The time for equivocating about a nuclear-armed, Taliban-friendly Pakistan is over

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This article appeared in The Washington Post on August 24, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton

August 24, 2021

Many profound ramifications of America’s exodus from Afghanistan are competing for attention. Among the top challenges, Pakistan’s future stands out. For decades, Islamabad has recklessly pursued nuclear weapons and aided Islamist terrorism — threats that U.S. policymakers have consistently underestimated or mishandled. With Kabul’s fall, the time for neglect or equivocation is over.

The Taliban’s takeover next door immediately poses the sharply higher risk that Pakistani extremists will increase their already sizable influence in Islamabad, threatening at some point to seize full control.

A description once applied to Prussia — where some states possess an army, the Prussian army possesses a state — is equally apt for Pakistan. Islamabad’s “steel skeleton” is the real government on national security issues, the civilian veneer notwithstanding. Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, has long been a hotbed of radicalism, which has spread throughout the military, to higher and higher ranks. Prime Minister Imran Khan, like many prior elected leaders, is essentially just another pretty face.

During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, ISI extensively supported Afghanistan’s mujahideen against the Soviet military, for religious and national security reasons. Washington made the mistake of funneling much of its assistance to “the muj” through Pakistan, thereby relinquishing control over which politicians and fighters actually received the aid. Pakistan also enabled terrorist groups targeting India, its main regional rival, over Kashmir, a continuing flash point emanating from the 1947 partition and independence from Britain.

After Moscow exited Afghanistan in 1989, ISI unsurprisingly pirouetted to support the Taliban and others who subjugated the country in 1996. Pakistani military doctrine holds that a friendly Kabul regime ensures “strategic depth” against India, which Pakistani leaders believed the Taliban provided. When the U.S. coalition overthrew the Taliban in 2001, ISI provided sanctuaries, arms and supplies inside Pakistan, although Islamabad routinely denied it.

Now, again in power, the Taliban can return the sanctuary favor to Pakistani Taliban — the Pakistani counterpart of the Afghan Taliban — and other radicals. Obviously, the world doesn’t need another terrorist regime, but the risk in Pakistan is of an entirely different order of magnitude, even compared with the menace of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State gaining secure bases in Afghanistan.
While Iran still aspires only to nuclear weapons, Pakistan already has dozens, perhaps more than 150, according to public sources. Such weapons in the hands of an extremist Pakistan would dramatically imperil India, raising tensions in the region to unprecedented levels, especially given China’s central role in Islamabad’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. Moreover, the prospect that Pakistan could slip individual warheads to terrorist groups to detonate anywhere in the world would make a new 9/11 incomparably more deadly.

These dangers provided compelling reasons to sustain the U.S. and NATO military presence in Afghanistan. We could have continued overwatch not just of potential new terrorist threats in-country but also observed what was happening across the borders in Pakistan and Iran. Sadly, the Trump-Biden withdrawal policy canceled that insurance policy.

From Cold War conflict against the Soviets in Afghanistan to our own efforts since 9/11, Pakistani-U.S. cooperation has been essential. It led Washington to temper vigorous criticism of Islamabad’s nuclear and pro-terrorist polices. Now, after Kabul’s surrender, America is less dependent on Pakistan’s good will and logistical support. Acknowledging the enormous uncertainty, given Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities, the United States must now come down hard on Islamabad if it continues supporting the Taliban and other terrorists. It has been said that Pakistan is the only government consisting simultaneously of arsonists and firefighters. The firefighters need to step up their game. They must convince their fellow countrymen that the government’s recent path has made Pakistan less secure, not more.

Absent clear evidence that Pakistan has terminated assistance to the Taliban, the United States should eliminate its own aid to Islamabad; strike Pakistan from the list of “major non-NATO allies”; impose anti-terrorist sanctions; and more. Our tilt toward India should accelerate.

Most important, we must devote maximum attention to Pakistan’s nuclear stockpiles and weapons-production facilities. If a future terrorist regime in Islamabad (or even today’s government or like-minded successors) appears ready to transfer nuclear capabilities to terrorists, we should take preventive action. This is highly unpalatable, but the alternative of allowing these weapons’ use is far worse. China must be made very aware of our intentions and seriousness, including that Beijing’s long-standing, vital assistance to Islamabad’s nuclear efforts makes China responsible for any misuse.

