A U.N. Reform Plan for Trump and Stefanik

December 26, 2024

The new administration should reject mandatory ‘assessments’ and fund only programs that work.
Elise Stefanik, Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has her work cut out for her. Fortunately, she’s already aware of the U.N.’s flaws. In a September op-ed for the Washington Examiner, she applauded Mr. Trump for withdrawing from the “corrupt and antisemitic” Human Rights Council and defunding the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the U.N.’s permanent refugee organization for Palestinians, during his first term. She also praised House Republicans for voting to impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court.

Ms. Stefanik joins a long line of U.S. officials dismayed by the U.N.’s profound failings, including its deep-seated bias against Israel. As one of those officials, my contributions to U.N. reform include implementing President George W. Bush’s decision to remove America’s signature from the treaty establishing the ICC, advising Mr. Bush to vote against creating the Human Rights Council and then casting the vote, and leading the effort to repeal the U.N.’s infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution. Years later, in 2018, I recommended that Mr. Trump withdraw from the Human Rights Council and defund Unrwa.

But the job is far from over. No one should underestimate the difficulties that lie ahead or the effort that will be required to achieve real, lasting U.N. reform. A major obstacle is our own State Department. Its bureaucracy historically has been unwilling to do the heavy lifting required to muster support for transforming the U.N. That burden will fall not only on U.S. missions to U.N. components but also on the State Department’s regional bureaus, which are responsible for bilateral relations with the other 192 members. For decades, the regional bureaus have found reasons not to engage, pleading that innumerable bilateral issues be given higher priority. Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio will need to crack the whip for reform to succeed.

The new administration should prove to U.N. members that its goal of reform isn’t merely rhetorical. Washington’s most important weapon will be its wallet—decisions about how much it financially contributes, or doesn’t contribute, to the U.N. Current spending is out of control. In 2022, the most recent year for which we have accurate data, the U.S. contributed more than $18 billion, accounting for roughly one-third of total U.N. funding. As the Heritage Foundation reported, “the U.S. provided more funding to the U.N. system than 185 other U.N. member states combined.” That year we forked over 8.5 times the amount that China, the second-largest donor, contributed.

Funding for U.N. components falls into two categories: mandatory “assessed” contributions and voluntary contributions. Assessments are calculated by opaque “capacity to pay” formulas, which have historically made America the largest contributor. After decades of negotiation and legislation, U.S. assessments are capped at 22% for most contributions and 25% for peacekeeping operations. On a one-nation-one-vote basis, bodies like the General Assembly decide agency budgets, and members then pay their percentage shares.

Assessments therefore amount to taxation of America by other U.N. members. A majority of member governments tells us what we owe, on pain of losing our vote in U.N. governing bodies if we don’t pay up. That alone is sufficient reason to reject the concept of assessments, since it isn’t our votes in these bodies that matter. The only vote that matters is our Security Council vote (and veto), our main shield against one-nation-one-vote majorities U.N.-system-wide. Our permanent seat in the council and its vote are written into the U.N. Charter, and we can veto changes to the charter. The potential negative consequences of ending assessed contributions, then, are essentially nil.

U.N. bureaucrats, U.S. officials and nongovernmental organizations assert without evidence that America gets enormous credit for its contributions to the U.N. and warn that America’s influence would diminish worldwide if those contributions were significantly reduced or eliminated. These assertions are false. Special-interest advocates simply take our current level of funding for granted, complain that it’s inadequate and demand more. It’s time they get their comeuppance.

The U.N. Charter doesn’t require assessed contributions. The charter says merely that the organization’s expenses shall be “apportioned by the General Assembly,” but requires no specific approach. The assembly could make contributions entirely voluntary, as is the case already with some U.N. agencies and programs. The Trump administration simply needs to resolve against the U.N. system’s longstanding reliance on assessments until the totally voluntary approach prevails and other members acquiesce.

Shortly after taking office, Mr. Rubio and Ms. Stefanik should announce that the U.S. no longer accepts the concept of assessed contributions. Henceforth, we will pay only voluntary contributions, which we will decide by evaluating the performance of each U.N. agency and program. We may zero out some programs; we may voluntarily fund others at or near our current assessed level; we may even increase funding for others. But we will decide. And every other U.N. member will have the same prerogative.

This approach rests on the revolutionary assumption that we fund the U.N. based on its performance, paying only for what we want and insisting that we get what we pay for. U.N. agencies that are funded entirely by voluntary donations, such as the World Food Program, generally tend to outperform those funded by assessments. Because they have to prove their worth annually, they have an incentive to sustain and even boost their performance. If voluntarily funded programs fail or falter, we should reduce their funding accordingly.

Ultimately, some agencies will prove unreformable, and America should simply withdraw from them. The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization immediately comes to mind, as it did for President Ronald Reagan, who withdrew the U.S. from Unesco in 1984. The country rejoined in 2003 under Mr. Bush, Mr. Trump withdrew in his turn, and Joe Biden rejoined. Doubtless Mr. Trump will withdraw again—and rightly so.

Using America’s money as an existential threat will rock the U.N. system. While many other reforms are possible, they won’t match the power of unilaterally controlling our contributions. Besides, we need a much larger defense budget; reducing contributions to the U.N. is a good start to find the necessary funding.

This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on December 26, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

The Fall of Assad

December 17, 2024

History is moving fast in the Middle East, raising the possibility, for well or ill, of massive changes throughout the region. The collapse of Syria’s Assad-family dictatorship took everyone by surprise, starting with Bashar al-Assad himself, and certainly including Russia and Iran. Arab and Western intelligence services missed the regime’s vulnerability, particularly the weakness and disloyalty of its military and security services.

The brutal dictatorship is gone, but what comes next? Most importantly, Assad’s removal is yet another massive defeat for Iran’s ruling mullahs. Following Israel’s thrashing of Hezbollah and its near-total dismemberment of Hamas, this is the third major catastrophe for Tehran’s anti-Israel “ring-of-fire” strategy. While Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu agreed to a cease fire with Hezbollah, he has made clear it lasts for only sixty days, ending just after the Joe Biden leaves office. Hezbollah will be in further dire trouble if its overland supply route through Iraq and Syria is permanently blocked. There is no cease fire with Hamas, meaning both terrorist proxies could face further Israeli decimation.

As for Iran itself, the situation could hardly be worse. With three major pillars of its regional power already fallen or on the way, the ayatollahs are now at great risk both internationally and domestically. Recriminations and finger-pointing among top leaders of the Revolutionary Guards and regular Iranian military(https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/12/09/iran-armed-forces-at-war-with-themselves-fall-assad-syria/) has already spread widely in the general population(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/world/middleeast/iran-syria-assad.html).

Disarray and fragmentation in the senior ranks of authoritarian governments are often the first signs of regime collapse. Popular discontent in Iran was already extensive due to long-standing economic decline, the opposition of young people and women generally, ethnic discontent, and more. If the Revolutionary Guard and regular military leaderships begin to come apart, the potential for internal armed conflict grows. Assad’s collapse showed that a façade of strength can mask underlying weakness, with surprisingly swift collapse following.

