Putin’s resolve hasn’t collapsed. He may be planning his most outrageous gambit yet

August 15, 2022

This article first appeared in The Telegraph on August 12th, 2022. Click here to read the original article.

Be prepared for Russia to halt hostilities and exploit European weakness in a brazen attempt to secure many of its objectives

Russia’s failure to capture Kyiv shortly after its February 24 invasion, kill or overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky, and seize all of Ukraine, will be a landmark case study for future political and military strategists. So will Russia’s subsequent decision to fight a World War I-style offensive, primarily in eastern Ukraine, grinding out a few miles or less in new territorial gains every day.

And so will the next phase of the war, as summer turns to fall. In all probability, it will depend more on political strategy than military affairs. Unquestionably, the military state of play is a critical variable, but in the coming months of the war, intangible, hard-to-measure, hard-to-predict political variables could have the dispositive role. Accordingly, Nato and other Ukraine supporters must start thinking now (and should have been thinking long before today) about how to prevent Moscow from seizing the diplomatic high ground and bring the conflict to at least a temporary halt on its terms, not Kyiv’s. The next ninety days is a useful time frame, especially in America, with nation-wide congressional elections looming on November 8.

At present, Russia is still fighting its excruciatingly slow and painful style of offensive operations, almost entirely in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Absent dramatic changes in the next ninety days, there will be no daring Russian armor attacks, no effective use of air power, and no significant, newly-initiated, cross-border incursions. In American football, this ground-game strategy is called “three yards and a cloud of dust.” Moscow’s casualties have been high, debilitating logistical and personnel problems persist, domestic public opinion is mixed and uncertain at best, and international sanctions have strained (albeit not visibly altered) the Kremlin’s war effort.

Ukraine appears to be readying a “southern strategy”, perhaps aimed to retake Kherson and to punch through the current lines to reach the Black Sea near Mykolaiv, thereby severing direct Russian land access from the Donbas to Crimea and adjacent territories. US, UK, and other Nato deliveries of high-end weapons are finally entering into significant usage on Ukraine’s front lines, although not at levels and in time-lines Kyiv’s military would like. Ukraine has kept a generally effective lid on disclosing its actual military casualties, but these may well be higher than generally understood in the popular Western imagination. And casualties among affected civilian populations, not to mention property and infrastructure destruction in the most contested regions, have been substantial.

Accordingly, one entirely possible scenario, perhaps even the most likely, is that the war simply grinds on, with no discernible end point, certainly not in the next ninety days. This, however, is where Russia’s political calculations may be dispositive. Before and during the conflict, the West has repeatedly underestimated Russia’s long-term resolve and its cost-benefit analysis about its gains and losses. Eager to personalise “Putin’s war” to show its purported domestic Russian unpopularity, Western leaders have failed to see how widespread – and how deep – is Russian feeling that Ukraine and other former Soviet republics were illegitimately torn away from the rodina, the motherland. People may tire from reading Putin’s 2005 view, but this is his core belief: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Minimizing the loss of “historical Russia”, in turn, leads to underestimating the Kremlin’s willingness to suffer what seem to foreign observers to be disproportionately high casualties for relatively modest territorial gains. It may also help explain why Russia’s war of attrition is acceptable to Moscow where it might not be in the West. In America’s Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant was harshly criticised (called a “butcher” by some) for his 1864-65 campaign against Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, as was William Tecumseh Sherman for his 1864 “march to the sea” from Atlanta to Savannah. Grant’s war of attrition against Lee and Sherman’s swath of destruction brought the secessionists to final defeat, the Union’s blunt strength crushing the Confederacy. Similarly, in the 1939-1940 “Winter War” with Finland, Moscow also bled profusely, but persevered to victory.

So, there should be no surprise that Russia’s resolve has not collapsed. Nonetheless, Putin can certainly see the risk that sufficient supplies of sophisticated weapons and other war materiel from Nato in Ukraine’s hands will jeopardise the gains Russian forces have made to date. Putin also knows that support for Ukraine in Europe, particularly in France and Germany, is not what Nato leaders make it out to be, and that President Biden’s actions (as opposed to rhetoric) during the conflict have hardly been consistent with deep resolve. Finally, signs of disagreements within Ukraine’s political leadership are now appearing – not as yet disabling, but increasingly visible nonetheless.

Russia thus has a difficult political decision to make. Putin will not want to lose opportunities to retake more Ukraine territory, especially since he is far from his initial goals. Even more importantly, however, he does not want to be caught with Russian forces in broad retreat, where any diplomatic effort would be taken as a sign of weakness. Westerners who believe Putin is inadequately aware of the human and material costs suffered by Russia’s military are kidding themselves; he knows all too well he needs a respite if he can get one on his terms.

In such circumstances, Russia’s best option may be this. In the next ninety days, Putin announces, with a straight face despite its obvious falsity, that the Kremlin has achieved its objectives. Accordingly, he has ordered all offensive military operations halted, demands Ukraine do the same, and calls for immediate ceasefire negotiations to establish an agreed line-of-control between the forces. Putin will have to grit his teeth to do this, but he knows that a cease fire will give Russia time, years perhaps, to rebuild its military, restore its economy, and perhaps reabsorb more pliant, weaker parts of the Russian empire, from Belarus to Central Asia.

Moscow will be calculating that it can catch Kyiv unaware. Obviously and understandably, Zelensky, left to his own devices, would flatly reject halting the conflict with Russia still holding perhaps 25 per cent of Ukraine’s territory. He knows full well that any purported “cease-fire line” could become the new Russia-Ukraine border. Unfortunately, Zelensky may not be in a position to give a “Snake Island” response.

Without a prior agreed-upon diplomatic strategy with Nato, optimally from now forward, Zelensky is vulnerable to political weakness in the United States and key European Union members, which Putin knows and is prepared to exploit. Winter is coming, as they say. Germany and much of Europe are deeply concerned about Russia’s considerable leverage over their energy supplies. And, let’s be honest, many Western Europeans are tired of this war. Continuing economic turbulence, whether inflation, recession or both, only reinforces the angst that, in just 6-9 months, this has become an “endless war” that needs ending. Proclaiming the need for humanitarian relief in war-torn Ukraine, they would seize the chance of a “cease fire” to return to pre-February 24 relations with Russia.

Ukraine and Nato need diplomatic agreement now against this pre-emptive Russian ploy, which may rapidly gain the initiative regardless of battlefield developments. Indeed, in the coming weeks, Russia’s inclination to spring a “cease fire in place” will increase as its prospects for substantial further military gains recede.

The most important element of a Western counter-strategy will be to make clear at once that all sanctions against Russia will remain in place until the full withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine’s territory. Eliminating the sanctions is central to any Russian expectation of reviving its economy and military, thereby to reinitiate hostilities at some future point. If sanctions looked to be effectively permanent until full Ukrainian sovereignty was restored, Putin’s gambit would fall at the first hurdle. Many other issues, including reparations, prisoners of war and accountability also need resolving, but the key point is to stop Russia from consolidating its territorial gains through a scam, unilateral “ceasefire”.

Will France and Germany agree to such a counter-strategy? Will Biden be so weak before the November elections that he will jump at the chance for a diplomatic “win” to enhance Democratic prospects on November 8? Achieving real Nato unity on a hardline political stance against Russian efforts to split the West and leave Ukraine in peril will require considerable heavy lifting. Now is the time to start, and underlines why a new government in London, as resolute on Ukraine as Boris Johnson, is so critical.

 Iran is stuck in Biden’s blind spot

August 15, 2022

By Ambassador John Bolton

This article first appeared in the Washington Post, on August 15th 2022. Click here to view the original article

John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump and is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

It has been somewhat surreal over the past few days, I admit, to be speaking publicly about Iran’s plot to assassinate me and many other American citizens on American soil. Fortunately, as an alumnus of the Reagan administration’s Justice Department, I have seen once again the diligent, enormously competent and courageous work of FBI agents and Justice Department attorneys who uncovered and pursued Iran’s murderous plots.

And, thanks to President Biden, I again receive Secret Service protection, as I did when I served as national security adviser.