Is President Biden sufficiently resolute to do the necessary? Probably not. In George Packer’s recent biography of diplomat Richard Holbrooke, he quotes from Holbrooke’s notes taken during an Obama administration Situation Room meeting on Afghanistan. “Among his notes were private interjections,” Packer writes. “Vice President Joe Biden said that every one of Pakistan’s interests was also America’s interest: ‘HUH?’”

Biden’s assertion was wrong when made and would be dangerously wrong today; Holbrooke was correct, and eloquent in his brevity. Let’s hope Biden has changed his mind.
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.”

Afghanistan: was it worth it?

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Declinists should think long and hard about the implications of a real “coming home” of American power

This article appeared in The Daily Telegraph on August 18, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton

August 18, 2021

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan have left many wondering whether the “20 year war” was worth the blood spilt. Here, John Bolton, former National Security Adviser to President Donald Trump, gives his view

Using military force to destroy al Qaeda’s Afghan bases and oust the Taliban from power was necessary, legitimate and beneficial to the United States, not to mention Afghanistan and the world at large. No subsequent terrorist attacks have come close to matching the lethality and complexity of 9/11’s terrorism, a point nearly forgotten not twenty years after the dies irae.

An almost-unthinkable but very real tragedy, however, is that too many wrongly concluded thereby that radical Islamic terrorism had been defeated, not to rise again as a threat either in remote south-central Asia or globally. They are dangerously wrong.

America has not been “at war” in Afghanistan in any meaningful sense for many years, no more than it has been “at war” in Germany, Japan or other countries where U.S. forces remained after World War II until now. Rhetoric about “ending endless wars” and “war weariness”; the fantasy lure of “nation building” that rested on inaccurate and ahistorical analogies to the Marshall Plan; and the sequence of Donald Trump’s aberrational presidency, followed by Joe Biden, who never understood the strategic importance of a significant U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, have all wrought this unhappy moment.

Withdrawing U.S. and allied troops from Afghanistan is causing even greater tragedies: enabling a Taliban return to power, with globally-threatening terrorist bases likely flourishing there once again soon; shielding and thereby enhancing Iran’s nuclear menace; and threatening the radicalization of a nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Countless foreigners (and Americans) hope Washington’s withdrawal from Afghanistan encourages other U.S. drawdowns in the Middle East (already underway) and worldwide. Those declinists should think long and hard about the implications of a real “coming home” of American power. They’re going to miss us when we’re gone. So will we.

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

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

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

By John Bolton

August 16, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By John Bolton

August 3, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the West could topple the ayatollahs

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

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

By John Bolton

August 10, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defense Threats in Cyberspace

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

By John Bolton
July 29, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lebanon and the Geography of Arab Change

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By Dr. David Wurmser
July 29, 2021

In a summer of brewing crises, from Havana through Caracas to Tehran (and other Iranian cities), Lebanon’s descent into crisis tends to be overlooked. And yet, it is part of a larger picture in which our greatest adversaries are on the ropes (Communists in Cuba and Venezuela, the Khomeinist regime in Iran, and Hizballah in Lebanon). While this is clearly a fortuitous moment, the emergence of which can properly be attributed to the policies of the previous administration, the Obama administration’s catastrophic failure to turn previous crises into opportunities should provide a cautionary tale. These crises can be weathered by our adversaries or hijacked by others as dangerous (or even more so) if the United States abandons the underlying policies that led these inimical regimes into their cul de sac. There is no predetermined arc of history, for better or worse: decisions matter. And this administration is dangerously close to fumbling.

The dream palace of Arab nationalism
Lebanon and to some extent Syria have always been both a bellwether and symbol of regional politics. The land of the cedars is an incubator of Arab politics, and thus its history is the first draft of the regional history of ideas. And nobody embodies the swirling development of ideas better than my old doctoral advisor, Fouad Ajami, who himself is a child of Ansar from the heart of the Jabal Amel Shiite community in Lebanon’s embattled south. The progression of his books are like a roadmap to understanding the ebb and flow of both the content and geography of ideas in the region.

In The Arab Predicament (1981), Ajami reflected upon the crises of Arab nationalism. It promised to deliver the great renaissance of the Arab world. Instead, it suffered its most decisive and humiliating defeat in 1967 at Israel’s hands. While in the West, the 1970s may have been the heyday of admiration for the international symbol of Arab nationalism – the Ray-Ban bespectacled Yasir Arafat – those in the region understood something was dying. For those who cared to see, Arafat’s expulsion from south Lebanon in 1978 and Beirut in 1982 marked the end of his Arab nationalism.

