Tomahawks fired, now think about the new Middle East

April 09, 2017
Post Photo

This article appeared in The Times (UK) on April 9, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
April 9, 2017

The Obama era in American foreign policy ended in Syria in the early hours there on April 7. Donald Trump’s prompt, calibrated and devastating assault on the airbase from which al-Assad’s dictatorship launched planes loaded with chemical weapons to murder innocent civilians was a fire bell in the night for all of America’s present and potential adversaries.

Whether Syria (and perhaps Russia) thought they would get away with the renewed use of chemical weapons based on media perceptions of Trump’s national security proclivities, we may never know. But his response has demonstrated that Trump will do what he believes is necessary when America’s security is threatened.

Vladimir Putin and perhaps even US Democrats will now realise there is no puppet of Moscow in the White House.

Iran and North Korea should take due note of the effects of 59 well-aimed Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles (“T-LAMs” in our jargon: they should become familiar with it).

No Hollywood scriptwriter could have imagined a scenario where Trump orders the attack and then sits down to dinner with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, and their wives. Welcome to the American way of war.
There is no doubt that Trump’s limited and precise attack was fully justified. Syria was a party to the chemical weapons convention, as is the United States. Whenever any party to a treaty that forbids the use or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction breaches its commitments, that constitutes a threat to American national security.

Critics in Washington who argue that the president needs congressional authorisation should study their constitutional history.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike, many will ask only what is next for Syria. In fact, the geostrategic question is far broader, encompassing nearly the entire Middle East.

Two important politico-military factors have changed dramatically since Trump took office.

First, unlike Barack Obama, Trump has no concern that his actions in Syria, especially those directed against Assad, will adversely affect the nuclear deal with Iran. Trump’s criticisms of that deal are abundantly clear.

Second, and perhaps even more important now, we are rapidly approaching the point of eliminating the Isis “caliphate” in what used to be Syria and Iraq. It behoves Washington and all other concerned parties to think hard about what will replace the vacuum created when Isis’s territory is liberated.

It is especially important to structure the Isis defeat to minimise the upside advantages for the Iran-led coalition, which includes the pro-Iran Baghdad regime, Assad’s Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah terrorists.

Russia is allied with this coalition, openly so in the case of Syria where Russia has a naval base at Tartus and a new airbase at Latakia.

We should not think only in terms of an either/or outcome in Syria: either Assad goes or Assad stays. There may be other outcomes, including partitioning Syria (and Iraq), leaving Assad in control only of what has been called “the Alawite enclave”.

Complex, seemingly intractable issues lie ahead, as the post-First World War Middle East order collapses, but they cannot be ignored under the complacent assumption that Syria and Iraq will simply re-emerge as the states they were before the ill-named Arab Spring and the equally ill-fated US decision to withdraw its forces from Iraq, both in 2011.

The Kurds are already de facto independent from Iraq and no one will force them back into Iraq against their will. Sunni Arabs will never happily submit to a government in Baghdad dominated by a Shi’ite population outnumbering them three to one and dominated by Tehran.

Similarly, Syrian Sunnis will not accept Assad as their ruler again. To believe otherwise is to ignore that such outcomes will simply precipitate further conflict and more extremism.

The main issue is to keep the aspiring nuclear weapons state Iran, still the central banker of international terrorism, from emerging in an even more menacing regional position.

Weakening Assad’s forces — and reminding Tehran implicitly of what Washington did to Saddam Hussein in 2003 — can only improve the regional prospects for stability. The lesson is that American strength is a force for international peace and security and American weakness an incentive for the world’s predators.

April 6, the day in US time when Trump ordered the strike against Syria, marked the 100th anniversary of America’s entry into the First World War.

We never asked for global responsibilities, but when it mattered we acted and we acted justly. Let America’s critics around the world think on that. I am particularly proud to be an American today.

John Bolton was the American ambassador to the UN, 2005-6

Possibilities for reunifying the Korean Peninsula

March 28, 2017
Post Photo

This article appeared in the Washington Times on March 27, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
March 27, 2017

With North Korea threatening its sixth nuclear test, and the pace of its ballistic-missile tests quickening, Pyongyang’s global threat is ever more imminent. Twenty-five years of self-defeating American efforts to negotiate with the world’s only hereditary Communist dictatorship have, not surprisingly, proven fruitless.