However, what gives surrealism an entirely new meaning is that the Biden White House, faced with Iran’s broad campaign of anti-U.S. terrorism, amounting to an act of war, is still obsessively grinding along to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps efforts targeting me reached the point where the Justice Department filed criminal charges against Shahram Poursafi, unsealed last week. Interestingly, the charging documents’ narrative of Poursafi’s criminal conduct ends in late April, just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken first publicly admitted Iran’s threats to current and former American officials in congressional testimony. A significant number of former public servants are also in Iran’s sights, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former defense secretary Mark T. Esper and others not now appropriate to name, but whose peril has been widely reported.

Nearly four months passed between Blinken’s public corroboration of Iran’s threat and the filing of criminal charges. The only reasonable explanation is that the president feared revealing the accusations would imperil his all-consuming goal of reviving the Iran nuclear deal.

Iran’s malign efforts, however, do not stop with public officials. Consider naturalized American citizen Masih Alinejad, an advocate for women’s rights in Iran. Just weeks ago, an Iranian agent armed with an AK-47 arrived at her Brooklyn home, intending, in the FBI’s view, to kill her. On Friday, Salman Rushdie, long an Iranian target, was grievously wounded by an assailant immediately lauded by Hasan Nasrallah, leader of Iran’s terrorist surrogate Hezbollah, as “a Lebanese champion” who had “implemented” the “honorable fatwa” promulgated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Agence France-Presse reported that pro-regime Iranian media hailed the attack, and quoted Mohammad Marandi, an adviser to Iran’s nuclear negotiators, tweeting, “I won’t be shedding tears for a writer who spouts endless hatred and contempt for Muslims and Islam,” while implying the attack was a U.S. false-flag operation.

The assassination attempts on Alinejad and Rushdie might or might not be coincidental. Along with the extensive list of present and former government officials at risk, however, this is no small matter, except apparently to the Biden administration. We face a concerted threat to America itself, not unconnected threats to random individuals. Iran does not fear U.S. deterrence.

Accordingly, continued pursuit of the nuclear deal signals U.S. weakness worldwide. Russia has invaded Ukraine; suppose the Kremlin was now trying to murder Americans, as in 2018 when it attacked defectors in Britain with chemical weapons? Would Biden still hope for climate change negotiations with Vladimir Putin, as John F. Kerry suggested before the invasion? Or, given China’s threat to Taiwan, would we still conduct trade negotiations if clandestine Beijing agents were similarly engaged? Too many Americans are already threatened with death on American soil by a foreign government. It’s time for Biden to reject business as usual.

In recent weeks, the White House has nonetheless heedlessly, zealously continued its policy of capitulation, reportedly making further concessions to Tehran. These include whitewashing long-standing Iranian obstruction of International Atomic Energy Agency efforts to pursue necessary investigations, and weakening the scope and effectiveness of U.S. sanctions against the very Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that is attempting multiple assassinations.

How to explain this manic quest for the Holy Grail of reviving the 2015 deal? Analytically, Biden is compartmentalizing Iran’s nuclear program in one silo and its terrorist activities in another, treating them as separable and unrelated. He is engaging in the classic diplomatic fallacy of “mirror-imaging,” believing his adversaries see the world the same way he does, sealed off into separate compartments.

The reality in Tehran is precisely the opposite. The ayatollahs’ malevolence is comprehensive, with nuclear weapons, assassination and terrorism all elements in their full spectrum of capabilities. By failing to grasp the wider scope of Iran’s menace, and plainly failing to deter it, Biden’s dangerous effort to resurrect the nuclear deal is threatening America’s larger interests. Substantive arguments against the 2015 agreement and the concessions Biden has made over nearly 19 months in office should already suffice to bury the deal, but the broader threat Iran now raises should be the final nail in its coffin.

Biden’s bizarre policy of “nuclear deal über alles” reflects an instinct for the capillary when it comes to Washington-Tehran relations. Iran’s nuclear program is only a symptom of the real problem: the regime itself. That is what the United States must focus on ending.

Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Boils Down To One Word: Weakness

August 01, 2022

By Ambassador John Bolton

This article first appeared in 19 Forty-Five. Click Here to see the original article.

The wrong countries, notably Russia and China, are learning dangerous lessons about President Biden’s lack of international political resolve. Both substantively and in diplomatic tradecraft, his Administration is hesitant, submissive, and erratic. On issues as diverse as prisoner swaps with Moscow, American re-entry into the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, or Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the White House betrays a propensity to crumple under pressure. Weakness and uncertainty on these seemingly unrelated matters, and others, comprise a pattern heartening to adversaries and alarming to friends.

For example, long-standing, bipartisan U.S. policy has rejected negotiating with hostage-takers, whether terrorists or lawless states.  That policy has at times been breached, as in the dismaying Iran-Contra affair, but the underlying rationales are clear. Bargaining with hostage-takers epitomizes the moral-equivalency fallacy, legitimizing and publicizing their status; often advances their cause by providing them resources or returning important personnel; and invites more hostage-taking, thus endangering other Americans, by putting a price on our citizens.

Instead of incentivizing hostage-taking by trading prisoners, the correct response is harsh action, either economic or military, depending on the circumstances, against those who engage in such atrocities. Deal-making is congenial for terrorists and authoritarian states; severe punishment is not. As painful as it is for hostages’ friends and families, a President’s responsibility is long-term, protecting the future security of all Americans, not placing more of them in jeopardy. This was Ronald Reagan’s mistake in Iran-Contra. The United States erred again by its utterly inadequate response to North Korea’s savage, ultimately fatal treatment of Otto Warmbier, taken hostage by Pyongyang in 2017.

Trading hostages with terrorists or rogue states is not comparable to well-established Western practices of exchanging prisoners of war and, more recently, intelligence personnel. Hostage-takers, including states under a pretense of “law enforcement.” are fundamentally illegitimate kidnappers seeking bargaining chips. Moreover, swapping personnel of different types (a common criminal offender for an illicit arms dealer, for example) encourages hostage-takers by conceding moral equivalency, obscuring their fundamentally unacceptable behavior.

Biden has shown little regard for these principles, as in his 2021 decision to grant Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou a highly favorable criminal settlement, dropping U.S. extradition proceedings against her in Canada. In exchange, China released two Canadian citizens it seized on fabricated charges immediately after Meng’s initial 2018 arrest in Vancouver. Biden’s retreat in Meng’s case undoubtedly colors China’s efforts to stop Pelosi’s Taiwan trip.

The Meng capitulation foreshadowed April’s exchange of American Trevor Reed for a major Russian cocaine trafficker, and ongoing negotiations to free Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan. All three arrests were politically motivated (although Griner “confessed” to drug charges); Reed is now pressuring Biden on behalf of the others. Viktor Bout, the Russian offered for Griner and Whelan, is serving twenty-five years for selling arms to Colombian narco-terrorists.

Interestingly, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week the prisoner-exchange talks originated in the June 2021, Biden-Putin meeting in Geneva, where the leaders “agreed to appoint representatives in charge of these issues, and the Foreign Ministry is not among them.  The timing is consistent with White House deliberations on conceding the Meng case and the Russia prisoner swaps. Also quite interesting is Lavrov’s comment that negotiations initially were not in diplomatic channels but perhaps between intelligence or law-enforcement authorities.

Lavrov was uninterested in speaking to Blinken before they finally connected on July 29. Russia’s Maria Zakharova had earlier said Lavrov “has a busy schedule of real work,” and the two would talk “when time permits.” Moreover, Blinken, having avoided calling Lavrov for five months after the invasion of Ukraine, has repeatedly publicly discussed the substance of a possible deal, which the Russians have not. Similarly, the White House openly denounced as “bad faith” Russia’s proposal that the deal includes releasing a former intelligence official in German custody.

This public commentary reportedly reflects administration nervousness that talks are proceeding slowly, an error of tradecraft if accurate. Similar disarray has marked Biden’s efforts to stop Pelosi’s Taiwan visit. China’s rhetorical pressure has been intense, and the Administration’s discomfort far too visible. The President himself referred to Pentagon concerns for Pelosi’s safety, and anonymous officials confirmed Biden discussed the trip in his recent telephone call with Xi Jinping. Beijing was not so shy, saying Xi told Biden, “Those who play with fire will perish by it. It is hoped that the U.S. will be clear-eyed about this.”

China is, in effect, trying to make Pelosi’s trip a hostage. Some American analysts buy Beijing’s propaganda, worrying the trip “[C]ould ignite this combustible situation into a crisis that escalates to military conflict.” Such paranoia may well reflect White House insecurity, but it is badly misplaced.  Xi knows full well that any danger to Pelosi’s safety would prompt a robust American response, at least from most administrations.  And while military exercises were held in Fujian Province, there is no evidence of any real threat, according to the White House itself.

