Biden is losing contest of wills with Iran over nukes

December 13, 2021
Post Photo

This article appeared in The Hill on December 12, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

Finally, the last whimper seems at hand for President Biden’s effort to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. Inherently flawed, with grievously inadequate verification provisions, and now overtaken by events, the deal’s demise comes not a moment too soon.

We face two closely related, urgent questions: Why has America failed to stop Iran’s nuclear-weapons program? And, with time running out, how does Washington avoid final defeat?

Biden’s advisers, sensing their Holy Grail is unattainable, blame America’s 2018 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), thereby signaling their continuing cluelessness that the deal itself was mistaken, not the withdrawal. The JCPOA was riddled with flaws, but one original sin doomed the entire enterprise to failure. If Biden acknowledged this reality, we might be able to craft a new, broadly agreed U.S. policy. If not, get ready for “Groundhog Day”-style failure.

That central error was allowing Iran any uranium enrichment capability, a bright red line until the Obama administration. In seven resolutions from 2006 to 2010, the United Nations’ Security Council demanded that Iran halt all uranium enrichment, the physical work necessary to raise the concentration of uranium’s fissile isotope, U235, to increasingly higher levels relative to non-fissile U238. (In natural uranium, U235 occurs 0.7 percent of the time, while U238 is 99.3 percent.)

Earlier negotiators, following the Security Council’s resolutions, rejected all Iranian demands to continue enrichment activity. During 2012, however, President Obama bent his knee; the U.S. ultimately accepted Iran’s continued uranium enrichment to reactor-grade levels (3-to-5 percent of U235) if Tehran would stop enrichment to 20 percent (allegedly needed to fuel an aging research reactor). This concession rested on fundamental misperceptions of what varying enrichment levels mean. Obama’s negotiators feared that 20 percent enrichment was too close to weapons-grade levels (typically, 90 percent U235), but asserted that limiting Iran to reactor-grade enrichment would minimize the risks of “breaking out” to nuclear weapons.

This was a critical mistake, one we must not repeat in a post-JCPOA world. Enriching “merely” to reactor-grade levels accomplishes 70 percent of the work required to reach weapons-grade uranium. Enriching from reactor-grade to 20 percent U235 means completing roughly 20 percent of the remaining work to reach weapons-grade levels, by definition, therefore, closer to the danger point.

Far more important, however, and obvious except to Obama’s negotiators, is that 70 percent of the work is greater than 20 percent. If Iran were forbidden to undertake the first 70 percent (i.e., to reactor-grade levels), the subsequent 20 percent would be irrelevant, as would be any higher U235 percentages.

Obama’s negotiators were blind to this point. They thus won a small negotiating victory but lost the diplomatic war. By allowing reactor-grade enrichment, Obama ensured Tehran would always be just baby steps from weapons-grade capabilities, a lethal concession. His negotiators were wholly wrong, moreover, in believing that reactor-grade levels (specifically, 3.5 percent in the JCPOA) were far enough from weapons-grade that monitoring and constraints on production and stockpiling would permit an effective international response before Iran could break out to actual weapons.

But any possibility of restraining Iran by agreement requires effective verification, which the JCPOA never supplied, demonstrated by Iran’s restrictions on International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring. Equally important, the additional time needed to reach weapons-grade levels from 3.5 percent rather than 20 percent enrichment is a matter of weeks, and depends more on the number of centrifuges spinning than the variance between these starting points. Moreover, in negotiating the JCPOA, Obama abandoned efforts to ascertain the “prior military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program, contrary to French and other public statements about needing to do just that.

Iran got what it wanted: No real disclosure of its prior military programs, later revealed by a daring Israeli intelligence raid; no effective verification of its JCPOA compliance; and, the jewel in the crown, license to do 70 percent of the work toward weapons-grade uranium.

Looking ahead, Iran will flatly reject any deal not embodying these three points, among others. The inescapable conclusion is that Tehran is so determined to get nuclear weapons, and so practiced in deceit and deception, that the regime cannot be allowed even “peaceful” nuclear programs.

