Reflections on the Outlandish: Navigating the Strategic Earthquake in the Fertile Crescent

December 10, 2024

By David Wurmser[1]

[1] David Wurmser, Ph.D. is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington and at the Misgav Institute for Zionist Strategy and at the Jerusalem Center for Foreign and Security Affairs in Israel.  He was former senior advisor to Vice President Cheney and to NSC Advisor Ambassador John Bolton.

The desolation wrought on Hizballah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering.  It has also altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East.  The story is not just Iran anymore.  The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change.  And the pieces on the board are beginning to move.

First things first. The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains still the greatest strategic imperative in the region for both United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel.  In its last days, it is lurching toward a nuclear breakout to save itself, which would not only leave one of the most destructive weapons in one of the most dangerous regimes in the world – as President Bush had warned against in 2002 – but in the hands of one of the most desperate ones. This is a prescription for catastrophe. Because of that, and because one should never turn one’s back on a cobra, even a wounded one, it is a sine qua non that Iran and its castrati allies in Lebanon be defeated.

However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other new threats. Indeed, not only are those threats surfacing and becoming visible, but the United States and its allies already need, urgently in fact, to start assessing and navigating the new reality taking shape.

The rise of these new threats, which are slowly reaching not only a visible, but acute phase  increases the urgency of dispensing with the Iranian threat expeditiously.  Neither the United States nor our allies in the region any longer have the luxury of a slow containment and delaying strategy in Iran. Instead, it is necessary to move toward decisive victory in the twilight struggle with the Ayatollahs.  

Specifically, the upheaval surrounding the retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of ISIS, are the first skirmishes in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham (HTS) – a descendent of the Nusra force led by Abu Muhammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of the al-Qaida system and cobbled together of ISIS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey, who used the US withdrawal from northern Iraq a few years ago to release Islamists captured by the US and the Kurds.  Some of these former prisoners were sent  to Libya to fight the pro-Egyptian Libyan National Army under General Khalifa Belqasim Haftar based in Tobruk,  and the rest were reorganized  in Islamist militias oriented toward Ankara. The rise of a Muslim-Brotherhood dominated by Turkey, rehabilitating and tapping ISIS residue to ride Iran’s decline/demise to great strategic advantage will plague us going forward.

Added to this is Hamas’ destruction – also a critical goal for Israel and the United States but one that also involves consequences that must be navigated and hopefully countered. The world of Hamas is a schizophrenic world.  It has two heads, aligned with different internal fractions – one more anchored to the world of Sunni, Muslim Brotherhood politics led by Turkey and the other to the Iranian axis. In 2012 Israel killed Ahmad al-Jabri, a scion of the powerful al-Jabari clan lording over Hebron but who had transplanted westward to become the leader of the Murabitun forces (part of the Izz ad-Din al-Qasem Brigades) within Hamas in Gaza.  He had transported those forces to train under the IRGC in Mashhad Iran in the years before and became the driving force of Hamas by the time Israel felt it had to deal with him.  Despite his demise, the structures he led anchored to Iran continued to grow and assume ever more dominance over Hamas, in part because of the release of several key figures in the Gilad Shalit hostage-release deal (2011), including Yahya Sinwar. But Iran did not cleanly control all of Hamas. Turkey maintained a powerful presence in the organization and had some senior leaders likely more loyal to itself than to Iran.  In many ways, Hamas reflected the schizophrenia of its patron – Qatar – who served a critical ally to both Iran and Turkey in the last two decades.  

In the last two decades, however, Iran proved more ascendent strategically in the region than Turkey.  In fits and starts, Ankara had tried to quietly compete with Iran in the last two decades, but more often than not left to only nibble at the scraps left by Iran along the edges, whether in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon (after the August 2021 port explosion, for example) or among the two structures of geopolitical discourse, the “Lingua Franca” embodiments of regional competition — the Palestinians and the Islamists.  Hamas, therefore, as well as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (an organization whose fealty was far more homogenously held toward Iran), became increasingly defined – indeed, far, far more — by Tehran than Ankara.  Iran had become the region’s new Nasser, and its minions accordingly flourished as did its factions in Palestinian and Islamist politics.

However, suddenly the ground shifted.  Israel has since summer, starting with Operation Grim Beeper and the demolition of Hizballah, triggered an earthquake in what is normally a glacial pace of regional strategic change.  If Israel presses onward with priority as it should to devastate and destabilize the Iranian regime, and the Iranian axis meets it demise, then Hamas – indeed all Palestinian and Islamist politics – drifts to a Turkish direction and slowly emerge as Ankara’s strategic assets. This reorientation does not represent an increase in the Palestinian threat to Israel, but it would be the triumph of hope over experience to think it would reduce it.  Indeed, it is likely no more than an exchange of a rabid donkey for a crazed mule.  For the moment, Qatar – being much as the Palestinian and Islamist clusters they fund — rides both animals.

The emergence of the Sunni, Muslim Brotherhood bloc, which includes Turkey’s slow drift of to a dangerous position, as a strategic problem began with President Obama. Although Tayyip Erdogan always was an Islamist politician, his attempts to recreate some sort of neo-Ottoman Caliphate and reignite its imperialist ambitions were disconcerting but largely resulted in rhetoric and symbolism rather than reality. It was, however, latently concerning because the reference point on which he focused of resurrecting the terminated Ottoman Caliphate in 1921 also serves as common ground with the most dangerous Sunni Islamist movements, such as al-Qaida, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad group (which was renamed Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn), and Fatah al Islam, ISIS and the assortment of al-Qaida and ISIS affiliate groups across the Maghreb in Africa.  There was always the danger of convergence of the Turkish and the most radical Islamist worlds into one strategic threat.

In 2011, President Obama made two critical mistakes that set a process that eventually now is beginning to realize our greatest fears of the Turkish-Jihadist convergence:

  • Instead of supporting indigenous Syrian opposition, President Obama subcontracted to Turkey and Qatar the task to define and support the opposition to President Assad of Syria as his regime descended into civil war.  The threat of ISIS has thus remained ever since, and with Iran’s going down, Turkey feels its oats and surfs the crest of the ISIS-remnant wave, — rather than the Free Syrian Army, which sought closer ties to the West — to expansion.
  • ⁠The U.S. remained wedded to trying to sustain Syria as a unified fiction of a state, fearing its partition would set a precedent to trigger a collapse of the Sykes-Picot foundation.  The same mistake was replicated in Libya, which had strategic consequences for Egypt. As a result, Egypt is slowly strategically also now drifting in a dangerous direction.

The insistence on retaining a unified state meant that to survive in conditions of communal, sectarian, tribal, ethnic civil war, each faction within that state had to fight to the death for control over the other rather than disengage into partitioned pieces.  Control meant survival while being controlled meant being slaughtered. This then also created the massive Syrian refugee crisis.

