Naive Biden is taking a huge risk going face to face with Putin

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The US President’s incoherent strategy makes the forthcoming summit a worrying one for the West

This article appeared in The Telegraph on June 13, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 13, 2021

Joe Biden’s first summit with Vladimir Putin this week comes relatively early in his new administration, so early it is fair to ask whether Biden is ready for it. If he does not yet know his goals regarding Russia and how to achieve them, far better to wait than to risk making pronouncements untethered to reality.

Biden, though, doesn’t have forever, although since his inauguration, he has engaged in a random walk. He has, variously, called Putin “a killer”; gratuitously extended the deeply flawed New START arms-control agreement; imposed sanctions for Russia’s chemical-weapons attack against opposition leader Alexei Navalny; waived economic sanctions that would have stopped Nord Stream II, Russia’s undersea gas pipeline to Germany; responded inadequately to Russia’s egregious “Solar Winds” computer hack, and others; and sanctioned Russia for interfering in Ukraine, while stressing how restrained these measures were.

Biden says he wants “a stable, predictable relationship” between Moscow and Washington, but his actions and statements to date reveal no gyroscope. Accordingly, while the Geneva summit may produce new American initiatives, don’t count on it. Putin is no novice, and the odds favour him springing new Russian gambits, for example articulating his framework to negotiate New START’s successor. There is no indication that Biden is prepared to respond on this critical strategic issue between the two countries, one enormously important to the UK and other nuclear-weapons states.

In domestic political terms, Biden wants to be seen as tougher on Russia than his predecessor, which is not hard to do rhetorically. Donald Trump was unwilling to criticise Russia for fear of giving credence to the narrative that he colluded with Moscow in the 2016 election. Trump was wrong politically: legitimate criticism of Russia would have enhanced his credibility, not diminished it. And Trump did little or nothing operationally to stop Nord Steam II, where even his rhetoric was anti-Moscow.

Considering the recent deluge of cyber attacks in America we are entitled to wonder if, without publicity, Biden has reverted to Barack Obama’s dangerously naïve approach to cyberspace. The Obama Administration hog-tied potential offensive US cyber operations in a web of decision-making rules that, as a practical matter, essentially precluded significant offensive activity. Those rules were changed substantially in 2018. American officials publicly welcomed being unleashed to take steps that protected the 2018 mid-term Congressional elections from Russian cyber interference, and hopefully later ones as well.

Has Biden disarmed the US in cyberspace, and have the Russians taken advantage? If so, Washington is making a potentially fatal strategic mistake. No one is looking for more hostilities in the cyber world, but the way to prevent conflict is to discourage adversaries from taking belligerent action for fear of the costs Washington will impose upon them. If the costs are seen to be high enough, they will back off. This is deterrence, which works in cyberspace as in all other human domains. Putin understands this point, but Biden has yet to prove he does.

After the G7 summit, Biden will be attending a Nato heads-of-state meeting in Brussels before his meeting with Putin. This choreography is correct: confer first with friends and allies, and then meet with Putin. The G7 meeting has focused heavily on finally exiting the coronavirus pandemic and economic recovery, and also planning against the danger of future biological-weapons and epidemiological threats.

This is entirely appropriate, but it is hardly a platform for serious consideration of wider geostrategic issues, let alone for coherent consideration of facing Vladimir Putin across the table. At Nato, Biden will be a comfort compared to the aberrational Trump, but no alliance strategy on Russia is likely to emerge.

Other than returning to normalcy, albeit merely on process, what does Biden have to say at such meetings on, for instance, Belarus, a new focus of the bipolar Nato-Russia struggle for advantage in Europe? What is his view on the increasing Russian (and Chinese) military attention to the Arctic? Biden’s Russia policy simply has not come into focus, which is troubling, even if not-quite-yet debilitating.

In short, Biden is taking a substantial risk in meeting Putin if he is only following a process of choreography, while seeking diaphanous goals like “stability” in the Washington-Moscow relationship. The wily and well-prepared Putin will have a very clear agenda, specific objectives, and the focused attention and energy to pursue them. Biden should hope the luck of the Irish is with him in Geneva.

Criticizing and sanctioning Lukashenko is no substitute for an actual strategy on Belarus

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This article appeared in The Washington Post on May 30, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 30, 2021

The United States and the European Union made a strategic mistake last summer by mishandling the unprecedented protests against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s autocratic regime. Now, after Lukashenko’s commission of air piracy on May 23 to kidnap an opposition critic, the West appears set on compounding its error by driving Belarus further into the welcoming arms of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Western capitals reacted with essentially unanimous condemnation when the Lukashenko government forced a Ryanair flight transiting Belarusian airspace to land and arrested passenger Roman Protasevich, an opposition journalist, and his girlfriend, Russian activist Sofia Sapega. Both kidnap victims were soon displayed in “confession” videos possibly obtained by threats or torture.

Rhetorical condemnation of the seizures came quickly, and E.U. and U.S. sanctions on the Lukashenko regime were announced. Lukashenko responded by accusing the West of launching “hybrid warfare” against Belarus.

Since Soviet days, Belarus and Russia have had an integrated air-defense system, leading to speculation about Moscow’s possible role or at least acquiescence in the kidnapping. Putin’s spokesman called such suspicions “obsessive Russophobia.” Putin pledged support to Lukashenko when the two met in Sochi, Russia, on Friday.

There is no question the West rightly concluded that Belarus committed air piracy, behavior entirely consistent with the regime’s autocratic methods. And as Alexei Navalny and many others could testify, it has the hallmarks of Putin’s equally authoritarian state next door.

Unfortunately, however, virtue-signaling, even accompanied by economic sanctions, does not constitute a satisfactory Western strategy to resolve a vastly more important issue: What is the future for Belarus as a whole? Will it be encouraged to follow the path of former Warsaw Pact states and at least some former Soviet republics into the West? Or will it be allowed to suffer full annexation into Russia?

President Biden needs to decide the answers to these questions and how to make them happen before his June 16 summit with Putin. There is no sign he knows what his answers are.

