Biden rewards Russia on Storm Shadow missiles

September 16, 2024

Keir Starmer’s first visit to Washington as Britain’s prime minister last Friday did not go well.

His meeting with President Joe Biden failed to resolve U.K.-U.S. disputes over whether Britain could transfer its Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine for use inside Russia. Kyiv has repeatedly asked that such restrictions on munitions like Storm Shadows be lifted.

Last week’s Starmer-Biden meeting did not change the status quo, to Ukraine’s dismay. The United Kingdom needs Washington’s approval because Storm Shadows contain technology from the United States and rely on our intelligence. Although there were other topics on the agenda, this first meeting since Starmer took office provided an opportunity to affirm the “special relationship” and the shared objective of defeating Moscow’s unprovoked aggression. Instead, Starmer was unceremoniously rebuffed. Worse, the Biden administration showed that, even in its last months, it remained wavering, hesitant, and uncertain on Ukraine 2 1/2 years since the war began.

Elaborate preparations preceded the Starmer-Biden meeting, starting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky conferring in Kyiv. Blinken then met with Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, reaffirming that “we’re determined to see Ukraine win this war” and “we will adapt, we will adjust, and make sure that Ukraine has what it needs when it needs it to deal with this Russian aggression.” A decision to allow the British to proceed seemed almost assured. But the next day in Washington, that did not happen. There was only silence.

Starmer implied afterward that decisions regarding Storm Shadows had simply been postponed, perhaps until the end of September when Biden and other world leaders address the United Nations General Assembly. Further delay alone, however, is harmful to Ukraine’s self-defense efforts. Delay, unfortunately, encapsulates the essence of Biden’s unwillingness to act decisively not just to prevent Ukraine from being overrun, but to ensure it is restored to its full sovereignty and territorial integrity, NATO’s stated goal.

Although the U.S. and NATO failed to deter Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has consistently deterred Biden from aiding Ukraine in a strategic and well-ordered way. Repeated White House statements indicating fear of “a wider war” explain that Biden has been more worried about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bluffs than about prevailing militarily, thereby not only defeating Moscow’s aggression but unmistakably showing China and other American adversaries that our capabilities and resolve are strong. We should be deterring them, not the other way around.

Since Russia’s 2022 attack, with each painfully slow additional delivery of advanced armaments to Ukraine, Putin has threatened dire consequences, including last week against NATO itself. But there has never been evidence of a credible threat of a “wider war” with conventional forces. If the Kremlin had such capacity, why hasn’t it already been deployed to Ukraine to overcome Russia’s poor offensive performance, including recently against Ukraine’s so-far-successful incursion into the Kursk region?

The Kremlin’s nuclear threats, including the most recent, deserve to be taken seriously, given the stakes involved. But taking a nuclear threat seriously does not mean believing it. When Putin has rattled the nuclear saber before, testimony of U.S. intelligence community officials before Congress has indicated that Russia has not actually redeployed any of its nuclear capabilities to ready them for use. Each assessment must stand on its own merits, but simply cringing before a Putin threat gives Russia what it wants at no risk and no cost. That is the short road to Ukraine’s defeat.

After meeting with Biden, Starmer downplayed the lack of a decision on Storm Shadows, saying that larger strategic questions were discussed. He is continuing London’s policy, begun by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, making it the strongest advocate within NATO for aiding Ukraine, notably more forcefully than the Biden administration. What should be on Starmer’s mind, however, is what may be coming after the November elections.

At last Tuesday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump refused to say whether he favored Ukraine winning the war, merely asserting that he wanted to “end” it. Worse, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance later said Trump’s “peace plan” would separate the parties by a demilitarized zone, with Russia keeping all Ukrainian territory it already holds, and that Ukraine would never join NATO. Putin could hardly ask for more. But if that’s Trump’s opening position, you can bet Putin will.

Biden has very little time left in office.

The least he could do is let allies aid Ukraine in ways that might allow it to prevail against Russia’s invasion, a shot that would definitely be heard round the world.

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

This article was first published in the Washington Examiner on September 16, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

America’s Crucial First Line of Defense in the Pacific

September 12, 2024

China’s recent incursions into Japan’s airspace and territorial waters materially escalate Beijing’s efforts to intimidate and dominate nations in the Indo-Pacific. Tokyo responded by announcing a multibillion-dollar satellite program to bolster detection capabilities against such intrusions.

Chinese “fishing vessels” have in the past periodically sailed near the Senkaku islands, which are claimed by Japan, Taiwan and China. Chinese coast guard ships and military vessels later began to appear, ratcheting up Beijing’s aggressiveness. Washington doesn’t explicitly recognize Tokyo’s sovereignty over the Senkakus but has committed to defend the islands under the U.S.-Japan mutual cooperation and security treaty.

These escalating forays follow Chinese interference in Taiwan’s airspace and waters, and its efforts to assert sovereignty over most of the South China Sea. Chinese naval encounters with the Philippines over disputed islands, shoals and reefs have made headlines. Vietnam and others have often faced Chinese challenges.

None of this is coincidental. Beijing is unmistakably contesting control of the First Island Chain. This variously described topography extends from the Kamchatka Peninsula to the Kuril islands, through Japan and the Senkakus to Taiwan, on to the Philippines and then Borneo and the Malay Peninsula.

America’s next president will have to face the strategic consequences of this belligerence. Climate-change negotiations with Beijing should no longer top Washington’s East Asia agenda. Tweets suggesting China consult Google Maps won’t suffice, though they at least show someone on Team Biden understands the problem.

With China pressing all along the First Island Chain, existing U.S. bilateral cooperation with affected states like Japan and Taiwan has plainly become insufficient. Finding seams in the intelligence or defense capabilities across the chain is far easier for Beijing when such efforts among the targets are absent. If China breaks through the First Island Chain at one place, other states in the chain and the Pacific would be at greater risk. Washington should recognize that the integrity of each nation’s air and maritime spaces requires multilateral cooperation, especially among air and naval forces and the intelligence communities of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand. Given the high stakes, involving other Asian and Pacific states, along with key European allies like Britain, could be critical.

Such cooperation doesn’t require creating an East Asian North Atlantic Treaty Organization or accepting a decision to contain China—at least not yet. More-robust multistate activities are nevertheless urgently needed across the island chain. Several areas of multilateral cooperation are already under way, but if much more isn’t done, Beijing will play one nation against another, calibrating belligerent activities along its periphery to advance its interests. If the affected nations don’t hang together, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, China may well hang them all separately.