For decades, U.S. presidents have proclaimed it “unacceptable” for Iran to have nuclear weapons. They said the same about North Korea. They largely failed with North Korea, and are poised to fail with Iran, too. Economic sanctions, without more, have failed — and China in particular is poised to buy all the oil Iran can sell, and either veto or ignore future Security Council sanctions.

If a nuclear Iran is truly unacceptable, the only paths open are regime change in Tehran and military/intelligence measures rendering Iran’s nuclear programs harmless. Accordingly, and very late in the day, Washington must decide who will win this contest of wills. Tehran is ahead. Over to you, Mr. President.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Trump from 2018 to 2019, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and held senior State Department posts in 2001-2005 and 1985-1989. His most recent book is “The Room Where It Happened” (2020). He is the founder of John Bolton Super PAC, a political action committee supporting candidates who believe in a strong U.S. foreign policy.

Expect America’s tensions with China and Russia to rise in 2018

December 29, 2017
Post Photo

This article appeared in The Hill on December 29, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
December 29, 2017

Yesterday’s 2017 review and forecast for 2018 focused on the most urgent challenges the Trump administration faces: the volatile Middle East, international terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Today, we examine the strategic threats posed by China and Russia and one of President Trump’s continuing priorities: preserving and enhancing American sovereignty.

China has likely been Trump’s biggest personal disappointment in 2017, one where he thought that major improvements might be possible, especially in international trade. Despite significant investments of time and attention to President Xi Jinping, now empowered in ways unprecedented since Mao Tse Tung, very little has changed in Beijing’s foreign policy, bilaterally or globally. There is no evidence of improved trade relations, or any effort by China to curb its abuses, such as pirating intellectual property, government discrimination against foreign traders and investors, or biased judicial fora.

Even worse, Beijing’s belligerent steps to annex the South China Sea and threaten Japan and Taiwan in the East China Sea continued unabated, or even accelerated in 2017. In all probability, therefore, 2018 will see tensions ratchet up in these critical regions, as America (and hopefully others) defend against thinly veiled Chinese military aggression. Japan in particular has reached its limits as China has increased its capabilities across the full military spectrum, including at sea, in space and cyberwarfare.

Taiwan is not far behind. Even South Korea’s Moon Jae In may be growing disenchanted with Beijing as it seeks to constrain Seoul’s strategic defense options. And make no mistake, what China is doing in its littoral periphery is closely watched in India, where the rise of Chinese economic and military power is increasingly worrying. The Trump administration should closely monitor all these flash points along China’s frontiers, any one of which could provoke a major military confrontation, if not next year, soon thereafter.

North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is where China has most disappointed the White House. Xi Jinping has played the United States just like his predecessors, promising increased pressure on Pyongyang but not delivering nearly enough. The most encouraging news came as 2017 ended, in the revelation that Chinese and American military officers have discussed possible scenarios involving regime collapse or military conflict in North Korea. While unclear how far these talks have progressed, the mere fact that China is engaging in them shows a new level of awareness of how explosive the situation is. So, 2018 will be critical not only regarding North Korea’s nuclear weapons threat but also whether Sino-American relations improve or take a distinct turn for the worse.

On Russia, the president has not given up on Vladimir Putin, at least not yet, but that may well come in 2018. Putin is an old-school, hard-edged, national interest-centered Russian leader, defending the “rodina” (the motherland), not a discredited ideology. Confronted with U.S. strength, Putin knows when to pull back, and he is, when it suits him, even capable of making and keeping deals. But there is no point in romanticizing the Moscow-Washington dynamic. It must be based not on personal relationships but on realpolitik.

No better proof exists than Russia’s reaction to Trump’s recent decision to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine, which is now a war zone entirely because of Russian aggression. To hear Moscow react to Trump’s weapons decision, however, one would think he was responsible for increased hostilities. President Obama should have acted at the first evidence of Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine, and even Trump’s aid is a small step compared to President Bush’s 2008 proposal to move Kiev quickly toward NATO membership. Nonetheless, every independent state that emerged from the Soviet Union, NATO member or not, is obsessed with how America handles Ukraine. They should be, because the Kremlin’s calculus about their futures will almost certainly turn on whether Trump draws a line on Moscow’s adventurism in Ukraine.