Given the calamity that befell Syria and the chaos that lies underneath, as well as these hovering strategic forces positioning already to scavenge the Syrian nation’s cadaver, it is important for both Israel and the United States, along with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, to contemplate as very possible many scenarios that hitherto were outlandish in the western end of the fertile crescent. It is too early to fully identify and digest, let alone definitively plan for the reality that will emerge, but now is the time for unrefined initial reflections that underlie a longer term strategic planning process.

First, to be clear; Iran remains the central threat. And nothing can be done until it is defeated. The urgency of ensuring and achieving its defeat is increasing rapidly.

With Iran’s defeat, Syria will begin the terminal process of unraveling. Russians will try to protect essential interests there – the Alawite regime and the Christian communities, especially the Greek Orthodox. It is not only the last legacy of Soviet global bloc (outside of Cuba), but also a more civilizational sense of commitment to the remains of the world of Byzantium. Russia considers itself to some extent the “Third Rome” – Rome and Constantinople being the first two – as several current Russian political commentators, intellectuals and religious leaders have posited, and the remnant Christian communities – especially the Greek Orthodox since the Maronites are Catholic and orient more to France – are envisioned as its charge.

We are thus witnessing the rise of an acute Russo-Turkish confrontation that will also ultimately threaten Israel. In this confrontation, it is not inconceivable that Russia may consider turning to Israel as a key offset to Turkish power rather than confront Israel once Iran is removed from the picture.

Moreover, China is likely to realign with Turkey and drop Iran when it realizes the Ayatollah regime is falling.  China has hedged for the last few years, having signed a strategic agreement with Iran in 2021, but it has just as aggressively sought to tighten its relations with Turkey. Part of what drives Beijing and Ankara together is the strategic competition between China and India. China has ties to Pakistan through the Hindu Kush range and sees India as one of its premier enemies. Turkey as well has close strategic relations with Pakistan, and uses that relationship to compete with India in Afghanistan, and has attempted in the last half decade to destabilize India both through using Pakistani help to rile up unrest in the Jammu and Kashmir, but also among India’s 200 million Muslims. Again, as Iran has begun to run into trouble and as the regime is faltering, we already see the first sign of China’s move to stop hedging and shift more uncarefully toward Turkey.  

And we see Egypt also recalibrating.  This was due in part because of Libya, but also the unrelenting pressure of the Biden administration on human rights and Washington’s tolerance of Qatar and the Muslim brotherhood regionally against the Saudis and Egypt. At first, Egypt retrenched into close alliance with the Saudis and positioned itself as Erdogan’s nemesis – even to the extent of supporting the Syrian regime in its efforts to withstand pressure from Turkey and its Islamist allies.  But the pressure by Washington (paused during the first Trump presidency) mounted and Egypt increasingly moved from confrontation to cooption of the internal Islamist threat. Again, this process began during the Obama era — which led to a strategic shift away from peace, away from Israel, and away from viewing Hamas as a profound strategic and domestic threat, and instead toward slow accommodation of Hamas and Turkey starting in 2016-17.

But the closure of the Red Sea and by extension Suez – and the unwillingness, which Cairo had thought was an inconceivable abdication of American power, of the United States to reverse that — as a result of the October 7 attacks so shook Cairo that it blew the lid off caution and hedging.  The quiet slow drift has by now turned into a stampede. Egypt had its finger in the wind, but the wind told it that it is time to make its peace with the Muslim brotherhood and Erdogan and align with China. For the moment, Egypt is not forced to choose whether to side with the emerging Turkish-Sunni MB- Chinese bloc or the Russo-Iran bloc since the links are blurred and still uncrystallized. So, for the moment, while clearly abandoning the West, it has yet to leap wholeheartedly into the Turkish camp.  The power of Russia and the residues of history still have their grip to some extent on Cairo.

In other words, we see already a mass realigning underway to digest the fall of Iran and the rise of an imperial Turkey.  If Syria begins to fall apart, then several essential things come into play, especially since the 13-year effort to sustain Syria as a unified state will yield to its irreversible and catastrophic final failure and collapse.  

This then raises the question of the pieces that emerge. Once again, there is a necessity of establishing a proper Lebanese state anchored to its Maronite foundation.

But then there is the more outlandish possibility that may become the desired and likely: it is important for the U.S. and Israel to start planning for an Alawite state further up the coast. Syria will unlikely remain one state.  Russia may find that it will be able only to hold a rump Alawite state and Christian communities (Greek Orthodox — not Maronite) and retreat to protect an enclave state. It will also rapidly even now come to see Iran as useless in this regard and split from Iran on Syria — or what’s left of it.

How the United States and Israel relates to the desperate Russian-oriented enclave entity becomes equally challenging.

To note, Russia had cobbled together a new foreign policy approach launched a year ago in Valdai Conference in Sochi, as unveiled in Putin’s speech there of October 5, 2023. He envisioned cobbling together the BRICS (Brasil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) nations into one geopolitical strategic bloc to challenge the West.  But that vision and the underlying unity upon which the Valdai vision is anchored now is being torn to shreds as Chinese and Turkish interests unravel Russian and Iranian interests (let alone leave Iran’s regime destroyed with a new more pro-Israeli and pro-Western regime in Tehran) in Syria and the Middle East splits along a Russo-Turkish competition Russia likely will reach out to India and a post-Ayatollah Iran, but less as a hostile challenge to Israel and the West as much as a desperate move to prepare itself and preserve its dwindling assets in the emerging Russo-Turkish confrontation.  

It is strategically wise to consider now — given all the immense complexities and conflicting interests swirling about and the multiple ambivalences — how one handles the disintegration of Syria.  It is likely that Russia will be forced to retreat into an effort to protect the Alawite and Christian (especially Greek Orthodox) communities, which it will likely only be able to do by creating a rump Syria state in traditional Alawite and Christian areas.  Given that it relies on access to the area via its port along the Mediterranean cost in Syria, it will most likely anchor that rump entity along the eastern Mediterranean with strategic partners in Lebanon, and then a rump Alawite state to the north of that in Tartus and the surrounding mountains. 

In this state of anguish, it is difficult to predict what Russia may do.  Putin has proven thus far  to change his strategic visions only slowly.  Some basic principles seem to have been rigidly ingrained.  Russia has shown itself to be more determined than nimble in strategic behavior. As such, it is possible that Russia will remain so focused on imperial European ambitions that it falters and falls – along with its Iranian ally – in its survival in the region. But it should not be ruled out as impossible that Russia may reach out to cooperate with the US and Israel to save its position. If so, one must ask: how much the US and Israel should cooperate with Russia, and how much should it attempt to create a third alternative and anchor a structure to US power and the greatly demonstrated Israeli power? The answer to that may also force on us another question – who represents the great threat – Moscow or Beijing?  Or should we even choose?

It’s time to start noodling these questions – even the outlandish ones.