The North’s persistence and duplicity, U.S. naivete and diplomatic incompetence, and political and economic backing over the years from China, Russia and Iran have all contributed to the current crisis, where good options are scarce. After decades of rhetoric and failed diplomacy, Republican and Democratic alike, we have all but run out of time to prevent a nuclear North Korea by peaceful means.

Accordingly, national-security strategists are now examining American military options to protect our innocent civilians, and those of regional allies South Korea (inconveniently enmeshed in a constitutional crisis) and Japan. Given Seoul’s vulnerability to Pyongyang’s chemical and biological weapons (which its choice of VX nerve agent to assassinate its leader’s half-brother has recently reminded us), the choices all embody significant risks. Moreover, the consequences of one of Barack Obama’s worst legacies, his gutting of America’s national missile-defense program, now leave us painfully vulnerable at home.

Do any diplomatic avenues remain open? Only one offers any possibility of a lasting solution, as opposed to resuming talks with North Korea in the diaphanous expectation that the 26th year of such negotiations will produce results not discovered in the first 25. That possibility — peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula — Washington has all but ignored these last decades, although the upside of potential success is enormous.

The case for Korean reunification is not an appeal to China to help America. It is an argument for China to look to its own national interest, and to act accordingly. Consider these postulates:

First, the Korean Peninsula will be reunified. Its division in 1945 was purely expedient, intended to be temporary, and just as unnatural as Germany’s contemporaneous partition. The only questions are when and how Korean reunification will occur: Will it be through war or the North’s catastrophic collapse, or will the United States, South K
Korea, China and others manage the South absorbing the North coherently?

Second, China may actually believe what it says in opposing a North Korean nuclear-weapons capability because it destabilizes East Asia and therefore harms China’s own economic development. For years, however, Beijing’s behavior has been schizophrenic, fostering, for example, the inevitably doomed Six-Party Talks, while disingenuously arguing that the real solution had to be found between Washington and Pyongyang.

In fact, China, through its massive economic power over North Korea, could itself quickly remove any Pyongyang regime. Communist ideology, embodied in the unappetizing metaphor that their respective Communist parties are as close as lips and teeth, has for years impeded Beijing’s leaders from contemplating Korean reunification. Today, however, younger Chinese leaders understand and talk openly about the ugly piece of baggage the North represents for China itself.

Skeptics believe China will reject reunification principally on two grounds. Beijing dreads with good reason that Pyongyang’s collapse could produce a refugee flood across the Yalu River into Manchuria, a humanitarian emergency taxing China’s resources and also risking political and economic destabilization. (Seoul fears a similar refugee tide into the Demilitarized Zone.) In response, Washington and our regional allies should pledge full cooperation with Beijing to avoid massive refugee flows from North Korea as its prison-camp structures dissolve.

This will doubtless involve complex, fraught issues like deconflicting intervening foreign forces in the region as the North’s regime collapses, and securing its missile facilities and stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. In addition, we need a communications program urging North Korea’s population to remain in place, plans for the substantial and expeditious distribution of humanitarian aid, and other steps to help steady the North’s population even before significant refugee flows begin. While there are unquestionably political implications in these issues, they are fundamentally technical, and ultimately manageable.

China’s real objection to a managed reunification obviously rests on strategic concerns, namely what America’s role in a reunited Korea will be. Most importantly, Beijing does not want U.S. forces along the Yalu River. China didn’t like that movie in 1950, and doesn’t like it any better today. Fortunately, Washington doesn’t want our troops deployed on the Yalu, either, any more than today it wants them pinned down in the DMZ as a trip wire. Being fixed in essentially indefensible positions is bad tactics and worse strategy, especially given the attractive alternative of redeploying U.S. forces to the southern tip of the Peninsula. From Pusan, they could be rapidly deployed in Korea as events might require, or elsewhere across East Asia. China may not like that, either, preferring complete U.S. withdrawal to Japan or points further east, but that is simply Beijing dreaming. China should be satisfied with our forces stationed near Pusan, far more desirable for both powers than standing watch on the Yalu.