Just as troubling as Russia’s menace in Eastern and Central Europe is its reemergence as a great power player in the Middle East. Just weeks ago, the Russian Duma ratified an agreement greatly expanding Russia’s naval station at Tartus, Syria. In 2015, Obama stood dumbfounded as Russia built a significant air base in nearby Latakia, thus cementing the intrusion of Russia’s military presence in the Middle East to an extent not seen since Anwar Sadat expelled Soviet military advisers and brought Egypt into the Western orbit in the 1970s.

This expansion constitutes a significant power projection for the Kremlin. Indeed, it seems clear that Russia’s support (even more than Iran’s) for Syria’s Assad regime has kept the dictatorship in power. Russia’s assertiveness in 2017 also empowered Tehran, even as the ISIS caliphate was destroyed, to create an arc of Shia military power from Iran, through Iraq and Syria, linking up with Hezbollah in Lebanon. This Russian-Iranian axis should rank alongside Iran’s nuclear-weapons program on America’s list of threats emanating from the Middle East.

Finally, the pure folly of both the U.N. Security Council and the General Assembly crossing the United States on the Jerusalem embassy decision was a mistake of potentially devastating consequences for the United Nations. Combined with the International Criminal Court’s November decision to move toward investigating alleged U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, there is now ample space for the White House to expand on the president’s focus on protecting American sovereignty.

Trump’s first insight into the rage for “global governance” among the high minded came on trade issues, and his concern for the World Trade Organization’s adjudication mechanism. These are substantial and legitimate, but the broader issues of “who governs” and the challenges to constitutional, representative government from international bodies and treaties that expressly seek to advance global governing institutions are real and growing. America has long been an obstacle to these efforts, due to our quaint attachment to our Constitution and the exceptionalist notion that we don’t need international treaties to “improve” it.

No recent president has made the sovereignty point as strongly as Trump, and the United Nations and International Criminal Court actions in 2017 now afford him a chance to make decisive political and financial responses in 2018. If 2017 was a tumultuous year internationally, 2018 could make it seem calm by comparison.

Threats of 2017 – Mideast, terror, weapons – will linger in the new year

December 28, 2017
Post Photo

This article appeared in The Hill on December 28, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
December 28, 2017

Domestically and internationally, President Trump finished 2017 in dramatic fashion. Obtaining the most sweeping tax cuts in 30-plus years (and repealing ObamaCare’s most philosophically oppressive aspect, the individual mandate) was a landmark achievement. And, by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, then suggesting major changes in U.S. funding of the United Nations, he disrupted foreign-policy conventional wisdom on both the Middle East and “global governance.”

The administration’s national security strategy, published this month, centered its foreign policy in the conservative mainstream, but there is little time for complacency. On Inauguration Day, the president inherited acute dangers and longer-range strategic challenges, ignored or mishandled for years. While Trump has emphasized his intention to reverse course, the national security agencies have a mixed record in actually following his lead. Events in 2018 could well determine whether America resumes control of its international fate, or whether it continues to be buffeted by threats it could overcome but chooses not to.

In this article today, we review the administration’s 2017 record and 2018 prospects in three critical near-term areas: Middle East turmoil, international terrorism, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Tomorrow, we consider the longer-term risks posed by China and Russia, and the overarching issue of U.S. sovereignty.

Trump’s Jerusalem decision had the virtue of recognizing reality and simultaneously erasing libraries of arid scholasticism on the “Middle East peace process.” The long-predicted violent reaction by the “Arab Street” largely failed to materialize, despite palpable efforts by Turkey’s President Erdogan and Tehran’s ayatollahs to foment trouble. And the inevitable efforts in the U.N. Security Council and General Assembly were essentially charades, ritualistic theater that now makes even the participants weary. The lasting consequences of bashing America in New York will more likely be felt within the United Nations, as we will see tomorrow, rather than in the Middle East.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states are undergoing sweeping changes, the full dimensions of which cannot yet be confidently predicted. These changes have, in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view, opened prospects for resolving the Palestinian and broader regional issues heretofore beyond reach. The behind-the-scenes White House peace initiative, also unconventional, has given the foreign policy establishment a case of the vapors.

