Joe Biden’s bungled Afghan exit is a calamity for America and the West

August 16, 2021

There was an alternative to following Trump’s policy. Now our enemies will look to exploit our weakness

This article appeared in The Daily Telegraph on August 16, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
 August 16, 2021

The rapidity with which the Taliban has effectively seized control of Afghanistan has stunned and embarrassed the Biden administration. Already a tragedy for the Afghan people, the situation will worsen, quite possibly catastrophically so. The Taliban has captured every major city, and President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country. The Afghan collapse is either a major intelligence failure or proof of congenital wishful thinking by Joe Biden and his advisers, probably both.

Worse, the collapse of Afghanistan’s national military is a debacle for America, Britain and our allies, posing a potential new world-wide threat. If, as now seems certain, al Qaeda, Isil and other terrorist groups take sanctuary in the country, we will have effectively returned to a pre-9/11 terrorist environment. 9/11’s twentieth anniversary was already heavy on our minds, and the confluence of events only makes the memories starker.

Observers had suggested ways to mitigate the damage caused by Biden’s withdrawal decision, or partially reverse it. They are now dreams. There was no chance Biden would reverse course, and now it is impossible. Iacta alea est.

Ironically, Biden’s withdrawal policy is virtually indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s, which was well underway when he left office. On Saturday, Biden himself admitted he was finishing the implementation of what Trump started. Biden claimed he had only two options: follow Trump’s blueprint or else considerably increase US combat forces in Afghanistan. This is a strawman argument, palpably false.

By August 2019, Trump was determined to leave this “endless war”. He hoped to exit before the 2020 elections, but he failed because of his perpetual intellectual disarray. So desperate was Trump to gain credit for the withdrawal, he wanted to invite the Taliban to Camp David to seal the deal, which his advisers viewed as near sacrilege. Trump was diverted from this theatre only because of a Taliban attack on a Nato convoy in Kabul.

Hoping to salvage his reputation from Trump’s ashes, former secretary of state Michael Pompeo has tried to distinguish Trump’s performance from Biden’s. Pompeo defends Trump’s withdrawal decision while criticising Biden for poorly executing it. Arguing that Trump’s plan was “conditions based”, Pompeo contends that US and Nato forces would have responded forcefully had the Taliban violated the deal.

Maybe. Maybe not. In the end, Biden, like Trump, had wanted to withdraw, and he did. History will label the US withdrawal “the Trump-Biden policy”.

Sadly, there is further irony here, and cruel irony indeed. After the US-led coalition overthrew the Taliban in 2001, Americans and others launched, mistakenly, a massive nation-building campaign. Today, this effort to show selflessness has been turned against the necessity of remaining in-country for strategic reasons. Many ask, reasonably, why we have spent so much to reshape Afghan society and construct a viable military, but have so plainly failed.

Others complain that the Afghan army folded without a fight. Kabul’s army was well-equipped and trained, but its morale was destroyed by the Trump-Biden withdrawal decisions, all of which was entirely predictable. In Afghanistan, we needed merely a partner military that could keep the Taliban sufficiently under control that Isil and al Qaeda did not obtain secure-enough sanctuaries to threaten us with renewed attacks. We didn’t need military perfection; a strong central government; or Afghanistan converted into a central Asian Switzerland. Today, this realisation comes too late.

The most fundamental mistake, which Biden reiterated on Saturday, is the notion we have been fighting in an Afghan civil war. To the contrary, we have been fighting a Western war against terrorists who happen to be in Afghanistan. Did Biden really believe we could leave it to Afghan surrogates to defend our vital interests? If our surrogates fail, as they have done, do we simply suffer the consequences of al Qaeda, Isil, and others conducting renewed attacks against us? We should certainly have others, like the Afghans, fight with us against the terrorists, and we did. But their inadequacy does not mean we throw up our hands and depart, giving the terrorists free rein.

Finally, we hear constantly that we have “been there for 20 years,” it is America’s “longest war,” and “the endless wars must end”. This is simple-minded, albeit politically appealing. We have believed correctly that “forward defence” against the Taliban in Afghanistan is better than waiting to defend against terrorists in our own streets and skies. Unfortunately, our leaders have failed to explain why “forward defence” is the best way to protect our innocent civilians, although the process may take a very, very long time. Constantly predicting it will be over in a year or two has been counter-productive. Our side doesn’t get to decide when the terrorists give up. Our publics would understand this cost-benefit analysis if leaders properly explained it. They have before, in the Cold War, not for merely 20 years, but for over 45 years before the Soviet Union collapsed.

Proponents of withdrawal missed the point. We entered Afghanistan for core strategic reasons: to remove the Taliban government and destroy al Qaeda. We had substantial but incomplete success. We remained for equally compelling reasons: to prevent a recurrence of terrorist capabilities to strike America and its allies, and to watch more carefully developments in Pakistan and Iran. We do not want Pakistan to succumb to extremists similar to the Taliban, which would put an arsenal of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. In Iran we worry about the terrorist ayatollahs still avidly pursuing that same nuclear capability.

For the West more broadly, the Afghan withdrawal dangerously impugns our worldwide resolve. After four aberrant years of Trump, Biden pledged that “America is back” and would provide competent leadership. Having followed Trump’s erroneous exit policy, and then bungled it, Biden’s credibility also lies in tatters. Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran, are fully alert, looking for every opportunity to exploit US weakness. Doing good by the Afghans was a substantial collateral benefit of America, Britain and others pursuing our strategic interests, but it was not central to why we were there. Now our departure will imperil us all. This is a strategic lesson, which, I fear, we will learn at great cost.

Israel’s (and America’s) imminent UNESCO mistake

August 16, 2021

This article appeared in The Daily News on August 3, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton 
August 3, 2021

Is it possible that Israel’s fragile governing coalition and Joe Biden’s administration will rejoin the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)? Apparently so, according to recent media reports.

If true, such a policy shift would be a significant mistake in dealing with the United Nations generally, and a dramatic repudiation of hard-fought victories against efforts to have “Palestine” declared a state by the UN rather than through direct negotiations with Israel.