Courting Arab nationalists remained the foundation of policy in Western capitals (and still does via the Oslo peace process obsession) – with the exception of the great scholar of the region, Bernard Lewis, who was the first westerner to discern the resurfacing of Islam as politics. But the rubble of Arab nationalism was not given to reconstruction and instead yielded new forces. Fouad Ajami captured the final tortured moment and despairing departure of the soul of the idea in The Dream Palace of the Arabs (1999), and the immense swath of destruction of Arab society left regionally in its place.

The resurfacing of Islam
The new lingua franca of Arab politics was a return to authenticity of the old through the language of Islam. While a few lingering leaders still held a corner of the stage for their final performance, the stage itself was now dominated by actors vying to control the legacy of the mystic past for control over the clouded future.

Arafat knew better than we the region’s trajectory. Arafat himself was already reconnecting to his underlying Islamic essence. When the Islamist threat challenged and then seized power with the rise of Khomeini in Iran, exposed its brutality in the seizure of the great Mosque in Mecca for a month, and revealed its penetration of the structures of power in the murder by the Gamaat al-Islamiyya in Cairo of President Sadat, Arafat was already a step ahead. He beat a path to Tehran – the first foreign “leader” to do so. And his top aid in Force 17, Emad Mughniya, became the developing architect of Hizballah. And Arafat asked of his Libyan allies that the leader of the Lebanese Shiite Awakening, Musa al-Sadr, be eliminated – probably at the behest of the Iranian Revolution, since such a charismatic and potent Shiite leader with greater credentials and a stronger claim to standard-bearing than the upstart Iranian regime posed a grave threat to Khomeini’s leadership. Lebanon again played the unwelcome role of regional incubator.

The first act was actually quite early, and took place in Lebanon. Indeed, the first act was the story of Musa al-Sadr. The tumultuous transition from the heady seduction of Arab nationalism — which though in most of the fertile crescent was a veiled form of Sunni dominance that nevertheless still drew the imagination of young Shiites — to a “Shiite Awakening” was captured with heart-tugging empathy and brilliance in The Vanished Imam (1986). Here were two ironies wrapped up in one: First, the return to Islam, with which the region and outsiders alike have had to contend for the last three decades, arose not from the heart of the Sunni world, but from the suppressed, backward and impoverished Shiite hamlets of southern and eastern Lebanon. Second, this Shiite Awakening came far from Lebanon, and not from the heart of Shiite Islam — Iran and southern Iraq. It manifested itself years before the Iranian revolution, which has ever since tried to claim fathership over an older and more tried “son.” Lebanon’s Shiite leadership thus controlled the claim to authenticity and true fatherhood over the Shiite Awakening – a claim which was so deeply and jealously sought by the Iranian revolution. True, the Shiites extended the tentacles of Iran’s central nervous system to the Levant, but as it extended Iranian power, it also profoundly threatened it. Iraq’s Shiites could have represented this duality as well, but they lived invisibly under the withering hand of Saddam. For that moment at least, the ownership and future of the Shiite Awakening was to be battled out in the south of Lebanon, not in Iraq’s ancient mosques in Kufa, Khadimain, Najaf and Karbala.

The Iraq war
For Ajami, that moment ended in 2003 when the inevitable angel of death, dressed as the American armed forces, claimed the lingering ghost of Arab nationalism in Baghdad. Ajami, being a Lebanese Shiite, understood that as much as this might influence the region, the battle over the Shiite Awakening had shifted from Jabal Amel to the cradle of Shiism itself in Iraq. Iran had spent two decades subjugating with tenuous success the competing center of the Shiite Awakening in Jebel Amal only to find itself now facing a far greater, closer and more serious competitor in an untethered Iraq. The prospect burst onto the Arab stage that at least a Shiite corner of it might find a better future out of Arab nationalism’s rubble.

Ajami captured in The Foreigner’s Gift, that brief ambivalent moment unleashed by the Iraq war in which the hope of freedom was at the same time haunted by fear. Iran despaired of facing this new Shiite challenge coming from the cradle of Shiism, so it was inevitable that it would launch its must-win war to control the Shiites of this newly liberated realm. Ajami in this book passionately echoed a century earlier when the works of Polish expatriate writer, Joseph Conrad, captured this tension between brutality, despair and hope in an unhinged political environment. Ajami also understood that Western eyes failed to see this battle over the soul of Iraqi Shiism – echoing the same battle over ownership of authenticity which Lebanon’s Shiites had posed.