Last August, amid huge protests in Belarus prompted by a thoroughly rigged Lukashenko election, demonstrators said they were inclined toward neither Russia nor the West and did not want to be pawns in any international struggle. That view was supported by the lead E.U. foreign-affairs official. The Trump administration, consumed by the 2020 election campaign, said and did little. The protests failed. Lukashenko remained in power, and quiet returned. Until now. Will we repeat this strategic mistake?

It may be true that Belarus’s dissidents simply want to end Lukashenko’s oppression, without regard for the geopolitical environment in which Belarus exists. If so, it is touchingly — and dangerously — naive. No one in Moscow, certainly not Putin, sees Belarus’s fate as anything but closely tied to Russia.

Caught between NATO’s easternmost reach and Russia’s border, Belarus and other former Soviet republics are in a gray space that invites insecurity and Russian interventionism. Simply looking at the borders Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine share with Belarus, Western Europeans would see that Minsk’s future is intimately tied to their own.

Supporting Belarus’s political opposition is thus not simply about deploring the thwarting of human rights through corrupted elections or the kidnapping of dissidents, unpalatable as those transgressions are. The potential freedom of all 9.5 million Belarusian citizens is at stake, since integrating Belarus into Russia would all but extinguish the chance for real liberty.

The fact that the West’s attention turned away from Belarus after the unsuccessful anti-Lukashenko demonstrations last summer, and refocused only following the Protasevich air-napping, shows that ad hoc, piecemeal approaches to a strategic problem are unsustainable and unlikely to succeed. Nor does it advance the Belarusian opposition’s cause to ignore the larger strategic context.

One approach, undoubtedly distasteful to the high-minded, would be to develop a way out for Lukashenko. Secure exile for himself and a select few followers in some well-appointed venue might be attractive to him at the right moment.

But such an extrication doesn’t happen overnight. It requires complex planning, specifically in this case to deter any possible Russian military moves into Belarus, as in Moscow’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine or its creation of other “frozen conflicts” on Russia’s periphery. One potential bargaining chip: Putin’s prized Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany still isn’t complete, and it can be stopped at will, assuming the West and Germany in particular still have one.

Some may sniff at the idea of “impunity” for Lukashenko, but other former communist countries have decided that looking to the future outweighs a backward-facing, prosecution-at-all-costs strategy. Nelson Mandela’s South Africa did something similar, employing a post-apartheid “truth and reconciliation” policy.

We cannot underestimate how difficult are the prospects facing Belarus. It is certain, however, that sanctions and one-off expressions of displeasure with Lukashenko will not change his behavior or regime. Merely driving him deeper into Putin’s embrace risks losing all of Belarus, essentially forever. Time was growing short after last summer’s rigged elections. It is even shorter today.

Until Hamas is confronted as a military force, it will go on stirring up violence in the Middle East

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Israel cannot hope to deter this terrorist organization by negotiation alone

This article appeared in The Telegraph on May 17, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 17, 2021

Middle Eastern armed conflicts involving Israel inevitably produce outpourings of cliches and muddled thinking: “cycle of violence,” “call on both sides to exercise restraint,” “immediate cease fire.” The list is endless, most of it virtue-signaling “moral equivalence.”

Allegedly improper evictions of Arab tenants in East Jerusalem did not cause Hamas’s recent missile and drone attacks against Israel, nor did “longstanding historical grievances,” nor “frustration and alienation,” nor “the Arab street.” All these cliches together cannot justify terrorism against innocent civilian targets, let alone the roughly 1,500 missiles launched into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Hamas, and now perhaps Hezbollah (missiles having been recently fired from Lebanon) are not so irrational to believe that their aggression would produce anything other than the vigorous Israeli retaliation now underway.

More is at stake. For diverse reasons, but emphatically united by Israel as a common enemy, Iran and its terrorist surrogates concluded that this was a propitious moment to go for Israel’s throat. Why, and why now?
Tehran desperately wants relief from the economic sanctions Washington imposed after withdrawing from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Chaos in Israel suits its purposes. Hamas, hoping finally to eclipse the corrupt, dysfunctional Palestinian Authority as the dominant Arab voice in Gaza and the West Bank, had its own reasons to follow Iran’s lead.

Israel is currently seized by unprecedented political gridlock. Even if Bibi Netanyahu were rejected as Prime Minister, no potential successor could afford to be less hard-line on Iran than he. Accordingly, while Israeli parties centered upon Arab voters might have benefitted in the near term by supporting a new Israeli government, the interests of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah are better served by continued turmoil and violence against Israel.

In fact, the hostilities appear to have terminated deal-making on a possible new Israeli coalition. Moreover, significant violence between Arabs and Jews inside Israel itself, massively under-reported by the press, could foreshadow long-term instability for Israel. More such violence only benefits terrorists and radicals across the Middle East. Further breakthroughs like the Emirati and Bahraini diplomatic recognition of Israel are highly unlikely for the foreseeable future, another win for Iran and the radicals. And while Israel is preoccupied, Iran is likely planning additional clandestine shipments of weapons and supplies into Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.

Viewing America’s return to the nuclear deal in near-theological terms, President Biden feels pressured by Iran’s impending June elections. Moreover, Iran correctly sees that he faces major domestic political problems from the vehement opposition of Israel and the Gulf Arabs to any lessening of U.S. pressure on Tehran. Distracting Jerusalem reduces its ability to influence Washington in the nuclear negotiations.
Whether Iran instigated the current conflict, or merely took advantage of these circumstances to accelerate and expand it, we do not presently know, but the consequences are the same regardless. How should Israel and the wider West respond?

Negotiations are not the answer. Israel, fully justified by its right to self-defense, would instead be wiser to eliminate Hamas as a military force now, once and for all. Jerusalem had a similar opportunity to destroy Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon war, which was indeed Israel’s declared objective. Failing to follow through, however, left Hezbollah the dominant force in Lebanon, and allowed Iran to expand its presence in Syria. Hezbollah is a greater terrorist and conventional threat today than fifteen years ago. Israel should not ignore that lesson.

Moreover, what are negotiations and “commitments” from terrorists worth? In his December 29, 1940 fireside chat, best known for calling America “the arsenal of democracy,” President Franklin Roosevelt said, “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.” Some things never change.