Perhaps Yair Lapid, the left-of-center foreign minister of Israel’s morganatic, bare-majority coalition, doesn’t see any problems ahead. What is stunning is that conservative Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has acceded to Lapid’s initiative, risking the ire of his own supporters, not to mention Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud Party, probing continuously and aggressively for mistakes potentially fatal to Bennett’s shaky government.

Equally incomprehensible is why Biden, beset by threats ranging from COVID-19 to rising inflation from huge federal spending increases, would seek to resurrect the UNESCO issue. Even if he did rejoin, Congress would certainly reject paying renewed contributions to UNESCO, much less over $500 million in arrearages America purportedly owes. Biden would face a massive political struggle without the prospect of any substantive accomplishment.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, center, flanked by Alternate Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, left, chairs the first weekly cabinet meeting of the new government in Jerusalem, Sunday, June 20.

The UN’s fundamental basis is that is an organization of member states. Accordingly, because Washington almost invariably opposes politicizing the work of UN technical bodies, it has consistently rejected efforts by non-states to join the UN and its specialized agencies.

UNESCO has long been among the most politicized UN organizations. Ronald Reagan withdrew America in 1983 because of UNESCO’s systematic anti-U.S. biases, and concern for its rampant anti-Semitism. Indeed, even as the Cold War later wound down, George H.W. Bush refrained from rejoining UNESCO, largely due to its deeply embedded anti-Israeli bias.

George W. Bush’s decision to return proved the error of thinking UNESCO capable of reform. Inevitably, despite clear forewarning of the disaster it was courting, UNESCO admitted the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a member state in 2011. Like its predecessor Palestine Liberation Organization, the PA palpably fails to meet customary international law requirements for “statehood.”

UNESCO’s misbegotten decision triggered U.S. statutory obligations to stop funding any UN agency that accorded the PA “state” status. This statute’s origin is an iconic marker of the longstanding, bipartisan, U.S. opposition to Palestinian efforts to create facts on the ground in the UN’s friendly corridors. In 1989, over U.S. and Israeli opposition, the PLO tried to join the World Health Organization. Then-Secretary of State Jim Baker pledged to advise President Bush that the U.S. “make no further contributions, voluntary or assessed, to any international organization which makes any change in the PLO’s status as an observer organization.”

Baker’s warning stopped the PLO cold. Congress subsequently enacted his warning into law, thereby binding subsequent administrations. Nonetheless, in 2011, this plain language was ignored by all concerned: Obama, the PA and UNESCO’s membership. Even afterward, when Washington, as required, terminated funding, UNESCO failed to get the point. Accordingly, in 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced America’s second withdrawal. Given this history of critical Republican attitudes on UN funding and the PA, and significant splits within the Democratic Party on the issue, Biden would be politically myopic to pick this fight again.

So why is Israel raising it now? Axios reports that Lapid believes “Israel’s withdrawal from international forums over claims they were biased only made Israeli foreign policy less effective.” We can only hope this reporting is deeply flawed; if true it would reflect a stunningly naive worldview, unprecedented among Israel’s modern-era foreign ministers.

What next? Will Israel join Washington’s plan to rejoin the deeply flawed UN Human Rights Council? Under Lapid’s reported rationale, and presumably Biden’s as well, this is entirely possible. Created in 2006, the Council was intended to avoid repeating the anti-American, anti-Israel practices of its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission. The reform effort failed so badly, however, that Washington and Jerusalem voted against establishing the new Council, and, once established, the U.S. declined to join. Obama reversed this policy, successfully seeking American election to the new forum. Entirely predictably, the Council’s behavior was as bad as its egregious predecessor. Trump’s senior advisers, rightly concluding there was no prospect for the Council to improve, unanimously recommended withdrawal, which occurred in 2018.

UNESCO membership might well be a non-event but for the evidence it provides of people’s views on larger issues. In “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More says scornfully, “it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world….But for Wales?” We can say here, that it never profits either America or Israel to compromise their vital national interests.…But for UNESCO?

How the West could topple the ayatollahs

August 10, 2021

The UK is in a unique position to unite the anti-Iran coalition around new expanded sanctions

This article appeared in The Daily Telegraph on August 10, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton 
August 10, 2021

Boris Johnson is facing critical decisions on Iran. On July 30, an Iranian drone attacked the tanker Mercer Street, off Oman, murdering a British citizen. UK and US forces nearby, on high alert, subsequently foiled an Iranian attempted tanker hijacking. Last week, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei installed his protégé, torturer and executioner Ebrahim Raisi, as Iran’s new president, thereby reaffirming that its Islamic Revolution has not moderated.

Concomitantly, Joe Biden’s efforts to beg the US’s way back into the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”, are imploding. Biden has his own hard decisions to make. Not only is the JCPOA at death’s door, he has done little to counter Tehran’s conventional military aggression and support for terrorism. So fixed was his administration on resurrecting the flawed deal, it has no apparent Plan B.

The ayatollahs are on the move, and the West is spectating. Johnson, however, can play a key role; among the leaders of Europe’s three JCPOA signatories, he faces the fewest political constraints. Germany’s Angela Merkel ends her long chancellorship in just months, and France’s Emmanuel Macron faces stiff challenges in next year’s presidential elections. By contrast, Johnson’s majority would support a harder Iran line than what he inherited in 2016 as foreign secretary.

Biden has assured America’s friends he wants to strengthen alliance ties, not weaken them, Trump-style. But on the Iran issue, competing alliances have been at odds. Washington’s Middle East partners (Israel and the Gulf Arab states) are deeply threatened by Iran’s nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programmes, as well as by its support for terrorism and its belligerent Quds Force. On the diplomatic scoreboard so far, European allies have done better under Biden than those in the Middle East, which Biden prefers to downplay.

No such luck. Iran is not going away, and neither are the Taliban, al Qaeda or Isis. The central strategic objective, therefore, remains, as for decades, preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Conveniently, this has been the declared objective of all concerned, although mostly rhetorically for some given that the JCPOA was never going to achieve that goal. By bending their knee to Iran’s insistence that it retain and expand its uranium-enrichment capabilities, the “EU-3” (before the UK Brexited) guaranteed failure.