Iraq’s Shiites were both a threat and a weapon for the West. They could be either the tentacle of Iran’s schemes or a dagger plunged into Iran’s heart. But the West’s elites, schooled almost exclusively in the Sunni narrative, could not fathom the existence of this internal Shiite battle nor the magnitude of its stakes. So with historic clumsiness, the West’s elites – especially the British Foreign Office and the American Foreign Service — sought their peace with Iraqi Shiites by preemptively surrendering them to Iran, ensuring the defeat at once of both themselves and of Iraq’s Shiites who so intrinsically threatened Iran’s revolution. Along with the surrender came the belief that Iraq could only be properly stabilized by accomplishing a larger accommodation of Iran regionally—giving birth to the two decade attempt now to invent Iranian-regime moderates and to pursue a nuclear understanding with it. A very different story could have been told, one which might have led to a very different Iran, but wasn’t.

Still, Ajami understood that the vast wasteland left by Arab nationalism was still waiting to be filled, and that the fragile order the foreigners broke was not easily restored. And the struggle between the forces of chaos and restoration shifted yet again to Beirut and Damascus. Instead of seizing control of the forces of chaos and change to ensure they deliver a shift in a favorable direction, Western elites sided with the forces of restoration, while at the same time insisting that the agents of restoration be changed. That was akin to validating the goal of restoring the old communist order in eastern Europe, but at the same time demanding that the leadership be changed to one more palatable. But the result of this muddled perplexity was that the West again imposed irrelevance on itself. The battleground now shifted between the old order’s elites – Assad and Russia – their uncomfortable ally – Iran – and the new parade of Khaliphs, from bin Ladin through Zarqawi and al-Baghdadi to Erdogan.

The collapse of Syria was described by Ajami as the clash of two immutable forces – the people shaking off their dictator and the regime determined to survive — in his book The Syrian Rebellion (2012), but he also quickly understood how regional geopolitical forces had reasserted themselves in the Levant and turned this clash in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon once again into their battlefield in his book, Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent (2014). The history of the fertile crescent has been written ever since by the interplay of these actors.

The question of Saudi Arabia
Ajami understood that if chaos was to be yielded to the new Khaliphs in Ankara and Deir Zuheir and their nostalgic imperial schemes, then there was to be a preference toward restoration, but it had to lay on a path to greater calmness than reversion to the old order and its masters in Moscow, Damascus and Tehran. He looked to those who withstood the charms of Nasser, the dynamism of Tehran or the new beacon of Ankara. He looked to an unlikely place. He looked south into the Arabian peninsula, which hitherto had been a desert in the geography of terrain and ideas other than the dangerous ideas of Salafism with which the Kingdom had now broken. Perhaps Ajami understood it was destined that a restoration based on some sort of change might yet come from this new periphery rather than the core.

Ajami wrote Crosswinds: The Way of Saudi Arabia in 2010, though it was published after his death in 2020. This itself was a comment on the state of Arab political thought: it was becoming so impoverished as a whole – and the intellectual heartland of Arab thought in Beirut and Damascus so stagnant — that the history of Islam and Arabdom was being written either in the non-Arab capitals of Ankara and Tehran or was being surrendered to mediocre secondary franchises in the Arab world. Islam itself, he notes, was moving in that direction, where the generation of fatwas and other religious decisions moved to “Shaykh Google” and populist, unrefined religious leaders, while traditional Islamic elites were increasingly relegated to being the Islamic equivalent of “Dear Abby” and commenting on issues of sexuality and sorcery.

Saudi Arabia seemed an unlikely place for intellectual movement at the time. It was a land of harshness which Ajami argues induced a conservative retrenchment into a system that leaves room for those that stray and seek their own path, but ultimately absorbs them. The irony, he noted, was that the very harshness of the land and environment produced a society of rules, but also found patient accommodation of those that strayed from the rules. The loner always returns when he finds that the harshness of the environment leaves no room for the loner.

