RUTHFULLY YOURS

The question is not whether President Trump should decertify President Obama’s farcical Iran nuclear deal. Of course he should. Indeed, he must: Even if we set common sense to the side, federal law requires it.

Instead, there are two questions.

1. Why has President Trump recertified the deal, not once but twice?

This is shameful. Remember, Trump insisted throughout the 2016 campaign that the deal — formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — was the worst and most dangerous in the history of deals. Just two weeks ago, addressing the U.N. General Assembly, he described it as an “embarrassment” and “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.” Yet, under the statute that calls for presidential findings every 90 days, the president, in recertifying, represented to Congress and the American people (a) that Iran is “transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing the agreement” and (b) that continuing the JCPOA is “vital to the national security interests of the United States.”

These assertions insult the intelligence.

The U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is charged with what laughably passes for the “monitoring” of the JCPOA and related “side agreements,” which the Obama administration shielded from congressional inspection. Last week, the IAEA fessed up: The agency has been unable to verify that Tehran is implementing the deal. The regime has barred inspectors from inspecting military sites. Consequently, as the invaluable analyst Omri Ceren points out, the IAEA has no way of verifying that Iran has refrained from “activities which could contribute to the design and development of a nuclear explosive device” (as required by the JCPOA’s Annex 1, Section T — see here, at p. 27).

This admission is not news. It just makes the obvious — the inevitable — explicit. It has been widely known from the first that the JCPOA is not verifiable, despite the Obama administration’s guarantees that it would be. It has long been known, moreover, that Iran is not in compliance with many of the JCPOA’s terms. That, too, illustrates the duplicity by which Obama sought his foreign-policy legacy monument: To get the deal approved by Congress — or, at least, to get it not disapproved under the cockamamie Corker-Cardin legislation — the prior administration solemnly pledged to hold the mullahs to the letter (and, of course, that this could be done verifiably). Obama officials further vowed that sanctions would “snap back” if Iran failed to comply. Once the deal got its congressional stamp of non-disapproval, though, we learned that Obama was quietly waiving violations left and right, and had even agreed to limits on what the IAEA could report — the better to conceal Iran’s breaches.

Bottom line: Iran has never, not for a moment, been “transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing” the JCPOA. The Obama administration knew this all along — and knew it would go this way. The Trump State Department, which is chockablock with Obama holdovers and has heavily lobbied the new president to stand by the deal, has known it from Day One.

And what about that second representation: vital to the national-security interests of the United States?

Seriously? With a straight face?

Quite apart from violating the terms of the JCPOA and refusing to permit verifiable inspections from the start, Iran continues to be the world’s No. 1 sponsor of anti-American terrorism, backing Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Taliban, a network of Iraqi cells, and the Houthis in Yemen, to cite just the best-known examples. That’s not just me talking; the regime continues to be one of just three countries on the U.S. government’s official terrorist list (the others are Syria, which is Iran’s cat’s-paw, and Sudan, which has longstanding ties to the regime in Tehran).

Moreover, Iran maintains its aggressive program of ballistic-missile development in defiance of Security Council resolutions. In fact, less than three months ago, Trump imposed new sanctions on regime officials and abettors. Iran is exporting arms and personnel to fortify Assad’s barbarism in Syria. It continues to threaten Israel’s destruction — in fact, two of the ballistic missiles it has test-fired were inscribed in Hebrew “Israel must be wiped out.” The mullahs are substantially responsible for the massive Hezbollah build-up (including an arsenal estimated at well over 100,000 missiles) that raises the distinct possibility of a catastrophic war. And, still proud to be the “Death to America” regime, Iran continues to abduct American hostages and menace American naval vessels.

For all the talk of “morons” Wednesday — did Rex Tillerson call Donald Trump a moron and what does that mean, if anything — the real issue for those not transfixed by media gotcha games is the certification, or not, of something truly moronic: the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA).

In normal times, devoid of mass murderers and endless natural disasters, the looming October 15 certification decision on this deal would be front and center in the national consciousness. It still should be because, ultimately, it is even more important than hurricanes and psychopathic killers. It’s about nuclear war.