What Western leaders must do, and where Johnson could be pivotal, is reconcile the disparate approaches among the governments determined to prevent a nuclear Iran. Israel will not watch idly as its nuclear and missile programmes advance. A litany of fires, explosions, inconvenient accidents and more, which may or may not be Israel’s work, is already slowing Iran down, albeit not enough. With or without Bibi Netanyahu as prime minister, Israel’s vigorous strategy is unlikely to subside.

The ayatollahs deserve no moral equivalence in attacking civilian shipping because Israel is trying to eviscerate Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme, one of whose objectives is a nuclear holocaust for “the Little Satan”. If Israel’s critics have trouble getting this point, they should note that Gulf Arab states are granting Israel full diplomatic recognition while Jerusalem shreds Tehran’s nuclear establishment.

Iran’s real threat is not just its parade of malign activities, but the regime itself. Waiting for the Islamic Revolution to cool has proven a fool’s errand. Moreover, no Western state can afford to pretend that the Middle East must take a back seat because we need to deal more extensively with the 21st century’s existential threat, China. In fact, Beijing’s menace is now palpably interwoven with the Iran threat, given China’s enormous energy needs and its willingness to satisfy them from Iran.

The answer is for the anti-Iran coalition to agree that US and Israeli economic sanctions must remain in place, and be enlarged to, and be more strictly enforced by, European and Arab states. Acting unilaterally, Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign for three-plus years has had huge economic and political impacts. Anti-regime forces inside Iran are increasingly active and effective, despite brutal repression. Discreetly assisting the opposition and exploiting the fissures among the ayatollahs, who have not been so vulnerable since 1979, could precipitate their fall.

The alternatives have failed. Ready for something new, Boris?

Defense Threats in Cyberspace

July 29, 2021

This article appeared in The National Review on July 29, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
July 29, 2021

Cybersecurity is now a commonplace, much discussed topic. Strategic adversaries (China and Russia), proliferators and state sponsors of terrorism (Iran and North Korea), terrorist networks, and criminal enterprises all threaten us. Pundits importune us incessantly to safeguard our information technology, communications networks, power grids, financial and personal data, and, last but certainly not least, national-security information.

While we are making progress, especially in raising national awareness, Americans nonetheless remain uneasy about our overall cybersecurity.

With good reason. We face not an easily discernible, relatively quantifiable threat but a multiplicity of hidden, ever-changing threats. We are deep into what Donald Rumsfeld called “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” And, although working furiously, we remain at risk by not fully thinking through the cybersecurity issue, both conceptually and operationally. Several steps are necessary to begin remedying these deficiencies.

First, we must jettison the idea that cyberspace is somehow different from other domains of human activity. It is not. Where mankind goes, war, treachery, theft, fraud, and all our other defects follow, along with, we pray, our virtues. For decades, however, we have treated the navigation of cyberspace as essentially cost- and even risk-free. It was all upside, no downside, the Garden of Eden rediscovered. While few today are as unaware or naïve as we were initially, traces of the Garden of Eden myth still infect our analysis and decision-making.

Indeed, it was the prevailing attitude under Barack Obama. His advisers feared that establishing deterrence in cyberspace through American offensive cyber operations was too dangerous. Rather than risk bringing “Death into the [cyber] World, and all our woe,” they worked almost solely on enhancing defenses, hoping for the best. To effect this approach, the National Security Council wrote decision-making rules for offensive cyber activities that induced government-wide paralysis. There was in Obama’s cyber policy little trace of what Alexander Hamilton called, in Federalist No. 70, “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch.”

The Trump administration eased Obama’s restrictions, but only after an enormous bureaucratic struggle. Nonetheless, these process changes allowed for effective measures before 2018’s congressional elections, preventing substantial Russian efforts to interfere, as U.S. officials publicly acknowledged. Even so, those who appreciate the full scope of potential cyberspace operations, and the speed and stealth by which hostile threats manifest themselves, agree that we need much greater capacity and flexibility.

Imposing cyber costs on our adversaries is useful not because we wish to increase the level of hostilities in cyberspace but for precisely the opposite reason. If we do not establish deterrence, as elsewhere in the human experience, attacks on America and its allies will increase, not decrease. By imposing substantially higher (i.e., greater than proportional) costs on potential adversaries than they inflict on us, we prove that they will ultimately suffer far more harm than they can levy. Deterrence works fully when their attacks never take place.

It is unclear whether Biden is following the Trump- or the Obama-administration approach. After the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, for example, Biden told Putin at their Geneva summit that he would hold Russia accountable for such attacks (for which Putin denied responsibility). Nonetheless, within weeks, REvil, another Kremlin cyber surrogate, struck again. Biden telephoned Putin, who once more demurred, although REvil then went dark. Was U.S. offensive cyber activity responsible? Or did Putin scrap the site to avoid an assertive response (thereby tacitly conceding that REvil was a Kremlin tool)? Did REvil simply fold its tent, to reopen somewhere else on the Web (perhaps even from within the U.S.)? The Republican National Committee was also attacked post-summit, likely by Russia’s hacking group “Cozy Bear,” which still seems to be prowling around.

Obviously, not all U.S. offensive cyber activity can or should be made public, to avoid revealing our capabilities to the very adversaries we are trying to deter. Some public disclosure, however, is critical to reassure the U.S. public and our allies that our cyber saber is working. A few cyber heads on pikes outside the Pentagon’s River Terrace entrance would be a public service.
America’s second major cyberspace problem is more profound. Partly because of the Garden of Eden myth and partly from laziness and lack of practice, we have done precious little original conceptual thinking about cyberspace hostilities. We urgently need the kind of rigorous analysis that took place during the Cold War on nuclear strategy.

Although deterrence is an ancient concept, Cold War theorizing on the potential of nuclear conflict gave rise to history’s most comprehensive deterrence strategies. In cyberspace, therefore, we are not starting entirely from scratch. But where are cyberspace’s Thomas Schellings and Albert Wohlstetters? Where is today’s Herman Kahn, “thinking about the unthinkable”? Where are the contemporary counterparts of Charles Hitch and Roland McKean and their iconic work, The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age? We can hope they are beavering away somewhere on classified projects, but we also need public-level conceptual debate, and we need it now. “Debate” is key; legendary nuclear-era whiz kids, after all, brought us “mutual assured destruction,” which was indeed both “MAD” and dangerous. Nonetheless, the conceptual basics were critical to our surviving and indeed prevailing (so far) in nuclear matters. We need the cyber equivalent soonest.

