RUTHFULLY YOURS

The State Department’s own “deep state” is trying to sabotage President Trump’s foreign policy agenda. From the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Iran, Qatar and climate change, the State Department, under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, is reported to be in “open war” with the White House. Key high level positions remain vacant as Obama holdovers “continue running the show and formulating policy, where they have increasingly clashed with the White House’s own agenda,” according to the Free Beacon. Secretary Tillerson has reportedly run interference to protect the Obama holdovers from being removed, allowing resistance to President Trump’s foreign policy agenda to flourish within the State Department.

The first casualty of this internal coup by the State Department’s deep state is Israel. The shadow of the Obama administration’s anti-Israel bias was reflected in a report the State Department released on July 17, 2017 entitled Country Reports on Terrorism 2016. It praised Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for reiterating “his commitment to nonviolence, recognition of the State of Israel, and pursuit of an independent Palestinian state through peaceful means.” The report referred to what it called “significant steps during President Abbas’ tenure (2005 to date) to ensure that official institutions in the West Bank under its control do not create or disseminate content that incites violence.”

The State Department report brushed aside clear evidence of a continuing barrage of incendiary rhetoric appearing on official Palestinian Authority and Fatah social media outlets and of inflammatory statements by Palestinian officials, including Abbas himself. Instead, it claimed that the Palestinian Authority “has made progress in reducing official rhetoric that could be considered incitement to violence.”

The State Department report conveniently skipped over the fact that Abbas remains committed to paying regular salaries to Palestinian terrorists imprisoned for killing Jews and to terrorists’ families. Their perfidiously named “Martyrs Fund” has a treasure chest of about $300 million dollars. That blood money comes in part from foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority, some of which is contributed by American taxpayers. President Trump has spoken out against the ‘pay to slay Jews’ terrorist payments, but the State Department has turned a blind eye. Obama holdover Stuart Jones, the Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, is reported to have steered Secretary Tillerson into making the erroneous claim that the Palestinian Authority had ceased spending U.S. taxpayer funds to pay terrorists, according to the Free Beacon’s sources.

After reciting the litany of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis, the State Department report held Israel largely responsible:

“Continued drivers of violence included a lack of hope in achieving Palestinian statehood, Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the perception that the Israeli government was changing the status quo on the Haram Al Sharif/Temple Mount, and IDF tactics that the Palestinians considered overly aggressive.”

Just a few hours after three members of an Israeli family were massacred by a Palestinian terrorist, a State Department official tried to defend the report’s conclusions on the drivers of Palestinian violence. The official sounded like a clinical psychologist or a social worker, declaring that there is “no one single pathway to violence—each individual’s path to terrorism is personalized, with certain commonalities.” This is the same type of irresponsible rhetoric used by the Obama administration in discussing the supposed root causes of what it called “violent extremism.”

The State Department has also carried over the Obama administration’s soft pedaling on Iran. Instead of presenting options to President Trump supporting a refusal to re-certify that Iran has complied with all of its obligations under the disastrous Obama nuclear deal with Iran, the State Department took Iran’s side. It recommended twice that President Trump sign certifications of Iran’s compliance. Deprived by the State Department of any analysis to the contrary, as he had requested, the president reluctantly signed the certifications in April and July. However, he has reportedly decided to sidestep the State Department going forward and rely instead on a White House team to prepare the way for refusing to sign the certification the next time it is presented to him. CIA Director Mike Pompeo, senior strategist Steve Bannon, and deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka opposed the State Department’s recommendation.

“The president assigned White House staffers with the task of preparing for the possibility of decertification for the 90-day review period that ends in October — a task he had previously given to Secretary Tillerson and the State Department,” a source close to the White House told Foreign Policy.

President Donald Trump has reportedly sidelined the State Department and entrusted White House staffers with making the potential case for withholding certification of Iran at the next 90-day review of the nuclear deal, Foreign Policy reported.

According to the report, the president made the decision after his “contentious meeting” with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week.

Via Newsmax:

“The president assigned White House staffers with the task of preparing for the possibility of decertification for the 90-day review period that ends in October — a task he had previously given to Secretary Tillerson and the State Department,” an unnamed source told FP.