The biggest mistake of the Obama years was not the Affordable Care Act — that can be fixed eventually — but the Iran deal, which has already resulted in massive catastrophe, causing irreparable damage. Iran, financially enriched by the agreement, has been able to play a growing and truly evil role throughout the Middle East (and even South America), but especially in the unending Syrian civil war through its brutal own Revolutionary Guard and its bloodthirsty Hezbollah cutouts. This war has undoubtedly changed the character of Europe forever by creating millions of refugees. Every one of our lives has been or will be affected by it, directly or indirectly. (Reminder: One of the Paris Bataclan theatre terrorists who slaughtered 130, more than twice Las Vegas, held a Syrian refugee passport.) Even now, as ISIS is being pushed back, Iran, not us or our allies, is moving in to take control of their territory. We can be sure the mullahs will use it to build children’s hospitals and cancer research institutes — either that or murder thousands more in the name of the Twelfth Imam.

Obama’s motivation to make this deal, to choose the mullahs’ side in the more than thousand-year-old Shiite-Sunni blood feud that comes to us as a horrifying ghost from the pre-Middle Ages, remains one of the great mysteries of our time. It was the kind of agreement only State Department bureaucrats could love or, for that matter, see. In that sense, the Iran Deal is a perfect “Swamp” agreement. Nobody really knows what’s in it, deliberately so — just like the Affordable Care Act, actually. Only in this instance, Nancy Pelosi did not have to tell us to sign it to know what’s in it, because it was never signed in the first place — nor intended to be. It was simply put in place — Constitution be damned — over the heads of an impotent Congress by Obama and his claque of unwise wise men and women.The Trump administration is expected to announce next week that it will not formally certify Iran as in compliance with the landmark nuclear agreement, a move that could kill the agreement and set the stage for Congress to reimpose harsh economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic, according to multiple U.S. officials and sources familiar with the situation.

While some senior Trump administration officials—including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis—are pushing for President Donald Trump to preserve the deal, it has become increasingly clear the president is frustrated with Iran’s continued tests of ballistic missile technology and rogue operations targeting U.S. forces in the region, according to these sources. CONTINUE AT SITE

As tensions mount with North Korea, fears arise that President Trump’s tit-for-tat bellicose rhetoric with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un might lead to miscalculations — and thus an accidental war that could have been prevented.

Is there evidence in history that wars break out largely because of an accident or over a misplaced word?

Seldom.

Enemies Fight, but Neutrals, Rivals, and Friends Rarely Do

The precise timing of particular outbreaks of war, of course, can depend on unique factors.

A sudden perception of a loss of deterrence can cause an army to mobilize. So can almost anything, from the introduction of a new weapon to a change in government.

Yet the larger events that originally drove two sides to fight are rarely, if ever, accidental in the manner of car wrecks.

Enemies go to war; rivals, neutrals, and friends rarely do. There is little chance that an accidental foreign incursion across the Canadian or even the Mexican border will result in war. The apparently accidental, but quite lethal, 1967 Israeli air attack on the USS Liberty did not result in a U.S. retaliatory strike on Tel Aviv, much less escalate to a general war. Yet a similar Soviet strike might have.

In general, the best deterrent policy in dealing with multiple aggressors is Teddy Roosevelt’s dictum to speak softly and carry a big stick — because loud speech is sometimes misinterpreted as a compensatory effort to disguise military incapability, and thus paradoxically it can lead to a fatal loss of deterrence.

Next best perhaps is speaking loudly while carrying a big stick. Intemperate words are not fatal if ultimately reinforced by overwhelming force.

Most dangerous is speaking loudly (and especially sanctimoniously) while carrying a twig — basically what we have seen in the past eight years with Russia, Iran, and Syria.

Was World War I Really an Accident?

It is often said that accidents and extraneous forces — nearly automatic and mindless mobilization, fumbled diplomacy, greedy arms merchants, archaic alliances on autopilot, confused messaging, or bellicose strutting and rhetoric in August 1914 — triggered World War I, which otherwise might have been prevented.