Dreading Chinese fist-shaking without a clear-eyed analysis of reality has all the hallmarks of Biden vetoing the transfer of Polish MiGs to Ukraine, and hesitancy and delay in providing Kyiv with higher-end weapons, for fear of provoking Russian escalation. Administration trepidation about Pelosi’s travels is painfully visible worldwide, dispiriting our friends and whetting our adversaries’ appetites.

In Tehran, the ayatollahs must be dismayed for having come in too low bargaining with Biden and not demanding more concessions before readmitting the U.S. to the 2015 nuclear deal. And no wonder Kim Jung-Un is again making nuclear-weapons threats.

By abandoning well-established American policy against negotiating with hostage-takers; by overestimating short-term pressures and underestimating longer-term ramifications; and by repeatedly signaling weakness and uncertainty dealing with China, Russia and others, Biden has harmed American credibility and thereby invited more threats and challenges. This lack of resolve bodes poorly for Ukraine if Russia’s invasion grinds on, especially since several European countries, notably Germany and France, are signaling their own lack of resolve. It’s no surprise that Taiwan wants a Pelosi visit.

Ambassador John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald J. Trump. He is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” You can follow him on Twitter: @AmbJohnBolton.

Situation Report: Joe Biden’s Middle East trip

July 29, 2022

President Biden spent almost a week in the Middle East recently, during a period of critical regional importance, and manages to depart having alienated nearly every major player.

Iran is reaching the breakout point on a nuclear weapon. Israeli leaders were eager to speak face to face with their American counterparts about applying more muscle into forcing Iran to back down. The Saudis expected a shift in U.S. policy on both Iran and about the criticism of the Saudi government for the Khashoggi affair. Riyadh was signaling a willingness to turn over a new leaf in the U.S.-Saudi relationship by increasing oil production and moving quickly to establish deeper public relations with Israel.

The Palestinians expected the United States to press Israel into allowing the reopening of the formal U.S. consulate to the Palestinians. The consulate, located on Agron Street (in the pre-1967 western half of Jerusalem), was closed during the Trump administration. Reopening it would signal a shift aligned with American and global progressives and more hostile to Israel. Jordan, in addition to backing the Palestinians, expected the United States to reinforce its demand to erode, or even erase, any Israeli sovereignty over any part of eastern Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount.

Virtually nobody was pleased by the outcome of the trip, however.

The Palestinians and Jordanians failed to understand that while the staff of the Biden administration fully agrees with them, the President was in no position to publicly validate those policy shifts. American officials indulged and inflated Palestinian and Jordanian expectations but failed to deliver the goods in public.

Then again, the Palestinians have always been hostile, and were never going to be pleased with any U.S. overture. Jordan, which since 2017 has acted more as an advocate of the Palestinian Authority than a strategic partner, was also inevitably going to walk away dissatisfied. Yet, , the Palestinians and Jordanians did come away with symbolic confirmation at least that the U.S. has walked back from the Trump administration policies on Jerusalem.

The regional countries most critical to the U.S. position in the region – Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE- come away the biggest losers.

The Arab states have been falling over themselves in the 24 hours since President Biden left to appease Iran, with the UAE now seeking to establish diplomatic relations with Tehran. Clearly the message they received from the U.S. was disconcerting. Most likely, they measured up Washington, heard weakness, and are now reacting accordingly.

For Israel, this trip was about meeting face to face with its counterparts in an attempt to avert a weak deal with Tehran and unify the Western ranks toward a far tougher policy on Iran. Israel is in an election cycle, so the government is desperate not to show tension with U.S. Even so, Israeli officials are now openly admitting the U.S. and Israel are at odds over Iran policy, even as they try to put on a brave face by saying that at least the U.S. was presented an unvarnished and blunt message from the top of the Israeli government. But actions speak louder than words. Tellingly, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) chief of staff said last night that the IDF is kicking its preparations for a major direct war with Iran into high gear – alone if necessary.

Iran was not the only issue.

Saudi and the UAE are furious over the attempts by U.S. Secretary of State Blinken to force PLO and Jordan into the most sensitive Abraham Accords forums in all facets, including defense and investment, which has caused the Saudis walk back what they were willing to do in terms of normalization with Israel. As Ehud Yaari, the Arab affairs correspondent for Israel’s channel 12, noted, this U.S. effort is a severe blow because it would allow the PLO, which is committed to undermining the accords, to serve as a spoiler, which this U.S. policy will essentially allow.

By the time the President arrived in Saudi Arabia at the end of the week, the atmospherics had already changed from warm expectations to coldness. Whatever remnant of original expectations that the Saudis did deliver on was pro-forma. Israeli flights beyond the UAE could now pass-through Saudi airspace, but no further normalization, and at best a small increase of oil production only without a firm promise publicly from the Saudi side, and no timeline.

Finally, of course, the idea of a regional security alliance, which only a week ago seemed to be already happening, suddenly vaporized the moment the U.S. said that it was going to put itself in charge of shepherding it to completion. This attempt to insert the U.S. on top of the security ties in the region was perhaps the most destructive failure on several levels. First, it demoted the direct ties between Israel and the Arabs – which were developing nicely without the U.S. — and devastated the confidence the regional players had in such a structure since they have measured up the administration and believe it is not serious about regional defense. Trying to force Qatar –Saudi Arabia’s nemesis–and Jordan –serving as an agent of the Palestinians– was the death blow to the whole scheme.

Notably, under the table, it seems Saudi, UAE, Morocco and Israel are proceeding alone to create such a structure without the U.S.’ involvement. The IDF’s chief of staff is, in fact, traveling to Morocco today and several top military officials have also been moving around their Arab neighbors as well in recent days.

The final verdict on the trip appears to be that the Saudis, Bahrainis, and UAE trust Israel more than the U.S.

When will American businesses wake up to the threat of Chinese espionage?

July 26, 2022

In an unprecedented joint public appearance on July 6, FBI Director Christopher Wray and his British counterpart, MI-5 Director General Ken McCallum, warned a London audience of business leaders and academics that China posed a “massive, shared challenge.” Beijing, said Wray, was “set on stealing your technology—whatever it is that makes your industry tick—and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.” McCallum was equally forceful, describing China’s “coordinated campaign on a grand scale,” representing “a strategic contest across decades.”

This is not the first time Wray has spoken out in unambiguous terms. On January 31 at the Reagan Presidential Library in California, he stressed that China’s threat to America’s economic security had “reached a new level—more brazen, more damaging than ever before.” This stress on foreign-government threats to America’s private sector may seem unusual for the FBI, but Wray has correctly focused on the incredibly broad scope of Beijing’s menacing behavior, well beyond intelligence gathering and clandestine actions against the U.S. and allied governments.

Wray’s public statements are complementary to Vice President Mike Pence’s 2018 warning about Beijing’s widespread efforts to influence U.S. public opinion. Unfortunately, we are, even now, only just awakening to the extraordinary scope of China’s whole-of government (which, in Beijing’s case, essentially means whole-of-society) operations against our economy and society, and that of our allies. This awakening must spread, and quickly.

In government, President Joe Biden’s performance is decidedly mixed. He deserves credit for the first in-person meeting of the “Quad” (Australia, India, Japan, and America), a constellation with enormous potential (but, so far, few practical achievements) for constraining China. The Pentagon agreed to the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (“AUKUS”) project to build nuclear-powered, hunter-killer submarines for Australia, a conceptual and operational breakthrough whose success or failure has major strategic implications across the Indo-Pacific. By contrast, Biden may have already rescinded Trump administration decision-making rules on offensive cyber efforts, thereby returning to Obama-era procedures that effectively strangled such measures, crippling our ability to strike pre-emptively against Chinese election-meddling efforts. Biden, seemingly intimidated by Chinese complaints about a projected Taiwan visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has urged her not to go.

AUKUS and the Quad represent initial steps in constructing a denser alliance framework, more akin to the North Atlantic pattern. Analysts have long worried that America’s bilateral Asian alliances are merely “hub-and-spoke” arrangements, but this picture is changing. Newly inaugurated South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, for example, is seeking to forge closer trilateral relations with Tokyo and Washington, symbolized by the three leaders’ recent meeting in Madrid. The “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing partnership (among Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and US) consists entirely of Pacific powers. The pieces are there for robust Indo-Pacific cooperation against the full range of Chinese threats.