Externally, Iran’s regime has not been this vulnerable since the 1979 revolution. Jerusalem has already eliminated Tehran’s Russian-supplied S-300 air-defense systems, seriously damaged its ballistic-missile capabilities, and destroyed elements of the nuclear-weapons program(https://www.axios.com/2024/11/15/iran-israel-destroyed-active-nuclear-weapons-research-facility). Netanyahu has never had a better opportunity to obliterate all or vast swathes of the entire nuclear effort. So doing would make Israel, neighboring states, and the entire world safe from the threat of Iran’s decades-long nuclear-proliferation threat, which has long contravened the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Israel, with US assistance if requested, should go for the win on the nuclear issue. Not only would that eliminate Tehran’s threat of a nuclear Holocaust, it would simultaneously strike yet another domestic political blow against the mullahs. In addition to the tens of billions of dollars wasted in supporting Iran’s now-decimated terrorist proxies, but the billions spent on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles would also be seen as squandered. Iran’s citizens would be perfectly entitled to conclude that the ayatollahs had never had their best interests at heart, and that their removal was now fully justified.

Russia is the next biggest loser. Distracted and overburdened by its unprovoked aggression against Ukraine, now about to enter its third year, the Kremlin lacked the resources to save its puppet in Damascus. Vladimir Putin’s humiliation is reverberating globally, and it will also have corrosive impact inside Russia, perhaps finally stimulating more-effective opposition to the ongoing burdens the Ukraine war imposes on Russia’s citizens and economy.

Even more significant losses may be coming. The Kremlin’s main interests in Syria are its Tartus naval station and its Latakia air base. These are Moscow’s only military facilities outside the territory of the former Soviet Union. They are vital to Russia’s position in the eastern Mediterranean. If forced to evacuate these bases, Moscow’s ability to project power beyond the Black Sea would be dramatically reduced, as would be the threat to NATO across the Mediterranean. Although there were early indications Russia might to retain the bases, recent commercial overhead photography indicates it may be preparing to withdraw some or all of its forces. The situation remains fluid(https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/13/world/syria-news).

Without doubt, Turkey, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorists, and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army are the big winners so far. However, Syria’s internal situation is far from settled. American troops remain in northeastern Syria assisting the largely Kurdish Syrian Defense Forces in the anti-ISIS campaign, and at al-Tanf. The Kurds should not be abandoned, especially to President Recep Erdogan’s neo-Ottomanist aspirations to expand Ankara’s control and influence in Arab lands It would be a mistake, at this point, to remove HTS from Washington’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, although, unwisely, the Biden administration is reportedly considering doing so(https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/09/us-debates-lifting-terror-designation-for-main-syrian-rebel-group-00193367).

While eliminating Assad is a critical contribution to reducing the Iranian threat, neither Israel nor neighboring Arab governments nor the United States have any interest in seeing another terrorist state arise, and this one on the Mediterranean. Delicate diplomacy lies ahead. In the meantime, Biden was right to bomb ISIS weapons storage depots in eastern Syria to deny those assets to HTS, and Israel is justified in eliminating the Assad government’s military assets for the same reason.

Importantly for the region and beyond, urgent efforts are required to locate and secure all aspects of Assad’s chemical and biological weapons programs(https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/12/12/syria-chemical-weapons-search-mustard-sarin/). Assaad used chemical weapons against his own people as recently as 2017 and 2018, so there is no question whether these capabilities exist.

Thus, while there is considerable good news surrounding Assad’s ouster and exile to Moscow, circumstances in Syria still pose serious threats to peace and security in the Middle East and globally. This is no time to relax or turn away, especially for the incoming Trump administration.

This article was first published in Independent Arabia on December 17, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Biden Goes to Extremes to Appease Tehran

June 05, 2024

The world has truly turned upside down when a U.S. president begs America’s allies to have a United Nations agency go easy on a terrorist nuclear proliferator. The Biden administration’s reported pleading on behalf of Iran isn’t merely a tactical error about yet another biodegradable U.N. resolution. It’s a persistent strategic blindness that existentially threatens key U.S. partners and endangers our own peace and security.

Iran’s largely successful effort to conceal critical aspects of its nuclear-weapons complex from scrutiny by the International Atomic Energy Agency and Western intelligence services is nearing culmination. IAEA reports about Iran’s uranium-enrichment program—and Tehran’s disdain for IAEA inspections, extending over two decades—finally have the Europeans worried.

Instead of welcoming this awakening, President Biden is reportedly lobbying European allies to avoid a tough anti-Iran resolution at this week’s quarterly IAEA board of governors meeting. The administration denies it. But limpness on Iran’s nuclear threat fits the Obama-Biden pattern of missing the big picture, before and after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, including cash-for-hostages swaps with Iran as recently as last year.

Mr. Biden has two objectives. The first is to keep gasoline prices low and foreign distractions to a minimum before November’s election. The second is the Obama-Biden obsession with appeasing Iran’s ayatollahs, hoping they will become less medieval and more compliant if treated nicely. Both objectives are misguided, even dangerous.

Election worries about gas prices have also weakened U.S. sanctions against Russia, which are failing because of their contradictory goals. It simply isn’t possible to restrict Russian revenue while keeping U.S. pump prices low. The ayatollahs don’t worry about elections, but they know weakness when they see it, including Mr. Biden’s relaxed enforcement of sanctions on Iranian oil exports.

Mr. Biden’s greater mistake is refusing to acknowledge Iran’s “ring of fire” strategy to intimidate Israel and achieve regional hegemony over the oil-producing monarchies and other inconvenient Arab states. The foundational muscle for achieving these quasi-imperial aspirations is Iran’s nuclear program, precisely the issue at the IAEA. Starting in his 2020 campaign, Mr. Biden repeatedly alienated Gulf Arabs, especially Saudi Arabia, which felt particularly threatened by his zeal to rejoin the failed 2015 nuclear deal. Mr. Biden’s willingness to exclude Israel and the Arabs from negotiations with Tehran, as Mr. Obama did, convinced Arab governments that Washington was again hopelessly feckless. Israel concurred.

Arab leaders privately see the need to eliminate Tehran’s terrorist proxies. Saying so publicly, however—even quietly—requires political cover, which Washington has failed to provide. The Biden administration could have sought to destroy, not merely inhibit, the Iran-backed Houthis’ capacity to close shipping routes in the Suez Canal and Red Sea. Since the U.S. failed to do so, rising prices from higher shipping costs increase the risk of a de facto Iran-Houthi veto over freedom of the seas. Not surprisingly, Iran now threatens to blockade Israel itself.

Mr. Biden decided to concentrate world attention on Gaza rather than on Iran as the puppet-master. Doing so has helped obscure that Gaza is only one component of the larger ring-of-fire threat. Many Israelis, including several members of the war cabinet, have long focused on the close-to-home threat of Palestinian terrorists rather than the existential threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. This joint failure enabled Tehran’s propaganda to outmatch Jerusalem’s, leaving the false impression of a moral equivalence.

Had the U.S. and Israel explained the barbarity of Oct. 7 in such broader strategic terms, they would necessarily have concentrated attention on Iran’s coming succession crisis. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is old and ailing. President Ebrahim Raisi’s still-unexplained demise has already launched a succession struggle that could transform Iran. The U.S. and its allies should help the Iranian opposition fracture the Islamic Revolution at the top. Instead, Mr. Biden, who couldn’t conceive of overthrowing the ayatollahs, has dispatched envoys to beg Iran not to stir things up further before November.