One final consideration for Washington is that we should long ago have stopped considering North Korea as merely an Asian problem. What Pyongyang has today in terms of deliverable nuclear weapons, Iran can have tomorrow by making a simple wire transfer. The North’s cooperation with Iran on ballistic missiles, intended to be used as delivery systems for their respective nuclear weapons, extends back 25 years, just as long as our fruitless negotiations. And there is every reason to believe the two rogue states are also cooperating on nuclear-weapons technology, such as Iran’s possible financing of the Syrian reactor destroyed by Israel in 2007. Moreover, since North Korea will sell anything to anybody for hard currency, international terrorists need only take a number.

Reaching agreement with China on Korean reunification will not happen overnight, which is why we should have broached the subject 15 years ago or more. But if we wish to avoid resorting to the military option, we must move immediately today. Better ideas are welcome. What should not be welcome is blithely sitting down with Pyongyang for a 26th year of diplomatic failure.

Trump, trade and American sovereignty

March 08, 2017
Post Photo


The WTO’s process for settling disputes fails to deter violators and leaches national power

This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on March 7, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
March 7, 2017

President Trump’s trade rhetoric until now has been simple and effective: America is getting ripped off, he says, and things need to change. Simplicity works on the campaign trail, but how does it translate into actual governance?

Earlier this month the administration submitted the annual National Trade Policy Agenda to Congress. The submission takes particular aim at the World Trade Organization’s “Dispute Settlement Understanding,” which provides a quasi-judicial process for resolving international trade disagreements. Although technical, even arcane, the DSU is dear to the hearts of global-governance advocates. The Trump administration is right to criticize its performance.

Agreed to during the Uruguay Round of world trade talks in 1994, the DSU has had some successes. But it is often criticized for failing to deter violations of the WTO’s substantive trade provisions and for too often exceeding its mandate by imposing new obligations on one or more parties, particularly against American interests.

This alarming trend extends beyond trade. A rising number of international agreements create “judicial” or “legislative” bodies that interpret and expand obligations well beyond what is laid out in underlying treaties, placing them beyond the effective control of domestic democratic institutions. This trend raises legitimate fears among states that they will lose sovereign authority. This fear is particularly acute in America, where the Constitution unmistakably fixes sovereignty in “We the People.”

The U.S. has in the past rejected or renounced international agreements that were not conducive to its interests. In 1986 the Reagan administration withdrew from the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. In 2002 the Bush administration unsigned the Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court. The U.S., thankfully, still has not ratified the Law of the Sea Treaty, thereby avoiding the jurisdiction of the tribunal it creates.

Washington has also blocked declarations by periodic “treaty-review conferences,” which have a similar tendency to expand member-state obligations beyond those contained in the original agreements. Likewise, the Trump administration is considering withdrawing from the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose creation the Bush administration voted against in 2006, and which the U.S. did not join until President Obama took office in 2009. The American people are often the last to learn of their new and purportedly legally binding commitments.

That isn’t to say that these international decision-making bodies are established exclusively to evade the burdens of America’s Constitution, only that evasion is their clear consequence. The unspoken objective is to constrain the U.S., and to transfer authority from national governments to international bodies.

The specifics of each case differ, but the common theme is diminished American sovereignty, submitting the United States to authorities that ignore, outvote or frustrate its priorities. Nothing in the Constitution contemplates such submission to international treaties or bodies. While many European Union governments seem predisposed to relinquish sovereignty, there is scant hint of similar enthusiasm in America. Moreover, the United Kingdom just dealt a stunning blow to the notion of Europe’s “ever closer union.” By reasserting their sovereignty, the British are in the process of escaping, among other things, the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.

That brings us back to trade. The DSU is not, as some say, analogous to U.S. courts, which preserve the Constitution’s nationwide free-trade area through the “dormant Commerce Clause” doctrine. America is a real civil society where real courts have real enforcement capabilities—a far cry from the “global community” fantasyland. If Americans feel increasingly unable to restrain the exercise of judicial and legislative power at home, why should anyone be surprised to learn that international bodies are even worse?