A possible model is George W. Bush’s Proliferation Security Initiative against trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. A British diplomat described PSI as “an activity, not an organization,” almost entirely operational and not overtly political. Its success rested on military and intelligence exchanges and exercises, only rarely involving diplomatic palavering among foreign ministries. What worked for PSI on a global basis can work in Asia and the Pacific.

The elephant in the room is Taiwan. Without it, there is little chance other concerned countries can effectively thwart China’s destabilizing efforts. This time it isn’t Taipei asking for help, but other regional capitals that need help as much as Taipei. Losing effective control over what Douglas MacArthur labeled an “unsinkable aircraft carrier”—much less actual Chinese annexation—would fatally breach the First Island Chain. There are ways around the Taiwan dilemma that would irritate Beijing. But that need not precipitate a political crisis unless China is resolved to have one, which in itself would reveal Beijing’s hostile intent.

Long before the Abraham Accords established full diplomatic relations among Israel and several Arab states, they were working together. Wide-ranging intelligence cooperation, especially over the common threat of Iran, stimulated creative, mutually advantageous ways to do business. In another context, West Germany’s somewhat anomalous status didn’t prevent its full integration into NATO. Instead of hypothesizing about obstacles to closer cooperation with Taiwan, Asian and U.S. diplomats should emulate their predecessors and include Taiwan in collective security.

More Chinese air and sea incursions are coming, along with increased influence operations in Asian and Pacific countries and more intelligence-gathering efforts. Beijing is dictating the pace and scope of its intrusions, underscoring the need for closer cooperation among its targets. That alone would augment deterrence, but we haven’t got time to waste.

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

This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on September 10, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Dealing with the greatest adversary

September 01, 2024

The United States is certainly split internally, as this year’s presidential race shows. Donald Trump and his congressional supporters question US mil itary support for Ukraine, and even espouse withdrawal from NATO, or fundamentally restructuring alliance commitments. Nonetheless, recent polling shows overwhelming majorities of Americans back NATO (73%–27%) and believe the US should defend NATO allies if they are at tacked (74%–26%). However, that same poll also found comparable majorities believe NATO relies too much on US funding and that other NATO allies are not doing enough (74%–26%).

Read the full article in the Stern Stewart Journal Sep 24 edition.

The Diplomatic Demons of Despair Battle Securing Strategic Victory in Israel

August 22, 2024

By Dr. David Wurmser[1]

In the summer of 2002, I was sent as a US diplomat to assess and correct the damage done by our negotiating team at the end of the 2000 Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference. In 2000, the overarching goal within our diplomatic corps was to reach a deal with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to expand NPT membership reach universality. So central had this goal become that it became a fixation to the point where the original mission of the NPT was obscured. The non-Aligned Movement believed self-imposed pressure was so great among Western diplomats to achieve such universality that they could be blackmailed and seduced into shifting the nature of the treaty from its original purpose of controlling nuclear technologies to responsible actors who could use it for peaceful purposes to become instead a disarmament treaty focused on disarming Western nuclear weapons arsenals, undermine Israel, and to establish a goal as well as to eliminate Western structures of missile defense. The vehicle of this attempt was to forward an unrealistic list of demands – which eventually became known as the Thirteen Points under Article VI of the NPT.

The NAM read US and British diplomats correctly. Both the US and UK diplomatic teams had indeed descended into such despair that they had crossed into an obsession. In a final act of surrender, all resistance or rejection by US and British diplomats on the 13-point plan was surrendered by the US negotiator as he physically collapsed from exhaustion and was wheeled away to a hospital in a life-threatening condition. He literally signed the agreement from the stretcher. The US had in effect signed away its (as well as the British and French) nuclear arsenals and any right to missile defense. The French felt betrayed since they had not even been consulted or coordinated, intentionally because the US and British teams knew that France understood more soberly than they that its residual claim to superpower status had just been erased.

It was a lesson that entered historical annals about diplomatic obsession and loss of proportion. Diplomatic goals were detached and prioritized over national interest, and diplomatic décor and sober policymaking were sacrificed at the altar of an agreement at all costs. The noble early intention to expand the NPT had descended into a possessed obsession.

Sadly, we have come to this point once again with the ceasefire/hostage deal negotiations over Gaza. The ceasefire/hostage deal talks began many months ago and are based on assumptions and parameters that originated from the very different reality of early Spring 2024 of pre-Rafiah, pre-Philadelphia Corridor period of Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza. But instead of assessing the tectonic changes, US diplomacy is redoubling its effort to the point of obsession while losing sight of the overall strategic picture, and even its more narrow goal of freeing the hostages.

The current diplomatic effort was born in a different reality. In April 2024, Israelis believed that the only way to get the hostages out— any of them — was a deal that came at a steep price. That difficulty of accepting a dear price, moreover, seemed offset by the difficulty and impasse of the situation. Israel controlled only about a third of Gaza in early May, and the U.S. demanded a ceasefire because of the mounting humanitarian cost and the assessment that any further advance of the IDF would trigger an unfathomable humanitarian catastrophe, as well as escalate to general war with Hizballah.

Iran, Hizballah, Hamas and Gazans themselves read the writing: Israel had stalled. Israel was unprepared to fight a war in the north against Hizballah, especially given how much of its force was still bogged down in Gaza, and was thus eager to end the fighting in Gaza to redirect more of its power northward.

Internally, Israel’s government teetered at the edge of collapse and was expected by most to fall within weeks as the crescendo of voices calling for early elections was deafening. The anti-government demonstrators who over the last two years had gathered at Kaplan street – starting with opposition to legal reform but morphing into essentially a lobby for a hostage deal in hopes that it would weaken the Netanyahu government enough to topple it — was back on the streets with confidence. It rode the tail wind of genuine universal Israeli anguish over the Israeli hostage issue as well as broad-based disappointment in the reigning government, leveraged overt US support, and tapped into the international outcry over the humanitarian “crisis” which had became the focus of all attention.

The majority of the war cabinet and Israel’s flag-rank defense establishment, let alone the world of retired generals for a parade of reasons, echoed the demands and outlook of the U.S. administration. The coalition of air power the US had gathered to parry Iran’s robust missile attack on Israel on April 13 moreover reminded Israel that its entire defense doctrine for decades had drifted into resting dangerously on a US regional strategic umbrella rather than its traditional doctrine of self-reliance and preemptive/preventative defense. And the umbrella came with its price of deference to American demands.

Hamas read all of that and dug in, believing time was taking its toll on Israel, the US was successfully manipulated into furthering its demands, and in the battle of wills, it was winning.

