support to the RS. Corridor Vc, a major highway being built north to south through Bosnia, will have to be re-evaluated.
RS withdrawal from Bosnia and Herzegovina’s institutions would leave the country in constitutional and legal limbo. The only real options at that point would be reversion to the constitution of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, (which preceded the current constitution), implementation of the current constitution without reference to the RS, or reliance on the constitution of the 51% of the country governed as the Federation (which however has many features in common with the current dysfunctional constitution). I’m not enough of a legal beagle to know which would be best, but somehow the legal continuity of the sovereign Bosnian state would need to be ensured.
In the 1990s, Americans hoped for a Europe “whole and free.” The NATO intervention in Bosnia was intended to ensure that hope was realized in the Balkans. But Serbia with Russian support has decided that not even the Balkans will be whole and free. Moscow and Belgrade are working to split the region between autocracy and democracy, or at least to cause instability. Republika Srpska, northern Kosovo, and Montenegro’s Serb regions are all trying to peel off, with Russian and Serbian encouragement. If they succeed, they will eventually be absorbed into what Serbian President Vucic calls the “Serbian world,” better known as Greater Serbia. This would be a serious defeat for liberal democracy and a triumph for Vladimir Putin.
RS’s independence ambitions, Serbia’s territorial aspirations, and Russian destabilization efforts need to be countered. That will not be hard, if done sooner rather than later. It will require a few hundred troops in Brcko, tough sanctions, legal ingenuity, and a halt to RS financing. It is time to stop the nonsense.
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Syria: what’s missing is more important than doing what was done before
Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, the Secretary of State’s Special Representative for Syria Engagement and the Special Envoy to the Global Coalition To Defeat ISIS until November 8, 2020, posted the following comment on peacefare.net, responding to my post on Syria yesterday. I am repeating it here, hoping it will be easier to find and more widely read:
Dan, you are right about the statement being the most extensive of the thin gruel we have gotten from Team B on Syria, and what they have announced that they will keep doing, what I will call operational activities “1,2,3….X”, is pretty much what we were doing up to a year ago (and with some minor mods what Kerry was pursuing). But I’m not sure we have a real policy towards Syria, or at least a policy similar to the one Pompeo and Kerry followed.
First, what the statement says is, we are doing all these operational things. Those cited and others we are doing have immediate purposes–help refugees, implement UNSCR 2254, support UN-led negotiating effort, fight ISIS, deal with CW threat, react to Iranian deployments, etc., but there is no clue to how these all fit together into a larger policy, especially one that deals with the underlying reason we have all the above problems to deal with–the Assad regime’s war on its own people supported by Iran and Russia including for their own regional expansionist goals. What the real US policy is in the larger sense remains under question, either it’s still being debated or the White House understands what they have decided on will be so unpopular best to conceal it.
There is thus no known ‘whole’ that is greater than the ‘parts,’ and what we have are just those ‘parts,’ “1,2,3,….X”. To illustrate what I’m driving at let me cite what I think (and drew on when I was doing Syria) is an analogous situation, one where the Biden administration is much clearer: Ukraine. Any policy has various elements (everyone has her/his own, I have four): (1) national interest in play; (2) specific goal to serve the interest, (3) operational strategy to achieve the goal, and (4) specific operational activities in support, i.e., the “1,2,3….X”. The Ukraine specific operational activities are remarkably similar to those being done with Syria: work through an international coalition, push for ceasefire, implement UN resolutions and support negotiations (in Ukraine case Normandie Process), provide arms to local partner, deal with humanitarian fallout.
But with the Ukraine policy there is a superstructure (elements (1)-(3) above) that explains and guides the specific operational activities. The national interest is preventing a major deterioration of European security through a Russian victory over and possible assimilation of Ukraine. The specific goal to advance that interest, given geography, balance of forces, other priorities, is necessarily limited: avoid a complete Russian victory, as opposed to rolling back or defeating the Russians or even the status quo ante. The operational strategy given the interest and the goal in the context of limited means is to create a stalemate, inflict costs on the aggressor with clarity that further aggression will generate more (hopefully counter-balancing) costs, while holding out a compromise resolution. Such a resolution is the best case scenario but a stalemate is ‘good enough.’ The operational activities, the “1,2,3,….X” are fluid, can be dialed up or down to signal resolve, and further the stalemate while holding open the chance for a compromise resolution.
This is essentially what our strategy was with Syria: national interest was preventing an Assad, Iran, Russian victory, the specific goal as our means were limited was to ensure through a stalemate that they could not win, the operational strategy was to increase costs, signal resolve and hold out a compromise solution, and the operational activities were geared to advance that operational strategy. This is what is now missing–we don’t know the larger purpose, i.e, the (1), (2) and (3) of the administration’s approach to Syria. As we have (4) we can through inductive reasoning postulate that they have some (1)-(3) and that it might be like the Trump or late Obama administrations’, but that’s just speculation. Jim
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