Sending Tehran what diplomats call a “strong message” from the IAEA isn’t much, but treating Iran as if it calls the shots is far worse. Praying that Mr. Biden wakes up to reality may be the world’s only hope.

This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on June 4, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Trump Should Lay Off NATO, Target the U.N.

March 08, 2024

By John Bolton

Donald Trump’s assault on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began in his first term and has continued as he campaigns for a second. NATO certainly has its problems, as Henry Kissinger argued in “The Troubled Partnership: A Re-Appraisal of the Atlantic Alliance” (1965). But it serves U.S. national-security interests. Undermining U.S. strength by eroding alliances hardly amounts to an America-first agenda. Further, Mr. Trump’s focus on NATO shields from scrutiny the United Nations and other international institutions that are much more inimical to America.

Mr. Trump’s acolytes recognize that his NATO withdrawal threats have kicked up problems. Tellingly, however, their efforts to clean up after him are themselves unwise and unworkable. They unintentionally reflect the irrationality of Mr. Trump’s longstanding effort to debilitate NATO and his blunderbuss approach to world affairs generally.

One MAGA-world alternative to complete withdrawal is creating a “two-tier NATO,” in which any member not meeting the 2014 Cardiff summit commitment to spend 2% of gross domestic product on defense wouldn’t receive alliance protection. This notion is toxic to alliance solidarity and impractical. Iceland, a NATO member, has no military and therefore spends nothing on defense. I never discussed Iceland with Mr. Trump, but I expect he’d question why it was even allowed in NATO. The simple answer: Look at a map. Shall we concede Iceland to Russia or China so it can “persuade” Reykjavik to allow naval and air bases there?

Consider the vulnerability of Poland, the Baltics and others on Russia’s periphery. Because of geography, they are at risk no matter how high their defense spending—and all now exceed the Cardiff target. NATO deterrence provides their only real protection. If that deterrence recedes or fails, the Moscow-Beijing axis will seize these low-hanging fruit, notwithstanding that they satisfy Trump accounting rules.

Finally, a two-tiered NATO would be untenable in combat, logistics and communications. Imagine that Russia invades Poland. The U.S. springs to its aid, but Russia advances close to the German border. The U.S. field commander calls his Russian counterpart to say: “You can do whatever the hell you want in Germany. Please excuse us while we retreat to the next NATO country that spends 2% of its GDP on defense. We’ll see you there if you attack them after you finish Germany.” The Russians are already enjoying vodka toasts over a two-tiered NATO.

Another Trump World proposal is to impose tariffs on NATO member countries that don’t reach the 2% spending level. Presumably, this logic also applies to non-NATO allies like Japan, South Korea and Australia if Mr. Trump believes they aren’t carrying their fair share of the defense burden. This gambit is a non sequitur to everyone but Mr. Trump, for whom international problems are nails crying out for his tariff hammer. Penalizing the economies of U.S. allies to encourage them to increase defense spending sounds like “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”

More practically, on what authority could Mr. Trump draw to impose such tariffs? Even a Republican-controlled Congress, which is far from certain, is highly unlikely to give him new tariff authority. Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, often cited in Mr. Trump’s first term, applies when foreign actions are “unreasonable or discriminatory, and burden or restrict U.S. commerce.” That hardly covers sovereign defense-spending decisions we happen not to like.

Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Act, authorizing tariffs to protect American national security, is closer to the mark. Mr. Trump used Section 232 to impose tariffs on Canadian and European steel and aluminum imports, thereby proving, unsurprisingly to everyone but Mr. Trump, that penalizing your allies doesn’t weaken your adversaries. Obviously, the opposite is true: we should be unifying allies against China economically as well as politically, not splitting the camp of those harmed by Chinese intellectual-property piracy and harmful trade policies.

Even if all NATO members reached the Cardiff targets, the spending issue wouldn’t disappear. Facing mounting global threats, Washington’s defense budgets need to increase to Reagan-era levels, perhaps 5% to 6% of GDP from the current 3.5%. Inevitably, therefore, NATO members (and other allies globally) will have to increase to perhaps a 4% minimum. Getting to 2% is the easy part. The Trump-mitigating proposals are untenable, evanescent, and inadequate to keep NATO strong.

Besides, there are better targets for MAGA ire. Mr. Trump could usefully wreak havoc on the U.N. As I said 30 years ago, you could lose the top 10 floors of the U.N. Secretariat building and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. Things have only gotten worse.

In 2022, Washington spent about $18.1 billion across the U.N. system, far more than any other contributor. Contributions are made via several methods in a complex, nearly incomprehensible system, most commonly through “assessed” contributions, with the U.S. generally paying 22% of agency budgets so funded. Washington has had limited success in constraining U.N. budgets, and has often itself prompted significant increases.

Assessed contributions are functionally taxes. Contrary to what some Trump supporters have said, defense expenditures aren’t. We need to spend on our defense whether we have allies or not. Allies help reduce that burden. The U.N. only makes it heavier.

One powerful reform would be shifting from assessed contributions to wholly voluntary ones. America and other members would pay only for what they want and insist they get value for money. Even if only the U.S. switched unilaterally to voluntary contributions, it would create a tsunami that could fundamentally change the entire U.N. Or not, in which case at least we wouldn’t be paying for it.

There is no chance any U.N. component will ever voluntarily adopt such a system, because the U.S. has been the U.N.’s cash cow since 1945. Instead, a President Trump could simply say we are moving to voluntary contributions whether anyone else does or not. Under Article 19 of the U.N. Charter, failure to pay assessments for two years running could cost a country its vote in the General Assembly, but that loss is insignificant. General Assembly votes are nonbinding, and the U.S. carries no more weight than Vanuatu or Eritrea.

America’s Security Council vote, and therefore its veto power, is totally secure, guaranteed by the charter’s Article 27, and the charter itself can’t be amended without consent from all permanent members, including the U.S., per Article 108.

For those U.N. specialized agencies and programs already funded voluntarily, Inauguration Day would present immediate opportunities to defund some entirely and reduce funding for others. In his first term, Mr. Trump defunded the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, a decision Joe Biden reversed. Given that some Unrwa employees joined Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, defunding it should be a top priority.

As Washington implemented a switch to voluntary contributions, it would face important decisions on continuing membership in several U.N. entities, decisions which would involve not merely defunding, but withdrawing from them completely. The U.S. has been in and out of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for decades, withdrawing first under Ronald Reagan, inexplicably rejoining under George W. Bush. Mr. Trump took us out again, and Mr. Biden again returned. A Trump win should guarantee a third withdrawal, hopefully for good. Mr. Trump also served notice of withdrawing from the Universal Postal Union but later backed down. UPU warrants another look.

Beyond massive changes in U.N. funding and membership, Mr. Trump should insist that an American become U.N. secretary-general when António Guterres’s term expires in December 2026. Although I have no prospect of and no desire for a position in Mr. Trump’s second-term administration, I would be available as our candidate for secretary-general.

The ultimate question is whether America should withdraw from the U.N. altogether. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick was once asked that question. She paused, then answered: “No, it’s not worth the trouble.”