North Korea comes to Europe: How will the next president respond? ​

October 30, 2024
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The threat of North Korea fighting alongside Russia in Ukraine is no longer a nightmare, but a real possibility. Two weeks ago, Kyiv said Pyongyang’s soldiers were already in Ukraine and had sustained casualties. Now the Biden administration has confirmed that 10,000 North Korean troops are training in Russia, adding that they will be “fair game” if deployed to Ukraine.

As Election Day approaches, voters should worry whether either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump are awake to and able to handle this immediate danger and its longer-term implications.

Having Pyongyang’s forces fighting in Ukraine would both bolster Moscow tactically and provide those troops with battlefield experience, greatly benefitting them in future conflicts on the Korean Peninsula. Moreover, the risk that, in return, the Kremlin supplies Kim Jong Un with nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile technology — if it hasn’t already — directly imperils South Korea, Japan and deployed U.S. forces in the region.

By contrast, in 2018, Trump canceled regular U.S.-South Korean “war games” to please Kim, thus compromising allied combat readiness. In a tense environment, where the U.S.-South Korean troops’ preparedness mantra is “Fight Tonight,” this is crucial.

There is no sign that Trump understands his mistake. And Harris’s thoughts on Pyongyang’s menace appear to be a blank slate.

South Korea is hardly standing idly by. Having previously sold tanks, artillery and ammunition to Poland, President Yoon Suk Yeol is currently considering selling weapons to Ukraine. Additionally, Pyongyang’s growing closeness to Moscow, and fears of Washington’s fecklessness, will only increase Seoul’s ongoing debate about whether to acquire an independent nuclear-weapons capability. We are well into uncharted territory.

The broader threat is not just North Korea but the emerging China-Russia axis, now widely understood as a reality, not a prediction. While similar in appearance to the Cold War’s Sino-Soviet alliance, today’s version differs dramatically: China this time is inarguably the dominant partner. The axis is far from fully formed. Disagreements and tensions clearly exist, notably over Pyongyang’s increasing affinity for Russia, as Kim emulates his grandfather Kim Il Sung’s uncanny ability to play Moscow off against Beijing.

Contemporaneously with Kim and Vladimir Putin locking step, the Kremlin is also reportedly supplying Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis with targeting data, thereby augmenting its campaign to effectively close the Suez Canal-Red Sea maritime passage (other than to “friendly” vessels like Russian tankers). Thus, notwithstanding its problems and quirks, the axis and its outriders are rolling along.

Worryingly, however, one variety of America’s contemporary isolationist virus, epitomized by vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), holds that the Middle East and Europe should be downgraded as U.S. priorities in order to focus on China’s threat in Asia, particularly against Taiwan. This menace is indeed real, but far wider than just endangering Taiwan or East Asia generally. While not yet comprehensive or entirely consistent internally, the Beijing-Moscow hazard is worldwide.

Worst of all, the latest manifestation of Beijing’s sustained, aggressive military buildup is the new projection that China’s nuclear-weapons arsenal will reach 1,000 warheads by 2030, much earlier than previous predictions. Increasing Chinese nuclear capabilities portend a tripolar nuclear world, one radically different and inherently riskier and more uncertain that the Cold War’s bipolar U.S.-USSR faceoff.

This is not simply a new U.S.-China problem. All our assessments about appropriately sizing America’s nuclear deterrent, allocating it within the nuclear triad (land-based and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, plus long-range bombers), along with all our theories of deterrence and arms control, were founded on the basic reality of bipolarity. Impending tripolarity means that all those issues need to be reconceptualized for America’s security, not to mention the extended deterrence we provide our allies.

Do we face one combined China-Russia nuclear threat, or two separate threats? Or both? The questions only get harder. This is not an Asia-based risk, but a global one, inevitably implying substantial budget increases for new or rehabilitated nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Responding to North Korea with yet another four years of “strategic patience” — the Obama and Biden do-nothing policy — is both wrongheaded and increasingly dangerous. As for China, focusing on securing bilateral climate-change agreements, Biden’s highest priority, is wholly inadequate. Even where his administration acted strategically — enhancing the Asian Security Quad, endorsing the AUKUS nuclear-submarine project, agreeing to trilateral military activity with Japan and South Korea — Biden demonstrated little sense of urgency or focus.

Surely the image of Pyongyang fighting Kyiv should jar both the simplistic premises of “East Asia only” theorists and the quietude of Biden-Harris supporters. We must immediately overcome any remaining French and German objections to increasing NATO coordination with Japan, South Korea and others, including ultimately joining NATO, as former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar suggested years ago. Existing Asia-based initiatives like the Quad, AUKUS and closer military cooperation among America’s allies need to be rocket-boosted.

We need a president who understands the importance of American leadership and has the resolve to pursue it. Let’s pray we get one.

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

A Biden-Starmer Giveaway Helps China

October 16, 2024
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As a one-term president, Joe Biden appears eager to take actions he might not have taken if he had to worry about getting re-elected. The latest example: He apparently pushed the U.K. to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean to the island country of Mauritius. The Chagos archipelago is unremarkable but for one key fact: Diego Garcia, its largest island, houses a critical U.S.-U.K. military base near the Indian Ocean’s geographic center point.

British media report that U.S. officials, fearing that existing International Court of Justice rulings and a potential push in the United Nations General Assembly would pose political problems, pressured British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to cede them on Oct. 3. Whatever Mr. Starmer’s motivation—whether to appease Mr. Biden or lessen guilty feelings about imperial history—the decision was utterly misguided.

The Chagos “problem” hasn’t figured prominently in British politics before now, except in certain Labour Party circles. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader before Mr. Starmer, obsessed over the issue, long a priority for Labour’s Trotskyite wing. Worried about disapprobation by biased global courts, the White House and State Department during Mr. Biden’s term fell in sync with Britain’s Corbynites.

Under the deal, Diego Garcia will remain under British jurisdiction for at least 99 years. The site is home to a critical U.S. military facility, fittingly nicknamed the “footprint of freedom.” The island will only become more important to U.S. resistance against China’s efforts to achieve hegemony in the Indo-Pacific.

Mauritius, meantime, is increasingly China-friendly. China is its top trading partner, and Beijing has used debt-trap diplomacy—lending with strings attached—to ensnare the island nation. If the British Parliament approves transferring the Chagos to Mauritius, China will be able to maneuver ships and planes near Diego Garcia for intelligence-gathering and military operations. Given Beijing’s history of militarizing comparable tiny landmasses in the South China Sea, the threat is clear.

China has long conducted extensive undersea surveys of the Indian Ocean, ostensibly for commercial reasons but obviously in pursuit of maritime dominance. A Beijing presence in the Chagos will facilitate these efforts, posing a direct threat to India, which it appears wasn’t consulted by either Whitehall or Foggy Bottom.

There’s no compelling logic for ceding the islands to Mauritius. That the Chagos are associated with Mauritius is actually a fluke of colonial administration: France was Mauritius’s first colonial European power, governing the islands from the larger chain after taking control in the early 1700s. Britain acquired Mauritius after victory in the Napoleonic Wars and continued France’s governing mode. Many alternative solutions for the islands are available, but neither Washington nor London have shown an appetite for considering them.