Now unleashed, Riyadh’s “modernization” efforts, in economic and social policy as well as religion, may appear unstoppable, but it would be a mistake for the administration simply to assume so. The Shah of Iran had far less distance to travel to “modernize” his country, and seemingly lighter opposition than the Saudi monarchy faces today. Nonetheless, the 1979 Islamic Revolution deposed the shah, leaving Iran repressed by the brutal theocratic regime founded by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Both Saudi reformers and Washington need to remember this catastrophe, primarily to avoid the possibility of radical backlash, but also to put in place contingency plans should there be either a countercoup or a religious eruption similar to 1979 Iran. The last thing we want is history recording we weren’t ready, that we didn’t try to prevent such a crisis, that the inevitable spiking oil prices and violent global market fluctuations surprised us.

Despite America’s 16 years combating radical Islamist terrorism since 9/11, serious threats against friendly Middle East regimes are entirely predictable. These threats underline the unfinished business of eliminating ISIS (following its caliphate’s destruction in 2017), Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and other, still nascent terrorist groups. Against entrenched resistance from Obama-era judges, Trump has tried protecting the homeland through stricter immigration controls. The Supreme Court will likely resolve several key legal issues in 2018.

The real fight, however, will continue to be in the anarchic regions where the terrorists take root, whether Afghanistan, the hollow shells of Syria and Iraq, Yemen, Libya or the chaotic seam between Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa where Boko Haram and its ilk continue their depredations. America requires what the British once called “forward defense” against the terrorists, at least until the current wave of radical Islamism finally burns itself out in distant decades and until its financial supporters like Iran turn off the flow of money and weapons. Indeed, it is the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons threat from rogue states and their terrorist proxies that was and will continue to be the gravest danger facing America and its friends worldwide.

In 2017, the president acted on his critique of the fatally flawed Iran nuclear agreement by refusing to certify it under the Corker-Cardin legislation. Because, however, Washington did not actually withdraw from the deal, it still provides cover and legitimacy to the terrorist regime of the ayatollahs and allows Europe, Russia and China to trade and invest, thereby subsidizing nuclear proliferation and terrorism. Just a few weeks into 2018, the White House will face yet another certification decision, which will afford the Iran agreement’s vociferous supporters within the permanent bureaucracy yet another opportunity to keep it on life support. Trump should abrogate the deal as early as possible and think seriously about how to thoroughly denuclearize Iran.

Trump also jettisoned President Obama’s failed “strategic patience” with North Korea, and not a moment too soon. Pyongyang’s threat will almost certainly come to a head in 2018. The past year showed dramatic improvements in both the North’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. China could act decisively, as it has the unique capability to do, to overthrow Kim Jong Un’s regime, allowing the Korean peninsula to be reunified or installing a new regime and, with America, jointly denuclearizing the North.

If not, Washington will face an unattractive but unavoidable binary choice: Either we will have to consider using preemptive military force to destroy North Korea’s nuclear and missile facilities, or we and our allies will have to endure Kim Jong Un with deliverable nuclear weapons. And it won’t just be a threat from the North but from ISIS or Al Qaeda, Iran, and other rogue states with nuclear aspirations and hard currency to which Pyongyang can sell. This year was fraught on all these issues, but 2018 will be even more so. Tomorrow, we consider the long-term strategic threats the Trump administration faced this year — and could confront head-on next year.

16 years later: Lessons put into practice?

September 11, 2017
Post Photo

This article appeared in The Pittsburgh Tribune Review on September 10, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
September 10, 2017

Tomorrow marks the 16th anniversary of al-Qaida’s 9/11 attacks. We learned much that tragic day, at enormous human and material cost. Perilously, however, America has already forgotten many of Sept. 11’s lessons.

The radical Islamicist ideology manifested that day has neither receded nor “moderated” as many naive Westerners predicted. Neither has the ideology’s hatred for America or its inclination to conduct terrorist attacks. Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution brought radical Islam to the contemporary world’s attention, and it is no less malevolent today than when it seized our Tehran embassy, holding U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days.