Although technically part of the U.N., international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank should also be carefully re-examined. On the IMF, Mr. Trump should read the seminal 1998 op-ed in these pages by George Shultz, William Simon and Walter Wriston, “Who Needs the IMF?” No one has answered the question adequately.

Not since the Reagan administration has there been a comprehensive review of multilateral foreign assistance. Proponents long argued that multilateral development banks help Washington mobilize development resources, but private capital is now far more widely available than when they were founded. Multilateral foreign aid only marginally advances U.S. national-security interests, but these banks have powerful Washington lobbies. Mr. Trump should mark them down for defunding or withdrawal. That would free up greater resources for bilateral foreign assistance, which, if implemented effectively, can advance core American interests.

Finally, a wall of pretend international courts—including the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the Law of the Sea Treaty’s tribunal and the World Trade Organization’s dispute-resolution process—are already on history’s ash heap, or on their way there. Clearing away what remains is still important work. In his first term, Mr. Trump stymied the WTO judicial mechanism, and even the Biden administration has kept it stymied so far. Mr. Trump’s focus shouldn’t be limited to international trade, but to all manifestations of emerging “global governance,” heartily encouraged under Mr. Biden and Barack Obama.

A related issue is arms control, particularly how to handle a potential renewal of the New Start Treaty. Although we persuaded Mr. Trump in 2019 to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces and Open Skies treaties with Russia, New Start was never much of an issue. Mr. Trump’s desire to cozy up to Vladimir Putin may give Mr. Putin an opportunity to cajole Mr. Trump into negotiations to extend New Start. Mr. Trump should resist any such temptation. Moreover, any strategic weapons negotiations should include China as well as Russia, given China’s rising nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities.

Mr. Trump rightly never expressed support for the “rules-based international order” the left loves to conjure. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel, and countless other examples demonstrate, there is no such thing. A president who truly grasps this can reawaken Americans to the necessity of operating from positions of strength in the world, not high-minded rhetoric and virtue-signaling.

NATO and other U.S. politico-military alliances aren’t acts of charity, and they are fundamentally different from the U.N., the international financial institutions and the global-governance project. We founded and support NATO because it serves hard U.S. national-security interests, not because of warm feelings for Europeans or abstract notions of “democracy.”

Nobody is going to defend us or maintain an international system favoring America if we don’t. That requires spending the necessary resources and extending our reach through alliances like NATO. If we reduce our defense capabilities or retreat from positions of strength, others will fill the vacuum, invariably to our disadvantage.

This article was first published in The Wall Street Journal on March 8, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Trump Is a Danger to U.S. Security

January 31, 2024

His isolationist views and erratic thinking and style would post even greater risks in a second term.

When I became President Trump’s national security adviser in 2018, I assumed the gravity of his responsibilities would discipline even him. I was wrong. His erratic approach to governance and his dangerous ideas gravely threaten American security. Republican primary voters should take note.

Mr. Trump’s only consistent focus is on himself. He invariably equated good personal relations with foreign leaders to good relations between countries. Personal relations are important, but the notion that they sway Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and their ilk is perilously wrong.

Mr. Trump’s most dangerous legacy is the spread of the isolationist virus in the Republican Party. The Democrats long ago adopted an incoherent melding of isolationism with indiscriminate multilateralism. If isolationism becomes the dominant view among Republicans, America is in deep trouble.

The most immediate crisis involves Ukraine. Barack Obama’s limp-wristed response to Moscow’s 2014 aggression contributed substantially to Mr. Putin’s 2022 attack. But Mr. Trump’s conduct was also a factor. He accused Ukraine of colluding with Democrats against him in 2016 and demanded answers. No answers were forthcoming, since none existed. President Biden’s aid to Ukraine has been piecemeal and nonstrategic, but it is almost inevitable that a second-term Trump policy on Ukraine would favor Moscow.

Mr. Trump’s assertions that he was “tougher” on Russia than earlier presidents are inaccurate. His administration imposed major sanctions, but they were urged by advisers and carried out only after he protested vigorously. His assertions that Mr. Putin would never have invaded Ukraine had he been re-elected are wishful thinking. Mr. Putin’s flattery pleases Mr. Trump. When Mr. Putin welcomed Mr. Trump’s talk last year of ending the Ukraine war, Mr. Trump gushed: “I like that he said that. Because that means what I’m saying is right.” Mr. Putin knows his mark and would relish a second Trump term.

An even greater danger is that Mr. Trump will act on his desire to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He came precariously close in 2018. The Supreme Court has never ruled authoritatively whether the president can abrogate Senate-ratified treaties, but presidents have regularly done so. Recently enacted legislation to stop Mr. Trump from withdrawing without congressional consent likely wouldn’t survive a court challenge. It could precipitate a constitutional crisis and years of litigation.

Mr. Trump is unlikely to thwart the Beijing-Moscow axis. While he did draw attention to China’s growing threat, his limited conceptual reach led to simple-minded formulas (trade surpluses good, deficits bad). His tough talk allowed others to emphasize greater Chinese misdeeds, including massive theft of Western intellectual property, mercantilist trade policies, manipulation of the World Trade Organization, and “debt diplomacy,” which puts unwary countries in hock to Beijing. These are all real threats, but whether Mr. Trump is capable of countering them is highly doubtful.

Ultimately, Beijing’s obduracy and Mr. Trump’s impulse for personal publicity precluded whatever slim chances existed to eliminate China’s economic abuses. In a second term, Mr. Trump would likely continue seeking “the deal of the century” with China, while his protectionism, in addition to being bad economic policy, would make it harder to stand up to Beijing. The trade fights he picked with Japan, Europe and others impaired our ability to increase pressure against China’s broader transgressions.

The near-term risks of China manufacturing a crisis over Taiwan would rise dramatically. Mr. Xi is watching Ukraine and may be emboldened by Western failure there. A physical invasion is unlikely, but China’s navy could blockade the island and perhaps seize Taiwanese islands near the mainland. The loss of Taiwan’s independence, which would soon follow a U.S. failure to resist Beijing’s blockade, could persuade countries near China to appease Beijing by declaring neutrality.

Taiwan’s fall would encourage Beijing to finalize its asserted annexation of almost all the South China Sea. Littoral states like Vietnam and the Philippines would cease resistance. Commerce with Japan and South Korea, especially of Middle Eastern oil, would be subjected to Chinese control, and Beijing would have nearly unfettered access to the Indian Ocean, endangering India.

And imagine Mr. Trump’s euphoria at resuming contact with North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, about whom he famously boasted that “we fell in love.” Mr. Trump almost gave away the store to Pyongyang, and he could try again. A reckless nuclear deal would alienate Japan and South Korea, extend China’s influence, and strengthen the Beijing-Moscow axis.

Israel’s security might seem an issue on which Mr. Trump’s first-term decisions and rhetoric should comfort even his opponents. But he has harshly criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since the Oct. 7 attacks, and there is no foreign-policy area in which the absence of electoral constraints could liberate Mr. Trump as much as in the Middle East. There is even a danger of a new deal with Tehran. Mr. Trump almost succumbed to French President Emmanuel Macron’s pleading to meet Iran’s foreign minister in August 2019.