And yet, it was in the chaos of the Arab world and the rise of Shaykh Google that the outside world laid siege to the Saudi realm. As Ajami put it, “once upon a time, Saudis were consumers of the literature of Beirut and Damascus. Now they render their own world.” Commenting on Ajami’s opus, a friend of Ajami’s, Charlie Hill, noted that it emerged from the shock that Saudi Arabia had defined itself as a sovereign state and as the embodiment of Islam, and then discovered in the 1980s that these are two incompatible and the Saud were riding “two galloping steeds at the same time.”

Ajami never carried through this intriguing line of thinking before he died because the drama of the clash between the forces of collapse, of change and of brutality took his mind elsewhere shortly afterwards, back to Lebanon and Syria, and he put the book aside unpublished. But from its pages, it was clear that he seemed confident to the end that the Arabian Arabs would somehow reassert their ability to absord the wandering loners and survive. They would find their path, and maybe even this was the path for the region to survive. Perhaps it is a stretch, but one could in some ways even say that he envisioned the Abraham Accords a decade before they happened.

Exhaustion, reflection and retrenchment
In his last book before cancer claimed him, In this Arab Time: the Pursuit of Deliverance (both in 2014) Ajami retreated into a retrospective and wistful survey of the outstanding – but often solitary – liberal voices of the Arab century, as well as the creative but also the destructive voices of ideologies and their battles in the shadow of events shaking the Arab universe. The retrospective nature of the anthology reflected perhaps his sense of his own approaching death, but it also captured the mood in the region of an end of a journey of potential and promise that in its various forms all were drawing now to an end.

It was a sort of eulogy of the world from which he came but within which he could not think and live. There were no great ideas or hopes looking ahead, only reflection on the colorful parade of promising ideas that failed.

By 2014, the struggle between chaos and restoration were dominated almost entirely by the voices of brutality. The new order of the 20th century had sidelined the old order of centuries, but left only chaos in its demise. And the softer nature of Arab politics of the earlier part of the century, when overthrown leaders were sent into exile and debate tolerated within margins, had yielded by the 60s and 70s to the brutal new generation where public inhumanity became common and horrifically tortured murder of dissent became normal. Besieged and in retreat, as well as abandoned by the West under the Obama years, the calmer voices of order in the region had out of despair realized they had no choice but to find their own path to survival, but at the same time they knew that they lacked the power on their own to do so. When Ajami died, in parallel the region had reached a chaotic and very dangerous abyss. And it was no longer the stage of great ideas, but the soapbox of very small ideas, demagogues and elixir peddlers. And with it any shred of charm, dignity and toleration was gone.

Left at the margins of this maelstrom was what Ajami had discerned in the Saudi kingdom: a world of smaller ideas and street fare was emerging. And a system that learned not only to survive but to forgive and absorb those who have deviated. And as an earlier generation of Saudi royals learned to preserve their system internally and protect it externally by making their peace with the West to survive the turbulence of a region flailing to find its moorings, seduced by dream palaces, and besieged by great power rivalries, so too was this generation of royals willing to make their pragmatic peace with the rising local power, namely Israel, which for lack of choice began to fill the regional void that was opened by an America fatigued by the withering hopelessness of the region to which it sought to bring great hope.

Lebanon returns to center stage
But then Lebanon, which had always regarded its role as the crucible of Arab thought as a guilded curse, could nonetheless not let go. What was happening in Lebanon in the last years is again the first writing of the next chapter of Arab history.

With the demise of grand ideas seeking to paint a vast new regional canvas, communities which earlier had thought that their participation in the dreaming, sketching and painting of the contours of such grand new epochs would allow them a new, integrated and common identity. But now they instead found themselves again on the outside. Again, as always, they were alone, different, and threatened. Minorities, who had spent over a century trying to transcend who they were to join a greater whole now realized that their only path to survival lay in the other direction. They could do nothing else but remember who they always were and retreat into that shell. The world of sects, tribes, clans and ethnicities had never really left; the region’s elites – especially among the minorities who let their hopes overpower their judgment — only imagined they had. But those loyalties survived. They adapted themselves to the new vocabularies and also appropriately wore the dress of the latest fashionably dominant ideology in the cavalcade of ideologies. But in the end, those ancient loyalties and affinities were the only true safety and identity, so underneath it all, they remained the bottom line.

It was through the nexus of the rivalries of greater powers and the rampaging of franchised ideologues that these minority communities – especially those who lived along the seam lines of the fertile crescent — knew they were particularly precarious. And nowhere was this dynamic more early and clearly palpable than in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the last few years. And while these minority communities retreated into themselves to provide the illusion of safety, they also knew they had to seek a hand of support from a distance. Adrift in chaos, all cling to the familiar and scan the horizon to seek the ship of their salvation.