Ironically, America’s sleeper problem, one spotlighted by Wray and McCallum, lies in the private sector. Despite two decades of increasing warning signs, American firms, led by financial and high-tech enterprises, invested and traded with China as if international political risk no longer warranted deep consideration in business decisions. Extensive capital investment in China exposed intellectual property to Beijing’s high-tech piracy. Forced-technology transfers as a condition to do business there, and the dangers to supply chains from political tensions, were ignored or minimized. Even today, as the political risks of doing business with China are skyrocketing, especially in sensitive national-security-related areas, many U.S. business leaders still do not appreciate the threats they face.

Assurances that China does not engage in commercial espionage or theft of intellectual property should carry no weight with Western businesses. In 2015, Xi Jinping and a gullible Barack Obama agreed that neither of their governments “will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property,” a commitment to which Beijing’s Ministry of State Security has paid no heed whatever.

Worse, too many business executives and politicians across the spectrum seem to believe that the proper response to Chinese threats is massive Federal expenditures to bolster U.S. competitiveness. This approach fundamentally misperceives the problem. America doesn’t suffer from a deficit of creativity and innovation. It suffers instead from decades of China stealing our creativity and innovation, as FBI Director Wray has forcefully explained, and in some cases benefitting from the gratuitous transfer of intellectual property by credulous Americans heedless of the consequences.

Beijing has weaponized what superficially appear to be commercial telecommunications firms like Huawei and ZTE, making them arms of the Chinese state. The Trump and Biden administrations have imposed increasingly strict sanctions on such firms, but enormous damage has already been done, including putting at risk communications involving America’s land-based, ballistic-missile forces. Beijing’s espionage deviousness is exemplified by its offer to build a Chinese garden at Washington’s National Arboretum, which would actually be a concealed listening post or accessing user data from the popular Tik-Tok app. We are still not adequately awake to the potential that virtually any Chinese “business” enterprise could be an agent of commercial infiltration and exploitation.

However, appropriate defensive measures should not be confused with massive subsidies to the U.S. information-technology industry. There is clearly a need for more Federal spending to counter Chinese espionage and piracy of intellectual property and other critical data, but that spending should be for military, and intelligence measures to enhance our defensive and offensive capabilities. Moreover, money to replace existing equipment sold by Huawei, ZTE, and others, largely in rural and sparsely populated areas, but which can affect the nationwide telecommunications grid, is well spent. Expenditures for “regional technology hubs” by contrast, will not enhance creativity, but will shrink the Federal dollars available for critically needed efforts at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community.

Chris Wray has more than enough to occupy his time at the FBI, so his public focus on the threat of Chinese espionage demonstrates just how serious he judges the threat to be. American businesses and government should pay more attention to what he is saying.

Let Pelosi Travel to Taiwan

July 25, 2022

This article first appeared in the Washington Examiner on July 24th. Click here to view the original article.

Whether or not Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) travels to Taiwan in August is a major foreign policy issue. Indeed, the answer will tell us a great deal about who actually controls American foreign policy: Washington or Beijing. We will see whether Xi Jinping’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy, which caught the Biden administration off guard at its inception, will work for Beijing regarding Pelosi.

China’s position on the status of Taiwan, not careful American calculations, has too long dominated U.S. diplomacy with Taipei. Too many in Washington have fretted about “damaging” relations with Beijing, with a few notable exceptions in recent administrations. Too few officials seem concerned either about America’s relations with Taiwan, an important Indo-Pacific ally, or about the damage that capitulating to Beijing would do to our credibility resisting its hegemonic aspirations worldwide.

Responding to Pelosi’s potential trip, China erupted, publicly and privately. “The United States is hollowing out and blurring up the ‘One China’ policy,” China’s U.S. ambassador complained. The White House responded that it still adheres to “strategic ambiguity” regarding Taiwan, leaving the distinct impression Beijing’s intimidation was succeeding. Perhaps due to its overriding concern for climate change negotiations with China, the White House is working overtime to prevent (or at least postpone) Pelosi’s trip — if only it could figure out how.

Biden himself has not addressed the issue squarely, leaving concern about Pelosi’s trip to the Pentagon and worries about the speaker’s safety. Of course, China’s efforts to interfere in Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, its menacing approaches by “fishing fleets” to the Senkaku Islands, which are disputed with Japan, its militarized assertion that the South China Sea constitutes a province of China, and its persistent harassment of Indian forces along the disputed border all indicate that any travel near China — not to mention within China — is potentially dangerous.

Of course, the source of the danger is China itself. Beijing creates the problem and then warns against it as if discussing threatening weather. If we simply accept that Middle Kingdom ultimatums alone will dictate our behavior, Beijing gets its way cost-free. Obviously, we should be clear-eyed in evaluating hostile threats, but our policymakers must learn to distinguish “wolf warrior” diplomatic theater from military reality.

What about the risks to China if it uses force against a Pelosi visit? She is, most importantly, an American citizen. She is also speaker of the House, a position the Constitution created, and, by statute, in the line of presidential succession. Her visit would be no vacation jaunt, whether she travels on military or commercial aircraft. Are we more intimidated by Chinese fist-shaking than they are by the retaliation we would unleash if they endangered the speaker’s safety? If that is true, America has a real problem, a severe one.

Pelosi’s travel highlights why America needs a forthright debate on the fundamentals of our relationship with Taiwan. Biden himself said openly he supported U.S. military involvement in Taiwan’s defense (unlike in Ukraine), but, as so often, his advisers walked that comment back. But jettisoning “strategic ambiguity” is not simply a legitimate viewpoint — it is now quite likely a near-consensus among serious analysts of American interests in the region. Integrating Taiwan into larger frameworks to constrain China makes sense not just for Taiwan but for other concerned neighbors such as Japan and South Korea.

Ultimately, of course, Washington should extend full diplomatic recognition to Taiwan. Doing so would be entirely consistent with the 1933 Montevideo Convention’s conditions for “statehood,” all of which Taiwan meets: defined territory, stable population, functioning government, and the ability to carry out international affairs. The only reason not to act is that Beijing would be unhappy. Given China’s unacceptably belligerent conduct around its Indo-Pacific periphery for the last several decades, however, it is time to recognize reality: Taiwan is a legitimately independent state.

In 1971, then-U.N. Ambassador George H.W. Bush first proposed “dual recognition” (full diplomatic linkages with both China and Taiwan) as a way to stave off expulsion of the Republic of China from the U.N. and its replacement by the People’s Republic of China. Both Taipei and Beijing rejected the compromise, but President Nixon maintained recognition of Taipei. Jimmy Carter mistakenly abandoned that position in 1979 by recognizing Beijing and ditching Taipei. Had Carter not folded dishonorably, the mainland could have done little more than grumble.

In fact, that’s still Beijing’s only real option to this day. Doing anything more than blustering is far riskier to them than to us. I recommended full recognition for Taiwan back in 2000, and the arguments still apply today. Let Pelosi go to Taiwan. It’s a good warm-up for the real thing.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

How to Stiffen Europe’s Resolve After the Iran Nuclear Deal

July 21, 2022

Israel and its Arab friends should visit the Continent’s capitals and deliver a message about the danger.

This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal on July 20th, 2022. Click here to view the original article.

President Biden admitted last week that his long-suffering efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal were finally nearing their end: “We’re waiting for their response. When that will come, I’m not certain. But we’re not going to wait forever.” Of course, we’ve been hearing this since December 2021, even from the Europeans, the deal’s most devoted acolytes.

The cascade of White House concessions during the negotiations, Iran’s additional time to advance its nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs, and the loosening enforcement of U.S. sanctions, have considerably emboldened Tehran’s ayatollahs. While the current ambiguity is far from their ideal, they may well accept living with it indefinitely.

That should not, however, satisfy Washington. Instead, the U.S. should fashion diplomatic strategies to align the original deal’s other Western parties (France, Germany and the U.K.) with Israel and the Arab states most threatened by Iran. For two decades, America’s Middle Eastern and European allies have taken opposing views on how best to prevent Iran from obtaining deliverable nuclear weapons. This divide has sometimes been public, sometimes not, and preferred policies have shifted, but the Europeans have generally stressed negotiation while the regional allies have taken a tougher approach. Unsurprisingly, with the two most concerned groupings of American allies in disagreement, Iran has been able to traverse the disarray, coming ever closer to producing deliverable nuclear weapons. Fixing this problem is a top priority.