Mr. Trump negotiated the catastrophic withdrawal deal with the Taliban, which Mr. Biden further bungled. The overlap between Messrs. Trump’s and Biden’s views on Afghanistan demonstrate the absence of any Trump national-security philosophy. Even in the Western Hemisphere, Mr. Trump didn’t carry through on reversing Obama administration policies on Cuba and Venezuela. His affinity for strongmen may lead to deals with Nicolás Maduro and whatever apparatchik rules in Havana.

Given Mr. Trump’s isolationism and disconnected thinking, there is every reason to doubt his support for the defense buildup we urgently need. He initially believed he could cut defense spending simply because his skills as a negotiator could reduce procurement costs. Even as he increased defense budgets, he showed acute discomfort, largely under the influence of isolationist lawmakers. He once tweeted that his own military budget was “crazy” and that he, Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi should confer to prevent a new arms race. Mr. Trump is no friend of the military. In private, he was confounded that anyone would put himself in danger by joining.

A second Trump term would bring erratic policy and uncertain leadership, which the China-Russia axis would be only too eager to exploit.

This article was first published in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

America’s Arms-Control Restraints No Longer Make Sense

January 26, 2024

Our enemies are proliferating, so we must adapt

On June 18, 1935, the United Kingdom and Germany entered “a permanent and definite agreement” that limited Germany’s total warship tonnage to 35 percent of the British Commonwealth’s. This was a major concession from Great Britain, since agreements at the Washington (1921–22) and London (1930) naval conferences had already significantly reduced its own fleet. Hitler defined “permanent and definite” to mean lasting less than four years: He abrogated the treaty on April 28, 1939, four convenient months before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact carved up Poland and started World War II. Arms control at work.

After 1945, America concluded a series of treaties that were, when signed or shortly thereafter, almost uniformly disadvantageous to us. Considerable efforts to eliminate these restraints have been made, but significant risk remains of reverting to the old ways or not extracting ourselves from the remaining harmful treaties. Whoever next wins the presidency should seek the effective end of the usual arms-control theology before the tide turns again.

To have any chance of bolstering U.S. national security, arms control must fit into larger strategic frameworks, which it has not done well in the last century. Even if they made sense in their day, many arms-control treaties have not withstood changing circumstances. Preserving them is even less viable as we enter a new phase of international affairs: the era after the post–Cold War era. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s ongoing “ring of fire” strategy against Israel, China’s aspirations for regional and then global hegemony, and the Beijing–Moscow axis augur trying times. We need a post–post–Cold War strategy avowedly skeptical of both the theoretical and the operational aspects of the usual approaches to arms control.

Rethinking arms-control doctrine down to its foundations began with Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative and resumed with George W. Bush. The partisan and philosophical debates they launched have continued ever since, but the next president will confront foreign- and defense-policy decisions that cannot be postponed or ignored. Best to do some advance thinking now.

Bush’s aspirations were more limited than what liberals derided as Reagan’s “Star Wars.” Bush worried about American vulnerability to the prospect of “handfuls, not hundreds,” of ballistic missiles launched against us by rogue states. Providing even limited national missile defense, however, required withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, as Bush did in December 2001. Arms control’s high priests and priestesses, and key senators such as Joe Biden and John Kerry, were apoplectic. Missile defense was provocative, they said. Leaving the ABM Treaty meant abandoning “the cornerstone of international strategic stability” (a phrase commonly used by politicians, diplomats, and arms controllers) and upsetting the premise of mutual assured destruction, they said.

But Bush persisted and withdrew. As the saying goes, the dogs barked and the caravan moved on. In 2002, Bush turned to a new kind of strategic-arms agreement with Vladimir Putin, the Treaty of Moscow, which set asymmetric limits on deployed strategic nuclear warheads and was structured in ways very different from earlier or later nuclear-weapons treaties. We abandoned the complex, highly dubious counting and attribution metrics of prior strategic-weapons deals, as well as verification procedures that Russia had perfected means to evade. The Treaty of Moscow was sufficiently reviled by the arms-control theocracy that Barack Obama replaced it in 2010 with the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), reverting to failed earlier approaches, more on which below.

During Bush’s first term, we also blocked efforts in the United Nations at international gun control. We established the G-8 Global Partnership — to increase funding for the destruction of Russia’s “excess” nuclear and chemical weapons and delivery systems — and launched the Proliferation Security Initiative to combat international trafficking in weapons and materials of mass destruction. Neither effort required treaties or international bureaucracies. We unsigned the Rome Statute, the treaty that had created the International Criminal Court, to protect U.S. service members from the threat of criminal action by unaccountable global prosecutors.

Finally, the Bush administration scotched a proposed “verification” protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) that risked intellectual-property piracy against U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturers but did not enhance the verification of breaches. The BWC and the Chemical Weapons Convention express aspirations not to use these weapons of mass destruction, but it is almost impossible to verify compliance with them. Moreover, arms controllers forget that the BWC sprang from Richard Nixon’s unilateral decision to eliminate American biological munitions, which proved that we could abjure undesirable weapons systems on our own.

The Bush administration went a long way toward ending arms control, but the true believers returned to power under Obama. Eager to ditch the heretical Treaty of Moscow, his negotiators produced New START — the lineal descendant of two earlier SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) and three START agreements — which entered into force in February 2011 for ten years, extendable once for five more. The Senate should never have ratified this execrable deal, as I explained in these pages (“A Treaty for Utopia,” May 2010). Nonetheless, with a Democratic majority it did so in a late-2010 lame-duck session, by 71 votes (all 56 Democrats, two independents, and 13 Republicans) to 26. While the vote seems lopsided, there were three nonvoters — retiring anti-treaty Republicans who opposed ratification — and the Senate secured the constitutionally required two-thirds ratification majority by only five votes. Today, given a possible Republican majority ahead and the unlikelihood that so many Republicans would defect again, ratifying a successor treaty is a dubious prospect at best.

The Trump administration resumed untying Gulliver, exiting the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019. While the INF Treaty may have made sense in the 1980s, by the time of withdrawal only the United States was abiding by its provisions. The likes of China and Iran, not treaty parties, were accumulating substantial numbers of intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and Russia was systematically violating INF Treaty limits. That left America as the only country abiding by the treaty, an obviously self-inflicted handicap that withdrawal corrected. Then, in 2020, the U.S. withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty because Russia had abused its overflight privileges and because our national technical assets made overflight to obtain information obsolete. Russia subsequently withdrew from Open Skies.

But the arms-control theology still has powerful adherents. On January 26, 2021, newly inaugurated Joe Biden sent his first signal of weakness to Putin by unconditionally extending New START for five years without seeking modifications to it. This critical capitulation was utterly unwarranted by New START’s merits or by developments since its ratification. The treaty was fatally defective in that it did not address tactical nuclear weapons, in which Russia had clear superiority. It remains true that no new deal would be sensible for the United States unless it included tactical as well as strategic warheads.

In addition, technological threats that postdate New START (which deals with the Cold War triad of land-based ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers) need to be confronted, especially cruise missiles, which can now reach hypersonic speeds.

Most important, China has made substantial progress since 2010 toward becoming a peer nuclear power. Beijing may not yet have the deliverable-weapons capacity of Washington or Moscow, but the trajectory is clear.