Given those realities, the only deal possible to get hostages back was essentially an Israeli surrender managed under American auspices – end the war and withdraw from Gaza – leaving Israel with the only hope that it will be able to return to fight another day. Some of the most prominent commentors of former generals on TV echoed that point, and insisted that victory was impossible; the only course was to surrender, leverage international support to find a more palatable Palestinian Authority to which it might be possible to turn Gaza over, and bring some – about a quarter at most — of the hostages home.

That is the reality when the fundamental assumptions and framework of the deal began being set. If hostages were to be brought home, which remained one of the two main Israeli goals, that was realistically the only way. And moreover, it was aligned with Israel’s local, regional and geopolitical strategic reality, as unsatisfying as those realities were.

But reality now is vastly different. Israel finally invaded Rafah and took control of the Philadelphia corridor, which severs Gaza from Egypt, with almost no loss of civilian life. Hamas lost its lifeline, its “oxygen supply,” from Egypt as long as the Philadelphia Corridor remains under Israeli control. Indeed, the capture of the Philadelphia corridor revealed a dark truth: Egypt’s government had over recent years failed, or was unwilling, to meaningfully govern the traffic entering and exiting Gaza to the point that Hamas had unfettered access and logistical support from the outside. Now, Hamas is suffocating and seems to be slowly dying.

Internally, the Israeli government is now stable and will survive at least into 2025. Almost all of the strongest voices within the Israeli governmental structure for U.S. administration positions, especially Benjamin Gantz and Gadi Eisenkott – who was among the strongest advocates for yielding and proponents of the view that victory was impossible — have left and the security cabinet is essentially replaced by the coalitional government cabinet. In Gaza itself, there is no genuine humanitarian crisis and the level of civilian deaths is a trace of what it had been.

The ground that shifts tectonically as a result of these dynamics has also shifted how one best can secure the release of the most hostages. Indeed, the best way to bring home the most hostages is no longer through the deal conceived by American diplomats, but through accelerated military pressure to create the realization among Gazans that total Israeli victory is inevitable. At that point, Gazans will despair of Hamas, and even those on the ground holding the hostages will see greater value in their own preservation rather than join Hamas in its collapse and demise. The remaining hostages acquire immense value at that point, since personally for Gazans they become the only asset they have to barter and save their skin under the inevitable Israeli victory. Not only will they keep them alive, but Gazans likely will begin to come forward either to release them to Israel as the IDF draws close, or to leak operational intelligence that can help locate hostages. People will cut their deals with the Israeli victor. In short, the greater the certainty of Hamas’ collapse and loss of control, the greater the chance of getting any or even all hostages back to Israel.

Under those circumstances, the parameters of discussion regarding a ceasefire as construed by US diplomats right now actually undermines the real dynamic that would lead to the release of hostages since it creates the idea that Hamas will be saved, and that there will be no collapse. Gazans thus will not risk their lives to abandon Hamas, given the inevitable resurrection of Hamas that the current parameters of the agreement guarantees. There will also be no intelligence divulged to Israel. There will be no hostage holders who give up their hostages to save themselves. Simply, there will be no Gazans who help the IDF until they are sure that Hamas will not survive.

Moreover, the broader regional strategic context surrounding the Gaza war has changed. And so has Israel’s strategic imagery now that the immediacy of the Gaza war has yielded to reflection on the nature of the overall defense of the nation. Indeed, Israel is slowly turning the geostrategic tide not only in Gaza, but in Lebanon and Iran too — and for the worse for Hamas, Hizballah, Houthis, Iraqi militias and the whole Iran axis. The longer the war goes on, the more Israel weakens, and will eventually defeat, the evil axis.

But Israel’s close-in strategic realities have also changed. In Gaza, dozens of hidden cross-border tunnels have now been exposed, some large enough for constant truck traffic even. The strategic supply of Hamas by Iran had been unrestrained until May – bringing the front line of Iran’s attack into the heart of Israel only 25 miles from the center of Tel Aviv. Israel now, however, controls that border. Nothing passes into Gaza now without traversing Israeli lines. And Gaza itself has been divided, with nothing from the south being able to move into the northern half without also going through an additional, robust Israeli line. Essentially, the Iranian threat had been pushed outside of the Mandatory border – the border established in 1921 by the League of Nations to define what was earmarked to become Israel, but after 1948 was partially controlled by Egypt and Jordan in Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and then captured entirely by Israel in 1967. The closest Iran can get is in the chaos of the Sinai Peninsula on the Egyptian side of the border with Israel.

On the negative side, Judea and Samaria (West Bank) have become an active front, more dangerous now than even Gaza. The reason for this is that Iran has used the Iraqi militias, the collapse of Syria and the weakness of the Jordanian state to penetrate Israel’s border in the Jordan Valley. It is able to smuggle significant material and event agents, and is attempting to trigger a dangerous new front that reaches into areas at the heart of Israel adjacent to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.[2] As a result, Israel is rapidly and urgently building a far more robust defense structure in the Jordan Valley to prevent a similar reality as had been in Gaza until May, when Israel took the Philadelphia Corridor, to separate Judea and Samaria from the Iranian pincer coming in via Jordan.

Essentially, Israel has rediscovered what it had neglected for at least three decades: The territory within Mandatory Palestine is a single strategic theater. Whoever maintains its borders — whether the Jordan Valley or the Philadelphia corridor and the whole Egyptian border to Eilat — strategically dominates all that transpires within the territory.

And the only way to control a border is operational control and presence over it. And such control – not only monitoring but enforcement against what the monitoring uncovers – can only be achieved by robust physical presence. The issue is not detection, but reaction to violation. Even if the IDF detects dangerous cross-border activity, reentry into an evacuated area is prohibitive — even to the point of Israel’s being deterred — and thus relies on cooperation from the Palestinian Authority and Egypt, both of whom are as much part of the problem as its solution. If Israel is present with boots on the ground in operationally capable levels, then reaction is automatic and hardly governs a second thought.

In other words, Gaza and Judea and Samaria all had become entirely part of the larger Iranian effort to penetrate into the heart of Israel using the Palestinian Arab populations. And thus it has become imperative that the IDF holds the Philadelphia corridor and the Jordan Valley corridor with a real, operational force that maintains positive full control as the only way to prevent the drift back to October 6 in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria (West Bank).

As such, the paradigm that informs US establishment thinking and which informs the current content of all American diplomacy, including the ceasefire deal – that Israel can subcontract to the Palestinian Authority and Israel’s neighbors the control of either the Philadelphia Corridor in Gaza or the Jordan Valley in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) — is now collapsing and rejected in Israeli strategic thinking.