The only point where negotiations with overzealous enemies makes sense is when the negotiation is one way. Many Americans and Europeans simply do not understand this approach, which, for Americans, ignores their own history. In the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant’s initials “US” were said to mean “unconditional surrender,” his trademark demand from defeated Confederate forces. And that was against fellow Americans. Israel can negotiate minor details of the Hamas surrender, but not whether there will be one.

Iran and Hamas crossed a real red line this time. Israel knows what it should do.

How Biden Can Turn the Tables on Putin

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He aggresses in a gray zone between NATO and Russia, so let’s remove it

This article appeared in The National Review on May 13, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 13, 2021

The Biden administration billed Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s May 6 visit to Kyiv as showing support for Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression. Instead, Blinken served up only rhetorical pablum, retreating from what senior Trump officials (although not Trump himself) did to back Ukraine and re­turning to Obama-era blandishments. Vladimir Putin must be delighted.

Inexplicably, moreover, Blinken equated Russia’s belligerence with Ukraine’s admittedly substantial corruption problems, stating that there is “aggression from outside . . . and, in effect, aggression from within.” This moral equivalence is nonsensical. For both Washington and Kyiv, corruption is hardly as strategically important as Moscow’s threat. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky won election by campaigning against corruption, and while he is struggling to prevail, lecturing him publicly will not improve his performance.

More fundamentally, President Biden still has no policy to deal with Russia (or China) in Europe. During his April 13 telephone call with Putin, for example, Biden raised a long list of issues and ended by inviting Putin to a bilateral summit. Strategic coherence, however, requires allocating priorities and resources among national-security problems, not just listing them. Absent substantive policy direction, process steps such as summits are theater at best and often counter­productive, highlighting the vacuum that lies beneath public rhetoric.

Biden’s inherited problems, complicated by the passage of time, nonetheless increasingly require urgent solutions. After the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed, NATO’s eastward expansion never reached a decisive conclusion. Six Eastern European and Caucasus countries were left in a gray zone between Russia and NATO’s new borders, thereby remaining vulnerable to Moscow’s desire to reestablish hegemony within the former USSR. (The five Central Asian states, having their own complicated relationships with Russia, deserve separate analysis.)

Following the USSR’s disintegration, Moscow vigorously sought to contest the gray zone: creating “frozen conflicts” in Moldova and Georgia through direct Russian military involvement, and manipulating Azerbaijani–Armenian hostilities over Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia kept Belarus politically and economically close, still its strategy today but an increasingly difficult one after 2020’s popular opposition to the Minsk regime.

The Kremlin tried to mirror its Belarus policy in Ukraine, because both are central to its vision of “Russia.” Moscow initially succeeded in Kyiv, but the 2004 Orange Revolution brought such dramatic changes that, in April 2008, George W. Bush proposed putting Ukraine and Georgia on a sure path to NATO membership. Germany and France rejected Bush’s proposal, and four months later Russia invaded Georgia. Russia subsequently subverted the Orange Revolution through fraud and skullduggery but was in turn reversed by another popular uprising in 2014. In retaliation, Putin seized Crimea outright and created a new frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine.

However messy the history, Russian aggressiveness within the former USSR harms U.S. interests by destabilizing the region and, left unchecked, threatens instability across Europe. Virtually all the states of “new Europe” — the post–Cold War generation of NATO members — believe, with good reason, that blocking Moscow’s interference is critical to their growth and stability. Old Europe, especially Germany and France, is still somewhat tone-deaf here, so the diplomatic heavy lifting ahead for Washington should not be underestimated — par for the course even at the Cold War’s height.

Russia’s belligerence in Europe also shows its increasing, disturbing closeness to China, a relationship reflecting Moscow’s importance to Beijing for supplying hydrocarbons and high-tech weapons and the regimes’ perception of common interests in shielding the likes of Iran and North Korea from U.S. pressure. Breaking this emerging axis should be a high U.S. priority and is entirely consistent with thwarting Russian interference across its European borders.

China’s effort to purchase Ukraine’s major aerospace firm Motor Sich, successfully blocked by Kyiv after considerable American effort, exemplifies this point. Standing up to China’s existential challenge to the West as a whole will also require diplomatic heavy lifting in Europe.

As long as a gray zone remains be­tween NATO and Russia, instability will persist. Shrinking this inherently dangerous geographic space reduces potential Russian mischief, and ultimately confronts Moscow again with the question whether to join the West or oppose it.

Ultimately, inclusion in NATO is the only way for the endangered countries to minimize the inevitable uncertainty and instability between the alliance and Russia. Previously, NATO has rightly shied from adding new members with foreign combatants on their soil, seeing that as inheriting a war and thereby triggering Article Five of the Washington Treaty. Reducing the gray zone does not immediately require any new NATO memberships, but the alliance can surely devise an appropriate status to handle today’s European problem.

To get there, our primary focus should be to substantially augment Zelensky’s diplomatic and military efforts to expel Russia from eastern Ukraine, and then to impose steeply increasing costs on Russia if it fails to respond diplomatically. Succeeding will not solve Crimea, but it will clear the decks to do so. Critically, we must keep Europe focused on rolling back Moscow’s blatant cross-border military action.

Moldova, tucked between Ukraine and Romania, is a frozen conflict ready for melting. Purportedly independent Transnistria, a Russian invention, exists separately from Moldova only through Moscow’s continued military presence. Simply raising international attention to this post–Cold War anomaly would startle the Kremlin, and a determined new government in Chisinau now provides the opportunity for Washington to step up.

Similarly, in Georgia, it is time to push back against Russia’s presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, with the aim of re-creating the April 2008 situation in which NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia was serious and feasible. Ukraine and Georgia remain the two most strategically important gray-zone countries. In turn, taken more seriously after Biden’s acknowledgement of Turkey’s genocidal campaign during World War I, Washington can then address the Azerbaijan–Armenian conflict. Real progress, however, will likely have to abide Turkey’s 2023 elections. If incumbent president Recep Tayyip Erdogan loses, much will be possible. But if he wins, Turkey will be dangerously close to removing itself from NATO by spurning Mustafa Kemal’s post-Ottoman vision, and thereby badly undermining NATO’s position in the Caucasus.