A tripolar U.S.–Russian–Chinese nuclear world (no other power has or will have rates of warhead production comparable to China’s) would be almost inexpressibly more dangerous than a bipolar U.S.–USSR world. The most critical threat that China’s growing strategic-weapons arsenal poses is to the United States. How will it manifest? Will we face periodic, independent risks of nuclear conflict with either China or Russia? Or a combined threat simultaneously? Or serial threats? Or all of the above? Answers to these questions will dictate the nuclear-force levels necessary to deter first-strike launches by either Beijing or Moscow or by both, and to defeat them no matter how nuclear-conflict scenarios may unfold.

None of this is pleasant to contemplate, but, as Herman Kahn advised, thinking about the unthinkable is necessary in a nuclear world. These existential issues must be addressed before we can safely enter trilateral nuclear-arms-control negotiations. Beijing is refusing to negotiate until it achieves rough numerical parity with Washington and Moscow. There is little room for diplomacy anyway, since in February 2023 Russia suspended its participation in New START. Further strategic-weapons agreements with Russia alone would be suicidal: Bilateral nuclear treaties may be sensible in a bipolar nuclear world, but they make no sense in a tripolar world. Russia and China surely grasp this. We can only hope Joe Biden does as well. Next January, our president will have just one year to decide how to handle New START’s impending expiration. We should assess now which candidates understand the stakes and are likely to avoid being encumbered by agreements not just outmoded but dangerous for America.

A closely related challenge is the issue of U.S. nuclear testing. Unarguably, if we do not soon resume underground testing, the safety and reliability of our aging nuclear arsenal will be increasingly at risk, as America’s Strategic Posture, a recent congressionally mandated report, shows. Since 1992, Washington has faced a self-imposed ban on underground nuclear testing even though no international treaty in force prohibits it. The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 bars only atmospheric, space, and underwater testing, a gap that the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which would have banned all testing, was intended to close. Because, however, not all five legitimate nuclear powers under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ratified the CTBT, it never entered into force and likely never will. Though the U.S. signed the CTBT in 1996, the Senate rejected its ratification by a vote of 51 to 48 in 1999. Russia recently announced its withdrawal, thereby predictably dismaying Biden’s advisers. The next U.S. president should extinguish the CTBT by unsigning it. As was recently revealed, Beijing seems to be reactivating and upgrading its Lop Nor nuclear-testing facility. We can predict confidently that neither China nor Russia will hesitate to do what it thinks necessary to advance its nuclear-weapons capabilities. We should not be caught short.

Additional unfinished business involves the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, another arms-control “cornerstone,” this one of European security. Effective since 1990, as the Cold War ended, CFE became obsolete almost immediately. The Warsaw Pact disbanded (its members largely joining NATO) and the USSR fragmented. Russia suspended CFE Treaty compliance several times before withdrawing formally in November 2023, having already invaded Ukraine, another CFE Treaty party. In response, the United States and our NATO allies suspended CFE Treaty performance. Like the CTBT, the CFE Treaty is a zombie that the next president should promptly destroy.

The list of arms-control-diplomacy failures goes on. The NPT, for example, has never hindered truly determined proliferators such as North Korea (which now has a second illicit nuclear reactor online) or Iran, much as arms-control agreements have consistently failed to prevent grave violations by determined aggressors.

This long, sad history has given us adequate warning, and the next president should learn from it. The array of threats the United States faces makes it imperative that we initiate substantial, full-spectrum increases in our defense capabilities, from traditional combat arms and cyberspace assets to nuclear weapons. Instead of limiting our capabilities, we must ensure that we know what we need and have it on hand. We are nowhere near that point.

This article was first published in The National Review on January 25, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Biden’s foolish rush to rejoin UNESCO has nothing to do with China

June 20, 2023

This article was first published in The New York Post on June 20, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

Demonstrating yet again that it’s little more than Barack Obama’s third term, the Biden White House is once more pressing to rejoin the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

This ill-advised gambit will cost about $600 million, apparently just a rounding error for the administration’s budgeteers.

Ronald Reagan rightly withdrew the United States in 1983, citing UNESCO’s highly politicized hostility to freedom of the press and general anti-Americanism; pervasive antisemitism and anti-Israel biases; and utter lack of program and budget discipline.

UNESCO’s US supporters, almost all on the political left, launched a series of unsuccessful efforts to rejoin, repeatedly seeking a new pretext to end the horror of being outside a multilateral organization, no matter how failed and irreparable.

Unfortunately, they persuaded President George W. Bush to return, ostensibly to mitigate the bad press he received for conducting a “unilateralist” foreign policy. Of course, nothing of the sort happened.

With the unwitting Americans seduced back in, UNESCO’s true political agenda emerged under the Obama administration’s welcoming gaze.

In 2011, continuing its decades-long campaign to demonstrate international “statehood” by obtaining membership in UN bodies, the Palestinian Authority, heir to the Palestine Liberation Organization, applied to join UNESCO.

Obama’s support for Palestinian causes so weakened the US position that the PA/PLO’s illegitimate campaign succeeded.

At that point, however, Congress rigorously adhered to a statute (originating as an appropriations rider from then-Sen. Bob Kasten in 1990) prohibiting contributions to UN bodies that admit or increase the status of the PA/PLO, meaning that US “arrearages” began to accrue immediately.

Biden’s excuse for rejoining UNESCO is to counter rising Chinese influence.

The State Department argues, for example, that “we can’t afford to be absent any longer from one of the key fora in which standards around education for science and technology are set.”
This claim is entirely specious. There is little to no need for America to rejoin UNESCO to prevent harmful Chinese influence.

UNESCO “standards” for any sort of education are irrelevant, if not harmful to real education, as we’ve learned over many painful decades.

Even on accords in which UNESCO acts as depositary or assists in administrating a treaty, like the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, America is typically a party to the agreement. So Washington can’t be excluded from any aspect of treaty affairs, whether or not America is inside UNESCO.

The broader issue of Chinese influence in the UN system turns on just how valuable that system is.

Chinese and Russian vetoes block effective action by the Security Council, as during the Cold War.

The UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council have also become essentially irrelevant, leaving only the question of which UN specialized and technical agencies are still worth protecting.

Some certainly are, such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and the International Maritime Organization.

But UNESCO, which never had a clearly defined mission, fails under any sensible cost-benefit analysis.

Biden is making precisely the same mistake as Obama, and, if Biden proceeds further, Congress should firmly block any UNESCO funding, as it has consistently done.
Although the administration obtained authority to waive the Kasten amendment in December 2022 (probably in the dark of night), appropriators can correct the mistake in the coming months.

House Appropriations Committee Republicans should lead the effort to defend taxpayer dollars by repealing this waiver. After all, it was passed in Nancy Pelosi’s waning days as speaker.

Not only that, House appropriators should make clear they will be scrutinizing Biden administration dealings with UNESCO and the UN system more broadly.

With the 2024 presidential campaign underway, moreover, none of the declared Republican candidates appears to support rejoining UNESCO.
Biden’s obsession with returning conveniently highlights several of his vulnerabilities, since basically only liberal Democratic elites care about rejoining. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not.

Make no mistake, UNESCO sees Washington as a spigot from which assessed contributions would flow regularly into its coffers and which Biden’s White House would turn to fully open.