But a continental war had come close to breaking out earlier in 1911 over Morocco and again in 1912–13 in the Balkans. A war would likely have broken out later, if not in 1914. Berlin by 1914 held views that were incompatible with peaceful resolution:

1) Germany felt cheated that its economic dynamism, population, and military power somehow had not resulted in what Germany thought it deserved: commensurate colonial expansion overseas and dominant influence on the Continent;

2) the German army since 1871 had felt that its size, and organizational and technological excellence, increasingly replicated in a rising and powerful navy, made it nearly unstoppable vis-à-vis other European rivals;

3) any sudden German strike in either the East or West could not be immediately deterred or stopped by the existing forces of Britain, France, or Russia.

The net result of these unchallenged assumptions was a likely German war of aggression sometime in the second or third decade of the 20th century.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan tried to extort Israel to withdraw its support, and threatened to end the process of normalization unless it does so. It is worth noting that Turkey strongly supports statehood for the Palestinians but not for their own Kurdish population. Hypocrisy abounds in the international community, but that should surprise no one.
Iraqi Kurds were a key partner for the U.S. coalition that toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime and has staved off further sectarian tensions in that country. One thing is clear: if the United States continues to neglect its “friends” and allies in the region — those on the front line in the fight against ISIS — the damage to its credibility will only increase.
Nor are there any limits to the hypocrisy of those university students and faculty who demonstrate so loudly for Palestinian statehood, but ignore or oppose the Kurds. When is the last time you read about a demonstration in favor of the Kurds on a university campus? The answer is never.
No one who supports statehood for the Palestinians can morally oppose Kurdish independence. But they do, because it is double-standard hypocrisy, and not morality, that frames the debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

More than 90% of Iraq’s Kurdish population have now voted for independence from Iraq. While the referendum is not binding, it reflects the will of a minority group that has a long history of persecution and statelessness.

The independence referendum is an important step toward remedying a historic injustice inflicted on the Kurdish population in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet, while millions took to the streets to celebrate, it is clear that the challenges of moving forward toward establishing an independent Kurdistan are only just beginning. Already, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, has said: “we will impose the rule of Iraq in all of the areas of the KRG, with the strength of the constitution.” Meanwhile, other Iraqi lawmakers have called for the prosecution of Kurdish representatives who organized the referendum — singling out Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Masoud Barzani, specifically.

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump said he didn’t think it was worth pursuing negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a day after his secretary of state revealed the U.S. was in direct contact with Pyongyang.

“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter on Sunday, using a disparaging reference to Mr. Kim. “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”

The president and his top diplomat have sent differing signals about North Korea before, as well as on other topics. In August, Mr. Trump warned of unleashing “fire and fury” on North Korea, raising questions about potential nuclear war, amid worries that Pyongyang may target Guam. Mr. Tillerson later told reporters there was no new threat from North Korea and that Americans should “sleep well at night.”

Mr. Tillerson has been interested in pursuing lines of communication with North Korea, but that approach has been largely rejected by Mr. Trump, whose advisers have warned about the signal it would send after North Korea sent a pair of missiles over Japan this summer and tested what it claimed was a hydrogen bomb.

Mr. Trump also tweeted on Sunday, “Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won’t fail.”

Ever since North American Aerospace Defense Command’s (NORAD) deputy commander, Lieutenant General Pierre St-Amand, testified that that “the extant U.S. policy is not to defend Canada” in the event of a North Korean missile attack, Canadians have begun reconsidering their opposition to missile defense. Efforts to overcome that opposition have failed a number of times in the past, because the perception that missile defense threatens Canada’s commitment to peaceful neutrality always trumped concerns over national security — and because Canadians took it for granted that NORAD and NATO would protect them in the event of an attack.

In fact, the mutual-defense clause in NATO’s charter only explicitly requires member nations to act following a direct attack, ambiguously referring back to the U.N charter on the question of collective self-defense. And NORAD is only a monitoring service; if a missile is detected, the decision of whether or not to intercept is left up to member nations themselves. St-Amand’s revelation of this dark reality has left Canadians scratching their heads: How has the Canadian government left them defenseless against missile attacks for so long?

Thirty-two years ago, during the incipient years of missile defense, President Ronald Reagan offered Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney the opportunity to join a space defense-research program called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Mulroney’s decision not to participate was hedged in concern that doing so would uproot Canada’s role as a mediator during the Cold War, but he told reporters that he had great respect for the program and fully supported America’s efforts.