Not all cyberattacks are equal. We can distinguish, for starters, four broad threat levels: vandalism (throwing rocks through cyber windows); criminal behavior (everything from stealing intellectual property or classified information to destroying it or replacing it with incorrect information, as well as our contemporary plague of ransomware attacks); espionage (including both the clandestine gathering of information and covert paramilitary activities and influence operations, which, like propaganda or other efforts intended to wreak political havoc, can occur in full public view, especially through social media); and, ultimately, war, in many varieties.

This is a starting point for devising countermeasures to help establish deterrence. Such retaliatory and other steps, of course, need not be confined to cyberspace merely because the offensive measures against us were cyberattacks. Cyber-strategizing must be integrated with other military and intelligence planning to maximize our options and effectively allocate limited resources. The key point is that we are still woefully unprepared conceptually for a cyber world that changes on a rapid, continuous basis. Remember, Kahn’s On Escalation had an escalation ladder for a generalized nuclear scenario with 44 steps. We have a long way to go.

While cyberspace is not unique among zones of human activity, and therefore not immune from inevitable conflict, cyber hostilities will have their own peculiarities. One of the most important may be the duration of cyberwar: perpetual and potentially ever-expanding even in times of “peace.” This paradigm would be more like contemporary terrorist threats, which, distressingly, Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan proves he does not understand. Espionage is similarly continuous and indefinite, although cyber conflict seems likely to be more lethal and destructive than clandestine intelligence activities have typically been. Thus, even though Fred Iklé’s classic work Every War Must End has an appealing title, cyberspace threats, like terrorists, may not be so agreeable.

From the perspectives of Moscow and Beijing, this is precisely the kind of reality that plays to their strengths and against ours. They are patient, we are not. They do not have (yet) the capability to match us in conventional warfare, but cyberspace can be a great leveler without having to risk unleashing the vast destructiveness of nuclear weapons. This is exactly what less powerful states seek to do broadly through “asymmetric warfare.” Obviously, the United States can handle these threats, but far more than other forms of asymmetric warfare, cybersecurity requires new thinking from our strategists and planners.

Cyberspace is also ideally suited to “hybrid warfare,” the marriage of direct political action with more-traditional military force, in a perpetual contest for influence. We have seen versions of hybrid warfare before, in the ideological, guerrilla-war struggles of the 20th century, for example, or in Ukraine today. Cyberspace, however, adds a vast new dimension, almost uniformly advantageous, at least initially, to the seemingly less powerful aggressor. Russian efforts to destabilize America’s political system are uniquely suited to cyber operations.

These and other cyberwarfare characteristics also demonstrate why calls for cyber “arms control” measures are even more futile and more dangerous than in other fields of weaponry. Our existing adversaries are just as likely to breach cyber commitments as they have been in previous arms-control agreements. Provisions for discovering or penalizing cyber breaches would alone require impossibly complex multilateral diplomacy. Even worse, the most dangerous cyber actors may not even exist yet. Tough to negotiate if you don’t know who your adversaries are.

After the chaos of Donald Trump, the Biden administration’s quietude has its refreshing aspects. But in cyberspace, intellectually and operationally, this is no time for overconfidence. In coming decades, America’s most important defense intellectuals will be those who penetrate the strategic realities of cyberspace and their interrelationships with the existing military and intelligence world. If Biden falters, this should be a prime political issue in 2022 and 2024.

Foreign Policy Returns to Normal, for Both Better and Worse

July 27, 2021

Republicans are suddenly tougher than Democrats on Russia and China. The Trump era is truly over.

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on July 27, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
July 27, 2021

The politics of American foreign policy are reverting to their modern norms, illustrated by two recent Biden administration decisions and the attendant reactions. Donald Trump’s idiosyncrasies and the Democratic opposition produced some aberrations in the traditional positions of the two major parties, confounding allies and adversaries alike. Now, Republicans and Democrats are essentially reverting to the status quo ante.

Last week, responding to Chinese hacking of Microsoft’s email systems, Washington orchestrated pronouncements by European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization members condemning the attacks. The statements, however, were not uniformly critical of Beijing’s actions.

These statements amounted to little more than what diplomats call “a stiff note.” More significantly, at least publicly and to date, there have been no retaliatory measures: no sanctions (unlike after recent cyberattacks by Russian entities) and no cyber response. The White House press briefer uttered the palpably false words “We are not holding back.” Of course they were, and Beijing understood it.

Mr. Biden also acquiesced to the completion of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The administration had previously said it opposed the project, even while waiving sanctions that could have crippled it. (Mr. Trump also had opportunities to stop the pipeline, but didn’t.) Mr. Biden’s final surrender means the U.S. is done trying to stop Nord Stream 2.

In both cases, there was immediate criticism. Republicans were dismayed by Mr. Biden’s flaccid answer to China’s cyberattacks and incandescent about Nord Stream 2. Had these same decisions been made by Mr. Trump, Democrats would have taken the offensive, accusing Mr. Trump of coddling Xi Jinping and reprising the clamor about “Russian collusion.”

In reality, the two political parties are simply returning to their traditional stances. Mr. Trump’s posture on Beijing was confused and inconsistent, from yearning for “the biggest trade deal in history” to imposing tariffs when the chimerical deal disappeared. He criticized the Wuhan origin of the coronavirus when politically advantageous but never censured China on North Korea, Hong Kong, human rights or much else.

Mr. Trump didn’t take a “hard line” on China; he was as opportunistic there as on everything else. No one can say with confidence what a second Trump term would have brought. Nonetheless, seeing Mr. Biden’s weakness, Republicans re-emphasized their opposition to China’s growing economic, political and military threat.

Even under Mr. Trump’s helter-skelter decision making, his Republican advisers repeatedly recommended strict sanctions against Russia, which he often approved, albeit unhappily. Republican officials also recommended and obtained U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies treaties, and a tough negotiation approach to any renewal of the New Start Treaty. Mr. Trump’s absence empowers congressional Republicans to express themselves with full force against Mr. Biden’s supine position on the pipeline.