The U.S. faced analogous challenges in ending its administration of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, or TTPI, during the 1980s and ’90s. Once German colonies, the islands became a Japanese mandate under the League of Nations, and, after 1945, a U.N. trusteeship under U.S. control. One part of the TTPI, the Northern Marianas, became an American commonwealth. Three others—Palau, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia—chose independence but entered into Compacts of Free Association with the U.S., giving Washington authority over their foreign and security policies.

For all the overblown rhetoric about a British “diplomatic success,” it seems no one bothered to ask Chagossians their views. Given Mauritius’s prior poor treatment of Chagossians, Chagossians might have preferred to have become a U.S. commonwealth.

China has already tried to take advantage of Washington’s inattention in the former TTPI by aggressively pressing its interests and intentions and using debt-diplomacy tactics. Although Washington is now pressing back against Beijing, we can’t afford to make similar mistakes in the Chagos or the broader Indian Ocean.

Messrs. Biden and Starmer have checked the Chagos Islands off Mr. Corbyn’s to-do list. Let’s hope there aren’t any other foreign-policy surprises in Mr. Biden’s remaining lame-duck period.

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 October 16, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

The first and perhaps last Iran-Israel war

October 03, 2024

Iran declared war in 1979 as one of the first acts after the Islamic Revolution. Along with declaring the aim of bringing about the demise of the United States, it embarked on a war of extermination against Israel.  It has been relentless in building the capacity over the intervening five decades to realize its objectives. We are now seeing the start of the final, acute phase of that war in which Iran promises to exterminate Israel, and Israel – fifty years later — has moved to try to destabilize the Iranian regime.  

In recent years, Iran persisted in developing its nuclear and ballistic programs to establish itself as a regional power to threaten not only Israel, but other continents. It also built a robust network of proxies to attack Israel, which it dubbed the “ring of fire.”  Recently, it has also cultivated distant allies, such as Venezuela, Columbia, Chile, and Brazil to begin to leverage gangs and drug pipelines to build a more limited version of the “ring of fire” to bear down on the United States.  

On October 7, 2023, Iran activated the Middle Eastern network of proxies in the bone-chillingly bloody and depraved invasion. This represented a new phase in Iran’s war against Israel, since it signaled the beginning of what it believed would have been an acute, ongoing war of attrition on eight fronts rather than periodic along alternate acting fronts.  This was Iran’s first miscalculation of Israel.  Israel realized this war of attrition was in fact the final stage of an existential attack Iran was launching.  As a result, it went beyond engaging in this war of attrition on Iran’s terms and embraced instead a war whose strategy was not conflict management, but total victory and defeat of these proxies.  

After a series of devastating blows to the key proxy, Hizballah, and the killing of senior Iranian liaison officers to that proxy in Damascus, Iran miscalculated a second time on April 14,2024. It launched the first direct missile assault on Israel from Iranian territory.  This transformed the war from one of Israel against Iran’s proxies – a war against the proxy tentacles of the Iranian octopus – in a direct war between Israel and Iran.

 
This also transformed the war from a long-term war with the proxies into a twilight, direct struggle between the Iranian nation run by a tyranny that seeks to extinguish another – democratic Israel.  After April 14, the containment of Iran and its management by deterrence was no longer viable; it has become a showdown in which either Iran or Israel, but not both, would emerge not only as victor but as survivor.


This then led to Iran’s third mistake, or more accurately strategic delusion. It is the same misperception plaguing all of Iran’s proxies – which led Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah to famously dub Israel as a mere, fragile spiderweb easily imploded —  and its minions in the West protesting on campuses against the “white” Israel against the “indigenous people of color” of Palestine.  The mistake is not that they underestimated Israel’s capabilities and prowess, nor that they misread its messy disunity and internal divisiveness on display almost daily as systemic collapse, but that they internalized their own ideology that Israel is a fake, fragile colonial entity rather than a deeply rooted civilization – one of the oldest and most solid, in fact. Israel has shown that despite its mistakes and setbacks, its internal strength and its “mystic chords of memory” (to borrow from Abraham Lincoln) eclipsingly transcended that of any of their neighbors, especially their more recently invented Palestinian nemesis.  

The cumulative effects of Iran’s miscalculations in this Iran-Israel war came home to roost and took a dramatic turn as a result of the last two weeks.  The proxy “ring of fire” — the network of proxies surrounding Israel which Iran built — not only had an aggressive aim to choke Israel to death by initiating a violent war of attrition and isolation, including closing ports and ending international airlines flying to Israel. It also acted as a defensive deterrent against Israel.  The ring of fire — particularly Hizballah — shielded Iran from any potential Israeli proactive action against Iran directly. Indeed, so powerful was the Hizballah tentacle that Israel feared it more than the head of the octopus on Tehran.  But the devastation wrought on Hizballah over recent weeks, starting with “Operation Grim Beeper” which incapacitated or killed 5000 of the key commanders at the heart of the organization, after a second, similar blow with the exploding walkie-talkie radios and other electronic means of communication the next day, followed the third day with the airstrike that took out the entire surviving command of its elite ground forces, and then a week later losing its iconic leader, Hassan Nasrallah, overturned Iran’s entire strategy.  Hizballah was the strategic linchpin of the proxy network at the center of the ring of fire It was the greatest threat Israel faced.  With its destruction, its deterrent contribution against Israel was erased.  Iran was now left fully exposed to the total weight of Israeli power. 

Which led Iran to commit its fourth big mistake the last day of September: again directly attacking Israel, which opened the door for a material Israeli direct counterattack, which Israel had chosen – under great US pressure — not to do in April. The result is that Iran will surely now feel the vulnerability to which it has exposed itself as Israel proceeds without fear any more of either Hizballah’s or Iran’s response. Jerusalem will take the war from the defensive to the offensive against Iran’s regime.  

Nor is Iran in a good position to engage Israel.  Iran’s strategy depends entirely on manipulation into paralysis of foes who possess far greater raw power.  Until now by deterrence and use of a failed will of Israel’s primary ally, the United States, Iran felt it could manipulate Israel and even more so the United States to play by rules that delivered it great strategic advantage and ultimate victory. But a strategy of manipulation depends on facing a predictable adversary.  As long as the Untied States and Israel restrained themselves within the rule that Iran had imposed on them, Iran’s far superior strategic acumen and the regime’s talent for strategic manipulation delivered for Iran a ramp leading to triumph.  This then led to Iran’s fifth miscalculation: Israel changed the rules after October 7 and became unpredictable for Iran.  For Iran, Israel was no longer controllable and restrainable, but a crazed wild man lashing out akin to the way a spraying firehose is flailing and uncontrollable.  There is no strategy of manipulation that can harness this flailing firehose, one can only run for cover or shut off the water leading to the nozzle.  Iran now fears Israel and no longer knows how to handle it or its superior raw power.