As early as 2003, President George W. Bush tried again, offering Canada the chance to buy into what was then named the Ballistic Missile Defense Shield (BMD). Despite a campaign promise to increase Canadian missile defense, Prime Minister Paul Martin, a Liberal, announced two years later that Canada would opt out of the program, bowing to public criticism and a lack of support in Parliament.

Both times, Canada’s opposition to joining America’s missile-defense program hinged on the same three issues: Its high cost, its low reliability, and, most importantly, the threat it poses to geopolitical stability. In 1985 and the early 2000s, the latter issue dominated criticism of the American program. Should a country begin preparing for a missile attack, the theory states, it will make volatile nations — the Soviet Union in the 1980s and Iran and North Korea today — feel less secure, and thus more likely to attack. This idea runs contrary to Canada’s international identity as a passively pacifist, neutral mediator; Canadians love staying out of the way, and missile defense, in their eyes, would be the opposite.

So far, to be sure, staying out of the way has worked. Canada is one of the few world powers — and arguably the only Group of 7 member — North Korea hasn’t threatened to destroy. Kim-Jong Un’s regime appears to regard Canada with none of the hostility it heaps on the U.S.: Returning from a successful mission to release a Canadian prisoner in August, national-security adviser Daniel Jean reported that Kim considers our northern neighbor to be a peaceful and friendly country. So the question of how the Canadian government could leave the nation powerless in responding to ICBMs has a simple answer: Missile defense is unpopular and unnecessary.

In the Weekly Standard, one Dominic Green writes that “there is no reason why an independent state in Iraqi Kurdistan should destabilize the region.” Mr. Green means well–he supports the Kurds, as do I–but the root of our problem lies in our misguided desire for stability. Of course a Kurdish state will destabilize the region. That’s precisely why we should support Kurdish national aspirations, although we may have to take care to keep the control rods in the fission pile. Our problem is that we have diplomats and generals who don’t want to make waves, and we face opponents who know how to shift the burden of uncertainty onto us.

At a twenty-year horizon neither Turkey nor Iran can be stabilized, for demographic reasons I have detailed in Asia Times. Iraq and Syria, the twin products of Sykes-Picot colonial state-construction, cannot be put back together again. What Vladimir Putin understands well, and we refuse even to consider is that the question isn’t whether chaos, but whose.

I explained why in a March 14, 2006 essay for Asia Times, entitled, “How I learned to stop worrying and love chaos.”

The US is in large measure responsible for the chaos that overstretches the world from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. Trade, information and entrepreneurship have turned the breakdown of traditional society in the Islamic world into a lapsed-time version of the Western experience. The West required the hideous religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Napoleonic Wars of the 18th, the American Civil War, and the two World Wars of the 20th century to make its adjustment. To export a prefabricated democracy to a part of the world whose culture and religion are far less amenable in the first place is an act of narcissistic idiocy.

As a policy, what does the pursuit of chaos entail? In essence, it means going back to the instrumentalities of the Cold War: containment, subversion, proxy wars, military intervention where required, and a clear distinction between enemies and friends. Given the absence of a competing superpower – Russia’s diplomatic embarrassment in the Iranian matter being proof of the matter – it is a far easier policy to pursue.

It does not necessarily mean “realism” in the sense of the Kissinger era of diplomacy of the administration of president George H W Bush, namely preserving the status quo. When the administration of president Ronald Reagan set out to bring down the Soviet Empire, it did not inquire as to the consequences for Russian or Ukrainian; its object was to reduce a threat to the United States.

‘Cut, and cut cleanly,” Sen. Paul Laxalt advised Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, urging the Philippine president to resign and flee Manila because of widespread civil unrest. The Nevada Republican, Ronald Reagan’s best friend in Congress, knew what his president wanted, and he made the point with customary Western directness.

President Trump could profitably follow Mr. Laxalt’s advice today regarding Barack Obama’s 2015 deal with Iran. The ayatollahs are using Mr. Obama’s handiwork to legitimize their terrorist state, facilitate (and conceal) their continuing nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs, and acquire valuable resources from gullible negotiating partners.