Belarus is the hardest challenge of all, with alliance membership inconceivable for quite some time. Yet however difficult it may be, the U.S. cannot leave Belarus to Moscow uncontested. The map alone shows how geopolitically critical Belarus is for Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic republics, and how grave a threat an offensive Russian military presence would be. Ironically, rising pro-democracy sentiment increases the risk of Russian military intervention, and perhaps an outright Anschluss, even as the popular discontent demonstrates that moving Belarus westward may be more feasible than previously thought. NATO needs more outreach into Belarus, and its Eastern European members should play a major role. Belarus also implicates the related question whether Sweden and Finland will finally accept the inevitable and join NATO, thereby bolstering the Baltic republics and others.

Russia’s promises not to intervene in its former republics — and its protestations that its intentions are benign — carry no weight. Russia will stop meddling when it knows that it cannot succeed and that crossing a NATO boundary (of some sort) will bring inevitable and highly damaging consequences. The sooner we make that clear, the better.

June’s back-to-back G-7 and NATO summits in London and Brussels, respectively, afford President Biden an opportunity to prove he has more to offer than recycled rhetoric. If he fails to deliver next month, there is trouble ahead for Ukraine, America, and Europe.

The Zarif tape shows why Biden should abandon reviving the Iran nuclear deal

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This article appeared in The Washington Post on May 3, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 3, 2021

A recording of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif that leaked last week remains unverified, but his apology on Sunday and a key Iranian official’s dismissal provide confidence in its accuracy. Considerable ink has been spilled over whether former secretary of state John F. Kerry at some point leaked classified U.S. information (he denies it) to Zarif about Israeli strikes in Syria.

Far more significant, however, is Zarif’s assertion that he learned sensitive Iranian information from Kerry. This from the Iranian diplomat who would be Tehran’s chief negotiator as the Biden administration ill-advisedly moves to revive the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran.

Remarkably, Zarif claims he was unaware of substantial increases in Iranian military activity in Syria that prompted the Israeli strikes in question. According to the Financial Times, after listening to three hours of the seven-hour recording that had been intended for an oral history project, “Kerry told Zarif that Iran Air flights to Syria had increased sixfold, a clear indication they were being used by the military to support Damascus in its conflict with the opponents of the Assad regime.”

When Zarif asked Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani about the flights, Soleimani blew him off, saying, “if Iran Air is 2 per cent more secure than [another airline], Iran Air must be used even if this inflicts 200 per cent costs on diplomacy.”

Beyond Syria, Zarif had a long list of complaints about his irrelevance to fundamental national-security decisions made without his involvement or even his knowledge. He provided several examples of efforts by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, to sabotage the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration, such as by seizing two U.S. Navy patrol boats in 2016, and by Soleimani’s direct intervention with Moscow in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Russia to reject the agreement.

Zarif says he was not aware that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad visited Tehran in February 2019, until he saw Assad on television. This devastating exclusion from a head-of-state visit prompted his (temporary) resignation; he fretted that otherwise, “nobody in the world” would even “give me broad beans to carry, let alone negotiate with me.” Zarif also says the IRGC initially denied shooting down a Ukrainian passenger jet in 2020, although it later had to admit the truth. No one should be surprised if more emerges to this effect.

Summarizing his discontents, Zarif said, “in the Islamic Republic, the [military] field rules. I have sacrificed diplomacy for the military field rather than the field servicing diplomacy.”

Zarif’s confessions show why President Biden should abandon his dream of returning to the 2015 nuclear deal, which the United States exited during the Trump administration. In Iran, it is not the negotiators who matter, nor what they say. It’s increasingly the IRGC, which controls the nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs, commands conventional military activities externally, and supports terrorists worldwide.

If Israel is pounding Iranian and allied units in Syria, it is hardly a secret to the Quds Force. The real news is that it was a secret to Iran’s foreign minister, and likely therefore his subordinates responsible for nuclear diplomacy. The killing of Soleimani with a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020, while an enormous blow to Iran, does not change the picture. If anything, Soleimani’s demise simply reinforced the IRGC ethos that it alone can protect the 1979 revolution.

The extent of internal deception in Iran shows that its “commitments” on nuclear issues are inherently unbelievable and untrustworthy. It is easier to disseminate diplomatic untruths when an envoy believes that what he is saying is true. Flat-out lying is harder to mask. The ready solution for authoritarians is simply to conceal key facts from diplomats doing the negotiations. No one should find this surprising. Even in Washington, there is hardly seamless cooperation between the Defense and State departments.

With Tehran, we do not face a government where “trust, but verify” makes sense. We have no basis for “trust” in the first place, let alone confidence that verification measures can detect active Iranian violation and concealment.

Advocates of the 2015 nuclear deal tout its “enhanced” verification mechanisms used by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but these are grossly ineffectual. Iran has long stonewalled IAEA inspections and declared key facilities off limits, which alone makes a mockery of reliance on its efforts.

The United States’ real insurance is not international monitoring, but its own intelligence capabilities. IAEA’s total operational budget in this area is roughly 0.6 percent of current U.S. intelligence spending of approximately $85 billion. If our intelligence is inadequate, it is hardly credible to think that the IAEA will safeguard us from Iranian nuclear violations.

The Zarif tape tells us much about Tehran’s diplomatic mendacity. Unfortunately, however, the Biden administration is still incomprehensibly piling up broad beans for Zarif and his nuclear negotiators.

What does Biden’s Armenia statement mean for the region?

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This article appeared in The Washington Examiner on April 26, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
April 26, 2021

Despite the headlines, President Joe Biden is not the first United States president to declare that the Ottoman Empire’s mass killings of Armenians, beginning on April 24, 1915, constitute genocide. President Ronald Reagan did so in his April 22, 1981, proclamation of “days of remembrance” for the Nazi Holocaust.

He emphasized that “like the genocide of the Armenians before it and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it, and like too many other such persecutions of too many other peoples, the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.” Whether Biden’s announcement marks a significant departure from the reticence of other presidents remains to be seen. Although the gruesome historical reality is undisputed, even Reagan’s administration was reluctant to highlight his statement, fearing disruption of relations with Turkey, a key NATO ally.