Since negotiations have failed repeatedly, Mr. Biden’s main diplomatic goal must be cajoling Europeans into adopting a harder economic and political stance, and accepting that clandestine military actions [BY WHOM?] against Iran’s [YES?] nuclear program have already begun. Even harsher measures may be necessary. If the Europeans share America’s view that a nuclear-capable Iran is unacceptable, they should be prepared to act on that belief.

An initial diplomatic step would be to have those most immediately endangered by Iran, both from its nuclear aspirations and as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, take the lead with our European friends. One could imagine a delegation of, say, Israeli, Bahraini and Emirati foreign ministers visiting their European counterparts to urge a united front against Iran. What an impressive display that would make in Paris, Berlin and London. The tour could include Tallin and Warsaw to symbolize for other Europeans the dangers of living near hostile neighbors.

This joint Arab-Israeli flying squad would bring compelling arguments beyond the global threat of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. The White House has revealed that Iran is near to selling several hundred “attack-capable” drones to Russia, almost certainly to use in Ukraine. Sending drones to Russia is in keeping with Iran’s policy of supplying Yemen’s Houthi rebels with drones and missiles, which are often used to target civilian Saudi and Emirati airports and oil infrastructure.

Iran’s oil sales to China, evading U.S. sanctions weakened under Mr. Biden, have also increased dramatically. By contrast, the Bahraini and Emirati foreign ministers, on behalf of the hydrocarbon-producing Gulf Arabs, can be part of Europe’s solution to its catastrophic mistake of becoming overly dependent on Russian exports.

The traveling foreign ministers could also emphasize that the original deal never delivered the increased visibility into Iran’s nuclear program the world was promised. Instead, Tehran has ignored both its 2015 commitments and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Europe’s leaders, strong U.N. adherents, should be deeply disturbed by International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi’s criticisms of Iranian obstructionism. The IAEA board of governors agreed overwhelmingly in June to censure Iran’s noncompliance, with only Russia and China voting against.

The diplomatic mission can also stress that Tehran’s intransigence over nonnuclear issues ultimately torpedoed revival of the 2015 agreement. Demanding that Washington de-list Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization is completely unrelated to nuclear issues. Of course, the IRGC has threatened terrorism in Europe, such as the foiled 2018 attack on an opposition rally in Paris. Incredibly, Belgian legislators are now considering releasing the Iranian “diplomat” convicted of this bomb plot; perhaps Brussels should be the Middle Eastern flying squad’s first stop. Moreover, albeit under the flawed “universal jurisdiction” concept, Sweden recently convicted Iranian agents for prison murders shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution [WHAT’S THE CONNECTION??].

And, as for potentially using force against Iran’s nuclear efforts, who better than Israel’s current prime minister, Yair Lapid, to deliver the message? As he said during Mr. Biden’s visit: “The only way to stop them is to put a credible military threat on the table.” The Europeans should hear that from Mr. Lapid directly, one-on-one, in their capitals.

America’s counter-proliferation diplomacy on Iran will need to be much more extensive, accompanied by far-tougher economic sanctions and assistance to legitimate opposition groups to overthrow the ayatollahs. A joint Israeli-Arab, foreign-minister traveling team would be a good start.

Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.

The death of Shinzo Abe is a loss to the U.S. and its allies

July 08, 2022

This article first appeared in the Washington Post on July 8th, 2022. Click here to see the original article.

John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump and is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

Shinzo Abe’s assassination was a brutal and completely unforeseen end to a life of public service to the people of Japan. The shock of his death will not dissipate quickly. He was a visionary leader, someone who believed his country was capable of taking a central, and responsible, role in international affairs. His loss will be deeply felt in part because he had more contributions to make.

Americans should appreciate how important Abe was for our nation. Over the past several decades, Japan had sought a role behind the historic memory of its part in initiating World War II and its conduct during that conflict. Abe agreed that Japan was right to believe, after this discreet but public soul-searching by his fellow citizens, that they lived in a “normal” country. And as with any “normal” country, Japan was legitimately entitled to defend its interests, especially in the hostile geography of Northeast Asia.

This Abe was determined to achieve, and he made giant steps toward reaching that once impossible goal.

Abe knew his country’s history well, but he could also see that it was time for Japan, and the rest of the world, to move beyond 1945. Germany had done so, forming a full military defense capacity (albeit one that has fallen into ill repair), and becoming a NATO member. Why shouldn’t Japan be able to do the same? And why shouldn’t the United States fully support Abe’s aspirations, not for Japan, but for ourselves and our other friends and allies in the Indo-Pacific and around the world?

I first met Abe in the early days of the George W. Bush administration, during a visit to Tokyo. At the suggestion of the U.S. Embassy, I had breakfast with Abe, then the deputy chief cabinet secretary and little known outside Japan. Our diplomats had tagged Abe, scion of a prominent political family, as a rising star, and so I found him to be, over 20 years ago.

He had focused on the threat of the North Korean nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs. As a Diet member, he made uncovering the fates of dozens of Japanese hostages kidnapped by Pyongyang a major campaign theme, demanding their safe return to their families, or at least a full accounting of what had happened to them. He never wavered from that goal. When he was assassinated, he was wearing the blue pin representing solidarity with the hostage families on his left lapel.

Through several U.S. administrations during his two stints as prime minister, and as a private citizen and political leader when not in office, Abe never tired of explaining to U.S. officials why they had to take the North Korea threat seriously. No one needed to convince Japan that Pyongyang was dangerous. Nonetheless, naive, ill-informed and obtuse leaders from more distant lands often needed to have the obvious explained to them.

I never saw Abe lose his sense of humor or his patience, as he tried repeatedly to stress why commitments made by various Kim dynasty leaders from the North shouldn’t be trusted. We could have used more of his wise warnings over the coming years. Now, that is not to be.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting in Nara, many instant commentators have said that Abe’s policies were “divisive” and “controversial.” That tells us more about the ideological biases of the commentators than about Abe himself.

He was prudent in his approach, meticulous in his planning (in politics and foreign policy) and resolutely calm in his demeanor. What distinguished him was the strength of his beliefs, despite adversity — adversity so intense that, in 2007, he resigned prematurely from his first term as prime minister, leaving the cognoscenti certain that his political career was over.

But Abe, who was as resolute as any politician in the contemporary democratic world, fought back. Five years later, he was reelected to lead Japan again and became its longest-serving prime minister. What really irritated his opponents were his successes, not his failures.

Abe’s international view is more important today than it ever was. He understood the long-term, indeed existential, threat posed by China, in all its spreading ramifications.

In the last years of his administration, Abe more than anyone else stressed the possibilities of a new constellation in Asia, the Quad: India, Australia, Japan and the United States. Initiated roughly 15 years ago but never developed effectively, Abe saw its potential, quietly pushing other Quad leaders to see what he did.

Especially as nations came to understand China’s role in the coronavirus pandemic, heads of governments in many Indo-Pacific countries intensified their search for more effective ways to constrain China, and they too see the Quad as an important building block.

We do not yet know the motives of Abe’s assassin. He might simply be a madman. But we should not let Abe’s tragic death obscure the permanent contribution he made to his country’s progress, or his friendship toward the United States.

The Case For American Leadership

June 27, 2022

This article first appeared in the Washington Examiner on June 27th, 2022. Click here to see the original article.

This week, President Joe Biden attends the G-7 summit in Germany and a NATO summit in Spain.

These meetings of the free world’s major economic powers and its paramount political-military alliance are particularly significant. America and its allies, seeking recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, have spent their way into dangerous inflation and the face grim prospect of an imminent recession. NATO is engaged in proxy military hostilities with Russia in Ukraine as Europe’s worst land war since 1945 grinds on, producing death, destruction, and global economic consequences. Looming above all else is China, the existential threat for the West’s foreseeable future.

In Henry Luce’s “American Century” (his 1941 aphorism), these diverse, menacing circumstances evoked calls for U.S. leadership to solve the West’s problems. Such calls still ring out today, but few seem to know what they mean. In the United States, the low-grade infection of isolationism persists, questioning why events in the wider world should concern us so much. Ironically, this skepticism is reinforced by reflexive demands for “leadership” that prize heading the parade without actually knowing where the parade is going. It is, therefore, entirely appropriate to consider what “American leadership” means and why we have it.