Mr. Trump’s real decision is whether to fulfill his campaign promise to extricate America from this strategic debacle. Last week at the United Nations General Assembly, he lacerated the deal as an “embarrassment,” “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”

Fearing the worst, however, the deal’s acolytes are actively obscuring this central issue, arguing that it is too arduous and too complex to withdraw cleanly. They have seized instead on a statutory requirement that every 90 days the president must certify, among other things, that adhering to the agreement is in America’s national-security interest. They argue the president should stay in the deal but not make the next certification, due in October.

This morganatic strategy is a poorly concealed ploy to block withdrawal, limp through Mr. Trump’s presidency, and resurrect the deal later. Paradoxically, supporters are not now asserting that the deal is beneficial. Instead, they concede its innumerable faults but argue that it can be made tougher, more verifiable and more strictly enforced. Or, if you want more, it can be extended, kicked to Congress, or deferred during the North Korea crisis. Whatever.

As Richard Nixon said during Watergate: “I want you to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up, or anything else if it’ll save it—save the plan.”

Mr. Trump should not be deceived. The issue is not certification. The issue is whether we will protect U.S. interests and shatter the illusion that Mr. Obama’s deal is achieving its stated goals, or instead timidly hope for the best while trading with the enemy, as the Europeans are doing. It is too cute by half to employ pettifoggery to evade this reality. CONTINUE AT SITE

Failure is an option, especially when it comes to U.S. policy towards North Korea. Decades of diplomatic efforts have failed to de-nuclearize and pacify Kim Jong Un’s regime while parallel efforts to deter small-scale conventional and large-scale cyber-attacks have also failed.

Despite these failures, however, U.S. policy-makers appear to still be enamored with the idea of getting up, dusting themselves off, and going for one more spin on the North Korean nuclear merry-go-round: provocation, emergency U.N. Security Council meeting, a new round of sanctions, failure of diplomatic talks, provocation, ad infinitum.

There are ways to break this cycle and achieve some form of success, options which the Trump administration appears to be considering.

However, while the Trump administration hopes for success in these endeavors, it should not forget to prepare for failure. Previous failures in U.S. and allied diplomacy and deterrence have led to dozens of deaths and millions of dollars in damages. Future failures could lead to the death of millions and damages measured in trillions of dollars.

Paradoxically, preparing for failure, in either diplomacy or deterrence, is the greatest way to increase the probability of success. If Kim Jong Un believes the United States can mitigate or significantly contain the consequences of a failure of diplomacy or deterrence, he may be less likely to initiate a provocation in the first place.

So what does preparing for failure look like in U.S. policy?

To begin, U.S. and allied policy-makers must examine why deterrence has failed, or nearly failed, in the past. For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Cuban leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara both lobbied for the use of Soviet nuclear weapons against the United States to advance the cause of the “socialist camp.” The Cuban leaders were rational in their own atypical non-Western way but were willing, even eager, to die for their cause. Kim Jong Un may not be all that different. His provocations may look crazy to the Western mind, but coldly rational to him.

The difficulty of deterrence is that it does not work in the same way universally, considering the diverse set of cultural values that each foreign leader holds. Demonstrating this reality in an academic setting, researchers in comparative psychology recently showed East Asians and Westerners the same picture for a short period of time and then asked the subjects what they remembered about the picture. The two groups, who saw the exact same picture, gave very different answers, in part, due to their cultural values which compelled them to focus on some things in the picture and not others.

This same dynamic recently manifest itself on the Korean peninsula. A few weeks ago, the U.S. military made the decision to withhold U.S. bombers from bilateral exercises with the South Koreans to signal North Korea its willingness to de-escalate the situation. Days later North Korea tested its largest-yield nuclear weapon ever. In the words of General Vincent K. Brooks, Commander of U.S. Forces Korea: “Apparently the changes in the exercise did not matter.” Both sides saw the same picture but gave different answers.

In fact, there is very good evidence that North Korean leaders hold dramatically different cultural values than the United States, namely, their elevation and devout protection of their leader’s “honor.” U.S. leaders regularly accept offenses to their honor as the price of politics. However, East Asian cultures in general, and North Korea, in particular, hold honor in much higher regard and are willing to go to greater lengths to defend it. This has major implications for the failure of deterrence and diplomacy.