Lebanon and the Geography of Arab Change

July 29, 2021
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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

July 27, 2021
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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

July 15, 2021
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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’

July 01, 2021
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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.

Pump the brakes on Iran, Joe: Biden must slow his rush to reenter the nuclear deal

June 29, 2021
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This article appeared in The Daily News on June 29, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 29, 2021

Since taking office, President Biden has unswervingly sought to have the United States rejoin, as rapidly as possible, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA). Through indirect negotiations conducted by other JCPOA parties, Biden has offered Iran concessions and adjustments that make an already dangerous agreement even riskier. He has been deterred only by the negative domestic political blowback he will justifiably encounter if and when America re-ups.

Now, however, significant new developments give Biden the opportunity to reverse the Gadarene haste with which he has pursued re-entering the JCPOA. He should seize the chance to pause his efforts, if not reverse them entirely.

Most importantly, Israel’s new government, led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, has expressed the urgent need to consult with Biden and his senior advisers. Bennett’s governing coalition is held together by little more than antipathy to former Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. If the parties break apart, it could well precipitate new elections, resulting in significant losses of Knesset seats for many of them, and even bring Netanyahu back to power. Biden, like Presidents Obama and Clinton before him, is no friend of Bibi’s.

President Joe Biden speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Friday, June 25. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Bennett is at risk here. Formerly a senior Netanyahu adviser, he aligns closely with his predecessor’s Iran policy. Moreover, Israel generally is far readier to continue using force against Tehran’s nuclear program than Biden’s team may appreciate. If Bennett deviated from Netanyahu’s approach, it would be a mortal political mistake, perhaps fracturing his party and his coalition. Biden needs to tread cautiously, or he places Bennett in an untenable position.

For America, rejoining the JCPOA (which Donald Trump exited in May 2018) would be a massive mistake. Obviously, Iran wants Biden back in the deal to obtain relief from our devastating unilateral economic sanctions. Tellingly, however, there has never been a shred of evidence Iran has made a strategic decision to renounce its nuclear ambitions.

Instead, the basic playbook for rogue regimes seeking deliverable nuclear weapons calls for them to make extravagant, highly- publicized promises forswearing nuclear weapons, while never following through with actual performance. Like all prior iterations of this diplomatic performance art, the mutual pledges of “action for action” benefit the proliferator. North Korea and Iran have successfully followed this playbook for decades.

The economic steps directly benefitting the proliferator come first (ending sanctions and releasing frozen assets, as in the JCPOA, or providing economic assistance, as in the 1994 North Korea Agreed Framework). Coming only afterward is what Washington should seek, and what never seems to happen: the complete, verifiable, and irreversible destruction of the nuclear-weapons program, as prior presidents have described their North Korea goals.

“Reaching agreement” with Iran, especially the way Biden has pursued it, thus means giving the ayatollahs much of what they want. The result will endanger America and close allies and friends globally, not just in the Middle East.

Here is where Biden’s face-saving opportunity to cut his losses arises: Jerusalem has sought urgent, critically important, consultations with Washington on the implications of America rejoining the JCPOA. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid (also deputy prime minister and co-leader of the new government) met Sunday in Rome with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Biden’s subsequent invitation for Bennett to visit the White House provides exactly the right moment to talk about Iran.

Moreover, Iran has a new president-elect, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner’s hardliner, and likely successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. JCPOA supporters believe U.S. reentry can be agreed upon before Raisi’s Aug. 3 inauguration, arguing he would benefit from the economic good times expected to roll if U.S. sanctions are lifted. By contrast, blame for failing to resurrect the JCPOA, if that transpires, can be laid on Hassan Rouhani’s outgoing regime.

This approach is a trap for the United States, but one Biden can readily avoid. He can capitalize on the opportune coincidence of new governments in both Israel and Iran to implement a pause in the re-entry negotiations for extended consultations with Israel and Arab allies. He could use, say, six months to gauge whether there is any change for the better — or the worse — in Iran’s international performance, not just in nuclear matters, but in its support for terrorism and conventional military belligerence across the Middle East.