One might say these aren’t real policy realignments, only evidence of the opposition doing what comes naturally: opposing. Internal divisions also remain, primarily among Democrats, facing their left wing’s foreign-policy onslaught, especially regarding Israel. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump’s influence is receding in Republican national-security circles, and it won’t be back, as further demonstrated by issues beyond China and Russia.

Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, thereby effectively implementing what Mr. Trump wanted and would certainly have done in a second term, has met with near-total Republican rejection in Congress. This is a reversion to the norm.

On North Korea, no clear Biden policy has yet emerged. In public, his approach so far looks much like President Obama’s “strategic patience,” which led to eight years of Pyongyang’s progress toward deliverable nuclear weapons. At least it comes without Mr. Trump’s showboating summit diplomacy, which did little but provide photo-ops to one of the world’s worst dictatorships.

Ironically, on issues where Mr. Trump closely followed traditional Republican lines—Iran, Venezuela and Cuba—Mr. Biden is having trouble reverting to the Democratic norm. Despite frantic efforts to rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the president may be realizing how abject his surrender to Tehran would be, and may be backing off. And if he wants a prayer of carrying Florida in 2024, Cuba and Venezuela policies that look like Mr. Obama’s are sure losers.

Only six months into Mr. Biden’s term, politics are reverting to familiar contours. Mr. Trump is increasingly visible only in the rearview mirror.

Of Biden, Trump, and alliances

July 15, 2021

This article appeared in The Washington Examiner on July 15, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
July 15, 2021

Washington’s current conventional wisdom on the utility and viability of America’s alliances is “Trump bad, Biden good.”

The idea being: Former President Donald Trump harmed our partnerships, formal and informal alike; allies doubted our direction and resolve; and, in consequence, our enemies grew stronger. President Joe Biden’s advent, however, means U.S. alliances are flourishing again, their harmony restored, because “America is back.”

Think again. Biden already has a significant record of throwing allies under the bus when it suits him, and the allies aren’t exactly breathlessly acceding to his positions. Beating Trump’s performance as an alliance leader is a low bar, to be sure. And whether Biden becomes an effective global leader is obviously far different from judging his policies on their merits. Objectively, good process is nice but neither necessary nor sufficient to advance U.S. interests. Smiling rather than snarling at your allies, and actually believing in the alliances, does not constitute leadership, just situational awareness. Ultimately, substantively correct policies are the decisive touchstone.

Alliance management should be about policy leadership, not about advanced schmoozing techniques. Such leadership wasn’t on Trump’s list of favorite things; he didn’t really “do” policy, he did Trump. As yet, though, Biden’s performance has been unremarkable, consisting largely of reasserting positions taken while vice president, hardly “glasnost.” In fact, even on alliance management, Biden is significantly underperforming.

Just last week, Biden reasserted his long-held view that American military forces should exit Afghanistan. This retreat’s first major consequence will almost certainly be the collapse of our ally, the current Afghan government, which we enabled and fostered since overthrowing the Taliban in 2001. The withdrawal’s principal beneficiaries will be those same Taliban terrorists Trump was eager to negotiate with in 2020, even hoping to bring to Camp David to announce a final deal. Ironically, Afghanistan is where Trump’s and Biden’s views are essentially congruent: Both wanted withdrawal. With Trump electorally disabled from selling out our Afghan allies, Biden cheerfully stepped forward to do so. Consigning a former partner (which is now what the Afghan government is for all intents and purposes) to being overrun and then governed by medieval religious fanatics is hardly encouraging to other friends facing analogous existential threats.

So this is Biden’s new alliance management? Imagine reactions by the likes of Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, facing China’s proximate threat, as U.S. forces wave goodbye in Kabul. Then, there’s Israel and the oil-producing Sunni Arab monarchies. They thought they were our allies but are now struggling unsuccessfully to explain the mortal risks of empowering Iran, their belligerent, terrorist-sponsoring, soon-to-be-nuclear power neighbor.

In the Obama-Biden-Kerry world, Tehran was predicted to emerge as a normal nation after the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement, thus stabilizing the Middle East. And the dream never dies, if Biden can just figure out how to contort himself back into the deal, without looking too obviously obsequious to the ayatollahs. European allies such as Britain, France, and Germany concur with U.S. re-entry. They win this turn of Biden’s alliance-management roulette wheel, while the second-class Arab and Israeli allies can go pound sand.

Iran, of course, flatters the sophisticated, nuanced Europeans, whose capitals our diplomats prefer to frequent, rather than the Levant’s hot, gritty sandboxes. For good measure, Biden kicked a little of that sand in Israel’s friendly face by resurrecting moral equivalency, treating Hamas terrorism against Israeli civilians comparably to Jerusalem striking back in self-defense.

Nonetheless, Biden has also dealt Europeans their share of his alliance management, blindsiding them by proposing to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines internationally, which the European Union intensely opposed. On balance, however, Biden has given Europe, which grudgingly bided its time with Trump, much of what it wanted. Not only do Biden advisers greet Europeans with “bonjour” or “guten tag,” the EU is again rejecting U.S. policy with indifference and avoiding the consequences of doing so.

Germany, for example, insisted on allowing Russia to complete the Nord Stream II gas pipeline despite Biden’s professed opposition. By contrast, Biden kicked Canada to the curb by canceling the Keystone XL oil pipeline approved by his predecessor. NATO’s European members are showing signs of reverting to their old habits of not spending enough for defense.

Europeans remain broadly in disarray on this century’s greatest issue, the China question. Many still do not recognize, as we do, the threat of ostensibly commercial firms like Huawei being weaponized to dominate 5G telecommunications and surveil all that passes through it. Nor are they prepared to hold Beijing accountable, for example, to WTO trade rules it supposedly accepted two decades ago (joining as a developing country no less, which it remains and likely always will). The conventional wisdom’s mistake is pretending that successful foreign policy rests on correctly answering process questions such as: Do we work through alliances or international organizations (actually, two very different things), or do we proceed unilaterally?

This is like asking if we prefer to eat with a fork or a spoon. Process does not resolve issues of policy objectives, resources, and strategies to achieve them. At times, even our closest allies will be divided from us, or among themselves, or the press of events will demand quicker actions than our friends can take. Alliances don’t accomplish much unless we know our objectives and how allies can help achieve them. What, for example, is Biden’s grand strategy for China? Six months into his administration, we still don’t know. And Russia? After the Biden-Putin summit, cyberattacks on U.S. companies continue. Will Biden respond effectively, as he has threatened, or is he searching for the “red line” Barack Obama drew in Syria?