The pundits immediately characterized Biden’s remarks as merely symbolic, which may prove to be correct. Biden supporters contend that he was underlining the importance of human rights in his foreign policy, but that misses the critical point: ignoring the imperative need, and opportunity, we now have for strategic realignment in the Caucasus. Rewriting history, even to correct it, is too transient an exercise of governmental authority unless more substance follows. International political logic explains Washington’s past hesitations. Turkey’s Cold War role in NATO was critical for immutable geographic reasons, such as anchoring NATO’s line in Europe against the Warsaw Pact and controlling the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. Thereafter, of course, the Soviet Union broke apart, almost all for the better, radical Islamist terrorism arose, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took power in Turkey, almost all for the worse.

In the Caucasus, three small states, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, are sandwiched between three large, incompatible ones, Russia, Turkey, and Iran, whose interests quite often run counter to the U.S. We cannot unpack the region’s political complexity here, but the key point about Armenia since independence from the Soviet Union is its too-tenacious loyalty to Russia. Locked in a desperate territorial, ethnoreligious struggle with Azerbaijan, deeply fearful of conflict with Turkey, and justifiably wary of Iran, Yerevan looked to Moscow for support. Doing so resulted in an Armenian foreign policy that is otherwise totally inexplicable. For example, on April 21, at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Armenia, along with the likes of Russia, China, and Iran, voted unsuccessfully against a resolution stripping Syria of its vote in the organization for using chemical weapons against its own people. Three decades of pro-Moscow policy has been wholly misguided.

Armenia’s highest international priority, the conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, is an outgrowth of Moscow’s Soviet-era internal boundary drawing, yet another failed effort to answer what Marxists called “the nationalities question.” When its most threatening recent crisis arose, the 2020 flare-up with Azerbaijan, which was aided by Turkey, Armenia’s dependence on Russia proved almost entirely worthless. Armenia suffered significant military reversals, but contrary to Yerevan’s expectations, Moscow essentially imposed a cease-fire that nearly collapsed Armenia’s government and acknowledged its territorial losses. With friends like that…

Armenia’s attachment to Russia has been tragic, especially given the large number of Armenian Americans who could have focused Washington’s attention on the plight of their ancestral homeland. During a 2018 visit to Yerevan, I asked Armenian analysts why this had not happened. Several pointed to the Armenian American focus on getting U.S. recognition of the genocide rather than on contemporary realities. Whether right or wrong, Biden nonetheless has an opportunity to place a higher U.S. priority on Armenia’s plight. The Armenian American community should now focus on the negative consequences of Yerevan relying on Moscow, and Washington should worry more about bringing peace and stability to all three Caucasus countries. We have no interest in any of them aligning with, or being exploited by, the regimes in Iran, Russia, and Turkey.

Certainly, Erdogan’s Turkey is dangerous for Armenia, but grounds for hope exist. Dissatisfaction with Erdogan is rising, reflected in his party’s defeat in key 2019 local elections, such as Istanbul and Ankara, making Turkey’s looming 2023 presidential race critical for its future direction. It is premature to dismiss Turkey as a NATO ally, at least until we see if Erdogan permits free and fair national elections, which will happen only under Western pressure and scrutiny. Turkey itself should long ago have recognized the Armenian tragedy, but its internal politics have made that impossible. Washington should not underestimate the difficulties of change even now, but Erdogan’s departure opens many possibilities for Turkey to rehabilitate itself.

No one seriously believes that Caucasus politics is anything but complex. Inadequate U.S. attention for three decades after the Soviet Union’s dissolution, however, has not made it any easier. If Biden’s genocide statement is more than domestic U.S. politics, an increase in awareness can only bolster Washington’s position in the region.

‘Bring the Troops Home’ Is a Dream, Not a Strategy

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A full withdrawal from Afghanistan is a costly blunder and failure of leadership.

This article appeared in Foreign Policy on April 19, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
April 19, 2021

U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw the United States’ remaining military forces from Afghanistan rests far more on domestic politics than on national security strategy. In 2020, he campaigned on the issue. He said last week, “It’s time to end the forever war.” We should “be focused on the reason we went in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again. We did that. We accomplished that objective.”

Biden sounds like his predecessor, Donald Trump, whom I served as national security advisor. That’s no surprise, as Biden is carrying out Trump’s policy with only slight modifications. Media coverage of Biden’s April 14 announcement has noted widespread public support for bringing the troops home. The American people are tired of foreign military engagements, or so the pundits tell us; they’re tired of Afghanistan, tired of Iraq, tired of Syria, tired of terrorism, tired of the Middle East—just plain tired. The chattering classes agree, academics agree, Democrats almost unanimously agree, and even some Republicans agree.

They are all wrong.

The basic national security goal that all U.S. leaders must pursue is to define their country’s strategic interests and how to protect them. Politicians must then justify how they propose to defend the country against external threats and to muster the necessary resources. When leaders do not explain hard realities, the public’s resolve flags, which politicians then use to justify their own hesitancy to make hard decisions. In effect, weak politicians switch cause for effect, levying responsibility on the people instead of themselves. Under Trump and former President Barack Obama, and now perhaps Biden, it wasn’t the public that was weak but its leaders, who were unwilling or unable to do their job.

Afghanistan proves the point. If the Taliban return to power in all or most of the country, the almost universal view in Washington today is the near certainty that al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and others will resume using Afghanistan as a base of operations. On April 14, Biden said that terrorism had evolved since the 2001 assault on the Taliban and that “the threat has become more dispersed, metastasizing around the globe.” Of course it has. That’s because the United States and its NATO allies have substantially denied al Qaeda its preferred safe haven for 20 years. Terrorists had to go elsewhere, seeking Middle Eastern or African zones of anarchy, because they had no choice. But make no mistake: Afghanistan, more remote particularly from the United States, is their preferred staging ground.

Washington didn’t create the threats, and the withdrawal won’t make them disappear.

In Biden’s own words, the United States obviously cannot “ensure” that terrorists will not again use a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan as a base to strike the U.S. homeland. Biden recognizes this danger by saying the United States will maintain “our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region” to guard against a future strike. Blunt geography, however, shows Biden is wrong to think that the United States can have comparably effective counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering assets after departing Afghanistan. After all, Osama bin Laden settled there after being expelled from other countries precisely because its remoteness made it attractive. The map hasn’t changed.

