RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Trump called on the United Nations Security Council Monday to adopt new and stronger sanctions on North Korea. Diplomats are skeptical that such measures would change Pyongyang’s behavior because it is already economically isolated, doesn’t mind inflicting pain on its people, and will never negotiate away its nuclear weapons. A new sanctions push is nonetheless worth a try—not least as a test of Chinese willingness to confront the threat it has helped to nurture.

It’s a myth that Pyongyang already faces tough sanctions, since by several measures North Korea is well down the list of sanctions targets. There’s plenty of room to tighten financial and trade restrictions on the Kim Jong Un regime. The main obstacle has been China’s efforts to water down sanctions and veto tougher measures.

Beijing also has failed to enforce sanctions that it has agreed to. In recent years a U.N. Panel of Experts has documented how Chinese companies and banks violate U.N. sanctions against North Korea. Last year it determined that Bank of China ’s Singapore branch allowed 605 payments on behalf of North Korean entities. Beijing blocked the release of that report, though its contents leaked to the press.

Beijing has long viewed the collapse of the Kim regime as a worse threat to China’s interests than are the North’s nuclear missiles. And previous U.S. administrations chose to tiptoe around China’s resistance in the hope of making incremental diplomatic progress.

Mr. Trump has taken a different approach as the North continues to increase its nuclear stockpile and its missile-delivery systems, threatening unilateral action against North Korea while seeking China’s help. The Trump Administration is signaling in particular that it won’t tolerate a North that can target U.S. cities for destruction with long-range missiles that can carry a nuclear warhead. The U.S. has done this with multiple public statements, private talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and an invitation this week to the entire U.S. Senate for a briefing on the threat.

“This is a real threat to the world, whether we want to talk about it or not,” Mr. Trump said Monday at a White House meeting of Security Council envoys. “North Korea is a big world problem, and it’s a problem we have to finally solve. People have put blindfolds on for decades, and now it’s time to solve the problem.”

As we’ve recommended, the U.S. has the legal authority to increase pressure on the North by applying “secondary sanctions”—denying access to the U.S. financial system to companies and financial institutions in third countries that conduct illegal business with North Korea. Past administrations were reluctant to do so for fear of upsetting Beijing, since most of the targets of such sanctions would be Chinese. If Beijing refuses to act against the North, such sanctions would be a minimum test of Mr. Trump’s seriousness.

In other words, as al-Kalbani has confirmed — and contrary to what McMaster has been telling his staff and his commander-in-chief, President Trump — Muslim terrorists are Islamic, and the term “radical Islamic terrorism” is apt, accurate and extremely “helpful.”

During his first “all hands” staff meeting on February 23, President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, called terrorism “un-Islamic” and the term “radical Islamic terrorism” not helpful.

Prior to the meeting, retired U.S. Army Col. Peter Mansoor told Fox News that McMaster, with whom he served in Iraq during the 2007 surge of American troops, “absolutely does not view Islam as the enemy… and will present a degree of pushback against the theories being propounded in the White House that this is a clash of civilizations and needs to be treated as such.”

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s National Security Adviser. (Image source: Center for Strategic and International Studies)

Let us put McMaster’s premise — which is antithetical not only to that of his predecessor, Michael Flynn, but to Trump himself and many of his senior advisers — to the test.

Less than three years ago, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh — a grandchild of Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, the 18th-century founder of the Saudi school of Islam called Wahhabism — said, in an August 19, 2014 statement, that Islamic State (ISIS), and al-Qaeda, are Islam’s “enemy number one.”

This would be a good sign, if not for the fact that four days earlier, Sheikh Adil al-Kalbani, a former imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and a Salafi (a strict sect of Sunni Islam advocating a return to the early Islam of the Quran), tweeted: “ISIS is a true product of Salafism and we must deal with it with full transparency.”

Later that month, al-Kalbani published two pieces in the Saudi government-aligned daily Al Riyadh — on August 24 and 31 — criticizing elements “in the Salafi stream for appropriating the truth and Islam and for permitting the killing of their opponents, and… clerics and society that dared not come out against them.”

This was a bold assertion on the part of al-Kalbani: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is based on Wahhabism, a form of Salafism embraced by the monarchy.

In January 2016, al-Kalbani gave an interview to the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based network, MBC, in which he acknowledged with regret, “We follow the same thought [as ISIS], but apply it in a refined way.” He added that ISIS “draws its ideas from what is written in our own books, from our own principles.” (Author’s emphasis)

Defense Secretary James Mattis slammed the Taliban as having “no religious foundation” and being “not devout anything” after a Friday attack on an Afghan army base that left 150 soldiers dead.

Afghan Defense Minister Abdullah Habibi and Army Chief of Staff Qadam Shah Shahim resigned from their posts after the attack on Afghan National Army 209 Shaheen Military Corps Headquarters in Balkh province.