Alliance management is not for those with short attention spans, or those who prefer to be led, rather than doing the leading themselves. Biden’s diplomacy does not yet warrant any victory laps.

Donald Rumsfeld Freed the World From ‘Mutual Assured Destruction’

July 01, 2021

His thinking on arms control proved prescient—but the howls reverberate to this day.

This article appeared in Foreign Policy on July 1, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
July 1, 2021

Donald Rumsfeld’s remarkable record of public service encompassed critical periods of U.S. history. He began with what was already a successful career in congressional politics and as a domestic policymaker in the Nixon and Ford administrations. But his consuming interest was national security, which he got a taste of as U.S. ambassador to NATO in 1973. His stint there was ever so brief: After Watergate crushed the Nixon administration, newly installed President Gerald Ford, remembering their days together in the House of Representatives, brought Rumsfeld back to Washington as the White House chief of staff.

Ford’s presidency, the only one brought about by invoking the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, was anything but normal, including the complexities of dealing with Nixon’s remaining staff while trying to get Ford’s own team in place. Following the 1975 “Halloween massacre”—a major reshuffling of Ford’s cabinet—Rumsfeld became the nation’s youngest-ever secretary of defense.

Managing the end of the Vietnam War, a tragic defeat for the United States that was largely inflicted by the war’s domestic opponents, while simultaneously coping with the rising threat of Soviet nuclear capabilities, would have severely taxed a lesser figure. Rumsfeld, however, showed his resolve on the full range of issues. He pressed particularly on strategic weapons issues, eviscerating the debilitating arms-control ideology inherited from prior administrations.

Rumsfeld rejected the conventional wisdom on what constituted “strategic stability,” a phrase much beloved by the Soviet Union because it embodied Moscow’s view of the appropriate balance of power with the United States and the West. In contrast, Rumsfeld believed—correctly, as it turned out—that Moscow was cheating on existing nuclear-weapons agreements, and that Washington needed to create far greater and more sophisticated strategic capabilities to reestablish credible nuclear deterrence.

The U.S. government has had few bureaucratic streetfighters tougher than Rumsfeld—and even fewer who could think creatively at the 30,000-foot level.

Leaving the Pentagon following Ford’s 1976 loss to President Jimmy Carter, Rumsfeld moved into private business and made yet another successful career. During this period, he refined and elaborated his thinking on strategic issues, working in particular on national missile defense, which would allow the United States to escape the logic of mutual assured destruction. Missile defense would ultimately prove fatal to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which epitomized the very arms-control ideology Rumsfeld rejected. The outraged howls of the liberal establishment against such thinking reverberate to this very day.

In a phrase that seemed deeply embedded in the brains of both the U.S. foreign-policy elite and that of the Kremlin, the ABM Treaty was the “cornerstone of international strategic stability.” It was simply unthinkable that Washington would abandon a central pillar of the mutual assured destruction theory, namely that defense against a nuclear attack was a bad thing. Rumsfeld’s various efforts on this issue included, most notably, chairing the congressionally created Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States (now known as the “Rumsfeld Commission”) in the late 1990s. It was largely due to Rumsfeld’s work that presidential candidate George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 on the pledge that the United States should withdraw from the ABM Treaty.

In 2001, I was the U.S. State Department’s negotiator, charged (along with an inter-agency team) with extricating the United States from the treaty so we could defend ourselves against the real and growing threat of rogue states seeking deliverable nuclear weapons. Rumsfeld was doing his second stint as secretary of defense. After one National Security Council meeting, during which Bush reviewed our strategy, Rumsfeld pulled me aside with a cheerful warning: “Don’t screw up,” or something close to that. I kept it in mind. Dick Cheney, who had been Rumsfeld’s aide during the early Nixon administration and was by then vice president, made sure I heeded Rumsfeld’s warning. Fulfilling his campaign promise, Bush accomplished what some considered impossible and announced in late 2001 that the United States would withdraw from the ABM Treaty, against the vehement opposition of then-Sens. Joe Biden and John Kerry—and all the other usual suspects. It took raw will power for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to lead the charge against the doctrine of mutual assured destruction and its embodiment in the ABM Treaty. Successfully burying that misguided, dangerous document and its underlying theory will amaze conventional minds for years to come.

The September 11 attacks obviously dominated everything else in 2001, showing how woefully unprepared the United States had been for such terrorist atrocities. That morning, I could see the fire and smoke from the Pentagon, which lay across the Potomac from my State Department office. I will never forget Rumsfeld and his top aides, during a secure video conference less than an hour later, explaining that they were leaving their conference room because the burning building required moving somewhere with better ventilation.

The next years brought key historical events, including the successful invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. You read right: successful invasions that overthrew the Taliban in the former and Saddam Hussein in the latter. That’s what Bush ordered and Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense delivered. Years of travail and controversy followed, all too well understood by Rumsfeld. But he never strayed from his conviction that the United States’ purposes were right, its missions necessary, and the risks manageable.

The U.S. government has had precious few bureaucratic streetfighters tougher than Rumsfeld—and even fewer who could think creatively at the proverbial 30,000-foot level. He had few, if any, easy days during his senior national security service. Fortunately for the United States, he was more than up to the job.

Pump the brakes on Iran, Joe: Biden must slow his rush to reenter the nuclear deal

June 29, 2021

This article appeared in The Daily News on June 29, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 29, 2021

Since taking office, President Biden has unswervingly sought to have the United States rejoin, as rapidly as possible, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA). Through indirect negotiations conducted by other JCPOA parties, Biden has offered Iran concessions and adjustments that make an already dangerous agreement even riskier. He has been deterred only by the negative domestic political blowback he will justifiably encounter if and when America re-ups.

Now, however, significant new developments give Biden the opportunity to reverse the Gadarene haste with which he has pursued re-entering the JCPOA. He should seize the chance to pause his efforts, if not reverse them entirely.