So, the entire hostage ceasefire framework has become obsolete and highly counterproductive. Indeed, its terms of reference try to preserve the realities of an Israeli defeat, which had been the only way out before Rafiah and Philadelphia, instead of an Israeli victory, which is what is emerging not only locally but potentially regionally.

And yet, even as the diplomatic effort as currently defined becomes ever more detached from reality, US diplomats redouble their effort to realize the unattainable. And the watershed issue is the Philadelphia corridor. Hamas, desperate to reestablish its lifeline to Iran, demands Israel leave the corridor. Israel, of course, now refuses. The U.S., however, is trying to bridge the gap by trying to reduce IDF presence to a meaningless symbolic level, such as a handful of observers to PA control, in the Philadelphia Corridor. It is an unbridgeable gap since it symbolizes and embodies who will win this war and define the post-war strategic reality: Israel or Hamas and Iran.

In their despair to reach a dead-letter deal, US diplomats are inching ever closer to trying to birth the sort of spectacle I had to help clean up in the 2002 NPT preparatory conference in Geneva by walking back the 13-point surrender plan delivered by a similar obsession and resulting despair possessing our diplomats in the 2000 NPT Review Conference.

[1] David Wurmser is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC as well as at both the Misgav Institute and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in Jerusalem

[2] https://x.com/wurmserscribit/status/1825094588047986854?s=48

Yet another Biden foreign policy failure

August 07, 2024

The Biden administration has again fallen victim to its own foreign policy, this time in Venezuela.

Entirely predictably, Nicolas Maduro’s illegitimate regime has stolen its second straight presidential election, propelled by White House concessions and naivete. As a result, the Venezuelan people remain under authoritarian rulers strongly backed by Russia, Cuba, China, and Iran. This is a U.S. failure by any measure.

Responding to Maduro’s first electoral larceny in 2018, Venezuela’s National Assembly, acting under the country’s constitution, declared the presidency vacant. The National Assembly then named Juan Guaido as acting president pending new elections. Some 60 countries, mostly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere, recognized Guaido’s government and its authority over Venezuelan state assets. Many imposed economic sanctions, particularly against PDVSA, the government-owned oil company, to pressure Maduro’s criminal regime into accepting this.

After extensive efforts to oust Maduro, opposition efforts failed in April 2019. Although he successfully reimposed authoritarian rule, the sanctions weakened Venezuela’s already-collapsing economy, forcing Maduro to rely increasingly on illegal drug trafficking for revenue.

Former President Donald Trump’s loss of interest in Venezuela thereafter meant that American policy drifted until his term ended. Unfortunately, and unavoidably, Maduro then proceeded to rig Venezuela’s 2020 parliamentary elections, which the opposition boycotted, giving Maduro’s supporters overwhelming control of the National Assembly.

President Joe Biden’s election brought a return of Obama-like policies toward Latin America, which downplayed Venezuela’s importance to the emerging Beijing-Moscow axis, or to Havana and Tehran.

Meanwhile, now fully in control of Venezuela’s governmental institutions, Maduro systematically dismantled opposition parties. He intimidated anti-regime political leaders ahead of the next presidential election, disqualifying candidates such as Maria Corina Machado, the opposition’s main leader.

Even as this repression was underway, the Biden administration made a deal with Maduro, weakening U.S. sanctions and making other concessions if Maduro committed to holding free and fair elections.

This agreement simply accelerated Maduro’s election-rigging, while simultaneously benefiting the regime through loosened sanctions.

After Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election, Maduro’s officials quickly declared him the winner. No one believed these assertions, not even Biden’s White House. Both the opposition and international observers believed Edmundo Gonzalez, the opposition candidate, had won a 2-1 majority.

Given Maduro’s long record of dishonesty, this was all tragically foreseen, except by the Biden administration. Distracted by his own political troubles, and with the international coalition against Maduro (particularly the Western Hemisphere’s Lima Group) in disarray, Biden had no strategy to respond.

However, led by Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Congress reacted quickly, and with strong bipartisan support, to recognize Gonzalez as Venezuela’s president-elect and reimpose U.S. sanctions.

The White House followed, declaring Gonzalez the winner and abandoning its initial feckless call on Maduro to make public the Venezuelan vote-tally sheets proving he had won.

Leftist regimes in Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico have so far waffled, not taking a public position on the outcome, and thereby providing Maduro oxygen. Reviving the Lima Group is now critical to show Western Hemisphere solidarity, but doing so requires urgent White House effort to get these important South American countries to recognize Gonzalez.

Without question, all previous American sanctions must be restored immediately, and more should be added.

Venezuela is the right place to start dramatically enhancing U.S. sanctions enforcement: in resolve, capabilities, and resources. Targets of sanctions don’t meekly accept their fate, but do everything possible to evade or mitigate sanctions’ effects. Accordingly, U.S. enforcement must be dynamic, evolving ahead of targets’ efforts to escape the economic bullseye.

The objective of U.S. and multilateral sanctions and other punitive steps against Maduro’s regime must have as their ultimate objective the defeat of “Chavismo” once and for all. Only by sweeping away Venezuela’s reigning ideology and returning government to its people will they have a meaningful chance to better their status, economically and politically, and reduce the heavy hand of foreign influence.

Although some observers believe Maduro has been weakened, there is no sign his masters in Moscow, Havanna, et al., have gotten the memo. Ensuring that they do should also be a U.S. diplomatic priority.

America failed the Venezuelan people once before. We must not do so again.

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

This article was first published in the Washington Examiner on August 6, 2024. Click here to read the original article

What Netanyahu’s visit showed about the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship

July 31, 2024

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to America last week reflected long-term pluses and minuses for the U.S.-Israel relationship. The historical relationship between Israel and the Democratic Party hit its lowest point ever, while that between Republicans and Israel has never been stronger. Driving these developments are tectonic shifts of power and demographics among Democrats and, even more importantly, tectonic shifts in Israeli public opinion about how to achieve lasting peace and security.

Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress echoed both alterations. His Gaza objectives were clear: “Israel will fight until we destroy Hamas’s military capabilities and its rule in Gaza and bring all our hostages home. That’s what total victory means, and we will settle for nothing less.”

The prime minister rightly laid responsibility for the threats facing Israel on Iran, the principal menace to Middle Eastern stability. This reality has still not sunk in with Democrats, particularly in the Biden White House. In Israel today, whatever Netanyahu’s personal popularity, there is little debate on these points.