We should dispense first with the myth that from independence, America had an almost entirely domestic focus, emerging only reluctantly into international affairs in World War I. Hardly. Transforming 13 weak colonies into a transcontinental giant was no mere domestic affair, marked as it was by foreign conflicts — starting with the undeclared 1798-1800 Quasi-War with France and against Barbary pirates in 1801-1805, as well as huge territorial expansion, culminating in 1900 with U.S. control over distant lands such as Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines.

This is not the history of an insular, inward-looking people but the most successful and enduring expansion since ancient Rome. The immeasurable economic capabilities resulting from territorial growth, the flood of immigrants to America, and our determination to maintain free, constitutional, representative government, along with soaring trade, travel, and communications, created the basis on which modern U.S. leadership rests. Three hot wars in Europe in less than a century, starting with the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, followed by the Cold War, did the rest, decimating Europe and ending its global empires.

China’s empire is now the last one standing. Nostalgia for quieter times internationally has been out of date for at least a century. The issue today is whether to continue the way of life we now enjoy by acting in our own interests, together with friends and allies, to protect against common threats. It is a false choice to think we can turn away from the rest of the world and bear no consequences domestically for doing so. We exercise international leadership because we thereby better protect America’s interests, not because we feel charitable toward others. We can choose to abandon U.S. interests, as some advocate, but make no mistake: No one else will protect them for us. The absence of American global leadership produces not greater stability but either growing anarchy or the emergence of hostile powers seeking to advance their interests to our disadvantage.

President Biden should demonstrate this week that America is still capable of providing leadership to confront unprovoked aggression, whether from Russia or China; handle our economies responsibly, undistracted by fanciful economic theories and social ideologies; and strategize on global challenges ahead. Whether Biden is capable of so doing is entirely another question, and his record does not provide much confidence.

NATO is not as allied with Ukraine as the president’s rhetoric suggests; he apparently has no idea that heedless expansion of the money supply has created the inflation now endangering the global economy, and whether he understands the China threat remains to be seen. The real test of U.S. leadership lies not in international diplomatic theatrics, but in hard battles over seemingly mundane, often mind-numbing subjects like the federal budget. One such ongoing struggle is over the size of our defense budget, which has suffered for 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Lulled into spending the “peace dividend” in non-defense areas, the West’s ability to deter and resist growing global threats has not kept pace.

Even as domestic government spending needs drastic reductions to combat inflation, we also need a significant increase in defense capabilities across the full spectrum of military threats. The 2024 presidential contest has already begun. It is not too soon, during 2022’s congressional campaigns, to debate not just budget numbers but America’s place in the world and why our international leadership benefits us and our allies. Our greatest strength is not our political leaders but the people themselves. Treated like adults by politicians, we are fully capable of doing what is required to safeguard our way of life. Let’s see which candidates grasp that reality. There we will find the next president.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

Part III: The foundations of the Jordanian state

June 13, 2022

By Dave Wurmser

In part one, I described the harsh and increasingly hostile anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic rhetoric recently employed by Amman, as well as its attempts to champion the Palestinian cause, wrest sovereignty from Israel on the Temple Mount and resurrect a pre-1852 status quo over Muslim, if not even all, holy sites in Jerusalem into some sort of “Vatican-like” status. I also outlined the accompanying geopolitical shifts in Amman that echo Russian and Non-Aligned Movement narratives rather than its traditional more pro-Western posture.

In part two I examined the various reactions in the West and Israel to this turn of events in Jordan, and the various options publicly debated over the best way to move forward.

In this section, in order to examine further whether Jordan should be confronted, indulged/ignored, or appeased I will both:

Describe the shift in Jordan’s policy. Although King Abdallah has never been identified with either anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic sentiment, and even though in fact he has had a deep investment and history of relations with England and the United States, he had until only a few years ago shown little interest in asserting Jordan’s role among Palestinians or in Jerusalem. Since it is unlikely that something happened that caused so profound a change of heart enough to radically alter his outlook across the board, it is more likely that this shift in policy is a result of pressures and circumstances and a strategic response on how to deal with that change.

Explore the foundations of Jordan’s stability to illustrate how serious a departure this new strategy is and how askew it is of the traditional policies that have secured Jordanian stability.

Jordan’s shift in 2017

The first visible signs of a significant shift in Jordan’s strategy in dealing with the Palestinians and Jerusalem, and by extension Israel, occurred six years ago, in the summer of 2017.

The first Temple Mount Crisis (2017)

In July 2017, three Arabs from Um al-Fahm in Israel traveled to Jerusalem and used the Temple Mount complex and the al-Aqsa Mosque as a hiding place and base of operations to smuggle and hide weapons which they would three days later use to launch a shooting attack on Israeli police. Emerging from the Temple Mount through the Gate of Tribes on July 14, the three terrorists gunned down two policemen standing near the Lion’s Gate of the city and wounded two more, one seriously. The terrorists then used the sanctity of the Temple Mount and al-Aqsa Mosque as a haven into which to retreat under the assumption that Israeli police would not follow them in hot pursuit – which is precisely one of the terms King Abdallah is demanding as an absolute from the Israelis (no Israeli police on Temple Mount ever for any condition, even in self defense or hot pursuit). In 2017, however, Israeli police did follow and successfully neutralized the terrorists.

As a result of this attack and the ongoing suspicion that the al-Aqsa Mosque could become a weapons storage repository by more Palestinian terrorists, Israel decided to install metal detectors to prevent the flow of potential weapons into the compound. What particularly disturbed the Israelis was that in the investigation of the attack, it became clear that members of the Islamic Waqf willfully assisted the attackers in smuggling and storing the weapons as well as harbored them. Moreover, when Israeli police raided the Mount to pursue the terrorists, they discovered that indeed the Waqf had begun storing a substantial amount of other weapons as well, and was using the sanctity of the area as cover to prevent Israeli police presence and observation.

In other words, the danger of the al-Aqsa mosque’s becoming a protected “armory” for the Palestinian factions with the acquiescence of the Waqf was not theoretical. It had just happened, which is what drove the Israeli government to install the magnetometers and cameras, as well as to close the Temple Mount to everyone for two days to calm the situation and to prevent mass demonstrations on the Mount as police swept the area searching for other arsenals. This closure was a response to the call by the Jordanian-sponsored Mufti of Jerusalem (essentially the head of the Waqf), Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, to all Muslims to come and ascend the Temple Mount and defy the Israelis. The Waqf – instead of being an instrument of administration and a voice for calm — had been caught helping to establish a terror infrastructure and haven and then serve as the cheerleaders for ensuing violence.

Jordan – who ostensibly was afforded a special status under the Peace Treaty over the Waqf in order to ensure its peaceful behavior and prevent third-parties from attacking Israel – instead immediately responded not with an apology over having failed in what had been expected of it under the Treaty, but with a sharp rebuke of Israel for installing the magnetometers and cameras. Ignoring entirely the events that had precipitated Israel’s action, Amman escalated its rhetoric in the following days and proceeded to continue to expand the Waqf, sided with the Palestinians, took the lead in escalating and further enflaming the crisis, and accused Jerusalem of changing the status quo of the Temple Mount and began to challenge Israel’s right to even be there.

Into this climate of rising Jordanian-Palestinian incendiary rhetoric and resulting rage – instigated by terrorists, sanctioned by the Waqf and enflamed further by the Jordanian government – it was not long in coming that a Jordanian construction worker, enraged by the course of events, attacked an Israeli diplomat (the deputy head of security in the Israeli embassy) in his apartment in Amman. The result of this attack on July 23, 2017, was unfortunately not only the attacking construction worker’s death but his co-worker as well, a result of the diplomat’s having defended himself.

This eventually led to a dangerous diplomatic standoff where the Israeli diplomat was prevented from leaving Amman, and was de facto held hostage by the Jordanian government as leverage to force Israel to yield on the Temple Mount, remove the metal detectors and cameras, and allow for further expansion of the Waqf. Indeed, a few days later Israel yielded to all of Jordan’s demands and removed the metal detectors installed in the access points to the Temple Mount and allowed the Waqf to expand, in return for which, the Israeli diplomat was allowed to return home.