Washington need not be in a hurry to grace Tehran by jettisoning sanctions, which are its principal leverage. Even if Biden remains obsessed with returning to the JCPOA, he loses little by waiting until the end of this year, while appreciably aiding Bennett’s new government.

‘Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons’ Review: In Tehran’s Nuclear Archive

June 24, 2021
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This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on June 21, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 21, 2021

The Biden administration is working hard to re-enter the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Readers of David Albright’s “Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons,” however, will realize that it is Washington, not Tehran, that is pursuing a truly perilous course.

Mr. Albright, since 1993 the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, neither advocates nor opposes re-entering the deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That is precisely why his careful, meticulous recitation of the full reality of Iran’s efforts, its “incessant dissembling and falsehoods” and its careful camouflage and concealment is so compelling.

Mr. Albright concedes that many years ago he was “skeptical of the seemingly exaggerated claims by Western governments” about Iran’s program. He now says that “the Iranian revolutionary regime is fundamentally a criminal operation.” For decades, “Iran has systematically violated its commitments under the [1970] Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.” Even nominal concessions from Tehran, including the JCPOA itself, occurred “under great pressure, with an underlying, unrelenting intention of preserving and advancing its nuclear weapons capabilities.”

“Perilous Pursuit” is the most comprehensive unclassified recounting of Iran’s nuclear aspirations ever written. Mr. Albright had generous access to the “nuclear archive” collected by Israel’s Mossad in an almost unimaginably daring 2018 raid on Tehran. This extraordinary archive embodies in detail the so-called Amad Plan, Iran’s late-1990s crash nuclear-weapons program. Mr. Albright and his team at I.S.I.S., aided by Israeli and U.S. intelligence analysts, found that the nuclear archive fills many gaps in the West’s knowledge.

As Mr. Albright shows, key Amad Plan activities continue today, both clandestinely and disguised as part of Iran’s “civil” nuclear efforts. Take the Natanz enrichment facility, discovered in 2002: “In a pattern that would repeat itself many times . . . Iran simply called it a civil site and allowed the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] to inspect it.” This may seem like retreating, but Mr. Albright exposes the nuclear jujitsu: “While withdrawing from safeguards or cheating on them would incur a cost,” calling Natanz a “civil” facility and allowing inspections or monitoring “was a price [Iran] found worth paying to keep them.”

Until revealed in the nuclear archive, Iran successfully lied about, or concealed from the IAEA, its uranium conversion and enrichment facilities, nuclear-core development plants, exploding-bridgewire testing units, and more. It asserted that the Gachin uranium mine and milling facility was for domestic rather than military purposes, and concealed both the location and the military purposes of the Fordow underground uranium-enrichment facility.

“Perilous Pursuit” eviscerates the idea, central both to negotiating the JCPOA and rejoining it, that the IAEA, an independent agency part of the United Nations system, can adequately pierce the falsehoods and cover-stories Iran has woven for decades. Time after time in Mr. Albright’s account, Tehran stonewalls the IAEA, underlining the point that it is not an intelligence agency. IAEA depends vitally on its members to supply sensitive information, yet as a U.N. body, its membership includes the very countries, like Iran, suspected of violating the non-proliferation treaty. (Imagine a police department with a mafia office at its headquarters.) Enumerating all that the IAEA has repeatedly missed indicts not the agency, but those seeking to endow it with capabilities it has never had and never will. Relying on it for verification and compliance reveals naiveté about the ayatollahs and unfamiliarity with the IAEA. Serious verification must rest with U.S. intelligence, not U.N. agencies.

Unfortunately, our intelligence community’s credibility also gets its share of shredding here, having missed much of what Mossad purloined. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of Iran, for instance, was perhaps the most intellectually dishonest, politically distorted U.S. intelligence “analysis” ever. It was not really an NIE but propaganda, intended to forestall harsh measures George W. Bush was thought to be considering. We need a forensic review of the NIE’s perverse tradecraft, especially examining whether the drafters were politically motivated, an anathema to intelligence professionals.