⁠Iran has limited options but can be counted on to embark on three strategic responses. 

First, it will try to “shut off the water” to the fire hose’s nozzle. This means that it will try to entangle the United States and threaten to raise the specter of a dangerous regional war to such vast and imaginary dimensions — far beyond any which it actually possesses the power to execute — that it unnerves and manipulates the United Stares into imposing a ceasefire, thus saving Iran from Israel’s counteroffensive against it.  There already are signs of this strategy being implemented as some of the Iranian regime’s proxy voices in the U.S. echo this, such as Vali Nasr on Monday (Sep 30).  

Second, Iran fears its own people and needs to frighten them into somehow rallying around the regime. The incompetence and impotence exposed by its proxies and itself in recent weeks threaten a regime whose tyrannical survival depends on projecting internally against its own people a insurmountable image of terror and omnipotence.  It needs somehow to rally a people that both despises and begins to lose fear of it. As such, the regime will seek to transform the Iran-Israel war into a part of a great Sunni-Shiite conflagration. It will likely even attack Sunni Gulf Arab states to provoke them to respond and thus to stimulate the existential fears Iranians all harbor in their every fiber of the Sunni Arab threat. 

Third, for the same reason of trying in despair to rally their own population which loathes it, Iran’s regime will instigate ethnic divisions in its own country — potentially even with high-profile self-inflicted false flag terror attacks — in order to establish among its populace that the survival of the regime is the sole barrier to the nation’s descending into a bloody internal ethnic civil war.


It is in the American interest – indeed in the interest of Western civilization – that Israel be allowed to  press its hard-fought advantages and be allowed now to gallop toward victory against the Iranian regime.  Unfortunately, the current administration appears incapable of restraining itself from continually sabotaging Israel instead.  Even so, Israel proceeds toward that victory, but more laboriously and turbulently than would otherwise be necessary if it had genuine US backing.

And yet, one caveat. Israel should do so in ways that avoid tapping either the Sunni card or the ethnic demon. Ironically, Israel’s attacking Iran as the representative of the Jewish people with which Persia and Iran has had a 2500 year history of alliance and amity – Cyrus returned the Jewish people from Babylonian exile to the Land of Israel and funded the reconstruction of the second Temple – purchases for Israel great popular Iranian support as the agent of their liberation from tyranny as long as it is not seen as doing so in service of Sunni Arabs or ethnic divide-and-conquer schemers.

Israel has exposed the lie at the heart of Starmer and Biden’s foreign policy

September 29, 2024
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Jerusalem’s bold strike at the heart of terror should bring shame to Western states still in thrall to false peace

Hassan Nasrullah, Hezbollah’s Secretary General, died on Friday, courtesy of an Israeli air strike. Iran’s “Ring of Fire” strategy, unfolding militarily against Israel across the Middle East since last October 7, has suffered a major setback.  

Jerusalem has already nearly destroyed Hamas’s organised military capabilities in Gaza and, combined with “Operation Grim Beeper” just over a week ago, has repeatedly imposed shock and awe on Hezbollah’s top cadres and infrastructure.  

Since Nasrullah met his maker, Israeli forces have pounded Hezbollah strongholds by air and are readying a ground attack, likely aiming to clear out all terrorist threats south of Lebanon’s Litani River.

Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu flatly ignored President Joe Biden’s pressure not to escalate military action against Hezbollah, and also Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s speech to the United Nations.  

The BBC derided Israel’s efforts, headlining that Netanyahu was trying to “chase victory”  Israel, however, clearly signalled its resolve against Iran, a quality much lacking in recent US and UK policy. Hezbollah and, more importantly, its paymasters in Tehran, should recognize that Israel is determined to do what it takes to establish its security, notwithstanding enormous external pressure.

Also on Friday, Yemen’s Houthi rebels attacked US Navy vessels in the Red Sea, the latest example of Iran’s year-long campaign via its Houthi proxies to close the Suez Canal-Red Sea passage to all but friendly vessels. The Houthis openly declared they would support Hezbollah “without limits”. Showing solidarity with its mates, the Houthis again launched missiles against Israel itself.  

These terrorist groups, like their allies Hamas and Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, have been armed, equipped, trained and financed by Iran for decades, as part of Tehran’s Ring of Fire strategy. Tehran is now arranging for Moscow to arm the Houthis with anti-ship missiles, evidence of Iran’s growing Russian ties.

Both the White House and 10 Downing Street need to lift their eyes to the strategic level. The barbaric Hamas October 7 attacks constituted but one facet of Iran’s multifront threat against Israel.  

Britain and America once understood what it meant to fight a multi-front war. They did so together successfully in two World Wars, and then again during the Cold War.  

Today, Messrs Biden and Starmer have trouble with this concept. Fortunately, Israel’s leaders do not. For the good of the West as a whole, Israel is now decimating our terrorist enemies in the Middle East.

Although Jerusalem still receives military aid from Washington, London has turned icy, and Biden’s White House is growing more frigid. Neither America’s Secretary of State nor its UN Ambassador attended Netanyahu’s General Assembly speech. And that was before Israel’s strike at Nasrullah.

Despite pro-terrorist propaganda, and the media echo chamber of supporters, the current conflict was never a war of Palestinians against Israeli oppressors. From the start, it has been an Iranian war against Israel.

Failure to grasp this bigger picture, a failure common to the national-security departments and agencies in Washington and London since October 7, persists in their opposition to Jerusalem’s determination to at the very least neutralise the serious terrorist threats it faces.  

Certainly, Israel has made its share of mistakes over the past year, along with the West generally, and can be faulted for allowing the terrorist menace to grow to its present levels.

We have all repeatedly dealt fecklessly with Iran’s efforts to create nuclear weapons. But now that the reality of present danger has become crystal clear, quibbling about Israel’s determination to survive is quite unbecoming to the West’s leaders.

Failed and misbegotten diplomacy toward Iran and Hezbollah particularly has helped produce the current conflict. I know personally because of my service as US Ambassador to the UN during and after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War.

Although the inadequacies of Security Council Resolution 1701, which brought that conflict to a halt, were evident even as the Council was voting unanimously to approve it, recent years have shown it to be wholly ineffective. Resolution 1701’s central objective was to prevent the rearmament of Hezbollah after Israel’s devastating retaliation for combined Hamas-Hezbollah attacks from Gaza and Lebanon (sound familiar?).  

To say the least, this UN diplomacy facilitated exactly the opposite result. It did not strengthen an independent Lebanese government, with the backing of enhanced UN peacekeeping forces, to stand against Hezbollah. Instead, Hezbollah in effect took over the Lebanese government.  

As with Hamas in Gaza, not until Hezbollah is eliminated will the truly innocent civilians have a chance for representative government.

Today’s real issue is Iran. Far from being eager to aid now-beleaguered Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran is clearly worried it will face direct, devastating retaliation from Israel. Indeed, there were reports even before Israel’s elimination of Nasrullah that Iran was dodging Hezbollah entreaties for Iran to come to its defence.