America’s core national interest in supporting Israel against Iran and its terrorist surrogates is more than religious, historical and cultural. Iran’s nuclear and terrorist threats both currently manifest themselves in the Hamas war against Israel, the “little Satan,” but Tehran also targets America, the “great Satan.” Gaza is not the main battleground, but merely one front of Tehran’s threat, which Netanyahu spelled out clearly, yet again. And yet again, the Democratic establishment didn’t get it. Fortunately for Israel, most Americans do.

Netanyahu’s meeting with President Biden was apparently workmanlike, focusing on Biden’s continuing, misbegotten pursuit of a cease-fire-for-hostages deal between Hamas and Israel. Ominously for Netanyahu, however, Biden has already moved far away from the “ironclad” support for Israel he pledged shortly after Hamas’s barbaric Oct. 7 attack. Inevitably, the leaders’ meeting reflected the unrelenting, unprecedented pressure the White House has put on Jerusalem to end the Gaza conflict.

When still a candidate for reelection, Biden wanted the Middle East (and Ukraine) off the front pages, hoping to conceal the spreading global chaos caused by his own foreign policy’s grave weaknesses. Biden also wanted to avoid offending tender Iranian or Russian sensitivities, lest increased global oil prices reignite inflation, thereby diminishing his waning chances of victory in November. Although Biden is now a lame duck, his and Vice President Kamala Harris’s interests still converge on this point.

For Israel, Biden truly is a transitional president, the last vestige of President Harry Truman’s pride that the U.S. was first to recognize Israel’s independence. Those days are over. As Netanyahu said to Congress, Biden described himself as “a proud Irish-American Zionist.” Vice President Harris is not a proud Zionist of any variety, which, if not already clear, became so in her Netanyahu meeting, evidenced by her frosty manner and both her public and private remarks.

Afterward, Harris said, “let’s get the deal done so we can get a cease-fire to end the war.” Easy to say if eliminating Hamas’s threat (let alone Iran’s) isn’t your foundational objective. But Harris wasn’t finished. She proclaimed that she would “not be silent” about suffering Gazans, although if suffering Gazans were her true concern, she would be pressuring Hamas, not Israel.

Hamas, after all, turned Gaza into an underground fortress at the expense of its civilians, whom it has used ruthlessly as human shields. Failing to acknowledge this reality effectively endorses a terrorist veto against Israel’s right of self-defense. Let Harris explain that during the campaign’s final 100 days.

The Democrats’ split with Israel mirrors Britain’s new Labour Party government. Labour has a long, disturbing history of antisemitism and doubtful support for Israel, and once again disdains the Jewish state. Last week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer pleased Labour’s hard left by lifting U.K. objections to the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and others. Another question for reporters to ask Harris: Does she support Biden’s continuing opposition to the warrants?

Netanyahu’s meeting with Donald Trump was no picnic either. The day before, Trump said, “I want him to finish up [in Gaza] and get it done quickly. They are getting decimated with this publicity. Israel is not really good at public relations, I’ll tell you that.” It suits Trump politically to pretend that his personal relationship with Netanyahu was always good, and the meeting provided Trump an excellent opportunity to recall his presidency’s pro-Israel decisions, like moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The risk underlying these comments, like similar Trump remarks recently, is not abstract concern about Israel losing the propaganda war with Iran and Hamas. Instead, Trump fears that his pro-Israel stance is now bringing him political costs rather than benefits, which is not how Trump thinks the world should work. His interests alone dictate his political positions, so Israel needs to shape up and stop troubling his already difficult presidential campaign.

Post-visit, Netanyahu and Israel have a better picture of the troubling tendencies of America’s three most important political leaders before Election Day. Whether Harris or Trump wins, Jerusalem’s relations with Washington will be more difficult. This is not the road America should be on, but these are the candidates we have, and one of them will prevail in November.

This article was first published in The Hill on July 30, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

JD Vance is a disturbing choice for Vice-President

July 29, 2024

Although widely expected, Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate is nonetheless profoundly disturbing in its implications for American foreign policy in a Trump presidency. Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater are turning in their graves.
Describing the substantive defects in the Trump-Vance approach could fill many pages of newsprint, but – taking Ukraine as an example – both men are disinterested, or openly disdainful, of assisting Kyiv’s defense against Russia’s unprovoked aggression. For Vance, the US lacks both the military assets and the defense-industrial base to be a global power, meaning it must concentrate its resources to defend against China.
It is beyond debate that years of inadequate defense budgets have made Washington’s job harder. Bill Clinton’s eagerness (along with European governments) to cut military budgets after the Soviet Union’s collapse (the so-called “peace dividend”) and Barack Obama’s debilitating military budget cuts still need repair. But these are failures of will and resolve, typical of Democratic foreign policies, not inadequate assets. Trump should work to correct these deficiencies, not treat them as excuses for further reductions, thereby abandoning even more international positions of strength.
Ironically, Trump rejects Vance’s foundational ‘logic’. He is apparently unwilling even to defend Taiwan. As re centently said: “Taiwan doesn’t give us anything. [It’s] 9,500 miles away. It’s 68 miles away from China…China’s a massive piece of land, they could just bombard it…Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.”
Isolationism combined with such incoherence is a toxic brew for US national security. But Vance’s nomination has additional implications beyond his and Trump’s poorly conceived statements.
In Vance, Trump unmistakably named his heir-apparent, which he had heretofore resisted. Many first-term officials and members of Congress had hoped for that designation, but their hopes have now been dashed. The new reality may persuade many disappointed aspirants not to serve in a second Trump term. They know that a VP’s influence in decision-making can be profound, especially when his personal chemistry with the President is as strong as that between Vance and Trump. Working in the West Wing, just yards away from the Oval Office gives the VP’ a customary advantage of being the last person to speak with a President before a major decision. These advantages are not overcome even by running great Cabinet empires like Defense or State.
Accordingly, the small army of political figures considering becoming candidates for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination might be best served by remaining in Congress or the private sector rather than joining a second Trump term, allowing them to retain their distance in case of disaster in the next four years, preserving their 2028 viability.
Moreover, choosing Vance signals that Trump will not be “normalising” his policy or personnel decision-making in a second term. Non-Trump Republicans hoped desperately during his march to the 2024 nomination that a second Trump term would profit from the mistakes of his first. They longed for four years of consistent policy directions and sound implementation, rather than the first’s transactional, unpredictable neuron flashes. Unfortunately for that dream, and the country, Trump clearly wants no troublesome subordinates, only yes-men and -women. Vance isn’t going to modulate Trump’s behavior. He is no Mike Pence.
Trump wants undiluted personal loyalty in his post-election government team, at all levels. Vance craved Trump’s endorsement in his 2022 Senate primary, and his help in that year’s general election. He worked for the past two years to get into Trump’s inner circle, adopting his policies as he went. He has now succeeded. As Chinese Communists describe their relationship with North Korean Communists: Trump and Vance are like lips and teeth.