Arguing that it’s trying to counter rising Chinese influence reveals the administration’s double standard on Beijing, given its craven efforts to “improve” relations with Beijing on climate-change issues and many others.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping only underlines the need for real, not illusory, measures to counter Beijing.

Returning to UNESCO is a waste of time and money, not an effective riposte to China.

Germany must decide whether it is a ‘normal nation’

February 01, 2023

Germany’s very public agonizing over whether to provide its Leopard II tanks to Ukraine (or allow other states that had purchased Leopard II’s to send theirs) graphically exposed Berlin’s continued confusion about its status as a NATO member. Just days after his tank decision, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is already warning against a “competition” to supply Ukraine with needed weapons systems, and ruling out Germany supplying combat aircraft.

While there is momentary relief that, at last, Scholz has committed to provide the armor Ukraine requested, he did so only after President Joe Biden also agreed to send roughly a battalion of America’s Abrams tanks. While Biden’s decision was correct on its own merits, it was hardly a matter of strategy, and more a matter of horse-trading to persuade Berlin’s decidedly reluctant leadership.

Amid the illusory self-congratulation following the tank decision, a pattern that has characterized much of NATO’s response to Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, a much larger issue lurks, one which only Germany’s citizens can resolve. Their reluctance to support a military capability appropriate to their country’s economic weight is uniformly expressed through the prism of the Nazi horror, and the death and destruction wreaked upon Europe and the world until Adolf Hitler’s monstrous tyranny was crushed in 1945.

Shame and penance are appropriate and necessary reactions for any country electing leaders such as Germany did. But there also comes a time when outsiders can legitimately ask that Germany behave as a responsible military ally, while continuing to carry those burdens. The real question is whether Germany wants to be a full NATO ally, or a doughnut hole in an otherwise strong alliance. Ukraine is as good an issue as any to leverage this decision.

Germany’s general unhelpfulness on Ukraine, often allied with France (which lacks Germany’s excuse), surfaced almost fifteen years ago by rejecting George W. Bush’s suggestion at the April 2008 NATO Summit to put Ukraine and Georgia on a fast track to join the alliance. Unfortunately, Bush’s key insight — NATO membership was the most effective deterrent to Russia — was ignored, even derided.

By torpedoing Bush’s proposal, Berlin and Paris almost certainly contributed to Moscow’s decision to invade Georgia four months later, and proclaim two provinces as “independent” countries, a classic manifestation of Moscow’s stratagem of creating “frozen conflicts” in former Soviet republics. When Russia then committed aggression against Ukraine in February, 2014, annexing Crimea and seizing the Donbass, NATO collectively responded with pathetic weakness, undoubtedly contributing to the Kremlin’s assessment that a second invasion in 2022 would evoke an equally limp NATO response.

The importance of NATO membership as a deterrent has now been graphically proven by the Swedish and Finnish decisions to join the alliance after Russia’s second Ukraine invasion. Abandoning the foundational neutrality premise of their post-1945 foreign policies, Stockholm and Helsinki concluded that the only guarantee of impunity against Kremlin aggression was to put a sheltering NATO border around their countries. Undoubtedly, what was happening in Ukraine reminded them of the consequences of NATO rejecting Bush’s 2008 initiative.

Since Russia’s February 24 invasion, there has been one disagreement after another within NATO on what weapons systems to provide Ukraine, with Germany almost always on the reluctant side, fearful of provoking a larger war, so its officials said. So doing, however, demonstrated that the Kremlin was effectively deterring NATO, and underlined NATO’s failure to deter Russia’s initial aggression. Germany’s first assistance to Ukraine was 5,000 military helmets.

Then-Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said, “The German government is agreed that we do not send lethal weapons to crisis areas because we don’t want to fuel the situation, we want to contribute in other ways.” Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko called the offer a “joke,” and it remains a paradigm of the doughnut-hole approach. Moreover, Germany’s 2022 defense spending was 1.44% of GDP, still well-below NATO’s 2% of GDP target.

Berlin has a new defense minister and Leopard II tanks are a step up, but Germany needs to make a broader conceptual decision. Japan shows a way forward. From the 1990’s, there was a quiet but profound debate among the Japanese on the question, “Is Japan a normal nation?” That debate’s outcome was reflected in now-deceased Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s effort to amend Japan’s post-1945 pacifist constitution, imposed by Washington, and his successor Fumio Kishida’s recent announcement that Tokyo would double defense spending from 1% to 2% of GDP over five years, giving Japan the world’s third-largest military, after America and China. Japan has clearly decided it is, indeed, a normal nation.

Germany should have the same debate. In 1961, Ronald Reagan said, “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.” Totalitarianism isn’t transmitted through the bloodstream any more than freedom. Nobody should forget Germany’s past, certainly not its own citizens, but neither are they ruled by that past. Germany must decide whether it is “a normal nation,” and, if so, act like one.

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

Is Washington’s arms control theology finally on the verge of collapse?

February 01, 2023

Three freshly installed Republican House chairmen of key national security committees are raising potentially fatal issues for the New START arms-control treaty between the U.S. and Russia. In letters to Biden Cabinet officials, the chairmen ask whether Russia is in material breach of the agreement. Along with the administration’s failing, misguided effort to rejoin the flawed 2015 Iran nuclear deal, one could ask whether Washington’s arms control theology is finally verging on collapse.

The House chairmen of the Foreign Affairs, Armed Services and Intelligence Committees (Reps. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Michael Turner (R-Ohio), respectively) are men to be reckoned with. Although the Senate has constitutional power to ratify treaties, for the next two years, House Republicans can require extensive scrutiny of Russia’s New START performance. 

One of President Biden’s first official acts (and a badly mistaken one) was extending the treaty until Feb. 4, 2026, after America’s 2024 presidential election. With no end in sight to Russia’s war in Ukraine, the odds Moscow and Washington can agree on a successor deal under Biden diminish every day, further reason to ensure the White House fully describes Russia’s potential treaty violations.

The House chairmen should also scrutinize White House efforts to make enough concessions to Tehran for Washington to revive the Iran nuclear deal. Despite administration assurances that Iran’s ongoing uprising against the ayatollahs has halted its diplomacy, the obsession to rejoin remains.

New START has always been a bad deal. Its warhead limits and “counting rules” for attributing nuclear devices to delivery vehicles, Cold War-era methodologies, are outdated and ineffective. Moreover, New START’s ceilings, even in their day, failed to reflect the different status of Russia and the United States, as President George W. Bush’s 2002 Treaty of Moscow did, namely that Washington needs different upper limits than Moscow because it faces more threats than just a bipolar face-off with Russia. 

Finally, New START’s verification provisions do not afford nearly the level of certainty necessary to satisfy U.S. concerns, given decades of cheating on similar agreements by Russia and other authoritarian states, which all have problems with the truth.

In today’s world, New START is even more dangerous, which is why Biden’s 2021 decision to extend its terms for five years without any modifications leaves America in an ever-more-precarious position.

Added to these pre-existing concerns, the questions raised by Chairmen McCaul, Rogers and Turner underscore legitimate concerns about the treaty even if Russia were fully compliant.