Limiting an aggrieved country’s ability to resort to the DSU is not a rejection of free trade. To the contrary, it is a rejection of the unaccountable, legalistic morass into which free trade can all but disappear. In reality, ignoring DSU outcomes has always been an option for those prepared to face the consequences.

What is the World Trade Organization’s central objective? Is it to promote actual free trade, or is it merely to reify the DSU? If, in fact, this faltering dispute-resolution mechanism is the WTO’s central pillar, without which global free trade is doomed to collapse, we can legitimately conclude there is something gravely wrong with the direction of the basic enterprise.

Some countries cause more global trade problems than others. China is doing tangible harm to the regime of liberal international trade by striking first, and sometimes repeatedly, in violation of substantive WTO obligations in fields like intellectual property protection. Such countries—not those that retaliate rather than submit to the DSU—deserve the world’s ire.

If the DSU fails to deter repeated acts of trade aggression because of its cumbersome nature and faulty decisions, then the problem is likely the DSU, not its critics. Ironically, many global-governance advocates play down the DSU’s significance since it involves only trade, not existential political questions. Such modesty might seem becoming, but precedents established in one aspect of international affairs inevitably bleed into others.

The burden properly lies with the White House to specify how it will confront the DSU’s failings, many of which seem embedded in its design. Whatever steps President Trump recommends should be understood and measured against the larger dangers of global governance. The shadows cast by other flawed multilateral “authorities” make clear that U.S. sovereignty is at stake.

Trump Needs ‘Long-Term Strategy to Keep Russia in Check in Europe and Middle East’

February 23, 2017
Post Photo

Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton on the Trump administration’s top foreign policy objectives:

“The two immediate threats are the proliferation of nuclear, chemical weapons. We see Iran and North Korea as the sort of two leading-edge threats in that regard. And then, second, the continuing threat of radical Islamic terrorism, with ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban in Afghanistan, all really threatening us in palpable ways today.”

“We need to have a long-term strategy to keep Russia in check in both Eastern and Central Europe and in the Middle East.”

“The relationship with China, I think, will be the dominant international issue for the United States for the rest of this century, and we’re not doing well right now.”

Trump Appointees Must Avoid ‘Siren Song’ of Positive Media Coverage in Shaping Policy

February 23, 2017
Post Photo

Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton discussed the mainstream media’s efforts to influence the administration:

“One of the bedrock principles of conservatism – and I think they start with the belief in American exceptionalism and the notion that our national security policy has to be based on American interests.”

“…In the mainstream media commentary about the president’s emerging team and the direction he’s going in, some of the themes that show how the press, the mainstream press in Washington, tries to manipulate new Republican administrations.”

“But what the media and the Democrats are trying to do now is convince them: ‘You don’t want to be controversial. You don’t want to be ideological. Things are just fine. Be a technocrat. Tinker around the edges. Don’t change much.’ That’s not what Donald Trump got elected to do. That’s the fight really on the national security front, I think, for the soul of the administration.”

Trump’s New Start With Russia May Prove Better Than Obama’s

February 13, 2017
Post Photo

This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Febraury 13, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
February 13, 2017

Media tittle-tattle about President Trump’s telephone calls with foreign counterparts received new fuel last week after details leaked of a conversation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The usual anonymous sources alleged that when Mr. Putin raised the 2010 New Start arms-control treaty, Mr. Trump asked his aides what it covered—and then, once briefed, declared it to be one of those bad Obama deals he planned to renegotiate.

If so, Mr. Trump got the treaty right. From America’s perspective, New Start is an execrable deal, a product of Cold War nostrums about reducing nuclear tensions. Arms-control treaties, properly conceived and drafted, should look like George W. Bush’s 2002 Treaty of Moscow: short (three pages), with broad exit ramps and sunset provisions.

Although President Obama had considerable help from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in this diplomatic failure, Russia was hardly blameless. Moscow subsequently exploited the treaty’s weaknesses to rebuild and modernize its arsenal of nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles, while Mr. Obama stood idly by. Republican senators opposed New Start’s ratification, 26-13 (three of them didn’t vote), as did 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Mr. Trump’s remarks are therefore squarely in the party’s mainstream.