The Taliban, which provided al-Qaida sanctuary to prepare the 9/11 attacks, threaten to retake control in Afghanistan. Al-Qaida persists and may even be growing worldwide.

While ISIS’s caliphate in Syria and Iraq will not survive much longer, countries across North Africa and the Middle East (“MENA”) have destabilized or fractured entirely. Syria and Iraq have ceased to exist functionally, and Libya, Somalia and Yemen have descended into chaos. Pakistan, an unstable nuclear-weapons state, could fall to radicals under many easily predictable scenarios.

The terrorist threat is compounded by nuclear proliferation. Pakistan has scores of nuclear weapons, and Iran’s program continues unhindered. North Korea has now conducted its sixth, and likely thermonuclear, nuclear test, and its ballistic missiles are near to being able to hit targets across the continental United States. Pyongyang leads the rogue’s gallery of would-be nuclear powers, and is perfectly capable of selling its technologies and weapons to anyone with hard currency.

During Barack Obama’s presidency, he ignored these growing threats and disparaged those who warned against them. His legacy is terrorist attacks throughout Europe and America, and a blindness to the threat that encouraged Europe to accept a huge influx of economic migrants from the MENA region, whose numbers included potentially thousands of already-committed terrorists.

IGNORING NORTH KOREA

Obama also ignored North Korea, affording it one of an aspiring proliferator’s most precious assets: time. Time is what a would-be nuclear state needs to master the complex scientific and technological problems it must overcome to create nuclear weapons.

And, in a dangerous unforced error that could be considered perfidious if it weren’t so foolish, Obama entered the 2015 Vienna nuclear and missile deal that has legitimized Tehran’s terrorist government, released well over a hundred billion dollars of frozen assets, and dissolved international economic sanctions. Iran has responded by extending its presence in the Middle East as ISIS had receded, to the point where it now has tens of thousands of troops in Syria and is building missile factories there and in Lebanon.

Before 2009, publishers would have immediately dismissed novelists who brought them such a plainly unrealistic plot. Today, however, it qualifies as history, not fantasy. This is the agonizing legacy the Trump administration inherited, compounded by widespread feelings among the American people that we have once again sacrificed American lives and treasure overseas for precious little in return.

These feelings are understandable, but it would be dangerous to succumb to them. We didn’t ask for the responsibility of stopping nuclear proliferation or terrorism, but we are nonetheless ultimately the most at risk from both these threats.

And as we knew during the Cold War, but seem to have forgotten since it ended, our surrounding oceans do not insulate us from the risk of long-distance nuclear attacks. We face the choice of fighting the terrorists on our borders or inside America itself, or fighting them where they seek to plot our demise, in the barren mountains of Afghanistan, in the MENA deserts, and elsewhere.

Nor can we shelter behind a robust national missile-defense capability, hoping simply to shoot down missiles from the likes of North Korea and Iran before they hit their targets. We do not have a robust national missile defense capability, thanks yet again to Barack Obama’s drastic budget cuts.

President Trump appreciates that nuclear proliferation and radical Islamic terrorism are existential threats for the United States and its allies. During the 2016 campaign, he repeatedly stressed his view that others should play a larger role in defeating these dangerous forces, bearing their fair share of the burden. But candidate Trump also unambiguously (and entirely correctly) called for restoring our depleted military capabilities because he saw that American safety depended fundamentally on American strength.

Sept. 11 should be more than just a few moments of silence to remember the Twin Towers falling, the burning Pentagon and the inspiring heroism of regular Americans in bringing down United Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa. We should also seriously consider today’s global threats. Those who made America an exceptional country did so by confronting reality and overcoming it, not by ignoring it.

Iran & the next Middle East war

April 09, 2017
Post Photo

This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review on April 9, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
April 9, 2017

Nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists and their state sponsors may not be the only threat from the Middle East. But in the coming years, it definitely ranks first on the list.

Thus, as American decision-makers focus on destroying ISIS in Syria and Iraq, they should also be shaping how that war ends to prevent nuclear Iran from benefiting the most.

Syria’s chemical-weapons attack against rebel forces and President Trump’s forceful response at week’s end clearly demonstrate how complex is the regional balance of forces.