The return of Naharayim (2018)

It was reinforced less than a year later by another action seen in Israel as hostile, although clearly it was under Jordan’s rights under the peace treaty. When the eastern Mandatory area had been separated from the western part and made into Jordan in 1921, a small area, which included an island and adjacent land where the Yarmouk and Jordan rivers flow together, was farmed by Jews, who remained in it throughout and after the 1948 war. Because the final armistice maps showed Israeli control there, the area remained in Israeli hands ever since, even though earlier maps indicated the small strip of land actually should have been considered outside the Rhodes armistice lines as part of Jordan.

It was a small tract, but it has some importance, especially since it included a power plant – which at one time in the 1920s and 1930s had supplied most of the Mandate with its electricity — and farm in the area of Naharayim on the Jordan River. In the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, however, Jordan asserted its claim to the land, and solution was found to formally recognize the land as part of Jordan, but that Israel could lease the land in 25-year renewable agreements. It was assumed that this was a long-term solution that would lay the issue aside for generations, but in 2018, Jordan suddenly gave notice that when the 25-year lease ended, Israel was to leave the area in entirety and simply abandon the 100-year investment in the power plant and fields. Israel complied because Jordan acted within its rights, but it left a significant amount of bitterness in Israel as behavior unbecoming of two nations in a genuine state of peace.

Traditional strategic cooperation before 2017

This episode marked a significant shift in Jordanian behavior. Amman had been careful not to challenge Israeli sovereignty over areas of Judea and Samaria. In return – as enshrined in the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty – Jordanian interests were given special consideration and Jordan granted an outsized role in the management of Islamic affairs on the Temple Mount was tolerated. It was a strategic relationship that benefitted both parties.

Prior to 2017, Israel-Jordanian cooperation was instrumental in reversing the chaos and bloodshed that had developed as a result of the Oslo process in 1993 and Israel’s precipitous withdrawal and indulgence of Yasir Arafat. This was especially important regarding Jerusalem.

Although Jordan had formally severed its ties to Judea and Samaria in 1988, Israel re-involved Jordan deeply as the Oslo process descended into increasing instability and violence. In particular, Jerusalem and Amman worked together to block increasing PLO and Hamas efforts – assisted in this destabilization by the Turkish government — to establish themselves over Jerusalem institutions. In particular, Israel had learned by the 1990s and 2000s the painful lesson of yielding the Waqf to the PLO’s dominance earlier in the 1990s.

The Oslo debacle

In 1994, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Sulaiman Ja’abari, died. The PLO moved quickly to appoint his successor, Ikrima Sa’id Sabri. Although Sabri was of the Muslim Brotherhood, Arafat had throughout the 1990s simultaneously cultivated , employed, suppressed and controlled Hamas and the Brotherhood. Arafat thus was thus comfortable in bringing into a position of power such a dangerous figure as Sabri, largely because he was confident that he could use Sabri’s talents to enflame and destabilize to his advantage.

Jordan, however, was having none of this. Having traditionally held dominance over the appointment of the Mufti, and highly sensitive to threats posed by the PLO from bitter decades of experience, King Hussein appointed another Mufti, Abdul Qader Abdeen, who was beholden neither to the PLO nor to the Muslim Brotherhood.

In a stark departure from amicable and coordinated Israeli-Jordanian strategies in dealing with Jerusalem for the preceding 30 years, Israel dissed the Jordanians and chose instead to appease the PLO and allow the PLO’s choice, Ikrima Sa’id Sabri – a Palestinian nationalist affiliated with the northern League of the Muslim brotherhood in Israel — to become Mufti of Jerusalem, a perch from which he energized Palestinian violence, threatened Israel, and rattled Amman.

After then having faced an unprecedented wave of violence in the 1990s and first two years of the 2000s, as a result of this catastrophic misstep, Israel realized its strategic mistake and happily seized upon the Jerusalem provisions of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. Israel pressed the PLO heavily to relent and bent Jerusalem’s Islamic structures toward Amman and away from the PLO and Hamas. Arafat had effectively used Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and its violence as an instrument throughout the 1990s, but eventually, after Arafat’s demise, Palestinian President Abu Mazen, lacking any real gravitas and facing so serious a threat over the growing and uncontrollable power of Sabri, especially after the PLO lost Gaza to Hamas in 2006, in private happily but publicly grousing, yielded to Israeli and Jordanian pressure, removed Sabri, and replaced him with another Mufti, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein.

In the great, but very quiet struggle which ensued in the following years, Jordan and Israel cooperated closely to prevent either Hamas or the PLO from weaponizing the issue of Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and the al-Aqsa Mosque in their internal struggles. Both Israel and Jordan knew that any Palestinian role over the sensitive sites would deteriorate into an internal rivalry and lead to a chaotic situation and violence – indeed, an intra-Palestinian bidding war paid in Israeli blood and Jordanian marginalization – that would threaten both Amman and Jerusalem, let alone their respective interests there (Israeli sovereignty and ultimate control and the lead given Jordan to administratively manage the area).

Indeed, by the mid-2000s, Israel and Jordan also began cooperating on a far broader strategic threat — the increasingly dangerous Turkish, neo-Ottoman imperial project launched by Erdogan and publicly, unapologetically touted by his foreign minister, Mehmet Davutoglu, and parliament speaker, Mustafa Sentop. Jordan and Israel together worked to prevent Ankara’s attempt to mobilize Muslims on the Jerusalem issue around Turkey’s new “Khaliphate” and hand the standard of leader of the Sunni world to Erdogan.

And to be sure, it was quite a war zone.

In the first decade and a half of the 2000s, Ankara invested effort and coin to challenge both Jordan and Israel and fill the expanding vacuum left among Palestinians as a result of the increasingly impoverished Hamas and increasingly limp PLO. Ankara aimed broadly, but it focused on Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount to replace the Jordanians. In Turkey’s endeavor to invest in encouraging a new leadership over Palestinian Muslims, it focused extensively, not solely, on Hamas as much as on the Northern league of the Muslim Brotherhood under Ra’ad Salah, and … Ikrima Sa’id Sabri.

Prime Minister Erdogan himself became involved, and soon labeled the very presence of Israel in Jerusalem as an insult to Islam and launched a quiet but overt Turkish governmental effort, led by Dr. Sardar Cam (a close associate of PM Erdogan who earlier had headed his office in parliament), to operate a largely governmentally-funded foundation called “Tika” under the ostensible cover of preserving and reinforcing the Islamic heritage of Jerusalem. By 2018, this foundation had spent USD 63 million in Jerusalem. The local leaders associated with Ankara’s efforts — Shaykh Raad Salah and ousted Mufti Ikrima Sa’id Sabri – used Turkish support and monies to escalate incitement and organized violent incidents against Israel. Another foundation tied to the Turkish government funded bus services to ferry members of the Murabitun and Murabitaat — both of which are banned organizations in Israel — to Jerusalem to conduct activities, many of which result in Israeli-Arab violence. Another organization, the “Agency for Our Heritage,” operated directly out of Istanbul and spent USD 40 million in the late 2010s.

Indeed, to help entangle Israel in law-fare, Ankara also sent old Ottoman land registries (some potentially forged) and lawyers to the Palestinians to challenge Israel everywhere on land ownership.

President Erdogan also has for most of the last two decades employed an increasingly hostile and serious parade of threats. With each year the rhetoric Erdogan employs against the West and Israel grows. By 2015, he even called on the Islamic world to follow him into organizing an Islamic army to “liberate” Jerusalem, which is essentially a declaration of war.

While strategic cooperation anchored to the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty functioned well enough to hamper Ankara’s schemes in the first decade, by the mid-2010s, Israel, in an attempt to tamp down Israeli-Turkish tensions, was loathe to continue to decisively confront Ankara and thus allowed Turkey considerable latitude rather than outright shut it down.

The result was not only an increased Turkish role in many critical places in Jerusalem. It also allowed the reemergence of Ra’ad Salah of the Northern League and Ikrima Sa’id Sabri as voices for Palestinian control and incitement focused on Jerusalem – which not only invited but demanded from Hamas and the PLO a competitive scramble to assert themselves over this most emotive issue. The situation was essentially beginning to spin out of Israel’s and Jordan’s control.

To note, though, Turkey’s primary target at the time was not Jordan, but Saudi Arabia. Ankara understood that by taking the lead in Jerusalem through its institutions and foundations, and through the rising fortunes of its allies Ra’ad Salah and Ikrima Sa’id Sabri, Ankara could begin to challenge Saudi Arabia’s claim to Sunni leadership which was emanating from its custodianship of the Two Holy Mosques — the al-Haram Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina.