The NIE promulgated the dangerously mistaken notion that, in Mr. Albright’s words, “Iran’s nuclear weapons program ended in 2003, with no work taking place after that date.” At that time, Tehran faced U.S. troops to the east and west, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and growing international criticism. Hassan Rouhani, then secretary-general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, now in his final days as president, promised full disclosure and suspension of key nuclear operations, all the while denying any were weapons-related. But, as Mr. Albright stresses, this “merely served as a tactical retreat, not an abandonment of [Iran’s] nuclear weapons ambitions.” Indeed, “Iran kept the international spotlight” on its civilian cover-story, “successfully using it as a distraction from [its] better hidden, unambiguous nuclear weaponization work,” as nuclear-archive documents clearly demonstrate.

Mossad’s haul deals a mortal blow to any fancy that Tehran ever came clean on nuclear issues. The archive, let alone what remains classified or still in Iran, also destroys the “What about Iraq?” riposte when discussing Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. As Mr. Albright says, the archive proves the program “can no longer be viewed as existing only in the past.” Obama’s JCPOA negotiators were profoundly wrong not to resolve the many unanswered questions about the euphemistically termed “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear work. We are still paying for that mistake.

Joe Biden is proceeding quickly and blindly to rejoin the nuclear deal. “Perilous Pursuit” should make him pause. U.S. sanctions and Israel’s kinetic activity against Iran’s program have done more to degrade and deter Iran than any diplomacy. That is the path to pursue, not more credulous deal-making.

Biden should use Raisi election for Iran course change

June 24, 2021
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This article appeared in The Washington Examiner on June 19, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 19, 2021

Iran’s hard-line mullahs left nothing to chance in Friday’s presidential election.

The man they wanted to win, Ebrahim Raisi, did so handily against a carefully limited field of rivals. In 2017, Raisi lost to outgoing President Hassan Rouhani, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was obviously determined to correct that mistake. Western media call Raisi a “hard-liner,” as if conveying important information.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, however, the spectrum of Tehran’s leadership has ranged broadly all the way from “hard-liner” to “extreme hard-liner.” Raisi falls in the latter category. Rouhani fell in the former, but it pleased many Westerners to consider him a “moderate,” essential to enacting the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal.

Yet, in 2005, as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Rouhani mocked those very admirers. The New York Times, no less, reported that “in a remarkable admission, Mr. Rouhani suggested … that Iran had used negotiations with the Europeans to dupe them. … ‘While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment … in Isfahan. … By creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work on Isfahan.'”

Some things never change. Those who portrayed the “moderate” Rouhani as Iran’s real boss should contemplate whether the term “supreme leader” means what it says. It does have a certain ring to it.

Khamenei is only the second to hold the title, succeeding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. Raisi is widely believed to become the third supreme leader; he is unlikely to forget the power of those two mellifluous words. Now facing a weekslong presidential transition period in Tehran, the Biden administration will undoubtedly worry most about whether it can beg its way back into the JCPOA, from which Washington withdrew in May 2018.

Resurrecting this deal is a near-religious priority for the Biden team, many of whose key figures were intimately involved (or at least entirely supportive) of President Barack Obama’s efforts to negotiate it. Although few specifics are publicly known, there is little doubt that the only limiting constraints on what Biden is prepared to give away to the mullahs are the negative domestic political consequences for surrendering. And make no mistake, those domestic U.S. political consequences could be enormous. Whatever minor modifications may occur to the deal, Iran will insist that key provisions and understandings remain unchanged. For example, there will be no renewed efforts to get the facts on the benignly termed “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program. In 2015, Iran made this concession a precondition to any deal. And don’t expect international inspectors to get any more access than the inadequate levels they now enjoy. Most importantly of all, Biden isn’t even contemplating clawing back Obama’s critical concession that Iran be allowed to enrich uranium to reactor-grade levels, a giveaway without which Iran would have rejected any deal.

President Lyndon Johnson once termed an analogous provision “more loophole than law.” Once a country can enrich to reactor-grade levels of U-235, it is nearly 70% of the way to weapons-grade enriched uranium. Going from 3-to-5% to 20%, or even 60%, enrichment levels merely marginally worsen the original, fundamental mistake of allowing enrichment at all. The pattern is clear: Obama accepted Iran’s insistence on even debilitating concessions because he was so determined to “succeed” and achieve a deal, any deal.