Iran has been visibly nervous about responding to Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Ismael Haniyah on July 31, and Nasrullah’s exit will only make the ayatollahs more nervous.

The fear that this time Netanyahu will not succumb to American pressure to “take the win,” as Israel did in April after Iran’s unsuccessful missile and drone attack, is clearly chilling Iran’s leadership. As well it should.

While the future is decidedly murky, Israelis undoubtedly remain determined to defend themselves. Too bad the current United Kingdom and the United States governments are not proud to stand with them.

This article was first published in The Daily Telegraph on September 28, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

“If Trump wins, he can make a pact with Maduro. He is a strong man who fascinates him”

September 24, 2024

The former National Security Advisor in the Trump Administration and ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush inaugurated the FAES 2024 Campus yesterday. Just a few metres from Madrid’s Retiro Park, the veteran foreign policy expert spoke to EL MUNDO about international news, full of “threats”.

This article was first published in Spanish in El Mundo on September 24, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Question: You say that your biggest failure as National Security Advisor to Donald Trump was “not being able to help the people of Venezuela against the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro.”

Answer: I feel that way. True. The conditions in Venezuela are so bad economically and politically that, from a strategic point of view, Maduro could not stay in power if it were not for the support of Russia and Cuba, as well as the intervention of China and Iran. So we have a global problem. We have the troika of tyranny, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, plus other leftist governments in Latin America, which resemble a return to the 1950s and 1960s, again, which is strategically a problem for the United States, but at the same time it is terrible for the people of the American continent.

Q. How do you assess the latest events in Venezuela, with the Spanish government at the epicentre of the exile of the winner of the elections, Edmundo González?

A. Yes. Well… Maria Corina Machado is still inside Venezuela, hiding. So she is still in danger, as are many other opposition leaders. It was a mistake to agree to let Maduro hold elections. He was never going to allow freedom. Maduro began excluding Machado, even from running. And the votes that the electoral officials proclaimed were completely fictitious. It was an exact repeat of the 2019 elections. It was the same thing again. Maduro is doing the same thing.
over and over again. The Biden Administration is completely blind. Sanctions were lifted for a while. Now they have to be reimposed. But the damage is already done. (The) international coalition against the regime has deteriorated and it will be difficult to rebuild it. We don’t know who will win in November in the United States, but Donald Trump has already said recently that Caracas is one of the safest places you can go; that it is safer than many cities in the United States.

Maduro is obviously a strong man for Trump. I remember from my days with him that I was fascinated by the strong man and I don’t know if you’ve read the chapter on Venezuela in my book [The Room Where It Happened], but in the end we managed to get Trump, much to the chagrin of some, not to meet with Maduro. We didn’t let it happen. However, now, it is possible that Trump will make a deal with him. That would be a big setback.

Q: So do you think it is better for Venezuelans if Kamala Harris wins the November 5 election?

A: Well, I don’t think we know anything about her position on Latin America. The best prediction I can make is that, during the first year of a Harris Administration, she will follow the trajectory of the Biden Administration, because that’s what she’s been sitting in National Security Council meetings for for three and a half years.

Q: You say you will not vote for Donald Trump, but neither will you vote for Kamala Harris, and in the 2020 elections you announced that you were going to write Ronald Reagan on the ballot.

A: I thought about writing Ronald Reagan in 2020, but then I also thought that people might think it was too much even for a protest vote. So I wrote in Dick Cheney. Because I wanted to vote for a conservative Republican and there wasn’t one on the ballot. Trump has no philosophy [of government]. He doesn’t think in political terms like most political leaders. Think in terms of what benefits Donald Trump. So what he does in a second term is much harder to predict than people think because the circumstances are different.

Q. And what decision can you take with NATO? You are very pessimistic on this issue…

A. Yes, I think Trump can withdraw the US from NATO. He was very close to leaving. And we’ll see what happens in Ukraine between now and the election and, if Trump wins, between the election and Inauguration Day. I’m very worried. I’m worried that if Trump wins, Putin can call him the day after the election and say, ‘Congratulations, Donald, I’m very glad you were elected. The Biden administration has been a disaster. Why don’t we just get together and resolve all our problems? ‘ And Trump can easily say, ‘As soon as I’m inaugurated, you’ll be the first person I meet with.’

Q. That would be a serious problem for Europe…

A. A Trump Administration doesn’t understand alliances. It’s not just with NATO; Trump doesn’t understand the alliance with Japan; he doesn’t understand the alliance with South Korea… One of the first fights he got into as president was with one of our two closest allies: Australia.

Q. And what about the European position on the Middle East, sometimes so distant, as in the case of the Spanish Government, from the United States’ staunch defense of Israel?

A. It’s hard for most Americans to understand. Support for Israel is overwhelmingly strong among both Democrats and Republicans, although there are many Democrats on the left of the party who take a more pro-Palestinian stance: on college campuses, among American Muslim communities, and on the radical left of the Democratic Party; which is important. I think Europe is making a big mistake. He is buying into the propaganda about who is responsible for the Gaza tragedy. Obviously it is Hamas. If Hamas had not taken billions of dollars to build its underground fortress, that money could have been used for economic development, for the citizens of Gaza, and yet they did not benefit from it at all. Absolutely it is barbaric and cynical the way Hamas is using the Palestinian people to protect itself, and that all this is done at the behest of Iran.

Q. Your tough stance towards Tehran is unwavering…

A. The Tehran regime is the main threat to peace and security in the Middle East and I think, unfortunately, that until that regime is gone and the Iranian people have the opportunity to take control of their own government, there will be no peace and security, because in the meantime it is using a network of terrorist groups. We don’t know what will happen in Lebanon with Hezbollah, but the Israelis live in fear of it. Hezbollah has a missile capacity that can overwhelm Israeli defenses if thousands of missiles are put into the air at once. No air defense system can withstand it. Israeli population centers are very vulnerable.

Q. Your support for Israel is tenacious, but is it also for Benjamin Netanyahu and the war he is waging?

A. Netanyahu has become strong within Israel and I believe that the vast majority of Israelis really want him to eliminate the terrorists. I support the right to self-defense, which includes eliminating your opponent, and Hamas is an opponent, Hezbollah is an opponent. People say, ‘Can’t the war in Gaza end?’ The answer is yes: Hamas could surrender.

Q. What role does China play for you in the complex geopolitical landscape? In Europe, for example, there is still a desire to maintain a bridge with Beijing.

A. Europe has become very dependent on the Chinese market. This is a significant
difference from the Cold War, when Russia had almost no economic connection with Europe or the United States. But the Chinese use this economic connection to in their own interest and people should take that into account. In the United States, companies are not making new capital investments in China. They are looking for alternatives. South Koreans are not investing their money in China either.