Not so, however, are some of Mr. Trump’s comments—or at least the inferences drawn from them—on Mr. Putin’s political and military adventurism in Europe. Many Republicans worry that, rather than strengthening the international economic sanctions imposed on Russia for its belligerent incursions into eastern Ukraine and its 2014 annexation of Crimea, Mr. Trump may reduce or rescind sanctions entirely.

This apparent difference is no small matter. Legislation to codify the existing sanctions is pending in Congress. It has overwhelming—most analysts think veto-proof—bipartisan support. Commentators wonder whether the remarkable Republican solidarity on Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominations might be shattered if Russia policy is the first area in which the new administration faces off with the Republican congressional majorities.

The sanctions on Russia for its interference in Ukraine are already under assault in Europe: Germany, France and others appear close to succumbing to their apparently hard-wired inclination to sacrifice geostrategic imperatives for economic ones. Elections across the Continent this year may produce results even more favorable to Moscow (possibly, in part, because of Russian meddling). By contrast, the Baltic republics and other NATO members in Eastern and Central Europe are alarmed that Russia’s adventurism would increase if its Ukraine aggression were brushed aside and sanctions lifted.

Yet amid the breathless press accounts about Mr. Trump’s purported fancy for Mr. Putin, one thing is clear: The Trump administration’s policy toward, and even its strategic assessment of, Russia is still under construction. Most important, if the substance of Mr. Trump’s comments on New Start was accurately reported, it shows him resisting items on Mr. Putin’s wish list, and not for the first time.

Mr. Trump has, for example, unequivocally opposed Mr. Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. On Feb. 1, National Security Adviser Mike Flynn put Iran “on notice” that the deal was on life support. New U.S. sanctions against Iran underlined the point. The White House is reportedly considering listing Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, which should have been done decades ago. Such a move would have a significant political and economic effect on Moscow’s military-industrial complex, particularly Rosoboronexport, its international arms-sales agency.

Washington should be also push back against Russia’s inserting itself militarily and politically into the Middle East by using the Syria conflict as a wedge. While Ukraine may seem an unrelated issue, it is not. Moscow’s diplomatic efforts to “solve” the Syrian conflict are in substantial part an effort to “help” Europe with the Syrian refugee problem, providing yet another inducement to wobbly Europeans to roll back sanctions. Any perceived American weakness on the sanctions would embolden Russian efforts to further penetrate the Middle East, increasing the dangerous, destabilizing effects of Moscow’s tacit alliance with Iran.

Significantly, Mr. Trump has said he doesn’t know what his relationship with Mr. Putin will ultimately be, and he must surely recognize that national interests, not personal chemistry, underlie great-power foreign policies. America doesn’t sacrifice its national-security bottom line just because a foreign leader “may smile, and smile.”

So let’s raise our glasses to Mr. Trump’s disdain for New Start, not to mention the Iran nuclear deal, and hope for more of the same. The new president ought to strengthen the sanctions, reassure NATO allies (while juicing them to meet their commitments on military spending), and then have coffee with Vlad. Negotiate only from positions of strength.

Mr. Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad” (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

Disarming the Iran threat

February 11, 2017
Post Photo

This article appeared in the Tribune-Review on Febraury 11, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
February 11, 2017

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will travel to Washington this Wednesday to meet with President Donald Trump. While the two leaders have a full agenda to cover — including international terrorism, the ongoing carnage in Syria and Israel’s continuing efforts to find peace with its neighbors — Iran’s nuclear-weapons program undoubtedly will dominate their discussions.

Rightly so. Iran’s long-standing program to develop deliverable nuclear weapons is a palpably existential threat to Israel and friendly Arab states in the Middle East. Joint Iranian-North Korean work on missiles and quite likely on nuclear matters demonstrates that the threat is truly worldwide. It is no accident that the Jan. 29 Iranian missile test that provoked Trump’s strong response involved testing a re-entry vehicle. Missiles designed to launch weather satellites into orbit need not be designed for re-entry, but missiles delivering nuclear weapons to their targets obviously do.