This article was first published in the Daily Telegraph on July 20, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Against the International Criminal Court – Lawless in the Hague

July 25, 2024

Since the late 19th century, generally well-meaning idealists have tried to conjure an international judicial system that would transform diplomatic, military, and economic conflicts into legal disputes. Led by sensible legal experts (who, of course, thought as they did), the global rule of law would replace destructive strife. If the rule of law worked within nations, why shouldn’t it work internationally? Whether parading under the banner of “world government,” “global governance,” or “the rules-based international order,” this blinkered, reductionist view of foreign affairs always includes a judicial component.

After World War II, the pace quickened. The United Nations Charter created the International Court of Justice (ICJ), to which nations could bring their disputes, replacing the failed Permanent Court of International Justice (formed by the Treaty of Versailles as an adjunct of the League of Nations). No one noticed the irony. The charter admonished the Security Council “that legal disputes should as a general rule be referred by the parties” to the ICJ (Article 36), and U.N. members agreed to comply with ICJ decisions in cases to which they were parties.

Contemporaneously, the victorious Allies established the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals to try allegations of “crimes against peace,” war crimes, and “gross abuses of human rights” committed by Germany and Japan. These tribunals were controversial even in their day, faulted for trying ex post facto charges (thereby violating the principle Nullum crimen sine lege, “No crime without law”), for being “show trials” with largely predetermined outcomes, and for constituting mere “victors’ justice.”

Advocates of judicializing international affairs wanted more, and in 1998, by the Statute of Rome, established the International Criminal Court (ICC), seated in The Hague near the ICJ. The European Union and Bill Clinton were ardent supporters of the treaty. Clinton signed it in his administration’s waning hours, knowing there was no chance of Senate ratification. His chief negotiator described the ICC as “the ultimate weapon of international judicial intervention” and “a shiny new hammer to swing in the years ahead.” George W. Bush reversed course, ordering the treaty unsigned in 2002, effectively ending any prospect of U.S. membership far into the future. India, Russia, and China, among others, also did not join.

American opposition to both the ICC and the Rome Statute’s substantive provisions (defining four crimes: genocide, aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity) was hardly confined to the Bush administration. Shortly after the statute entered into force, Congress enacted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, authorizing, among other things, “all means necessary and appropriate” to release Americans held by or on behalf of the ICC. For good reason, it was dubbed the “Hague Invasion Act.”

Simultaneously, President Bush launched a global campaign under the statute’s Article 98 to prevent U.S. citizens from being turned over to the ICC, in time securing agreements with over 100 nations. The Trump administration made further efforts to protect U.S. interests, although Joe Biden has abandoned many of them.

The ICC’s flaws are too numerous for one brief article. Fundamentally, the very concept of the ICC is illegitimate, an utterly unwarranted derogation of our constitutional, democratic sovereignty by an unaccountable entity operating in an international void. The court is not part of a coherent international-order structure. It is simply “out there” pretending to be a court in a pretend constitutional system that lacks even a pretend legislature to make laws and a pretend executive to enforce them. The ICC combines all three branches of government authority into one body, defying every American concept of separation of powers and the “structural constitutionalism” the Framers believed so critical to protecting our freedoms. Though ICC supporters claim it as vital, it is precisely this consolidating of functions that makes the court most dangerous.

The ICC is not checked anywhere in its jurisdictional reach, its legal conclusions, or its prosecutorial discretion. ICC supporters argue that its member governments ultimately control the judges and the prosecutor, but that is entirely theoretical. So far-reaching is the ICC’s purported jurisdiction that it applies even to nonmembers such as the United States and Israel when alleged crimes are committed on the territory of a state that is party to the Rome Statute. When such nonmembers try to protect themselves against the ICC’s excesses, they are accused of interfering with its independence. While the ICJ decides cases among nations, the ICC purports to exercise jurisdiction directly over individuals, authority no prior international organization ever claimed. Americans fought a revolution against such usurpations.

ICC advocates believe that if they just pretend hard enough, real governments will come to accept the prosecutor’s unaccountable decisions and follow the ICC’s orders. Unfortunately, for over two decades, it has been the court and its prosecutor that have done most of the pretending. Nonetheless, Westerners especially have a childlike capacity to pretend; they see hope in the ICC where potential aggressors see only opportunity. Those whom the threat of prosecution and punishment is supposed to deter have not been impressed, an outcome surprising to ICC partisans but not to history’s hard men. The likes of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, and Ayatollah Khamenei couldn’t care less about the threat of “legal” consequences for their actions.

The ICC’s most dangerous component is its essentially unaccountable prosecutor, whose extraordinary leeway makes U.S. “independent counsels” look tame. As with the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, the Rome Statute’s substantive crimes are vaguely stated, written in broad and sweeping diplomatic prose. They do not pass muster by American standards, which require clarity and precision in criminal statutes in order to give citizens notice of what prohibitions and obligations they face. The Supreme Court has long employed the “void for vagueness” doctrine to declare unconstitutional laws that afford too much discretion to prosecutors, impermissibly putting citizens at risk of prosecution for crimes they never understood existed.

Turned loose on the Rome Statute’s definitions of crimes, U.S. courts would not hesitate to declare much of them unacceptably vague. Moreover, the statute’s drafters openly advocated expanding the list of criminal prohibitions as the prosecutor and the ICC confronted new circumstances. Here, of course, the lack of separated powers and checks and balances figures importantly. It is one thing for a popularly elected legislature to enact new criminal laws but quite another for a prosecutor accountable to the ICC alone, and a court accountable to no one, to do so, especially where the ex post facto issue arises every time a new “crime” is detected. Nor are defendants protected by jury trials, as our Sixth Amendment requires; cases are tried instead before panels of the court, juries being so 18th-century to the statute’s drafters.

ICC supporters believe that many of these concerns are overstated because of the doctrine of “complementarity.” Embodied in the statute’s Article 17, complementarity means theoretically that jurisdiction to handle serious international crimes lies primarily in member states, with the ICC involved only rarely. Although reasonable-sounding, complementarity is not some well-settled principle of international law. It is simply an academic theory, carrying about as much force in the real world as most such fantasies. In practice, the ICC decides whether states have sufficiently met their obligations, and if not, the ICC will act. States are subordinated to the ICC’s unreviewable decisions, period. This is as plain a usurpation of sovereignty, especially from constitutional democracies, as one can imagine. What other countries accept is up to them, but America bends its knee to the ICC at its own peril.