And what exactly is the United States doing today in Afghanistan? To the proponents of withdrawal, it has been 20 years of endless, daily, bloody combat. But this narrative is false, especially during the last seven years following the transition of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force into Operation Resolute Support. Afghanistan remains extraordinarily dangerous, and there have been casualties, but the last U.S. combat death occurred in February 2020. Moreover, there is no proof of real financial savings from withdrawing the approximately 3,500 remaining U.S. military personnel; the costs for Washington may well increase after the withdrawal because of the greater distances that must be overcome for any future operations.

Moreover, U.S. allies are performing a key mission in Afghanistan: training, advising, and assisting the Afghan National Army and other security forces. This is not combat. The roughly 10,000 troops from NATO members and nonmembers deployed as part of Resolute Support are a much-reduced presence from the International Security Assistance Force’s peak of 130,000. Their departure alongside that of U.S. troops is a severe blow to a free Afghanistan.

Concededly, the United States has spent enormous sums on so-called nation-building activities in Afghanistan, with precious little to show for it. It never should have been the United States’ objective to create a Central Asian Switzerland, even if it had the ability to do so, which it does not. But it is an even graver mistake to conclude that because Washington wasted resources on the wrong objective before, withdrawal is now justified. The United States hasn’t engaged in nation-building for many years and has long moved beyond these costly mistakes.

Supporters of withdrawal assert that the United States has tried long enough to enable the Afghans to defend themselves and that U.S. responsibilities are over. Those making this argument miss the key point that it is U.S. security that is at stake, not Afghan military competence. Washington and its allies are not there to protect Afghans against Taliban solely for their sake but to protect against the terrorist threat to Western nations that has previously emanated from the petri dish of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and would do so again.

To that end, the United States concentrates on gathering information on possible terrorist threats through a variety of mechanisms, not just the military. It is, however, the military presence and a considerable logistical base that enable much of this critical work. And it is in-country U.S. armed forces, which can scale up rapidly, that provide confidence that no sustained terrorist threat can reemerge while the United States remains. Removing the troops removes a key predicate.

Biden, having in effect tacitly admitted that the United States has not achieved its basic objective of safeguarding the homeland, then complains that new objectives have been established. That is true; reality has changed since the initial victory over the Taliban and al Qaeda. But it is hardly a radical departure for the United States to remain overseas for long periods when it has substantial interests there, even if those interests change dramatically. Biden is quick to say he is restoring U.S. leadership in NATO—yet there have been no complaints that the United States has had troops garrisoned in Germany for over 75 years since destroying the Third Reich. The same goes for Japan and South Korea. With U.S. troops remaining in those places, Trump could say that Biden is not following their shared rhetoric to end “forever wars.”

Long-term deployments in dangerous places can be required by long-term threats to the United States. Washington didn’t create the threats, and the withdrawal won’t make them disappear. The war against terrorism is unlike 19th-century conventional warfare not because the United States made it so but because the terrorists did. Even conventional warfare is changing, as we are seeing in cyberspace and the varieties of asymmetric and hybrid warfare being developed and deployed by adversaries hoping to leverage their smaller strengths against Western weaknesses. The war against terrorism is open-ended in the same way the struggle against international communism was open-ended. Many of the same people who disliked having to defend the United States in the Cold War—and their ideological successors—dislike having to defend the country against terrorism. Too bad the United States’ enemies won’t give it a break.

Among other reasons to stay in Afghanistan is keeping watch on the risks emanating from Iran and Pakistan. These are clear cases where geographic proximity has no substitute. Iran’s continuing nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs; its unwavering support for terrorist groups such as the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah; and its belligerent conventional military activity around the Middle East all mark it as an aspiring regional hegemon whose near neighbors have become increasingly anxious. Afghanistan is an excellent, proximate location to keep an eye on things inside Iran. Moreover, a Taliban takeover, which could lead to a distinctly fragmented pattern of Afghan government, would undoubtedly increase Iran’s influence in western Afghanistan as before, to the United States’ distinct disadvantage.

Perhaps Biden is turning into a modern-day George McGovern, the Vietnam-era Democratic presidential nominee who made “come home, America” his mantra.

A U.S. withdrawal may be even riskier with respect to Pakistan. If the Taliban resume control in Kabul, this can only encourage the Pakistani Taliban and other Islamist radicals, including within the Pakistani intelligence services. Since Partition in 1947, Pakistan has never had a reliably stable government. Instead, to paraphrase the famous jibe against Prussia: Where some states have an army, the Pakistan Army has a state. If Islamabad’s government fell to the radicals, terrorists would possess a significant number of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, not only threatening India and others but also risking the proliferation of nuclear weapons to terrorists worldwide. For Washington, this is perhaps the most dangerous consequence of the Taliban retaking power in Afghanistan, yet it rarely receives significant attention.

Moreover, ignoring the follow-on effects of a U.S. Afghanistan withdrawal on Iran and Pakistan does not augur well for Biden administration’s national security policies globally. The United States’ continuing and probably growing strategic struggle with China and Russia, the critical need to prevent the further accumulation of weapons of mass destruction by North Korea and Iran, and the threat of proliferation more broadly should be matters of enormous concern. Weakness and self-congratulation are often contagious.

Recently, media commentators have breathlessly proclaimed that Biden is governing much further to the left in domestic affairs than most people predicted. Perhaps the same is coming true in the international arena—and Biden is turning into a modern-day George McGovern, the Vietnam-era Democratic presidential nominee who made “come home, America” his mantra. Unfortunately, that call is a dream, not a strategy. It is not a dream that ends well.

How to confront China on Hong Kong

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This article appeared in The Daily News on April 7, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
April 7, 2021

The recent conviction of seven prominent advocates of Hong Kong autonomy for participating in peaceful protests is yet another milestone in China’s campaign to bury freedom of speech and conscience. The authorities are suppressing not just student protesters, but the leaders of China’s most important freedom movement since Sun Yat-sen. Martin Lee, Jimmy Lai and others fought for decades to expand political freedoms, and now face lengthy jail terms.