CALL FOR A ‘COMMON STAND’

Just before meeting last week with British Prime Minister Theresa May, Netanyahu told Israel’s Cabinet that the West needed to take a “common stand” against “Iranian aggression.” Unfortunately, after Barack Obama’s fatally flawed June 2015 Vienna nuclear deal with the ayatollahs, the West is badly divided. The Vienna agreement’s elimination of economic sanctions against Iran has enticed Europeans in particular to enter extensive trade and investment dealings with Tehran. This is precisely what Iran intended: to make it difficult, if not impossible, to restore meaningful international sanctions once the West realized its basic strategic mistake in striking the deal and its frightening long-term consequences.

As long as Obama remained president, Iran’s nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs had little to fear. The advent of Trump’s White House, however, has changed all that. The new administration’s tough rhetoric and renewed sanctions demonstrated clearly that critics of Obama’s appeasement policy have taken command in Washington. They now face the question of how to pull the United States out of the hole into which Obama put it — and to do so as soon as possible.

Accordingly, Trump and Netanyahu can make progress toward accomplishing several objectives at this week’s meeting. First, they should fashion a diplomatic strategy to recreate the West’s common political resolve to prevent the ayatollahs from ever getting nuclear weapons. The emphasis should be on “effective.” Strong rhetoric, military maneuvering and economic sanctions all have their place, but even the now-defunct sanctions regime had not slowed down Iran’s nuclear and missile efforts. Putting a tough-minded Western coalition against Iran back together will face heavy going, but it is both vital and urgent.

Second, and to that end, Israel and America must enhance their intelligence-gathering capabilities and cooperation. We know already that Iran has significantly shredded the Vienna deal’s provisions regarding heavy-water production and missile testing. Since the ayatollahs’ project to obtain deliverable nuclear weapons has been an animating desire of their regime since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, we can safely assume they are still at it, likely violating many other provisions of the Vienna deal.

We can also infer that Obama gave very low priority to uncovering and investigating Iranian breaches. Undoubtedly, there is fertile ground for Trump’s new intelligence-community leadership and the Israeli government to compare notes on what nefarious actions Iran has taken since the Vienna deal.

TWO LEADING ROGUE STATES

Moreover, we know that Iran and North Korea, the two leading rogue states, have cooperated for over 25 years on ballistic missiles, and there is compelling anecdotal evidence they are similarly cooperating on nuclear matters. Working with South Korea, Japan and others, America and Israel must do far more to investigate potential linkages than in the past eight years.

Third, Trump and Netanyahu must address how to eradicate ISIS without enhancing Iran’s influence across the Middle East. Obama’s approach to ISIS, a slow-motion campaign that could take years to reach its objectives, if ever, actually strengthens Tehran’s hand in the region along with its surrogates and allies, such as Hezbollah, the Assad regime and the current Baghdad government. Even if ISIS is ultimately defeated under Obama’s approach, Iran will emerge the real victor. Trump has already ordered the Pentagon to review U.S. military options. Now, he and Netanyahu should develop a comprehensive political framework into which the new military strategy will fit.

Wednesday’s meeting in Washington has the potential to change overnight the last eight years of American retreat from the Middle East and from the great global threats of our time, such as nuclear proliferation. Not all the problems will be resolved in one meeting, but the importance of this encounter cannot be overemphasized.

John Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations and, previously, the undersecretary of State for arms control and international security.

The Iran Deal Can’t Be Enforced

February 05, 2017
Post Photo

This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Febraury 5, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
February 5, 2017

Iran’s continued missile testing on Saturday has given President Trump one more reason to tear up his predecessor’s deal with the regime in Tehran. After Iran’s Jan. 29 ballistic-missile launch, the Trump administration responded with new sanctions and tough talk. But these alone won’t have a material effect on Tehran or its decades-long effort to acquire deliverable nuclear weapons.

The real issue is whether America will abrogate Barack Obama’s deal with Iran, recognizing it as a strategic debacle, a result of the last president’s misguided worldview and diplomatic malpractice. Terminating the agreement would underline that Iran is already violating it, clearly intends to continue pursuing nuclear arms, works closely with North Korea in seeking deliverable nuclear weapons, and continues to support international terrorism and provocative military actions. Escaping from the Serbonian Bog that Obama’s negotiations created would restore the resolute leadership and moral clarity the U.S. has lacked for eight years.