FP explained that Trump relayed the new assignment last Tuesday to a group of White House staffers after he reluctantly signed certification.

“This is the president telling the White House that he wants to be in a place to decertify 90 days from now and it’s their job to put him there,” the source told FP.

According to FP, three unnamed sources described the new process as a way to work around the State Department, which the president felt had given him no other options but to sign certification.

“This is about the president asking Tillerson at the last certification meeting 90 days earlier to lay the groundwork so Trump could consider his options,” one of the sources said.

“Tillerson did not do this, and Trump is infuriated. He can’t trust his secretary of state to do his job, so he is turning to the few White House staffers he trusts the most,” the source added.

According to FP, there’s been friction for “months” between the White House and State Department over how to handle the Iran nuclear pact — something Trump had vowed to tear up during his presidential campaign.

Last Monday, as the administration was set to certify that Iran was meeting the necessary conditions, “the president expressed second thoughts around midday” and a meeting between Trump and Tillerson that afternoon “quickly turned into a meltdown,” FP reported.

Steve Bannon, the White House chief strategist, and Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president, repeatedly asked Tillerson to explain the U.S. national security benefits of certification, FP reported.

“The president kept demanding why he should certify, and the answers Tillerson gave him infuriated him,” one source told FP.

Tillerson is “trying to be a counterweight against the hard-liners, trying to save the [nuclear deal], but how long can that last?” one unnamed senior State Department official told FP. “The White House, they see the State Department as ‘the swamp.'”

Tillerson’s communications adviser, R.C. Hammond, disputed the account of the meeting between Trump and Tillerson, however.

“Not everybody in the room agreed with what the secretary was saying,” Hammond said. “But the president is certainly appreciative that someone is giving him clear, coherent information.”

Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton advocated for the United States to withdraw from the Iran Deal last week in an opinion piece at The Hill, calling recertification “an unforced error.”

Certification is an unforced error because the applicable statute (the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, or “INARA”) requires neither certifying Iranian compliance nor certifying Iranian noncompliance. Paula DeSutter and I previously explained that INARA requires merely that the Secretary of State (to whom President Obama delegated the task) “determine… whether [he] is able to certify” compliance (emphasis added). The secretary can satisfy the statute simply by “determining” that he is not prepared for now to certify compliance and that U.S. policy is under review.

During President Trump’s campaign he said that Mr. Obama’s 2015 nuclear weapons deal with Iran was the “worst deal ever.” Although there are many diplomatic deals vying for that title, the deal engineered by Mr. Obama is at least one of the worst ever for two reasons.

First, it essentially guarantees that the world’s principal terrorist nation will obtain nuclear weapons either during the fifteen-year term of the deal (stealthily) or openly soon after it ends. Second, because it does precisely nothing to limitIran’s development and production of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

The Trump administration has certified to Congress that Iran is in compliance with the deal (the “Joint Cooperative Plan of Action”) twice, first in April and again last week. Those certifications are required every 90 days by the “Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act” (INARA), the anti-constitutional law that permitted Mr. Obama the ability to claim Senate approval of the deal without senate ratification.

Mr. Trump reportedly considered telling Secretary of State Tillerson to not make the July certification but decided not to. It would have been far better if the president had blocked both certifications.

The problems that should have blocked the certifications are found within INARA’s terms or are directly derivative of them.

INARA required that within five days of reaching an agreement with Iran, the president shall send Congress, “the full details of the agreement, including all supporting materials and any classified annexes to the agreement.”

That was never done. The Senate’s duty to object to that failure, thereby killing the deal, was ignored.

Because of the Senate’s failure we don’t know what the so-called agreement actually provides. For almost two years it has been entirely clear that secret side agreements were made with Iran that the U.S. wasn’t allowed to see. At least one of them provides that Iran can self-inspect the Parchin nuclear site which is believed to be the center of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. (Unsurprisingly, the self-inspections tell the IAEA that all is just peachy at Parchin.)

When he was 17, five years ago, Mujtaba al-Sweikat committed the “crime” of participating in a pro-democracy rally in Saudi Arabia. Instead of attending Western Michigan University, as he had planned to do that fall, he was put in prison. Reports are now leaking out of Saudi Arabia that al-Sweikat will soon be beheaded for his transgression. It’s just the latest reminder that Saudi Arabia is America’s worst best friend.