The place that is out of date is Europe. And that puts Europe at greater risk. It has also been difficult to convince European governments. Companies like ZTE and Huawei are a threat, and they are not just telecoms companies, they are arms of the Chinese state, designed to take over fifth- generation telecommunications so they can get all the information they want. This is unprecedented in history: using commercial companies in this way, as intelligence arms.

Q. Are we Europeans then naive?

A. Everyone has misjudged China. The US didn’t fully appreciate the threat from Huawei and ZTE until the Australians and New Zealanders sounded the alarm, explained it to us, and fortunately we realised they were right. We then went to the British and told them our whole intelligence-sharing relationship could be in jeopardy. They didn’t believe us, although they do now. Then we tried to talk to the Europeans, on the continent, where we’re having mixed success.

Q. And yet Europe must fear the Chinese connection with Russia…

A. Like South Koreans, the Japanese, and the Taiwanese… who are seeing that same connection between China and Russia.

Q. What do you think of the peace plan that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is about to present?

A. Zelensky hopes to demonstrate with his peace plan that Ukraine is flexible.
But he may be making a mistake in trying to be too reasonable, because Putin is not going to be.

Q. This week the United Nations General Assembly is being held in New York and you are the author of the famous phrase…

A: ‘if the UN headquarters in New York lost 10 floors today, no one would notice.’

Q. That’s it. Do you really think it’s not worth it? Will what is happening and discussed these days in New York mean anything?

A. The United Nations is a large and complex organization, and that is part of its problem. But several of its specialized agencies do very important work: the International Atomic Energy Agency, the International Telecommunication Union, the International Maritime Organization,
the World Health Organization (WHO)… They all do a good job when they are not politicized, and in the case of the WHO, for example, we could see how Chinese influence and politicization affected them during Covid. The problem with the UN is that its political decision-making bodies are paralyzed and irrelevant. The General Assembly does almost nothing. And the Security Council is broken by vetoes from Russia and China. The real reason the UN was created was political. It was the answer to the failed League of Nations. It was supposed to stop World War III, but the fact that we haven’t had a World War III has had nothing to do with the United Nations. It’s had to do with the West prevailing in the Cold War. Now it’s going to stop World War III.

We are going to have… I don’t like to call it a second Cold War… it is a very different circumstance… it is a Sino-Russian axis that is a reality. So in the Security Council we are going to have the United Kingdom, France and the United States on one side, and China and Russia on the other.

Q. Let’s end with the future of the Republican Party to which you have dedicated so many years of work since you were in the Reagan Administration. What awaits the political party whether Donald Trump wins or loses?

R. A fight is going to break out in the Republican Party whether Trump wins or not. Let’s say he loses… As I said, Donald Trump has no philosophy, he doesn’t do politics, there is nothing he can pass on to his successors, apart from his style and his way of acting, which is a performing art. So there is no Trumpism. Because Trumpism is what he decides on a given day. After this fight, the Republican Party can return to a Ronald Reagan style, to that kind of party in a few years. If Trump wins, the fight will be greater, because he will be in the White House. But it must be remembered that Donald Trump will become a lame duck the very day he is sworn in, since he will not be able to run for president of the United States again. And that is a very different circumstance than the one he faced in his first term, where he had an eight-year runway.

Potentially, you now only have a fixed term of four years, which goes by very quickly.

This article was first published in El Mundo on September 24, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

‘Midnight in Moscow’ Review: Losing the Deterrence Game

September 22, 2024
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For more than a century, U.S. diplomats in Russia have had to fend off propaganda, outright lies, harassment and seduction, often simultaneously. Our envoys have been gulled into damaging concessions, and their Washington bosses have proved just as susceptible. Recall Franklin Roosevelt’s appalling observation about Joseph Stalin: “I think if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.” Incredibly, Roosevelt’s mindset, with variations, persists in many contemporary American leaders.

John J. Sullivan worked for two such presidents, first as deputy secretary of state from May 2017 to December 2019, and as U.S. ambassador to Russia from then until September 2022. In “Midnight in Moscow,” Mr. Sullivan describes what it was like.

Mr. Sullivan focuses on the events before, during and after Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine, but he covers considerable additional territory. His legal career and experience under prior Republican presidents made him a natural for deputy secretary. Mike Pompeo, as the new secretary of state, kept him on after Rex Tillerson was unceremoniously purged by President Trump in March 2018. Mr. Trump, if he wins in November, may find Mr. Sullivan too experienced, grounded and loyal to the Constitution to serve in a second term. His is a cautionary tale for those thinking about joining a Trump administration redivivus.

Mr. Sullivan describes Mr. Trump’s “chaotic and undisciplined style,” as when he fired Mr. Tillerson via tweet—an episode that captured the tumult that made Mr. Tillerson, among others, “completely miscast for his role—any role—in an administration [so] undisciplined and unconventional.” Mr. Trump “would not or could not draw a distinction between his own interests and those of the country he was leading,” Mr. Sullivan concludes.

He was dispatched to Moscow without the traditional photograph with the president. Mr. Sullivan never spoke with him thereafter—not even to have a courtesy meeting before the ambassador’s departure: another reminder of Mr. Trump’s limited comprehension of running a government, especially in national security.

President Biden kept the ambassador in place. Mr. Sullivan paints a telling picture of State Department operations, especially the unglamorous but critical job of keeping Embassy Moscow functioning in a hostile environment, exacerbated further by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Outside their embassies, our ambassadors have responsibilities for Americans living or visiting their respective countries. They strive, for example, to ensure that U.S. citizens arrested, legitimately or otherwise, receive fair, humane treatment. The Kremlin’s use of innocents abroad as human pawns greatly complicated that effort. Mr. Biden explicitly embraced outright hostage swapping (with Russia, Iran and others), significantly departing from Ronald Reagan’s opposition to trading guiltless victims for criminals or spies. Mr. Trump has recently pilloried swaps for well-known victims, like WNBA star Brittney Griner, but Mr. Sullivan reveals that the Trump administration attempted exactly that in 2020, unsuccessfully offering to trade convicted Russian criminals for Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, two Americans held in Russian prisons, since released.

Describing Mr. Biden’s actions prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Sullivan shows that the president’s minimal emphasis on deterring Moscow contributed to Vladimir Putin’s confidence that he could succeed. At Mr. Biden’s June 2021 Geneva summit with Mr. Putin, Ukraine barely came up. Nor did it often arise at lower levels in the following four months, further confirming to Moscow that Mr. Biden gave it low priority. Watching “the calamitous and tragic American withdrawal from Afghanistan,” the Kremlin “drew a direct connection to Ukraine,” Mr. Sullivan writes. Nikolai Patrushev, Moscow’s then-counterpart to our national security advisor, predicted that Ukraine, like Afghanistan, “would be left to ‘the whim of fate.’ ” Mr. Sullivan found the Afghanistan pullout the only point at which even ordinary Russians expressed “to me personally their contempt for the United States.”