During Biden’s first five months, no one in the White House has pretended that Iran has made a fundamental strategic decision to abandon pursuing nuclear weapons. With good reason. All the available evidence shows that Iran continues to do whatever it takes to possess deliverable nuclear weapons as soon as feasible.

Of course, Iran wants the United States back in the deal. Without that, Tehran will not get relief from America’s devastating sanctions, far more effective than any of the 2015 negotiators ever envisaged. The sanctions have created enormous public dissatisfaction inside Iran, but Biden seems blind to the leverage thereby provided, so zealous is he to rejoin. Nor is there any visible effort by Biden’s advisers to design or justify a “larger” deal to replace the failed JCPOA. If sanctions are lifted, and substantial economic benefits flow again, Iran will even more actively pursue nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs; support for terrorism in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria; and increased conventional military activity across the Middle East.

Whether U.S. reentry happens before or after Raisi is inaugurated is immaterial. If there is any chance whatever Biden might be dissuaded from his crusade, Raisi’s election provides him a face-saving excuse to back away. Don’t hold your breath over he will avail himself of the opportunity.

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

June 18, 2021
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The US President’s incoherent strategy makes the forthcoming summit a worrying one for the West

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

By John Bolton
June 13, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why we might be closer to war than we think.

June 14, 2021
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By Dr. David Wurmser
June 14, 2021

Over the last week, there have been increasing signs that Hamas may be preparing to re-initiate hostilities, starting along the border at a trickle, and then more as they go along.

These threats should be taken seriously since the underlying tectonic forces that in part led to the last war are still in place.

And yet, in this particular situation, there is a new dimension that can further fuel the choice toward escalation by Hamas, as well as for the panoply of other actors that previously played a contributing role in detonating the region last month. It is likely that Hamas, the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Joint Arab List party ( HaReshima Meshutefet) in Israel and Iran and Turkey outside Israel all have a strong common interest in sabotaging the new government taking shape, which is most easily done via escalation, particularly because of their being threatened by Mansour Abbas and his United Arab List party (Raam). It is possible that even Jordan might harbor hostility, and not because the incoming Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, is seen as a symbol of the settler movement, but because they cannot comfortably accept the success of Mansour Abbas.

Let me explain.

So, what does Mansour Abbas represent? First of all, what he is not. He is not a dreamy peace processor, nor is he a man given to grand theories of regional cooperation, nor even of some contractual permanent change that would demand an alteration of his basic system of Islamic beliefs. Nor would such leaders in any Arab society survive. The cultural root of Arab society is nomadic, and tribal traditions which even preexist Islam are as important as religious dogma. Any civilization anchored to a nomadic soul views its survival through the personal capability and following of leadership of the tribe, which is really a quite different matter than our image of tribes shaped by Hollywood in Westerns. Families, or clans, are part of the Middle Eastern tribe, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say, though, that institutions in such societies are not envisioned as “trusts,” as they are in urban societies of the West, but are embodiments of the tribal leader, who in turn is not a custodian of a permanent institution or “office,” but its very essence. When Muhammad died, Abu Baqr was named the Khaliph, but the tribes revolted. This was not because they opposed Abu Baqr, but because they had no institutional loyalty to the the Khaliphate; Abu Baqr had to personally renegotiate the terms of loyalty with each tribe, each of which would continue in revolt until he did. It is a very personal affair between the leader and his “tribe” of followers. Contrast this with the concept of leader and institution in the West. While any leader in the West owes those in society that helped him rise to the top, the office he assumes and the institution which he heads have their own existence as a possession of all the people of community. A U.S. president, while obviously trying to realize policies that deliver for his supporters, is bound to talk about being the president of all Americans. He loses his personal validity the moment he tries to limit the office or institution to the narrow purview of clan or tribal head. And there are strict laws against such favoritism in U.S. politics. Not so in the Middle East. The inverse is true. A leader that does not pursue the interests of his tribe has betrayed their personal trust in him, and he has lost his claim to loyalty and following, and thus his personal validity.