Concern about the mirage of complementarity is not hypothetical. The prosecutor’s recent decision to seek arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant, along with two Hamas officials, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza (and other Iranian-backed terrorist threats against Israel) was a fire bell in the night that complementarity was no protection at all. Moreover, by interfering in the heat of battle, the ICC undoubtedly made resolving the war politically more difficult, all the while exhibiting the stench of moral equivalence by seeking arrest warrants against both sides as if they were equally culpable. Similar concerns apply to the prosecutor’s decision to proceed against Vladimir Putin and then–Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu in the ongoing Ukraine conflict. Who holds the ICC to account for these unilateral decisions? The precedent for irresponsible interference in future conflicts is unmistakable.

The solution is to treat questions of whether and when to prosecute internationally as unique to their circumstances. Prosecution über alles is not the answer. Nations should take responsibility for their own citizens’ crimes even if that is impossible until there is regime change in the offending state. That may mean justice delayed, but international probity will ultimately increase only when nations accept responsibility for crimes committed in their names. Merely that the ICC can try cases more immediately is no answer. The hard reality is that many (perhaps most) contemporaneous ICC trials would be in absentia, which simply fuels grievances that provoke future conflicts. Who, for example, believes that trying Putin in absentia would increase global peace and security? The most grievous crimes ultimately require international resolution in broad political terms, not narrow legal ones. The ICC cannot bear that burden.

For Americans, the fundamental question is how to protect ourselves and our allies from this illegitimate court and prosecutor. During two decades of operation, the concerns expressed while the Rome Statute was being negotiated have too frequently become realities. “Fixes” to the ICC, of whatever magnitude, will not suffice. The institution itself is irreparably flawed.

Sporadic U.S. cooperation with ICC investigations is potentially dangerous. Indeed, the most insidious temptation is for Washington to assist the ICC when the likely accused nation is discernibly evil. In George W. Bush’s second term, for example, the United States cooperated with the ICC in the Darfur conflict and more broadly. Barack Obama found numerous opportunities, including in Kenya, Libya, and the former Zaire. Under Joe Biden, with the support of several congressional Republicans, U.S. cooperation with and rhetorical support for the ICC advanced to its highest levels, especially regarding multiple allegations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Although such cooperation has not to date increased the chance that Washington will join, the risk is still real, and the allegation of hypocrisy hard to ignore. The unpleasant reality is that U.S. cooperation with the ICC when it suits us is hypocritical and ultimately damaging to America’s principled case against the ICC’s legitimacy. Biden personally demonstrated the hypocrisy when he criticized the prosecutor’s pursuit of senior Israeli officials while simultaneously supporting the ICC investigation of Russian crimes in Ukraine.

The only safe and conscientious American approach is what I have long called the “three noes”: no U.S. cooperation of any sort with the ICC, no direct or indirect financial contributions to the ICC, and no negotiations with other governments to “improve” the Rome Statute. We should continue and expand our efforts, especially with European Union members, to obtain Article 98 agreements to protect U.S. citizens. And we should continuously reexamine the adequacy of our weapons against ICC efforts to investigate American conduct.

This zombie organization cannot ultimately survive without American support. We shouldn’t give it oxygen.

This article appears as “Lawless in The Hague” in the September 2024 print edition of National Review.

John R. Bolton served as national-security adviser to President Donald Trump and as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush. He is the author of The Room Where It Happened.

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

Biden Drops Out, the Dangers of a Lame-Duck President Emerge

July 21, 2024

Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race effectively makes him a lame duck. The odds favored his achieving this status on Nov. 5 anyway, but America now faces a nearly 100-day longer interregnum than in prior transition periods. We may focus on the election campaign, but the wider world worries what Washington’s global role will be for the next six months.

History affords no clear answer. The constitutional rule that we have only one president at a time is often hard for Americans, let alone foreigners, to grasp. The dangers posed by uncertainty about who’s in charge even in normal transitions are exacerbated by a weak incumbent no longer seeking re-election. U.S. adversaries, and even some allies, will see opportunities to advance their interests. Nor can we rule out what an otherwise responsible, but disappointed and possibly bitter lame duck might consider doing as his tenure in office dwindles.

The national-security risks and opportunities facing lame-duck presidents vary with the international environment and their own beliefs and proclivities. This year, the length of Mr. Biden’s lame-duckery offers unique complexities. Given the 22nd Amendment’s two-term limit, one could argue that presidents become lame ducks on their second Inauguration Day, but that obscures the key differences between how the Reagan, George W. Bush and Obama administrations ended versus the “defeated” Lyndon Johnson, Carter and Biden presidencies.

Past lame-duck periods don’t uniformly demonstrate presidential (or national) weakness. While Mr. Biden may simply slumber through the remainder of his term, that outcome is far from preordained. For good or ill, presidents retain broad discretion, and their approaches have ranged from high-minded to vindictive, with enormous consequences for their successors.

Wide-ranging actions by lame ducks are sometimes simply unnecessary. Transitions between same-party presidents, which may or may not happen this cycle, are rare, but in 1988-89 Ronald Reagan worked hard to facilitate Vice President George H.W. Bush’s accession to office.

In some cases, lame-duck presidents simply do their own thing, irrelevant to their successor. Bill Clinton continued to chase the gray ghost of Middle East peace while Gov. Bush and Vice President Al Gore slugged it out in the Florida recount. During the 2008-09 financial crisis, global disarray so thoroughly dominated international affairs that the U.S. didn’t seem particularly vulnerable.

Lame-duck periods during party-to-party transitions are the most dangerous, almost unavoidably so, whether the outgoing president was defeated or simply trying to finish without impairing his party’s nominee. Freighted with potential consequences, conflicts between the lame duck and his successor, and between their teams, are often testy, reflecting just-concluded campaigns, and most acutely raising the question of who’s in charge.

The 1980-81 Carter-Reagan transition was such a case, dominated by the Iran hostage crisis. The campaign had been bitter, with mutual recriminations on many fronts, including about the hostages. Fortunately, a potentially destructive Carter lame-duck period was averted by a deal that suited all the actors: releasing the hostages (a plus for Mr. Carter) after Reagan was actually inaugurated (a plus for Reagan), bringing a temporary end to Tehran-Washington tensions (a plus for Tehran). Nonetheless, with controversies like the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and high tensions with China, the prospect of conflict clouding Biden’s lame-duckery is palpable.