The Pentagon is reviewing options to defeat ISIS as rapidly as possible, thus preventing the radical Islamists from recruiting, training and deploying more terrorists throughout the West. This is all to the good, alleviating the dangers to innocent civilians far from the Middle East conflict.

But the Pentagon and the White House should also emphasize another critical strategic fact inherent in any complex, multiparty conflict: Completely eliminating one combatant invariably benefits all those remaining. Certainly, this current war is as complex and volatile as any America has ever seen. Nonetheless, the United States must defeat ISIS through a strategy that maximizes the postwar position of its allies rather than Iran’s. Conversely, Iran and its regional surrogates (Iraq’s current regime, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah terrorists) should find their relative strength increased as little as possible.

However unpleasant it may be to face the reality of one conflict rapidly succeeding another, our anti-ISIS strategy must recognize Iran’s long-term scenario, where its coalition strives for regional hegemony over Israel and Arab states friendly to America. Iran remains the most prominent state sponsor of terrorism, first designated by Ronald Reagan in 1984 and holding that dubious designation ever since. It is the world’s central banker for international terrorism, funding and arming Shia terrorists like Hezbollah and Sunni terrorists like Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Troubling Trump ‘reality’

It is therefore troubling when Trump administration spokesmen say that leaving Assad in power in Damascus is now a regional reality we must accept. Instead, as we pursue the top priority of destroying ISIS, we should avoid strengthening either Assad’s Iran-backed regime or Hezbollah, which dominates Lebanon and threatens Israel.

In both Iraq and Syria, many Sunnis supported ISIS not because of its extremist ideology but because they opposed, respectively, the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad or Assad’s Alawite regime in Damascus. Accordingly, the last thing we want is a Tehran-dominated Iraqi government increasing its territorial control over Sunni lands in Western Iraq recaptured from ISIS.

We should substantially reverse President Obama’s support to Iraq’s government, as in the ongoing battle for Mosul, which is slowly being obliterated. Baghdad’s forces, especially its Shia militias, are continuing to commit atrocities against the Sunnis and Christians they are supposedly liberating from ISIS, laying the basis for future conflicts.

Divisions among the Kurds are equally complicated; some are reliable allies in Iraq, but others are mortal enemies of Turkey, still a NATO ally, albeit a problematic one.

Tehran’s arc of influence

Tehran’s objective is clear: an arc of influence from Iran through Iraq and Syria, anchored in Lebanon by Hezbollah. From this geographic base, terrorist attacks against Israel, Jordan and the Arabian Peninsula’s oil-producing monarchies, conventional warfare and ultimately even nuclear weapons are entirely feasible.

There should be little doubt that Iran, whose path to deliverable nuclear weapons was paved by Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement, would readily use or threaten to use those weapons, or provide them to terrorists, to achieve regional hegemony. Iran’s continuing menace as a terrorist state is inextricably linked to its nuclear program, and that is one reason why Obama’s nuclear deal is so inadvisable.

It also explains why meaningful anti-terrorism cooperation with Russia is impossible as long as Russia aligns itself with the ayatollahs.

The grim reality is that Russia and Iran are functional allies in this and probably future Middle East wars, less interested today in destroying ISIS than in consolidating and expanding their positions in preparation for the next conflict.

Russia stood by Assad even when his prospects looked bleakest during Syria’s bloody post-2011 civil war. Moscow was determined not only to maintain its Tartus naval facility in Syria, but to expand its reach, regaining levels of influence unmatched since Anwar Sadat expelled Soviet military advisers in the 1970s.

By unequivocally calling for ISIS’s immediate defeat, candidate Trump marked victory in this critical aspect of the war on terror a principal goal of his administration, distinguishing himself clearly from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Now, to re-establish real international peace and security, we should achieve victory over ISIS in ways that protect America and its friends against the continuing nuclear and terrorist threats from Tehran’s radical Islamist regime.