In short, the mission or purpose of the tribal leader, and the clans which make up the tribe, is primarily to deliver the survival and welfare of that tribe. In an urban setting, traditional tribes, or the identity of having come from a tribe, still exist and are important but are weaker. Still, one’s tribal origins are part of one’s soul. Moreover, the patterns of politics and the nature of leadership remains baked into the culture despite having been urbanized. And is understood in those terms as well. The Prime Minister of Israel is seen as much in the Middle East in personal terms as the leader of the Jewish tribe, rather as he is understood in the West as the custodian of the institution of the Israeli state. Indeed, the United States president is seen in such terms as well and is expected to act as required along those lines. When Israelis or Americans talk in larger theoretical terms of global order or regional peace, it is simply confusing. What tribal leader would talk about regional structures of conflict resolution and “interests of the international community” which stand above the interests of the Jewish or American tribes they represent? What tribal leader in his right mind would give in to expectations to cede his tribal authority voluntarily?

Since survival as a community is the basic aim in a harsh environment, the legitimacy of one’s being the tribal leader is based on how well he protects and provides for the tribe. In turn, each tribe member understands that his survival and welfare is derivative of the tribe, so his purpose is to help his tribe survive, and in turn, he exists under the tribe’s protection. If some member wants to be individualistic, he can do so as a dead person.

The tribal leader thus, to provide and protect his tribe, must always be on the lookout for the strong horse to which he attaches his tribe and to whom he links their fate. The wrong choice, or some “principled” choice, represents a fundamental failure and abdication of authority. So the basis of all leadership and politics is seeking and signing with the rising power.

Mansour Abbas has made the choice — to some extent similar to the choice made by the tribal leaders of Abu Ghosh in 1948 — as such a “tribal” leader that identifies Israel as the strongest horse. It is the same choice the UAE has made as well. Mansour Abbas has attached his fate to Israel, based on the expectation of Israel’s being and remaining a rising power.

The other Arab leaders in this picture all hedge or think Israel will not prevail. They follow in the footsteps of so many Arab leaders before, who have climbed up and over the precipice into the abyss in viewing Nazism, Communism, China, Saddam’s Iraq, Iran, Turkey or ISIS and bin Ladin as the rising and prevailing power. So they, as these previous Arab leaders have done, attach themselves to any movement against Israel and the U.S.

As long as the U.S. and Israel understand that they are viewed in the region as the tribal leaders for their “tribes,” they can navigate the region successfully, and gather power and following along the way. But when we try to be above it all, and think like a detached academic or politic utopians who believe in conflict resolution or pacifism, or worse engage in self-denigrating or conciliatory actions, like the U.S. and Israel have often done before, and which the United States is now asking again of its ally, then we and Israel will lose all value as the strong horse. The U.S. and the Israelis become toxic and are to be fled from as fast as possible, and we will find ourselves alone and under attack even by those who just a moment ago were our “best friends.” In fact, in particularly by those who were just recently our best friends because they have to disassociate themselves the most from the catastrophic choice of having misread us as a strong horse.

Mansour Abbas is essentially now a “tribal” leader of a substantial group of Arabs, esoteric the Negev Arabs of whom most are Bedouin, and as his “tribe’s” leader, he relates to Israel as the strong horse with whom it is in his tribe’s best interest to align, assuming Israel understands and accepts its role as the strong horse. In this way, it is quite possible that Mansour Abbas sees PM Bennett’s pedigree as a hard liner and a graduate of the General Staff commando unit as advantages, not as an offense.