The Taliban claimed the attack was perpetrated by a “mujahid who had already infiltrated to the enemy ranks, managed to accomplice a heavy amount of explosive materials in a large dining room in the Corps; later on 9 further mujahideen equipped with heavy and light arms entered the installation tactically and launched attack on the enemy.”

They claimed the attack was retaliation for the killing of Taliban governors in Kunduz and Baghlan.

“The martyrdom offensive of 209th Corps conveys message to all enemy soldiers, police, intelligence apparatus and other relevant stooge organs that this spring operation will be more deadly and painful,” the Taliban message continued. “It is better for mercenaries to avoid sacrificing for American and foreign interests anymore. If they still continue protection of their masters they are then responsible for their actions.”

At a press conference in Afghanistan on Monday, Mattis said the attack on the soldiers “just as they were coming out of a mosque, you know, coming out of a house of worship — it certainly characterizes this fight for exactly what it is.”

“This barbaric enemy and what they do,” he added, “kind of makes it clear to me why it is we stand together.”

Mattis predicted it’s “going to be another tough year for the valiant Afghan security forces and the international troops who have stood and will continue to stand shoulder to shoulder with Afghanistan against terrorism and against those who seek to undermine the legitimate United Nations-recognized government of this nation.”

“If the Taliban wished to join the political process and work honestly for a positive future for the Afghan people, who have suffered long and hard, they need only to renounce violence and reject terrorism,” he said. “It’s a pretty low standard to join the political process.”

The global outlook for American interests is dismal. The country’s best hopes may well lie in the destructive power of its own innovation

Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle tells of a palace perched above a Bohemian village. Ineffable emissaries leave and enter in sealed coaches. The townspeople barely glimpse the denizens of the Castle, who govern the town by mysterious means. A telephone connects to the Castle, but the villagers can only speak to whomever might be listening on the other end of the line, without hearing a word of reply. It is interpreted variously as an allegory for the relation of the divine to the human, or as a satire on the Imperial Austrian bureaucracy.

An appropriate ending would be a visit to the Castle, where the inscrutable beings would sit in cavernous offices and complain about their inability to influence events. It would resemble the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, where the tyros of the Trump administration are learning how little influence America has in the world after eight years of Barack Obama (not to mention eight years of George W Bush), and how difficult it is to change a game in which America no longer sets the rules.

There is very little the United States can do about the Levant and Mesopotamia, and nothing it can do about the Korean Peninsula – not, in any case, without a long-term effort to change the game.

Bottom of Form

America has no European partner except for German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the European Union, whether we like it or not. The press chatter about personalities is irrelevant. The problem is not a “Wall Street” group (Gary Cohn, Steven Mnuchin, Jared Kusher) versus the “nationalists” (Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway). The problem is that no matter which adviser has the president’s ear, or whether the president acts on his own impulses, there are no good short-term outcomes.

Among Trump’s inner circle, the one individual whose star has risen fastest belongs to neither the “Wall Street” nor the “nationalist” wing of the administration. That is Wilbur Ross, the most influential Secretary of Commerce since Herbert Hoover and a billionaire investor who rescued Korean and Japanese banks after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. A past president of the Japan Society, Ross is Trump’s key man for Asian trade issues.

Japan is not only an American ally; it is a credible counterweight to China’s rising economic influence in Asia, where the US$100 billion One Belt, One Road infrastructure scheme is winning influence for Beijing among former American allies such as Thailand and the Philippines. There is a great deal of scope for Japanese-American collaboration in Asia, but that is a sole bright spot in an otherwise dismal world picture.

Probing Washington’s resolve

The sarin gas attack in Syria’s Idlib province earlier this month perplexed many America analysts: Why would the Assad regime, and its Russian and Iranian backers, subject itself to global condemnation, just after UN Ambassador Nikki Haley allowed that Washington was not focused on removing Assad? The plain facts, as I understand them, show that the Assad government ordered the attack at the highest level, and that Russia was aware of it beforehand and therefore complicit. US officials believe that they can establish these facts with virtual certainty, which means that the Russians knew that Washington would learn what occurred. I conclude that the Syrian government and its Russian ally used poison gas because they could, and wanted to probe Washington’s resolve.

That required a sharp American response, which came in the form of a cruise missile attack on Syria’s Al Shayrat airfield on April 6. There was no follow-up to the American gesture. Nor could there be.
Iran cannot be forced out of Syria. As I reported on March 14, Iran is arming tens of thousands of South Asian Shi’ites to join Hezbollah in its Levantine International Brigade. It can draw on practically inexhaustible resources of manpower from the oppressed Shia minorities of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and its objective is to replace the Syrian Sunni majority with Shi’ite settlers. It has the backing of Moscow and Beijing, who have to contend with Sunni rather than Shi’ite jihadists in their own territories (and, in the case of China, on its Asian periphery). Saudi-funded madrassas are proliferating through East Asia, as Asia Times warned a year ago.