How should the United States respond to these convictions, and the growing list of other acts of internal repression? Opening the March 18 Alaska encounter with senior Chinese diplomats, Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised Hong Kong as an issue concerning America. Shortly thereafter, the State Department’s 2020 human-rights report explicitly described extensive Chinese abuses, and the annual Hong Kong report to Congress confirmed that Beijing was systematically dismantling the territory’s separate status.

Recent administrations, including President Biden’s, have imposed economic sanctions on Chinese leaders. In retaliation, on Jan. 20, Beijing sanctioned 28 Americans (full disclosure: myself included), and later imposed travel bans on members of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

But is that it? Are salvos of economic sanctions effective, or are we Americans simply engaging in virtue signaling? Most importantly, how should human rights fit into U.S. national-security policy?

Despite considerable disagreement and confusion, a realistic approach is readily apparent. How China or other authoritarian states treat their own people speaks volumes about how they will treat us. Great-power authoritarians repress their citizens and threaten foreigners with hegemonic subordination. Rogue states like Iran and North Korea repress their citizens while seeking weapons of mass destruction and supporting international terrorism. None of them are trustworthy.

There are, of course, repressive regimes friendly to America. During World War II and the Cold War, we allied with such regimes, and often had their support in confrontations with regional authoritarian powers, as in the Middle East, which Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards” championed. This is neither immoral nor insincere, since Washington cannot cure all the world’s human-rights ills. Morality is boundless, whereas both state interests and material resources are finite.

The human-rights sins of friendly states have not threatened U.S. interests or values significantly, and are addressable through forceful but quiet diplomacy, not public breast-beating. Virtue signaling is for political show horses, but unbecoming for America.

As state policy, Washington’s opposition to Beijing’s repression or genocide is not abstract moralizing, but a legitimate concern for the implications of China’s domestic conduct on its behavior abroad. While not America’s job to mend the world’s ills, it is most certainly our job to protect ourselves. Thus, when China violates its 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration obligation to “a high degree of autonomy” for Hong Kong, it demonstrates graphically how it regards international treaties. It has not chosen to withdraw from the deal, but to violate it.

That demonstrates, not that we need further proof, Beijing’s true priorities. Chinese genocide against Uighurs, or repression of Falun Gong believers, Christians and Tibetan Buddhists, reveals how Beijing is prepared to resolve disputes with its near neighbors and beyond.

We should aggressively highlight China’s internal authoritarianism in our information statecraft, an aspect of U.S. diplomacy that needs enormous improvement. As during the Cold War, we need not fear a debate with China on human-rights issues. We should welcome it.

Rhetoric and individual sanctions alone, however, are not only inadequate but sometimes counterproductive, giving the appearance of “doing something,” when we are actually just being self-indulgent, not damaging our authoritarian adversaries.

Semiotic warfare should be left to academicians. The real way to make human-rights policy effective is by linking it with other bilateral priorities. How, for example, can we take trade agreements seriously when Beijing is prepared to sacrifice a choice economic asset like Hong Kong for overriding internal political considerations? Just how long will a Chinese pledge to buy more American soybeans last as compared to snuffing out internal dissent?

Economic complications were missing during the Cold War because U.S.-Soviet economic interaction was so limited. Of course, China’s massive penetration of Western economies makes it a far more dangerous adversary, but at the same time one more vulnerable to criticism and punishment for human-rights transgressions.

Washington still does not understand how to integrate human-rights issues effectively into foreign policy. Certainly, however, treating them in a silo separate from all other disputes with Beijing will only ensure their second-tier status. Advocates of an aggressive human-rights posture should recognize that trade-offs with other national-security priorities will be required. Accepting less-than-perfect outcomes means success, not defeat, because it means human rights are an integral part of U.S. policy, not an isolated, hot-house flower.

Biden must confront North Korea via Beijing

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This article appeared in The Washington Examiner on March 29, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
March 29, 2021

North Korea’s first ballistic-missiles launches during Joe Biden’s presidency triggered the usual flurry of speculation about Kim Jong Un’s intentions, Biden’s possible responses, and whether to resume Washington-Pyongyang negotiations.

But before we yet again commence a diplomatic minuet of semiotics and process, two questions demand answers. First, how close is North Korea to nuclear weapons and delivery systems that can accurately target America? Second, does Biden really intend to stop the North from achieving these objectives?

On capabilities, the Kim family dynasty has made slow but steady progress for decades. The best bet, although not certain, is that its nuclear-warhead stockpile has steadily increased. Pyongyang likely now has the ability to put a warhead over North America, and it is pursuing systems beyond land-based ballistic missiles. There is, however, no certainty among observers that the North can target accurately or that its warheads can survive the difficult atmospheric reentry process. Critically, therefore, enough time remains (albeit not much) to stop North Korea before it directly threatens the United States.

That said, important U.S. allies like Japan are already vulnerable. Accordingly, Tokyo has long pressed Washington to stand firm against both Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and missiles (whatever their range), stressing correctly that technological advances at shorter ranges also benefit longer-range missile developments.

Biden’s intentions remain unclear. The administration scoffed at North Korea’s March 21 launches of two anti-ship cruise missiles, describing them as “normal missile activity.” Whereupon Pyongyang fired two nuclear-capable ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan. On March 25, Biden said plainly that these latter launches violated U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, thereby reversing his predecessor’s unwarranted insouciance about such activity. Biden acknowledged that North Korea was “the top foreign policy issue that he was watching” and that America’s Pyongyang diplomacy “has to be conditioned upon the end result of denuclearization.” If Biden is serious, he has rejected the idea, advocated by the international left, that we accept Kim’s regime as a nuclear power and instead try merely to constrain it. And hopefully, Biden won’t be the second president to fall in love with Kim.

These positions are necessary but hardly sufficient conditions for realistic U.S. policy. Biden said further, “we’re consulting with our allies and partners” about the launches. This is simply common sense (in all except the last administration). Biden added, “If they choose to escalate, we will respond accordingly.”

The problem: Pyongyang has already escalated, and Washington is not responding.