After the 1992 election, George H.W. Bush intervened militarily in Somalia to open closed channels for humanitarian assistance. The White House made it clear Bush would act as he saw best while still president, but he offered to withdraw all U.S. forces before Mr. Clinton’s inauguration if the new president desired. Mr. Clinton chose to continue the mission, later mistakenly expanding it, but the two presidencies functioned smoothly during the handover.

In stark contrast, Barack Obama chose to settle scores with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the United Nations Security Council. By abstaining on Resolution 2334 (passed 14-0-1 on Dec. 23, 2016), Mr. Obama figuratively knifed both Mr. Netanyahu and the incoming Trump administration, which had openly advocated a U.S. veto. While abstaining wasn’t a startlingly new position, it was unnecessary and vindictive, auguring in a small way what a determined lame-duck could do.

Mr. Trump made the 2020-21 transition perilous by trying frantically and erratically to thwart the results of the 2020 election. Whether one considers the Jan. 6 riot and the runup to it an insurrection or simply disgraceful and disqualifying for Mr. Trump, his lame-duck period was the second-worst in American history (after James Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln in 1860-61).

While it’s difficult to predict what Mr. Biden may do as a lame duck, or what external threats or crises might develop, our current circumstances hold uncharted dangers. Congress, the candidates and especially the American public need to begin thinking about the challenges ahead, and monitoring Mr. Biden’s prolonged lame-duck status closely.

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

This article was first published in Wall Street Journal on July 21, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

The New Iranian President and Donald Trump

July 16, 2024

Masoud Pezeshkian probably never expected to become Iran’s President, nor did most of his countrymen, nor the outside world. Whatever the reasons for his success, Pezeshkian’s victory means only that Tehran now shows a smiley face to foreigners rather than a mean face. Beneath surface appearances, nothing substantive has changed.

Westerners especially have long misunderstood that Iran’s elected Presidency does not hold decisive political power, certainly not on Tehran’s critical national-security priorities like nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and supporting innumerable terrorist groups. Ayatollah Khamenei is the Supreme Leader, like his predecessor and father of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini. “Supreme Leader.” That title tells you everything.

Elections for Iran’s presidency are hardly free and open. To start, only candidates satisfactory to the Guardian Council may run, and the Council has never been slack in applying rigid ideological standards. The races are ultimately never more than hardline-hardliners running against moderate-hardliners. If the Guardian Council had wanted to exclude Pezeshkian from the election, they could have. If they wanted to ensure he lost, they could have allowed multiple “moderates” in the race and only one “hardliner.” Instead, they did the opposite, and Pezeshkian prevailed. If the regime had really been worried about such an outcome, it would simply have stolen the election, as in 2009. Interestingly, voter turnout figures remain hotly disputed, so we may never know exactly how many people legitimately cast ballots.

Until the regime finally issues a definitive statement on why Pezeshkian’s predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, died in a helicopter crash, questions about regime stability will linger. Whatever the cause of the crash, Pezeshkian is an accidental President. For Raisi, the presidency may well have been but a steppingstone, given Khamenei’s age and infirmities. He had been fingered by the Supreme Leader and others as potentially Iran’s third Supreme Leader upon Khamenei’s death or incapacity. Pezeshkian, by contrast, seems to be a temporary fill-in, even more of a figurehead than other Presidents, until the key ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard decide how to proceed.

Over 45 years, Iran’s two Supreme Leaders, through successive presidencies, have never deviated from their fundamental national-security precepts: (1) pursuing nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile delivery capabilities; and (2) creating and enhancing multiple terrorist proxies across the Middle East and globally. These have been foundational both to Tehran’s hegemonic regional ambitions and its broader aspirations for dominance in the Islamic world. No mere substitute President is going to obstruct that strategic vision.

What Pezeshkian does for the mullahs is to provide what Russians call “maskirovka”: camouflage that disguises Iran’s real foreign policy. Like other puppets and front men Tehran has used over the years, including former Foreign Minister Javid Zarif and Hossein Mousavian, a former nuclear negotiator now nestled comfortably at Princton, Pezeshkian is a walking, talking disinformation campaign. Susceptible Westerners, longing for resumed nuclear talks with Iran, now have a straw to grasp at. Nothing will come from any resumed diplomacy, of course, because there is no sign Iran the Supreme leader has made a strategic decision to change course.

Ironically, therefore, the mullahs have scored a public-relations coup by having an empty suit like Pezeshkian replace Raisi, widely called “the butcher of Tehran” for his judicial role in ordering executions of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of political prisoners. If Pezeshkian chooses to attend the UN General Assembly opening in New York this September, one can imagine the welcome America’s credulous media and academic institutions will afford him. He smiles, he waves, he acts informally, perhaps he likes progressive jazz, maybe he drinks a little Scotch whiskey in private (who knows!), he must want to make a deal the United States!

US liberals and the Biden Administration can dream about this scenario, but they may not be in office after November’s election. Even if they were, of course, the compliant Pezeshkian they imagine would not be making nuclear-weapons policy, nor would his Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, chief negotiator of the 2015 nuclear deal. Americans are all too apt to succumb to the diplomatic phenomenon known as “mirror imaging,” where negotiators look across the table and see people just like themselves: reasonable men and women simply looking to find practical solutions to shared problems. That’s exactly opposite from how the Islamic Revolution views the outside world.

Instead, if Donald Trump wins, now more likely than ever after the failed July 13 assassination attempt, his propensity to treat national-security issues simply as opportunities for making deals could lead to a Trump-Pezeshkian get-together. French President Emmanuel Macron almost seduced Trump into meeting with Zarif on the margins of the Biarritz G-7 in August, 2019. Trump’s “zeal for the deal” brought him within an eyelash of seeing Zarif, and foreshadows a contemporary version of that meeting early in a new Trump term. It may take second place to Trump visiting North Korean leader Kim Jung Un in Pyongyang to reopen nuclear negotiations, but it suits Trump’s singular focus on personal publicity.

Thus, while Pezeshkian’s election as President may not have been conscious Iranian maskirovka, there is no doubt the Supreme Leader and his cohorts can take advantage of the opportunity presented if they so choose. Such circumstances do not mean a new nuclear deal would emerge, since that would certainly not be Tehran’s negotiating objective. Instead, the mullahs would be playing for more time, which is uniformly beneficial to would-be nuclear proliferators, hoping to achieve a nuclear-weapons capability, and then to decide how to employ it. The same would be true for Iran’s terrorist objectives in the region and beyond. Trump would not even realize he was playing according to the Supreme Leader’s script.

Although the unsuspecting Masoud Pezeshkian may not realize it, he may be exactly the gift the ayatollahs never thought to ask for.

This article was first published in the Independent Arabia on July 16, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

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