The U.S. does get something out of its relationship with Saudi Arabia; there is real intelligence sharing, and the Kingdom has used its power over OPEC to drive oil prices down when we want to humiliate Russia or accomplish some other goal. That’s not nothing. Nor will I pretend that a global superpower can do the business of horse-trading only with saints and scholars. But there are real costs to our relationship with the Saudis, and I’m not sure that our policy elites are reckoning with them at all.

A day will come when we need friends with whom we share a real civilizational affinity, and our relationship with the Saudis will hurt us on that day. Saudi-funded mosques and preachers flow into the nations of our friends and allies, preaching hatred and occasionally terror. We often talk about how nationalism is a response to the globalization of commerce. But it’s also a response to the globalization of Saudi Arabia’s favorite forms of Islam. Syrian refugees come to Germany and find Saudi-funded mosques that are far more extreme than anything they knew at home. Saudi-funded clerics are a major engine of extremism, and of the nationalist backlash it produces, from France to India.

Saudi actions in this regard are so embarrassing and brazen that Western nations won’t even let themselves be heard discussing them intelligibly. Last Week, U.K. home secretary Amber Rudd refused to publish her own government’s delayed report on the funding of extremist groups. Even in the press releases, the government was too ashamed to admit the fact that everyone knew to be in them: Saudi Arabia funnels money to the extremist groups that threaten Europe with terrorism.

There is a major strategic cost to our alliance with the Saudis, whether anyone cares to admit it or not. The U.S.–Saudi preference for regime change and demotic movements (no matter how loathsome) has been a gift to extremists everywhere. It’s destabilized several Middle Eastern countries and contributed to a refugee crisis that is reordering the politics and society of Europe, while also visiting terrorism on our historic allies. By contrast, the Russian and Iranian strategy of siding with sovereign states (no matter how loathsome) so long as they represent predictable national interests seems rational.

What is needed now is a push for regime change, a watering of the seeds of popular resistance that are again budding — after Obama abandoned the Iranian people in 2009, when they took to the streets to protest the stranglehold of the ayatollahs.

American leadership expert John C. Maxwell defines a leader as “one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” During his two terms in the highest office in the world, former U.S. President Barack Obama failed at all three, with disastrous consequences.

There is no realm in which Obama’s lack of leadership was more glaring than that of foreign policy, particularly in relation to the Middle East. His combination of action and inaction — pushing through the nuclear deal with Iran at all costs, while simultaneously adopting a stance of “patience” with and indifference to Tehran’s sponsorship of global terrorism and foothold in Syria — served no purpose other than to destabilize the region and weaken America’s position.

While hotly pursuing the nuclear accord — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed between Iran and U.S.-led world powers in July 2015 — Obama enabled the regime in Tehran to assist Syrian President Bashar Assad in starving and slaughtering his people (with chemical weapons, among others) into submission. Meanwhile, thanks to Obama’s passivity, and the $1.7 billion his administration transferred to Tehran upon the inking of the JCPOA, the Islamic Republic was able to dispatch its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to recruit and train Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and Syria, as well as militias in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan.

Today, two years after the signing of the JCPOA, and six months into the presidency of Donald Trump, there is a growing rift between America and Europe over implementation of the deal, which officially went into effect in January 2016. Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has been wavering on whether to remain committed to the deal, which his administration and members of Congress claim has been violated repeatedly by Iran. The U.S. also has maintained certain sanctions, over Iran’s ballistic-missile tests, human-rights abuses and sponsorship of global terrorism.

European countries, however, have taken a very different approach, pointing to International Atomic Energy Organization reports confirming Iran’s compliance, and rushing to do business in and with Tehran.

At a ceremony on July 14, 2017 to mark the anniversary of the deal, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called the JCPOA a “success for multilateral diplomacy that has proven to work and deliver,” adding, “This deal belongs to the international community, having been endorsed by the United Nations Security Council, that expects all sides to keep the commitments they took two years ago”

Meanwhile, when reports emerged about Trump being “likely” to confirm on July 17 that Iran has been complying with the deal — and because the law requires that both the president and secretary of state re-certify the deal every three months — four Republican senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, with a copy to Trump, urging him not to do so.