Most importantly, Israel’s new government, led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, has expressed the urgent need to consult with Biden and his senior advisers. Bennett’s governing coalition is held together by little more than antipathy to former Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. If the parties break apart, it could well precipitate new elections, resulting in significant losses of Knesset seats for many of them, and even bring Netanyahu back to power. Biden, like Presidents Obama and Clinton before him, is no friend of Bibi’s.

President Joe Biden speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Friday, June 25. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Bennett is at risk here. Formerly a senior Netanyahu adviser, he aligns closely with his predecessor’s Iran policy. Moreover, Israel generally is far readier to continue using force against Tehran’s nuclear program than Biden’s team may appreciate. If Bennett deviated from Netanyahu’s approach, it would be a mortal political mistake, perhaps fracturing his party and his coalition. Biden needs to tread cautiously, or he places Bennett in an untenable position.

For America, rejoining the JCPOA (which Donald Trump exited in May 2018) would be a massive mistake. Obviously, Iran wants Biden back in the deal to obtain relief from our devastating unilateral economic sanctions. Tellingly, however, there has never been a shred of evidence Iran has made a strategic decision to renounce its nuclear ambitions.

Instead, the basic playbook for rogue regimes seeking deliverable nuclear weapons calls for them to make extravagant, highly- publicized promises forswearing nuclear weapons, while never following through with actual performance. Like all prior iterations of this diplomatic performance art, the mutual pledges of “action for action” benefit the proliferator. North Korea and Iran have successfully followed this playbook for decades.

The economic steps directly benefitting the proliferator come first (ending sanctions and releasing frozen assets, as in the JCPOA, or providing economic assistance, as in the 1994 North Korea Agreed Framework). Coming only afterward is what Washington should seek, and what never seems to happen: the complete, verifiable, and irreversible destruction of the nuclear-weapons program, as prior presidents have described their North Korea goals.

“Reaching agreement” with Iran, especially the way Biden has pursued it, thus means giving the ayatollahs much of what they want. The result will endanger America and close allies and friends globally, not just in the Middle East.

Here is where Biden’s face-saving opportunity to cut his losses arises: Jerusalem has sought urgent, critically important, consultations with Washington on the implications of America rejoining the JCPOA. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid (also deputy prime minister and co-leader of the new government) met Sunday in Rome with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Biden’s subsequent invitation for Bennett to visit the White House provides exactly the right moment to talk about Iran.

Moreover, Iran has a new president-elect, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner’s hardliner, and likely successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. JCPOA supporters believe U.S. reentry can be agreed upon before Raisi’s Aug. 3 inauguration, arguing he would benefit from the economic good times expected to roll if U.S. sanctions are lifted. By contrast, blame for failing to resurrect the JCPOA, if that transpires, can be laid on Hassan Rouhani’s outgoing regime.

This approach is a trap for the United States, but one Biden can readily avoid. He can capitalize on the opportune coincidence of new governments in both Israel and Iran to implement a pause in the re-entry negotiations for extended consultations with Israel and Arab allies. He could use, say, six months to gauge whether there is any change for the better — or the worse — in Iran’s international performance, not just in nuclear matters, but in its support for terrorism and conventional military belligerence across the Middle East.

Washington need not be in a hurry to grace Tehran by jettisoning sanctions, which are its principal leverage. Even if Biden remains obsessed with returning to the JCPOA, he loses little by waiting until the end of this year, while appreciably aiding Bennett’s new government.

‘Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons’ Review: In Tehran’s Nuclear Archive

June 24, 2021

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on June 21, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 21, 2021

The Biden administration is working hard to re-enter the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Readers of David Albright’s “Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons,” however, will realize that it is Washington, not Tehran, that is pursuing a truly perilous course.

Mr. Albright, since 1993 the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, neither advocates nor opposes re-entering the deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That is precisely why his careful, meticulous recitation of the full reality of Iran’s efforts, its “incessant dissembling and falsehoods” and its careful camouflage and concealment is so compelling.

Mr. Albright concedes that many years ago he was “skeptical of the seemingly exaggerated claims by Western governments” about Iran’s program. He now says that “the Iranian revolutionary regime is fundamentally a criminal operation.” For decades, “Iran has systematically violated its commitments under the [1970] Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.” Even nominal concessions from Tehran, including the JCPOA itself, occurred “under great pressure, with an underlying, unrelenting intention of preserving and advancing its nuclear weapons capabilities.”

“Perilous Pursuit” is the most comprehensive unclassified recounting of Iran’s nuclear aspirations ever written. Mr. Albright had generous access to the “nuclear archive” collected by Israel’s Mossad in an almost unimaginably daring 2018 raid on Tehran. This extraordinary archive embodies in detail the so-called Amad Plan, Iran’s late-1990s crash nuclear-weapons program. Mr. Albright and his team at I.S.I.S., aided by Israeli and U.S. intelligence analysts, found that the nuclear archive fills many gaps in the West’s knowledge.

As Mr. Albright shows, key Amad Plan activities continue today, both clandestinely and disguised as part of Iran’s “civil” nuclear efforts. Take the Natanz enrichment facility, discovered in 2002: “In a pattern that would repeat itself many times . . . Iran simply called it a civil site and allowed the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] to inspect it.” This may seem like retreating, but Mr. Albright exposes the nuclear jujitsu: “While withdrawing from safeguards or cheating on them would incur a cost,” calling Natanz a “civil” facility and allowing inspections or monitoring “was a price [Iran] found worth paying to keep them.”

Until revealed in the nuclear archive, Iran successfully lied about, or concealed from the IAEA, its uranium conversion and enrichment facilities, nuclear-core development plants, exploding-bridgewire testing units, and more. It asserted that the Gachin uranium mine and milling facility was for domestic rather than military purposes, and concealed both the location and the military purposes of the Fordow underground uranium-enrichment facility.

“Perilous Pursuit” eviscerates the idea, central both to negotiating the JCPOA and rejoining it, that the IAEA, an independent agency part of the United Nations system, can adequately pierce the falsehoods and cover-stories Iran has woven for decades. Time after time in Mr. Albright’s account, Tehran stonewalls the IAEA, underlining the point that it is not an intelligence agency. IAEA depends vitally on its members to supply sensitive information, yet as a U.N. body, its membership includes the very countries, like Iran, suspected of violating the non-proliferation treaty. (Imagine a police department with a mafia office at its headquarters.) Enumerating all that the IAEA has repeatedly missed indicts not the agency, but those seeking to endow it with capabilities it has never had and never will. Relying on it for verification and compliance reveals naiveté about the ayatollahs and unfamiliarity with the IAEA. Serious verification must rest with U.S. intelligence, not U.N. agencies.