The participation of Mansour Abbas thus means several things for the other Arabs:

1. Mansour Abbas bartered his support for the Israeli strong horse in exchange for the real empowerment of an Arab party — something the Joint Arab List leadership has forfeited for decades by its choice to champion the Palestinian flag over the Israeli, and serve consistently as apologists for the violence and rejection of the state of Israel that this represents. In some ways, Mansour Abbas’ fate is tied and dependent on his gamble, namely on his bet on Israel’s success and remaining strong. Mansour Abbas, thus, is the domestic Arab opposite of the local Arabs who are the followers of the external rejection front led by Syria, Iran, the PLO, Turkey and others (in practice even Qatar) — namely Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the PLO’s many factions, including Fatah and Abu Mazen — some members of whom have even wound up in exile in the capitals of their preferred external “strong horses.” All these rejectionist forces, inside and outside, have staked the credibility of their leadership over their “tribes” and clans on Israel’s weakness, temptation to conciliation and peace processes, which it is assumed will lead to its retreat and ultimately to Israel’s demise. In contrast, Mansour Abbas can roughly be considered the internal Israeli Arab equivalent of the UAE and Abraham Accords — namely while his informing dogma may still not, and likely never will, accept the genuine legitimacy of the Jewish state, the “tribal” leader he represents — and his irreducible need to deliver protection and validation for his followers — drives him to reconcile and seek the fulfillment of his community’s interests through some sort of reconciliation and accommodation with Israel. As such, the success of Mansour Abbas essentially embodies the Abraham Accords.

In the process, Abbas has rendered himself the mortal enemy of these rival “tribes” and their leadership, namely those whose primary allegiance is to the various shades of the rejectionist front. This is a fight to the death, so they will do anything to tear Abbas down. As Iran and Turkey view the Abraham Accords as a mortal strategic threat, so too will they view Mansour Abbas.

2. The outside forces of the rejectionist front — which ultimately includes the PLO, as well, despite the fiction clung to by western elites of its moderation — have been forced to surrender their monopoly and with agony watch their rival, Mansour Abbas, leverage his access to Israeli power to deliver to his followers what they cannot. Mansour Abbas, like the UAE externally, annulled their veto over any movement toward reconciliation. Jews and Arabs, this time internally as opposed to regionally, could find formulas to work together when their interests converge even without having to first solve the “Palestinian issue” over which the rejectionist front held a veto. The other Abbas, Muhammad Abbas of the PA and head of the PLO had, once again had his rudimentary persona and purpose rejected. So apart from Muhammad Abbas’ having a new rival (Mansour Abbas) for the street from which he largely already is humiliatingly rejected, he also suddenly finds himself, his movement, and the balloon of the PA’s importance as “the indispensable factor” punctured. Mansour Abbas threatens Muhammad Abbas as much as the Abraham Accords did.

3. Hamas, Iran and Turkey invested immensely in creating the sort of fundamental breakdown of law and order that was expressed through the Arab Spring instigated during the recent war between Israel and Hamas. For the first time since 1948, the internal fabric of Israeli society was ripped and the very real danger of an Arab-Jewish communal civil war threatened within just last month. And now, only a few weeks later, the leader of a party whose platform stands to the right of the outgoing Israeli government, Yemina, embraced Mansour Abbas and invited him into the inner circle of Israeli power structures. Symbolically, the greatest achievement of the war for Hamas has been challenged, eroded, and potentially burst as suddenly as it exploded last month. They have been humiliated by Mansour Abbas.

4. Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria have increasingly looked with envy at the ability of Israelis to be free and express themselves. While still uneasy about accepting the image of political chaos as potentially an expression and form of strength rather than weakness, there is an increasing attraction to Israeli society among Palestinians when juxtaposed against the suppression, corruption and brutality of the governments they live under in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. This unnerves, and properly so, those governments and possess a threat to the legitimacy of their rule. This may also threaten other regional leaders since Mansour Abbas and Israel have managed to deliver the only genuinely democratic path to enfranchisement of Arabs in the Middle East, not the Arab Spring nor any other fashionable Arab ideological movement of the last century.

5. Iran and Turkey invested heavily in effort and coin in creating a new Palestinian Arab leadership that echoes and furthers their regional power ambitions. And then along comes Mansour Abbas out of nowhere and grabs the standard of leadership of Israeli Arabs, especially but not only the Bedouin. Another balloon bursts, and the vast resources spent by Iran, Turkey and Qatar go up in flames.