As I write these words, the Iranian nuclear agreement that was brokered by the Obama administration is sitting on President Trump’s desk. It requires presidential certification of compliance every 90 days, and the president is deliberating on whether or not to certify.

My answer is an emphatic, unqualified, and resounding “No”.

Firstly, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear regulatory agency, has already certified that Iran has been out of compliance with the deal. The most recent IAEA report specifies that Iran has already exceeded its limit of heavy water under the agreement. Heavy water can use unrefined uranium as a fuel, shortcutting the expensive process of enriching uranium to rapidly produce a nuclear bomb. This is happening, as we speak, in Arak.

Beyond that, since the deal was struck in July of 2015, Iran has conducted as many as 14 missile tests, in brazen defiance of UN Resolution 2231.

Then there is the process of verification, which is inherently flawed. Anything that Iran deems as a “military site” is, according to Iranian leadership, off limits to inspectors. These include those “military sites” which we don’t even know about. That means that the IAEA’s means of obtaining critically important information is via a letter certifying compliance written by the government of Iran. That is akin to releasing murderers and rapists from prison and having them certify in a letter that they are no longer committing murder and rape.

And the Iranians gave their own soil samples from Parchin, where explosive nuclear tests took place. Senator Jim Risch of Idaho compared this to the NFL allowing a football player to mail in his own urine samples as part of a drug test.

Thanks to Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and CIA Director and former Congressman Mike Pompeo, we now know of the existence of multiple secret side deals made with the Iranian regime.

We know that the deal was not even allowed to be voted upon as a treaty because Mr. Obama made an end-run around the U.S. Constitution, as well as around the Congress, by going first to the UN, and then presenting it to Congress as a fait accompli.

We also know that the deal that the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament, voted on, was more than 1000 pages long, while the agreement that we saw in the United States was only 159 pages long.

The reason the agreement is so utterly flawed is that President Obama was hell-bent on securing this deal as his foreign policy legacy. He basically refused to acknowledge the Iranian government for what it is: an apocalyptic, messianic regime that believes that destroying Israel and America will bring about the coming of the 12th Imam, (the Shia Messiah). Equipping this sort of regime with nuclear weapons presents a clear and present danger to the survival of the United States, Israel, and to the Sunni Arab nations, as well as much of Europe.

We recall that President Obama began his first administration on an apology tour to the Muslim world, and had a difficult time articulating a belief in American exceptionalism. And we know that even until his last day in office, Obama vehemently refused to articulate that radical Islamic terrorism exists.

Mr. Obama and his ilk sees all the worlds actors as morally equal. There is no distinction between those who would obliterate entire innocent populations so that their theology or political entity would reign supreme, and those who would never even entertain such a thought. Such a world view makes one incapable of acknowledging that certain nations, such as the United States, Israel, Britain, etc., are morally capable of possessing a nuclear bomb, because they are responsible enough to use it only for morally correct reasons, and other nations, like Iran, are not.

We know that the Obama administration had absolutely no qualms about deceiving the American people about Iran’s intentions. We recall that Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes, in a May 5, 2016 article in the New York Times magazine, openly boasted of manufacturing the belief that Iran’s new leadership was more “moderate,” and thus willing to make, and keep, a nuclear deal with the U.S. and the West.

Iran is reacting angrily to U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s announcement on Tuesday, and to subsequent comments by U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis Wednesday, about a review of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed between Tehran and world powers in July 2015.

On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, a chief negotiator of the nuclear deal, tweeted: “Worn-out U.S. accusations can’t mask its admission of Iran’s compliance with JCPOA, obligating U.S. to change course and fulfill its own commitments.”

Zarif was referring to claims by President Donald Trump’s administration that while it was re-evaluating its Iran policy, it would not walk away from the deal in the meantime.

The part that Zarif and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have been leaving out of their anti-American rhetoric — and Iranian assertions that the U.S. is the party violating the agreement — is the real reason for Washington’s review of the JCPOA, which in any case merely delays Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

As Tillerson said, it is Iran’s “alarming and ongoing provocations that export terror and violence, destabilizing more than one country at a time” that make it necessary to prevent the regime from traveling “the same path as North Korea.”

Indeed, even while it engaged in talks with representatives of the P5+1 countries (the U.S., the U.K., China, France, Russia and Germany), Iran continued funding and training terrorists across the Middle East, leaving others to do its dirty work.

One of its key proxies is Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Shiite organization that has also been fighting on the ground in Syria on behalf of President Bashar Assad.

Though Iran unveiled missiles inscribed with a Hebrew warning about wiping Israel off the map, it nevertheless has been relying on Hezbollah, situated along Israel’s northern border, to carry out this objective, bit by bit, through battles of attrition that involve both limited terrorist operations and all-out war. Hezbollah’s last major military campaign against the Jewish state took place in the summer of 2006. The 34-day Second Lebanon War, during which rockets blitzed northern Israel and even reached the major city of Haifa, culminated in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which was aimed at preventing Hezbollah from re-arming.