Israel was close, but uninterested in playing the role of savior. It had been scorched a generation earlier trying to navigate Lebanon’s communal politics, and the trauma of that adventure lingered. True, Israeli leaders nearly universally understand the imperative of preventing the subordination entirely of Lebanon and Syria to the region’s ambitious Ayatollahs, self-anointed Khaliphs and raw dictators. And yet, at the same time, there is almost as universally no Israeli leader who entertains the idea of trying to save either Lebanon or Syria, and perhaps the region more broadly, from itself.

Salvation, however, could not wait. A Hizballah stash of ammonium nitrate exploded and tore the center of Beirut to shreds in August 2020. The veneer of calm which masked a deeply unsettled reality yielded. Any semblance of national community crystallized into anger at the domineering outsider — namely, Iran and its local agent Hizballah. And in the anger, something new seemed to emerge among Lebanese: the hope no longer to be a regional incubator, but instead to be just left alone. Lebanese took to the streets to demand their quiet and the solitude to live their lives. Perhaps this is symbolic of the region; a popular desire emerging among many to just stick their heads down, live their lives and finally just be left alone – exhausted from a century of grand ideas that ushered in upheaval and grand destruction. We hear of such voices in other lands, and even among the people whose very existence was the product of the grand idea of Arab nationalism itself, the Palestinians. Even as far away culturally and geographically as Iran we hear Iranians demonstrating also to be just left alone: “not Gaza nor Lebanon nor Syria; Iran for Iranians” they chant on the streets of Tehran, Ahwaz, Isfahan and Tabriz and elsewhere in anger toward the Ayatollahs and their grandiose projects.

And yet, also symbolic of the region as a whole, the Lebanese were not to be indulged in their simple dream. Into their chaos immediately intruded all the ambitious actors, who redoubled their efforts to tear apart the region more broadly, especially Turkey (which saw an opportunity) and Iran (which sought to preserve its position). Lebanon was such a prize for decades, as well as the treasure chest to raid and the conduit to channel wealth, corruption, trafficking and laundering for the dark forces of the region. Money flowed from all corners of the earth through Lebanon’s dominated institutions to conduct all sorts of nefarious activities from Iraq to Palestine and further line the wealth of the region’s corrupt elites from Tehran to Ankara. It is an asset of utmost critical value for all the region’s malevolent actors and thus cannot be ceded under any circumstances since doing so could threaten their very survival, let alone their further enrichment and empowerment. These oppressors, thus, will subject Lebanon to any cost, no matter how horrifying, to stay in power. And unfortunately, entangling Israel to the south may be part, even their most important part, of their perverse toolbox to do so by changing the subject into an active regional war.

So now we have the two trends converging. On the one hand, the pillaging of Lebanon by outsiders, led by Iran and to some extent Turkey, has reached such a level that it has left the Lebanese people with nothing to lose. And in contrast, the populations are so broken that they wish nothing more than to withdraw from the region spiritually and just be left alone to mind their own business not in condominium, but in isolation.

But it is at this moment that Lebanon does offer hope. When a population has its back against the wall and nothing left to lose, the domineering outsiders face a collapse of their position to a potentially volcanic challenge from the street. That challenge is swelling as I write. So Lebanon now returns to where it has always returned: the laboratory concocting the region’s trends and ideas and the vessel through which the region’s actors pursue their ambitions.

Despite the hopes of Western elites, Lebanon’s institutions, from its government to its armed forces, stand helpless and powerless, as they always have, to the sway of those internal and regional dynamics. Indeed, it was always a western fantasy to believe that any institution, agreement and border, rather than leaders and ancient communal bonds, moved reality. To invest in those institutions as realities is to follow the leprechaun to the end of the rainbow.

So we are left with two immutable forces destined to clash: on the one hand, a restive and imminently erupting population fatigued of grand ideas and has nothing to lose, and on the other hand powerful regional actors with raw ambition who have proven they will act to win at all costs. And lurking in the wings are street ideologues with their small ideas selling their wares as well.