6. Mansour Abbas also places King Abdallah of Jordan potentially in a difficult position, largely because King Abdallah has spent the last decade making a series of grave mistakes. First among these, King Abdallah of Jordan has allowed himself to be defined so consistently as the cheerleader for the Palestinian camp led by Abu Mazen that he has become its shadow. But King Abdallah is not a Palestinian. He may be the decedent of the Prophet Muhammad, and thus a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic leader, but he also is essentially the current head of the Hejazi tribes from when he hails. As such, he gained little real following among the people of whom he is not — the Palestinians — but forfeited the following of the people of whom he is, the Hejazi Bedouin tribes. In the process, he offended the Hejazi Bedouin tribes which traditionally form the core of the Hashemite kingdom and without whose support the state of Jordan loses its raison d’etre. The symbol of this misplaced attention was in 2017, when King Abdallah intervened, mostly unhelpfully, in the Temple Mount unrest following a terror attack which was launched from within the Temple Mount complex that killed two Israeli police, while at the same time the Hawaitat tribe — which had been loyal to the Hashemite family since the Arab Revolt in World War I a century ago — threatened to withdraw its loyalty from the King for his prosecution of two of its members for a terror attack on American soldiers. King Abdallah chose to focus on the Palestinian crisis rather than his own regime-threatening one. In short, King Abdallah has been so busy entangling himself with the PLO-based Palestinian movement, and becoming Abu Mazen’s champion among Western establishments, that he forgot he was the tribal head of the Hejazi Bedouin tribal core of the state. He is acting like man without a tribe. This ultimately is what underlies the dangerous rift between himself and Prince Hamza, who clearly had powerful supporters among the Hejazi tribes.

Across the African rift valley in the Negev in southern Israel, Mansour Abbas established his leadership most by championing the cause of the Bedouin Negev tribes. Their concerns and issues formed the unsurrenderable core of the demands to which Mansour Abbas held in negotiating his entry into the Israeli government. He delivered. So in some ways, he is the tribal leader now de facto of the Negev Arab Bedouin tribes.

Despite the harshness and difficulty of the landscape of the African Rift Valley, there is effectively no border dividing the Hejazi tribes from the Bedouin of the Negev. Historically, indeed going all the way back to the ancient Nabateans, the tribal allegiances of today’s southern Jordan and Israel ran up and down from the north in Ma’an to south in the Hejaz, but equally from the east in Ma’an to the West in Be’er Sheva. It is unclear how solid the tribal connections are still now after 1948, but the rise of a de facto champion of the Negev Bedouin must register on the Hejazi tribal radar — which has been left dangerously abandoned and orphaned by the Palestinian-focused, British-groomed Jordanian King who still fits more comfortably in the meeting halls of Davos than a tent near Aqaba.

To note, when a tribal member or group is abandoned in Arab society his life or existence is forfeited. When the Prophet Muhammad fled Mecca to Medina, since his uncle had to surrender his protection, it was understood by both Muhammad and the Meccan establishment as tantamount to a death sentence. One can only imagine what the Hejazi tribes today feel as they sense their abandonment by King Abdallah for his Palestinian allies. They are looking for a champion, and the Saudis — who reside over those same Hejazi tribes on their side of the border — anxiously look at King Abdallah’s failure and probably hope the tribes find a new patron, perhaps one attached to a strong horse like Israel.

So, it is possible Mansour Abbas as the most prominent champion right now of Bedouin interests threatens even King Abdallah. The UAE and the Saudis fears over the unhinged status of the Hejazi tribes by Jordan’s straying — who drifting abandoned could easily wander to a new patron hostile to Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, like Turkey — could be somewhat allayed by the success of Mansour Abbas among the Bedouin Arabs. The drift of the Negev Arabs was dangerously close to Hamas and to regional malefactors, particularly Turkey whose nemeses are Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It is dubious that Abdallah is shrewd enough at this point to realize this, but eventually he could see this as a threat.

In other words, the success of Mansour Abbas represents a catastrophe for powerful interests everywhere.

It is to be expected that interested parties, all of whom have the power to act, will in fact sabotage Mansour Abbas at all costs, the quickest and easiest route being escalation to violence or war.

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

June 01, 2021
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This article appeared in The Washington Post on May 30, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 30, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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