The Biden administration, then and now, seemed completely unaware that its behavior was encouraging the Kremlin to believe that a second invasion of Ukraine would produce the same response as Barack Obama’s after Russia attacked the Donbas region and annexed Crimea in 2014—essentially no response at all. At least from Embassy Moscow’s perspective, there is little evidence that Mr. Biden’s policy makers were thinking hard about deterring a renewed Russian assault.

On Oct. 25, 2021, Mr. Sullivan, then in Washington, attended an intelligence-community briefing at the National Security Council, stressing that Russia was “undertaking a massive aggregation of forces” on its Ukraine border, preparing to invade. This news “changed everything in my life,” he writes. He was “struck . . . that the information had come together so quickly.” The week before, he had “met with the senior U.S. military leadership in Europe, and no one had raised an alarm about an imminent invasion of Ukraine by Russia.”

Eventually, when Russia’s intention became obvious, Mr. Biden sent CIA Director Bill Burns to Moscow to tell Mr. Putin that our response to an invasion would be “devastating.” But the Russian leader had seen Washington’s feckless response to his aggression in 2014 and the incompetent Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021. Why should he have listened?

Mr. Biden’s subsequent public releases of intelligence, touted as an administration success, obviously failed to make a difference in Mr. Putin’s calculations. Moreover, U.S. intelligence badly underestimated Kyiv’s resolve and capacity to resist Moscow’s assault, which led to Mr. Biden’s unwillingness to provide additional lethal support to Ukraine before the invasion began.

Mr. Sullivan has made an important contribution to understanding what transpired in Washington and the Kremlin concerning Russia’s unprovoked 2022 aggression, and what might have been done differently. Unfortunately, it’s still midnight in Moscow.

For more than a century, U.S. diplomats in Russia have had to fend off propaganda, outright lies, harassment and seduction, often simultaneously. Our envoys have been gulled into damaging concessions, and their Washington bosses have proved just as susceptible. Recall Franklin Roosevelt’s appalling observation about Joseph Stalin: “I think if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.” Incredibly, Roosevelt’s mindset, with variations, persists in many contemporary American leaders.

John J. Sullivan worked for two such presidents, first as deputy secretary of state from May 2017 to December 2019, and as U.S. ambassador to Russia from then until September 2022. In “Midnight in Moscow,” Mr. Sullivan describes what it was like.

Mr. Sullivan focuses on the events before, during and after Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine, but he covers considerable additional territory. His legal career and experience under prior Republican presidents made him a natural for deputy secretary. Mike Pompeo, as the new secretary of state, kept him on after Rex Tillerson was unceremoniously purged by President Trump in March 2018. Mr. Trump, if he wins in November, may find Mr. Sullivan too experienced, grounded and loyal to the Constitution to serve in a second term. His is a cautionary tale for those thinking about joining a Trump administration redivivus.

Mr. Sullivan describes Mr. Trump’s “chaotic and undisciplined style,” as when he fired Mr. Tillerson via tweet—an episode that captured the tumult that made Mr. Tillerson, among others, “completely miscast for his role—any role—in an administration [so] undisciplined and unconventional.” Mr. Trump “would not or could not draw a distinction between his own interests and those of the country he was leading,” Mr. Sullivan concludes.

He was dispatched to Moscow without the traditional photograph with the president. Mr. Sullivan never spoke with him thereafter—not even to have a courtesy meeting before the ambassador’s departure: another reminder of Mr. Trump’s limited comprehension of running a government, especially in national security.

President Biden kept the ambassador in place. Mr. Sullivan paints a telling picture of State Department operations, especially the unglamorous but critical job of keeping Embassy Moscow functioning in a hostile environment, exacerbated further by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Outside their embassies, our ambassadors have responsibilities for Americans living or visiting their respective countries. They strive, for example, to ensure that U.S. citizens arrested, legitimately or otherwise, receive fair, humane treatment. The Kremlin’s use of innocents abroad as human pawns greatly complicated that effort. Mr. Biden explicitly embraced outright hostage swapping (with Russia, Iran and others), significantly departing from Ronald Reagan’s opposition to trading guiltless victims for criminals or spies. Mr. Trump has recently pilloried swaps for well-known victims, like WNBA star Brittney Griner, but Mr. Sullivan reveals that the Trump administration attempted exactly that in 2020, unsuccessfully offering to trade convicted Russian criminals for Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, two Americans held in Russian prisons, since released.

Describing Mr. Biden’s actions prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Sullivan shows that the president’s minimal emphasis on deterring Moscow contributed to Vladimir Putin’s confidence that he could succeed. At Mr. Biden’s June 2021 Geneva summit with Mr. Putin, Ukraine barely came up. Nor did it often arise at lower levels in the following four months, further confirming to Moscow that Mr. Biden gave it low priority. Watching “the calamitous and tragic American withdrawal from Afghanistan,” the Kremlin “drew a direct connection to Ukraine,” Mr. Sullivan writes. Nikolai Patrushev, Moscow’s then-counterpart to our national security advisor, predicted that Ukraine, like Afghanistan, “would be left to ‘the whim of fate.’ ” Mr. Sullivan found the Afghanistan pullout the only point at which even ordinary Russians expressed “to me personally their contempt for the United States.”

The Biden administration, then and now, seemed completely unaware that its behavior was encouraging the Kremlin to believe that a second invasion of Ukraine would produce the same response as Barack Obama’s after Russia attacked the Donbas region and annexed Crimea in 2014—essentially no response at all. At least from Embassy Moscow’s perspective, there is little evidence that Mr. Biden’s policy makers were thinking hard about deterring a renewed Russian assault.

On Oct. 25, 2021, Mr. Sullivan, then in Washington, attended an intelligence-community briefing at the National Security Council, stressing that Russia was “undertaking a massive aggregation of forces” on its Ukraine border, preparing to invade. This news “changed everything in my life,” he writes. He was “struck . . . that the information had come together so quickly.” The week before, he had “met with the senior U.S. military leadership in Europe, and no one had raised an alarm about an imminent invasion of Ukraine by Russia.”

Eventually, when Russia’s intention became obvious, Mr. Biden sent CIA Director Bill Burns to Moscow to tell Mr. Putin that our response to an invasion would be “devastating.” But the Russian leader had seen Washington’s feckless response to his aggression in 2014 and the incompetent Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021. Why should he have listened?

Mr. Biden’s subsequent public releases of intelligence, touted as an administration success, obviously failed to make a difference in Mr. Putin’s calculations. Moreover, U.S. intelligence badly underestimated Kyiv’s resolve and capacity to resist Moscow’s assault, which led to Mr. Biden’s unwillingness to provide additional lethal support to Ukraine before the invasion began.

Mr. Sullivan has made an important contribution to understanding what transpired in Washington and the Kremlin concerning Russia’s unprovoked 2022 aggression, and what might have been done differently. Unfortunately, it’s still midnight in Moscow.

Mr. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, served as national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019.

This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on September 22, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

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
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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.