But those who supported the Iran deal, along with even many who had opposed it, argue against abrogation. Instead they say that America should “strictly enforce” the deal’s terms and hope that Iran pulls out. This would be a mistake for two reasons. First, the strategic miscalculations embodied in the deal endanger the U.S. and its allies, not least by lending legitimacy to the ayatollahs, the world’s central bankers for terrorism.

Second, “strictly enforcing” the deal is as likely to succeed as nailing Jell-O to a wall. Not only does the entire agreement reflect appeasement, but President Obama’s diplomacy produced weak, ambiguous and confusing language in many specific provisions. These drafting failures created huge loopholes, and Iran is now driving its missile and nuclear programs straight through them.

Take Tehran’s recent ballistic-missile tests. The Trump administration sees them as violating the deal. Iran disagrees. Let’s see what “strict enforcement” would really mean, bearing in mind that the misbegotten deal is 104 pages long, consisting of Security Council Resolution 2231 and two attachments: Annex A, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the main nuclear deal, known by the acronym JCPOA); and Annex B, covering other matters including ballistic missiles.

Annex B isn’t actually an agreement. Iran is not a party to it. Instead it is a statement by the Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany, intended to “improve transparency” and “create an atmosphere conducive” to implementing the deal. The key paragraph of Annex B says: “Iran is called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons” for eight years.

Note the language I’ve italicized. Iran is not forbidden from engaging in all ballistic-missile activity, merely “called upon” to do so. The range of proscribed activity is distinctly limited, applying only to missiles “designed to be capable” of carrying nuclear weapons. Implementation is left to the Security Council.

The loopholes are larger than the activity supposedly barred. Iran simply denies that its missiles are “designed” for nuclear payloads—because, after all, it does not have a nuclear-weapons program. This is a palpable lie, but both the JCPOA and a unanimous Security Council accepted it. Resolution 2231 includes a paragraph: “Welcoming Iran’s reaffirmation in the JCPOA that it will under no circumstances ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” The ayatollahs have been doing precisely that ever since their 1979 revolution.

Finally, Resolution 2231 itself also merely “calls upon” Iran to comply with Annex B’s ballistic-missile limits, even as the same sentence says that all states “shall comply” with other provisions. When the Security Council wants to “prohibit” or “demand” or even “decide,” it knows how to say so. It did not here.

The upshot is very simple: Iran can’t violate the ballistic-missile language because it has reaffirmed that it doesn’t have a nuclear-weapons program. Really, what could go wrong?

These are weasel words of the highest order, coupled with flat-out misrepresentation by Iran and willful blindness by the United States. The Jell-O will not stick to the wall. The deal cannot be “strictly enforced.” And this is only one example of the slippery language found throughout the deal.

Pentagon sources have said that the missile Iran recently tested failed while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. This is telling. If the missile program were, as Iran claims, only for launching weather and communications satellites, there would be no need to test re-entry vehicles. The goal would be to put satellites in orbit and keep them there. But nuclear warheads obviously have to re-enter the atmosphere to reach their targets. The recent tests provide even more evidence of what Iran’s ballistic-missile program has always been about, namely supplying delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons.

Time always works on the side of nuclear proliferators, and the Iran deal is providing the ayatollahs with protective camouflage. Every day Washington lets pass without ripping the deal up is a day of danger for America and its friends. We proceed slowly at our peril.

Mr. Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad” (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

The return of the ‘special relationship’ between the US and UK

January 30, 2017
Post Photo

This article appeared in the Boston Globe on January 30, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
January 30, 2017

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s just-completed visit to Philadelphia and Washington came at a critical time for both her country and the United States, and particularly for the one-week old Trump administration. Rarely in peacetime have two national leaders faced a more consequential opportunity to redirect, dramatically and swiftly, the course of international affairs.

The prospects here lie at the core of the alliance structures America has created since 1945 to protect its vital global interests. Strong and lasting alliances are not merely transactional. They do not rest on accounting examinations of recent debits and credits. Instead, they rest on profoundly important shared values and interests, foundations that endure transitory political and economic bumps in the relationship. This is how the US-UK “special relationship” was built over the years since it was forged in World War II.