Unfortunately, our intelligence community’s credibility also gets its share of shredding here, having missed much of what Mossad purloined. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of Iran, for instance, was perhaps the most intellectually dishonest, politically distorted U.S. intelligence “analysis” ever. It was not really an NIE but propaganda, intended to forestall harsh measures George W. Bush was thought to be considering. We need a forensic review of the NIE’s perverse tradecraft, especially examining whether the drafters were politically motivated, an anathema to intelligence professionals.

The NIE promulgated the dangerously mistaken notion that, in Mr. Albright’s words, “Iran’s nuclear weapons program ended in 2003, with no work taking place after that date.” At that time, Tehran faced U.S. troops to the east and west, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and growing international criticism. Hassan Rouhani, then secretary-general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, now in his final days as president, promised full disclosure and suspension of key nuclear operations, all the while denying any were weapons-related. But, as Mr. Albright stresses, this “merely served as a tactical retreat, not an abandonment of [Iran’s] nuclear weapons ambitions.” Indeed, “Iran kept the international spotlight” on its civilian cover-story, “successfully using it as a distraction from [its] better hidden, unambiguous nuclear weaponization work,” as nuclear-archive documents clearly demonstrate.

Mossad’s haul deals a mortal blow to any fancy that Tehran ever came clean on nuclear issues. The archive, let alone what remains classified or still in Iran, also destroys the “What about Iraq?” riposte when discussing Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. As Mr. Albright says, the archive proves the program “can no longer be viewed as existing only in the past.” Obama’s JCPOA negotiators were profoundly wrong not to resolve the many unanswered questions about the euphemistically termed “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear work. We are still paying for that mistake.

Joe Biden is proceeding quickly and blindly to rejoin the nuclear deal. “Perilous Pursuit” should make him pause. U.S. sanctions and Israel’s kinetic activity against Iran’s program have done more to degrade and deter Iran than any diplomacy. That is the path to pursue, not more credulous deal-making.

Biden should use Raisi election for Iran course change

June 24, 2021

This article appeared in The Washington Examiner on June 19, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 19, 2021

Iran’s hard-line mullahs left nothing to chance in Friday’s presidential election.

The man they wanted to win, Ebrahim Raisi, did so handily against a carefully limited field of rivals. In 2017, Raisi lost to outgoing President Hassan Rouhani, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was obviously determined to correct that mistake. Western media call Raisi a “hard-liner,” as if conveying important information.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, however, the spectrum of Tehran’s leadership has ranged broadly all the way from “hard-liner” to “extreme hard-liner.” Raisi falls in the latter category. Rouhani fell in the former, but it pleased many Westerners to consider him a “moderate,” essential to enacting the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal.

Yet, in 2005, as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Rouhani mocked those very admirers. The New York Times, no less, reported that “in a remarkable admission, Mr. Rouhani suggested … that Iran had used negotiations with the Europeans to dupe them. … ‘While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment … in Isfahan. … By creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work on Isfahan.'”

Some things never change. Those who portrayed the “moderate” Rouhani as Iran’s real boss should contemplate whether the term “supreme leader” means what it says. It does have a certain ring to it.

Khamenei is only the second to hold the title, succeeding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. Raisi is widely believed to become the third supreme leader; he is unlikely to forget the power of those two mellifluous words. Now facing a weekslong presidential transition period in Tehran, the Biden administration will undoubtedly worry most about whether it can beg its way back into the JCPOA, from which Washington withdrew in May 2018.

Resurrecting this deal is a near-religious priority for the Biden team, many of whose key figures were intimately involved (or at least entirely supportive) of President Barack Obama’s efforts to negotiate it. Although few specifics are publicly known, there is little doubt that the only limiting constraints on what Biden is prepared to give away to the mullahs are the negative domestic political consequences for surrendering. And make no mistake, those domestic U.S. political consequences could be enormous. Whatever minor modifications may occur to the deal, Iran will insist that key provisions and understandings remain unchanged. For example, there will be no renewed efforts to get the facts on the benignly termed “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program. In 2015, Iran made this concession a precondition to any deal. And don’t expect international inspectors to get any more access than the inadequate levels they now enjoy. Most importantly of all, Biden isn’t even contemplating clawing back Obama’s critical concession that Iran be allowed to enrich uranium to reactor-grade levels, a giveaway without which Iran would have rejected any deal.

President Lyndon Johnson once termed an analogous provision “more loophole than law.” Once a country can enrich to reactor-grade levels of U-235, it is nearly 70% of the way to weapons-grade enriched uranium. Going from 3-to-5% to 20%, or even 60%, enrichment levels merely marginally worsen the original, fundamental mistake of allowing enrichment at all. The pattern is clear: Obama accepted Iran’s insistence on even debilitating concessions because he was so determined to “succeed” and achieve a deal, any deal.

During Biden’s first five months, no one in the White House has pretended that Iran has made a fundamental strategic decision to abandon pursuing nuclear weapons. With good reason. All the available evidence shows that Iran continues to do whatever it takes to possess deliverable nuclear weapons as soon as feasible.

Of course, Iran wants the United States back in the deal. Without that, Tehran will not get relief from America’s devastating sanctions, far more effective than any of the 2015 negotiators ever envisaged. The sanctions have created enormous public dissatisfaction inside Iran, but Biden seems blind to the leverage thereby provided, so zealous is he to rejoin. Nor is there any visible effort by Biden’s advisers to design or justify a “larger” deal to replace the failed JCPOA. If sanctions are lifted, and substantial economic benefits flow again, Iran will even more actively pursue nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs; support for terrorism in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria; and increased conventional military activity across the Middle East.

Whether U.S. reentry happens before or after Raisi is inaugurated is immaterial. If there is any chance whatever Biden might be dissuaded from his crusade, Raisi’s election provides him a face-saving excuse to back away. Don’t hold your breath over he will avail himself of the opportunity.