The State Department has reportedly sent Congress a report that finds that Russian violated the treaty’s verification and consultation provisions, which State says are repairable. Desperate to save New START, the more serious violations of concern to the three chairmen are not addressed. Congressional oversight is clearly warranted.

Even beyond the failures of New START itself and the prospect that Russia is violating it, the agreement is fatally outdated for additional reasons. Here, the three Republican chairmen and their Senate counterparts can do important work over the next two years to elaborate on these new issues and to prepare a successor administration to address the dangers ahead.

First, the days of meaningful bilateral U.S.-Russian strategic weapons treaties have ended. During the Cold War, we lived in essentially a bipolar nuclear world, the arsenals of other nuclear states, legitimate or illegitimate, being insignificant for our purposes. 

Today, however, China is rapidly manufacturing and deploying nuclear warheads in significant numbers, likely approaching the New START limits applicable to Russia and the U.S. imminently. The U.S. simply cannot accept bilateral limits on its nuclear stockpiles or delivery systems when it will soon face two peer or near-peer nuclear adversaries, a dramatically dangerous new environment.

Whether Moscow and Beijing combine against Washington, or we face one confrontation with the risk of another following, we are in a tri-polar nuclear world, and must plan and act accordingly. Thus far, China has flatly refused to engage in diplomacy, saying its current warhead stockpile is too low to join U.S.-Russia talks. Beijing is essentially asking for a pass until it comes close to our existing ceilings, and only then talk, an approach in which Russia has acquiesced. We should tell Moscow sooner rather than later that there will be no talks on extending or modifying New START until China sits at our negotiating table.

Second, a basic New START flaw is its failure to limit tactical nuclear weapons, which Moscow possesses in far greater numbers than Washington. With Russian President Vladimir Putin threatening to use tactical strikes in Ukraine, there is no longer a serious argument to allow this issue to remain outside the overall nuclear-arms negotiations. If Russia disagrees, we should not resume talks, and should make our own plans at both the strategic and tactical levels accordingly. The potential for substantially broader coverage of nuclear warheads also raises new, difficult verification issues beyond the existing treaty’s failings.

Third, New START fails to deal satisfactorily with new technologies that have matured since 2010, especially advanced hypersonic capabilities. Biden’s failure to address these new developments before extending the treaty in 2021 was a grave mistake, and it would be diplomatic malpractice to repeat it in discussing a successor deal.

While we consider our post-New START options, we are also, hopefully, witnessing the last throes of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. For any number of compelling reasons, the White House should do far more to support the Iranian opposition and its struggle to overthrow the ayatollahs. 

One benefit of regime change in Tehran would likely be a new government that renounces the pursuit of nuclear weapons and opens the files of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and other actors in its nuclear-weapons program. We will undoubtedly learn far more about how the mullahs led western governments by the nose during the negotiation and implementation of the 2015 nuclear deal, and especially how Iran repeatedly violated it. This new information might even shake the faith of the arms-control priesthood, but at a minimum it would enlighten those determined to prevent nuclear proliferation.

These are all issues for the 2024 campaign. Chairmen McCaul, Rogers and Turner have done the country a great service by getting us started.

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.

When Blinken goes to China, he should call its bluff on North Korea

January 25, 2023

This article was first published in The Washington Post, on January 25th, 2023. Click Here to read 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.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Beijing in early February to meet with his new Chinese counterpart, Qin Gang. Bilateral relations between their two countries are on shaky ground, so the agenda will be crowded.

This may seem an inopportune moment to propose North Korea as a central agenda item. But recent threatening actions from Pyongyang, including ballistic-missile testing and preparing for a seventh nuclear test, offer Blinken a good way to gauge Beijing’s sincerity about seeking Indo-Pacific peace and stability.

Moreover, important policy decisions by Japan and South Korea are rapidly changing the Indo-Pacific’s political-military landscape and fully justify emphasizing North Korea in Washington-Beijing negotiations.

The United States has for too long allowed China to escape responsibility for North Korea’s threat, and the administration should use the Blinken-Qin meeting to reverse course. For decades, China has reassured the United States, Japan and others that it opposed Pyongyang’s program to build nuclear weapons and the long-range ballistic missiles that could deliver them.

A nuclear-armed North Korea was not in China’s interest, one Beijing leader after another claimed. It would destabilize northeast Asia, they said, implying that they feared a nuclear North Korea would provoke Japan and perhaps South Korea to seek nuclear arms, thus generating further instability. And instability, Beijing’s elite fretted, would hamper China’s own economic growth — and economic growth, they promised Washington, Tokyo and Seoul, was China’s only priority.

The United States and its allies have swallowed this line for decades, allowing China to pose as a mediator and conciliator between North Korea and its potential targets. In the 2000s, Beijing played the congenial host for round after round of the failed six-party talks, which essentially consisted of repeated Chinese attempts, as our delegation faithfully reported from Beijing, to get U.S. and North Korean diplomats alone in a room together for the “real” negotiations. Somehow forgotten amid this performance art was the Chinese and North Korean communist parties’ insistence that they are as “close as lips and teeth.”

With admittedly perfect hindsight, we now see that Beijing did not genuinely oppose Pyongyang’s nuclear aspirations. By focusing on North Korea as a pressing threat while assuming that China was similarly concerned, the United States not only doomed its own Korea nuclear policy but also missed the mounting menace from Beijing. With China now pursuing hegemonic objectives along its periphery and expanding its military power, its performance regarding a nuclear North Korea can be seen as reflecting the “hide and bide” approach Beijing has long practiced. It was a kind of disinformation campaign.

Only now are we fully realizing the scope of Beijing’s threat. And despite decades of U.S. presidents saying it was unacceptable for North Korea to possess nuclear weapons, it is on the verge of success. Indeed, those who repeatedly advocated negotiations with North Korea instead of using coercive methods are saying we should treat North Korea as a nuclear power. The only way to peacefully prevent the unacceptable might be for China to actually adopt the policy it had only espoused.

After all, North Korea’s dangerous behavior is bringing about exactly what China earlier said it feared. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has announced that Japan’s defense budget will double from 1 percent to 2 percent of gross domestic product in five years, thus giving Japan the world’s third-largest military, after the United States and China. China surely knows that Japan’s already-announced purchase of Tomahawk cruise missiles gives it significant counterstrike capabilities, with Beijing in range. North Korea will know it as well, since all of North Korea will also be in range.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has revived discussion of his country’s acquiring its own nuclear-weapons arsenal or again deploying U.S. tactical nuclear arms on the Korean Peninsula. Although Yoon later softened his comments, public support for such proposals, especially among Korean conservatives, is rising. Moreover, cooperation between Tokyo and Seoul, always difficult, as well as trilateral cooperation with Washington, appears to be increasing.

China’s neighbors are worried about both its long-term intentions and, particularly for Taiwan, its short-term intentions. And domestically, Chinese President Xi Jinping faces a public-confidence crisis because of his regime’s pandemic bungling. Blinken will arrive in Beijing well-positioned to turn up the heat regarding North Korea.

To prove its benign intentions, China need simply act on the mellifluous words it has mouthed for decades about North Korea’s nuclear program. Beijing’s extensive energy, food, military and other aid to Pyongyang is all that stands between Kim Jong Un and retribution from his long-suffering people.

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