May and Trump made it clear in their public remarks that they intend to rejuvenate the “special relationship,” in both economic and political affairs. That does not mean they will necessarily agree on everything, exemplified by their likely conflicting views on sanctions imposed on Russia for its military adventurism across international borders in Ukraine. Nonetheless, a newly independent Britain and a new Trump administration have far more uniting than dividing them.

May’s government is currently undertaking the unprecedented task of unwinding itself from the cumbersome, bureaucratic and regulatory morass of the European Union. The Brexit decision, made last June 23 in a referendum, confounded trans-Atlantic business and political elites, who could not imagine that the desire for mere self-government could overcome the secular theology reflected in their conception of Europe’s “ever closer union.” May herself opposed Brexit, but now leads a government whose place in history will be determined by whether it succeeds or fails in exiting the EU on terms advantageous to Britain.

In America, Trump’s victory upended decades of belief in multilateral trade deals essentially for their own sake. The new president has said he believes in free trade, insisting correctly that true free trade is not reflected in the dirigiste, “managed trade” provisions that characterize so many so-called free trade agreements. Perhaps even more importantly, Trump has said emphatically that he will follow a revolutionary principle in administering trade treaties: He will expect the other parties to adhere to their obligations, and will not conceal or ignore their violations.

The potential for a dramatically different trade and investment agreement between America and Britain, despite obvious risks and difficulties, should be the highest and most immediate priority. Both countries can shed layers of stifling government regulations in the process, and London and New York could sustain and enhance their reputations as the financial capitals of the world, while competitors in Europe and Asia lag behind.

US businesses could reach UK markets all but closed-off for decades because of high EU external barriers to trade. In short order, Canada could join this new bilateral trade relationship, with other non-EU nations in Europe coming on board in due course. Not only would the prospect of a US-UK agreement strengthen London’s hand in the exit negotiations with Brussels, it would encourage nations remaining within the EU to demand that the lords of Brussels wake up to what is happening in the wider world.

Politically, with Britain freeing itself from the EU’s common foreign and defense policy, it will resume its role as a full leader of NATO. For far too long, NATO’s European members (with some notable exceptions) have simply not adequately attended to threats to international peace and security. Sustained, disciplined thinking on global threats like nuclear proliferation and international terrorism, and threats on the Continent itself from a belligerent Kremlin, has been lacking, also for far too long.

As Britain once again demonstrates a broader perspective, the possibility of making NATO a global organization, as suggested by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose-Maria Aznar, can receive careful attention. Admitting Australia, Singapore, Japan and Israel, to name just a few, could contribute significantly to international stability if they thought NATO capable of resuming a vibrant existence.

Especially in Europe, there is misplaced concern that Trump will work actively for the collapse of the EU. He doesn’t have to; the Europeans themselves are doing quite a job of demonstrating the EU’s manifold internal problems. The new White House should simply cease propping up the EU’s mercantilist, anti-democratic, inward-looking proclivities, and nature will take its course.

And although May and Trump appear to differ on the Russia sanctions issue, this is neither new nor unusual in US-UK relations. Tony Blair was accused in Britain of being George W. Bush’s poodle during the second Iraq war, a charge that was unfair and untrue from the outset. Neither Theresa May nor Donald Trump are anyone’s poodles, and a new special relationship will be the stronger for it.

John R. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was the US ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006.

Moving U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem as Simple as Moving the Sign from One Building to Another

January 25, 2017
Post Photo

Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton discussed the prospective relocation of America’s Israel embassy to Jerusalem:

“One of the things that distinguished Donald Trump, and you can see it even in his first days in office, is during the campaign he said ‘I’m going to do X, Y, and Z’ – and miraculous to behold, he’s actually doing it on so many different fronts, internationally and domestically.”

“You can move the embassy by taking the plaque off the wall at our consulate building in Jerusalem and putting up a sign that says ‘U.S. Embassy.’ You can build a bigger embassy, the full-scope embassy, obviously over a longer period of time, but you could make the dramatic move quickly.”

“Once you slow down, once you miss the chance to strike dramatically in the early days…once you give up that opportunity, the cost actually mounts.”

“Israel has the land. Let’s forget the legalities. Israel has control of the territory. They believe it’s their land, dating back historically, and they’re building settlements on it. I tell you what, nobody’s going to stop them.”