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

Tomahawks fired, now think about the new Middle East

April 09, 2017
Post Photo

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

By John Bolton
April 9, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 13, 2017
Post Photo

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

By John Bolton
February 13, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Iran Deal Can’t Be Enforced

February 05, 2017
Post Photo

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

By John Bolton
February 5, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cracks in the International Criminal Court

October 31, 2016
Post Photo

This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 31, 2016. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
October 31, 2016

The International Criminal Court—established by an international treaty and operating since 2002 in The Hague—is under assault from within. South Africa, Burundi and Gambia have announced their intent to withdraw from the ICC (the first members to do so), and other African states, such as Kenya, are also on the brink.

When “nonaligned” nations begin deserting any international organization, it surely is in real trouble. But for reasons that have been clear since the Statute of Rome creating the ICC was negotiated, it has never been in America’s interest to see the court succeed. We should hope the African exodus continues.

The ostensible trigger for the withdrawal is that many African nations are unwilling to arrest and remand to the ICC Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, accused of genocide and war crimes, when he enters their sovereign territory. There is hardly a less sympathetic figure on the planet, outside of Islamic State and al Qaeda. However, the issue is emphatically not whether one favors “justice” for international wrongdoers, but whether the ICC—with its inherent illegitimacy—could ever be the right vehicle for the job.

Within the African Union (open to all countries on the continent) the issue is also made more complex by a rising feeling that the ICC is the latest European neocolonial pretext to interfere in their internal affairs. Since the court’s founding, all 39 public ICC indictments have been of Africans.

Given the European Union’s deepening travails, Europe hardly has the time, will or resources to dabble much in neocolonialism. Yet it is also true that the ICC has been the Western human-rights community’s dearest project, pursued with near-religious devotion in much of Europe and the U.S., and much less enthusiastically elsewhere.

Europeans happily embraced this additional effort to reduce their own sovereignty by joining an institution that could severely compromise their own justice systems. Yet only 124 of 193 U.N. members have joined. The U.S. removed its signature from the Rome Statute in 2002, and even Barack Obama never re-signed, knowing that Senate ratification was impossible—Americans up to the president himself remain at risk of ICC prosecution if U.S. personnel are alleged to commit offenses on a member state’s territory.

Russia, China and India are the most prominent among nearly 70 other nations that have not become members, although something called “Palestine” has joined. This is hardly the trajectory of a viable international institution.

What Africa’s simmering discontent really exposes are the fundamental fallacies underlying the ICC project itself. The world is not one civil society, like a real country, within which disputes are resolved peacefully under the rule of law. Pretending that the globe is a nation under construction, and establishing institutions that pretend to perform like national legislatures, courts and executives, won’t make the world a country.

Even characterizing the ICC primarily as a court ignores the real problem. The Rome Statute’s actual danger is less the court than its prosecutor, which, as Americans understand the separation of powers, is not a judicial function but an executive one. Next to the power to wage war, prosecutorial authority is the most-potent, most-feared responsibility in any executive’s arsenal.

In the case of the ICC, its ability to prosecute democratically elected officials and their military commanders for allegations of war crimes or crimes against humanity could undercut the most fundamental responsibility of any government, the power of self-defense. This power, lodged in the ICC’s prosecutor, is what Africans are really protesting, and also why the U.S. will not join the ICC in the imaginable future.

The prosecutor is much like the “independent counsels” created in America by post-Watergate legislation. These prosecutors performed so irresponsibly and oppressively that a bipartisan congressional majority quietly allowed the statute to lapse. Americans now understand that political accountability—in the broad constitutional sense that federal prosecutorial legitimacy stems from the president’s election—is absolutely critical to responsible law-enforcement.

ICC advocates contend that the prosecutor is supervised by the court itself. Yet in the U.S., for instance, our separation of governmental powers specifically rejects judicial supervision of prosecutors—precisely because elected, and therefore politically accountable, officials must be vested with responsibility for prosecutorial decisions. ICC advocates also argue that the prosecutor is supervised by the Rome Statute’s 124 state parties.

This is purest fantasy. Anything supervised by 124 governments isn’t supervised by anyone, as the sprawling U.N. system demonstrates on virtually a daily basis. Particularly from an American perspective, the ICC’s lack of political accountability and dangerous potential to impede resolution of global conflicts proves it is not fit for purpose.

No wonder the ICC is well on the way to becoming yet another embarrassment like the International Court of Justice or the U.N. Human Rights Council.