The intensity of this Turkish-Saudi, intra-Sunni cold war, and the fear that any weakening of Jordan could undermine Saudi Arabia helped shift Riyadh’s perception of Jordan. From being a traditional rival over the allegiance of the region’s tribes since the late 1910s, suddenly Saudi Arabia viewed Jordan, and indeed even Israel, as a strategic partner in its rivalry against Turkey. Jordan’s partnership in helping Israel prevent the radicalization of Jerusalem institutions by either Turkey, Iran or their local proxies, also strategically helped the Saudis, who had over the last decade found themselves as gravely threatened by Turkey’s neo-Ottoman project – especially the attempt to resurrect the Khaliphate to seize the standard of Sunni Islam — as anyone else in the region.

The Saudis understood how Turkey or Iran could use of the Temple Mount to open a new, violent and highly emotive front in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict to radicalize the region.

That this structure of several Arab states working together with Israel (some openly, some semi quietly) seemed to work so well makes it all the more befuddling and disconcerting that Jordan suddenly shifted the foundations of its policy in July 2017 and became part of the confrontation front on Jerusalem against Israel in cooperation with the PLO – and through the PLO’s complete failure and unpopularity to unwittingly opening the door for HAMAS to seize the issue — rather than assist Israel in keeping the situation there calm.

Why did Jordan do this?

What is Jordan?

To properly understand what would lead to such a dramatic and potentially self-destructive move by Amman, one has to examine the nature of what constitutes Jordanian stability, and indeed, what the very purpose and essence of the Hashemite dynasty is.

To understand the seriousness of the threat, and the gravity of Jordan’s missteps now, one has to first appreciate the geography and foundations of the Jordanian state.

Jordan, north of Amman, is largely part of the urbanized Levantine Sunni Arab structure, which includes Arab Palestinians. Some of these Jordanians are refugees from west of the Jordan River, but most are indigenous inhabitants of what once was called Trans-Jordanian Palestine (mirroring Cis-Jordanian Palestine which includes all the lands west of the Jordan River). These Arab Palestinians have long-standing and deep ties to their mirrored populations across the Jordan River, such as Karameh with Jericho, Zarqa with Jenin, Amman with Jerusalem. They are intertwined populations.

It is not a clean divide. Outside of the cities, some Bedouin tribes have long lived north of Amman, such as the Bani Hassan, who inhabit the areas of Jerash and Zarqa, and the Bani Sakher, who have been in the area of Amman and Madaba. Both thus have a long history in some of those areas North of Ma’an (just south of Amman) and Amman. Moreover, those Bedouin tribes had a history of rejecting the authority of the Ottoman Khalipha, and thus were the primary targets of the Ottoman empire in the 19^th century as it tried to settle Circassian and other Muslim populations from the Balkans and other areas of Samaria to break the geographic integrity of those tribes. As such, north of Amman, and in fact Samaria north of Jerusalem, is somewhat of a mishmash of populations emerging from Ottoman policies of internal exile, with urban populations aligned with the Ottomans in distinct tension with the tribes operating outside the cities in the area, and ultimately because of their hostility to the Ottomans aligned with the Arab Revolt and the Hashemites (led by Lawrence of Arabia).

South of Ma’an, the picture is much clearer. Jordan is the northern-most extension of the realms of the tribes of the Hejaz, among the largest in the northern Hejaz being the Banu Huwaitat of the Banu Laith, who are found primarily in the Wadi Rum area and around Petra.

The Hejaz is the area encompassing northwestern Saudi Arabia, Jordan south of Amman — particularly south of Ma’an – and even southern Israel. This area is the cradle of Islam and the realm and heartland of Arab history and the dominant tribes – most of which emerged from the Nabatean kingdoms and the Ghassanid Arabs aligned with Rome a millennium and a half ago – are its aristocracy and custodians of its identity. The area includes the cities of Mecca and Medina, and the holy “Two Holy Mosques of Islam” within them — the al-Haram Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Thus, the most revered family among these tribes has always been the traditional custodian of the two mosques and the core Hashemite family of the Muslim Prophet himself, Muhammad.

Clearly, the Hashemite, Hejazi pedigree of Jordan’s ruling family – the Hashemites had been the family in in charge of being the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques until the end of World War I — has in the past led Saudi Arabia, which took control of the southern part of the Hejaz and supplanted the Hashemites as the Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques in the late 1910s, into tension with the Hashemites and Jordan. And yet, in recent decades a common purpose of fighting regional forces that threaten both and could undermine the stability of both via destabilization of the Hejaz has led not only to condominium, but even a climate of coordination between the two. In short, the stability of Jordan ever since the rise of Arab nationalism and the threat to Saudi Arabia from the Yemen War (1964) has gradually become ever more a core Saudi interest, with common enemies strategically driving the two into each others’ arms.

But Jordan also assumed in its north the eastern part of the Arab populations of Palestine. While Jordan’s ruling family and its reigning pillar of allies are part of a vast north-south alignment of Hejazi tribes, the urban Arabs of Palestine are oriented east-west on both the trans-Jordanian (Jordanian) and Cis-Jordanian (Israeli) sides of the Jordan River and are part of the more urbanized Levant with a complex history very separated from the Hejazi tribes as well as the tribes further east of Jordan, Iraq and northern Saudi Arabia. Indeed, one can almost think of the Jordan River like a mirror, which were the urban centers in the north and key urban Arab clans on one side have interacted and intermarried along east-west roads with their mirrored equivalents on the other side of the Jordan River, while Bedouin tribes – deeply suspicious of the urbanized Arabs as Ottoman allies – moved about around the cities. There was, indeed, very little north-south movement or interaction of these urban Arabs of northern Palestine, and very little common identity or affinity passing from north to south.

This particular east-west orientation of politics among urbanized Arab Palestinian posed both a threat but also opportunity for Jordan and its reigning structure of tribes and families after 1948. On the one hand, it meant that any unrest in Cis-Jordanian Palestine (Israel, Judea and Samaria) could threaten to spread into Trans-Jordanian Palestine (Jordan), but on the other it also meant that Jordan could also use its sway and control over the eastern Arabs of Palestine to control their western extensions, especially by alliance with the Bedouin tribes of the area (Banu Sakher and Adwan being the biggest in the north and in the Jordan Valley, although in conflict with each other, with lesser tribes in the north as well of the Rwala nomads and the Bani Khaled, Bani Hassan, Bani Sirhan, Sardiyeh and Isa). Against these tribes stood the urbanized populations, which posed a challenge to the Hashemites, especially given their east-west orientation of influence and affinity.

As such, this complex reality upholds the delicate balance in northern Jordan. Hebron can unsettle Ma’an, or Jericho can rattle Karameh, but so too can the control over the Jordanian-sanctioned elites of Ma’an and Karameh help stabilize Hebron and Karameh.

The same dynamic as governs Jordan also applies as well to Israel.

It is precisely this reality – this duality of threat and opportunity to both Amman and Jerusalem – which underpins the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty as both have a vital national interest to work together to ensure calm among the non-Hejazi urbanized (non-tribal) Arabs of both banks of Palestine. Thus, Jordanian-Israeli relations are not based on flowery western notions of peace emanating from a treaty, but on a mutual set of strategic realities that demand from each coordination of the other which long predated any formal peace treaty.

That is why the only unrest, let alone war, that has ever occurred on either of the banks of the Jordan River among the Palestinian was not a result of a Jordanian-Israeli conflict, but a result of an intrusion by external forces to that relationship that challenged the tribes and the Jordanian-cultivated elites of the big towns. Those external forces included a parade of revolutionary agents of upheaval and disruption of the carefully cultivated balance – the German-instigated Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Soviet-inspired Arab nationalists of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his tentacles (the PLO) in 1964-1970, or through the reintroduction of the PLO after 1993 by the Israelis.

As such, other than the brief period from 1993-1996 as a result of the Oslo process, the absolute exclusion of foreign actors was a foundation of Jordanian-Israeli relations and the vital interest of their American ally.

Until now.

Part IV will examine how a series of missteps – not only by Jordan, but by the US and others – rocked the Jordanian state and made wobbly its foundations.

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Israel and its Arab friends should visit the Continent’s capitals and deliver a message about the danger.