To the contrary, U.S. officials admit they made several unrequited efforts to open discussions with Pyongyang, thereby potentially looking desperate for a deal. Nor has Biden restored joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises to levels necessary for true readiness against North Korean conventional attacks. Doing so would be not just a “signal,” but an important, long-overdue correction in its own right. Congress should demand it. Next week, Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga will be the first foreign leader to visit Biden’s White House. Suga has stressed his intention to “thoroughly discuss” North Korea’s threat, meaning Biden will surely hear, prior to completion of the National Security Council’s ongoing policy review, a strong, realistic message about the grave risks of conventional diplomacy with Kim.

Tokyo and Washington should both understand, however, that the real target of their efforts must be Beijing, not Pyongyang. History has proven clearly that North Korea has never made the strategic decision to give up its nuclear goals. It is always willing to trade promises of denuclearization for financial assistance and sanctions relief. That route has been tried and failed for 30-plus years. Pyongyang gets the financial benefits upfront, but mysteriously to some, never fulfills its denuclearization commitments. It is time for the U.S. to focus on China.

Over 70 years, Beijing has provided North Korea with enormous military assistance and, while denying recent support for nuclear-related programs, undoubtedly provided considerable help previously (as did Moscow). Politically, Beijing flies protective cover for Pyongyang at the United Nations Security Council. This is no casual activity: Beijing and Pyongyang’s respective communist parties once proclaimed themselves “as close as lips and teeth.” Economically, North Korea would collapse quickly if China suspended energy transfers, which constitute 90%-plus of its supplies, not to mention massive subsidies and humanitarian assistance. Indisputably, China made and sustains North Korea. Beijing must now own up to its responsibility.

Either Xi Jinping takes serious measures to help terminate Kim’s nuclear ambitions, or he risks dramatically raising the level of disagreement between China and America. Will this approach offend Xi? Possibly, but his sensitivities are hardly a useful metric of American interests. For too long, Washington has meekly accepted Beijing’s line that it too wants to “solve” the North Korea nuclear problem. That was likely never true, and it is certainly not true today. Until we accept and act on that reality, Pyongyang will only continue to progress toward deliverable nuclear weapons.

Suez Crisis Will Become Unstuck. The Real Security Crisis Will Remain.

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Countries and companies should wake up to new political risks to shipping and supply chains.

This article appeared on Bloomberg.com on March 29, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
March 29, 2021

The Suez Canal Crisis of 2021 is upon us. The canal is closed, and maritime traffic jams extend into the Mediterranean and Red Seas. The reopening date is uncertain, supply chains are stressing, and executives are nervous.

“Crisis” may strike some as the wrong word. After all, there are no Cold War tensions as there were during the 1956 Suez Crisis, which closed the canal for six months, as the USSR simultaneously crushed the Hungarian Revolution. Nor are there Arab-Israeli military hostilities as during 1967’s Six-Day War, which (along with the 1973 Yom Kippur War) closed the Suez Canal for eight years.

The current blockage apparently arose from adverse weather conditions. But no one should underestimate the geostrategic warning it sends about the potential for political sabotage. As nature inspires art, so too does it inspire malevolence. This is not merely about geography, but also about today’s broader political risks to world commerce, ranging from one errant ship at Suez to confronting China’s enormous political, military and economic challenge.

Indisputably, political risks are now rising from sources not previously perceived. The coronavirus pandemic, for one, has alerted terrorist groups, rogue states and major powers alike that biological (and chemical) weapons have far more coercive power than once recognized. Such weapons are comparatively easier to make than nuclear devices.

New political risks have come on little cat feet, almost unnoticed. For decades, foreign investment in and reliance on supply sources in China expanded as if political risk were irrelevant. No longer. Former President Donald Trump’s tussle with Beijing, hardly amounting to a “trade war,” simply underscored the emerging political risks of dealing with China. Looking to hedge their bets, some foreign companies were already shifting capital allocations and supply chains to Southeast Asian countries, India and elsewhere. That trend is accelerating.

And the aggregate China risk factor will only increase. Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong and the city’s melancholy demise as a “rule-of-law” international enclave in China is all but certain. Computer-driven industrial and financial espionage, outright theft of intellectual property, discrimination against foreign firms, and internal political and religious oppression all make China an increasingly risky place to be. And as political conflicts between China and the West continue to escalate, it becomes more dangerous to rely on Chinese supply sources.

Many Europeans, favored Wall Street investors and well-paid pundits argue that rising tensions are not inevitable. Perhaps. Certainly, the risks of relying on China don’t rule out having any presence whatever in the country. There are innumerable intermediate options. Yet in virtually every line of business, the intermediate options cry out for estimating a higher risk to any material supply-chain investment in China.

Moreover, China is creating its own geostrategic choke points, by building naval and air bases on islands, rocks and reefs it claims in the South China Sea, and declaring the region a Chinese province. In the East China Sea, Beijing is threatening Taiwan and challenging Japan on the sovereignty of the islands called the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyus in China. This menacing behavior leaves the economies of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asian countries in danger.

Clearly, geopolitical risks are rising sharply. And to mitigate disruption, governments and businesses must diversify their supply chains and methods of shipping, and avoid geographic or political chokepoints, man-made or natural.

The United Arab Emirates has shown foresight by building an oil pipeline bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. The East-West Petroline, running from Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province to Yanbu on the Red Sea, was also designed to avoid the Strait of Hormuz. Nevertheless, shipments must traverse either the Suez Canal or the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the Red Sea’s southern end, now threatened by Yemen’s Houthi rebels (who have also attacked the Petroline itself). Today’s Middle East might consider building pipelines and other shipment methods through Jordan to Israel’s Mediterranean coast. Iran may well have had such an alternative route in mind for its (and Iraq’s) oil in extending its military dominance through Lebanon and Syria to the Mediterranean.

By the same token, why shouldn’t American and European companies concentrate more investment and manufacturing in the Western Hemisphere (or at home) rather than in China? As long as they avoid the likes of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, their political risk would be drastically lower, not to mention their transportation costs and possible losses during shipping. Perhaps the 2021 Suez Canal Crisis will have a silver lining after all, impelling governments and companies to come to terms with the new global security dangers they face.