The squandering of opportunity
Which takes us back to the beginning. Our policies over the last several years have so weakened and besieged the nefarious actors in the region that the balance was tipped, and there was lent a modicum of hope to the despairing populations from Tehran to Beirut that there might be a chance to prevail, and the age of exhausted introversion might be brewing. That is what is playing out these weeks in the streets of Iran and Lebanon (and in Caracas and Havana too).

We have been here before in other places and other lands – for example, in central and eastern Europe in the late 1980s – and we have learned one thing in all those places: which side of the fork in the road is travelled between victory of peoples over their oppressors on the one hand and the gut-wrenching crushing of dreams on the other, is set greatly by the tone in the capital of freedom, the United States and its most powerful allies.

In other words, if Washington and its powerful ally to Lebanon’s south, unwilling as it may be, build on the policies of the past administration and understand the nature and stakes of the coming clash and embark on a robust policy of support of the Lebanese people, and if we support our ally Israel if attacked by Hizballah in their effort to change the subject, and if Hizballah is left tattered, or even better eradicated, then Tehran may reach the end of its road, not only in Lebanon, but in Tehran itself. The battle over the great prize of Lebanon has the power to set regional trends and crown regional winners, but also to bury regional losers.

And yet, Washington’s attentions are elsewhere. It is torn between not noticing, governed by obliviousness to currents on the ground, still obsessing over the dream palaces of old which long ago died in the Arab world (and their frameworks like peace processes), investing in institutions whose existences are empty (such as the Lebanese Armed Forces or the UN Interim Force In Lebanon), and unattuned – or misinformed — to the broad regional geopolitics which are playing out on the Lebanese stage. So, instead of placing our powerful hand to tip the scales toward the people of Lebanon, the United States is emerging as an eclipsing and powerful but utterly irrelevant non-player by its own doing, which is sad.

What happens in any one of these current upheavals in the seats of evil – Havana, Caracas, Tehran or Beirut – will set the tone for all the rest. But supporting the demonstrators does not seem to be the guiding principle of the current U.S. administration. Sanctions are lifted on Caracas and Tehran, weak platitudes are extended the freedom fighters in Havana, and dead silence is greeting the Lebanese and Iranians who clearly have had it. The summer of 2021 may yet be remembered more like the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and Prague Spring of 1968: the age of crushed hopes – but this time because the West could have at almost no cost helped those aspirations prevail, but instead chose to do nothing.

But if the collapse of Iran and the frustration of Turkey is deferred (not cancelled), it will come, but the issue is whether it comes now, or years in the future.

Conclusion
Lebanon has become once again the microcosm, or more accurately the herald of the region to come. The tragedy of Lebanon is that the Lebanon as we have known it for a century is about to implode and die. There is no rehabilitation or resurrection. Yes, there is a noble attempt to seize the state intact by the people of Lebanon who are unified by the desire to exorcise the demons hijacking them — as we all had briefly hoped after the horrific destruction of the exploded Hizballah depot last August. And yet, all that is left of that state – especially its internal structures of authority and power, including finance, education, culture and favor — is mastered by the region’s two greatest imperialists, Iran and Turkey. So total is their domination that their removal would leave not institutions worthy of inheritance, but only a vast, razed expanse of societal and governmental debris. And yet, avoiding that collapse only leaves these reprehensible actors in power and Lebanon still shackled to their continued predatory ambitions. It is an unenviable choice, but the former – the collapse of the Lebanese state — is the only path to true freedom. If there is to be change, Lebanon faces sadly the need for it to be revolutionary, not velvet, as we have learned in the last three decades in the former Soviet lands.

And yet, as will go Lebanon, so too will go the region. And thus, it is critical for the world on the outside, and the collection of forces under assault by Iran and Turkey (including and especially the United States which remains oblivious to its being their target), band together to stand with the Lebanese as they inescapably must pass through Mordor’s scorched Plateau of Gorgoroth on their way to build anew, not rebuild.

If successful, what will emerge there, as in its neighbor Syria, eventually is unlikely to be a truly Western sense of freedom, let alone democracy. But it will be an exhausted, perhaps impatient, and not necessarily unified introversion among a collection of besieged and defensive minority communities, tribes, clans and sects which is, after all, a good incubator for the generation of new ideas that the regio

Foreign Policy Returns to Normal, for Both Better and Worse

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

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

By John Bolton
July 27, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Biden, Trump, and alliances

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

By John Bolton
July 15, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Rumsfeld Freed the World From ‘Mutual Assured Destruction’

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

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

By John Bolton
July 1, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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