Two years on, the Iranian nuclear deal is a failure.

Some will surely protest that this cannot be; on Monday, the Trump administration just indicated that it plans to certify Iranian compliance to Congress. But that certification does not mean what it may seem to.

It certainly does not indicate that Iran has been in perfect compliance with the deal. Iran has already exceeded its limits on uranium enrichment and production of heavy water on several occasions. Furthermore, a series of recent German intelligence reports discovered Iranian efforts to procure technology that “can be used to develop plutonium for nuclear weapons.” One report concluded there was “no evidence” of the “complete about-face in Iran’s atomic policies” that had been hoped for.

But of course there’s no evidence of that. This was the central flaw of the Iran deal: There was never any reason to suspect that the nature or aims of the Iranian regime had changed. Iran of course has scaled back its nuclear advances, but the Supreme Leader and his cronies still seek to obtain a nuclear weapon to fortify their regime, advance Iranian regional hegemony, and threaten Israel. Until this changes, the Iranians can safely be expected to use any deal to better pursue those aims. This is why it matters when H. R. McMaster, director of the National Security Council, explains that Iran has violated the spirit of the agreement.

So why does Trump plan to certify compliance? One debilitating weakness of the Iran deal is that there are no punishment mechanisms short of re-imposing sanctions, at which point Iran can reasonably argue that the deal is dead and it is free to pursue whatever nuclear advances it wants.

The deal provides a process whereby America can allege misconduct and force the U.N. Security Council to vote on a resolution. This resolution would maintain the deal’s suspension of sanctions, so any veto — including the U.S.’s own — would trigger the reestablishment of the legal basis for sanctions. But there are several hurdles to getting the sanctions to “snap back” as promised.

As Eric Lorber and Peter Feaver wrote in Foreign Policy, “An effective sanctions regime consists of a legal basis, the institutional capacity to implement the sanctions, and the political will to carry it through. This course of action only provides for the first.” Indeed, if the sanctions are rejected by Russia or opposed by European allies eager to continue trading with Iran, both of which are likely in the absence of truly flagrant Iranian violations, the sanctions regime will not be effective. It might not even get off the ground and certainly will fail to pressure Iran the way our previous sanctions regime, which took a decade to ratchet up, did. That’s why formally alleging Iranian misconduct is extremely risky: It would unleash Iran and offer only weak and disunited sanctions.

This means that incremental Iranian cheating will likely continue to go unpunished. The best we can do is remain neutral, neither certifying compliance nor alleging noncompliance. But even with this meek third route, declined by the Trump administration this time, the deal leaves us helpless to stop Iran from slowly — never radically — preparing itself to push for a nuclear weapon once the deal’s restrictions wear off in ten and 15 years.

That’s why the deal will be certified. But why is it a failure? Some might say that pushing back a confrontation with Iran by ten or 15 years is a major accomplishment. We’ve bought ourselves time, claimed the deal’s advocates, over and over again.

Philip Gordon and Richard Nephew, two of the Obama-administration officials who negotiated the Iran deal, now repeat this mantra in The Atlantic. The deal was supposed to “buy time for potential changes in Iranian politics and foreign policy,” they write. But have we actually bought ourselves time?

What if it is Iran that has been buying time, using the sanctions relief to put itself in a stronger position for an eventual confrontation? What if, at the end of the Iran deal, Iran is stronger economically, geopolitically, and domestically, while we find ourselves with less power in the region and bereft of an international sanctions coalition?

Then, you might say, we got swindled.

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration on Tuesday leveled more sanctions against Iran, targeting its elite military unit and ballistic missile program in a move that heightened tensions between the two countries and raised new questions about the fate of the 2015 international nuclear deal.

The sanctions came after the administration told Congress late Monday that Iran was continuing to comply with the 2015 international nuclear agreement, a notification that kept the accord in place for now. But that determination came after an intense debate within the administration over whether to certify Iran’s compliance, according to officials familiar with the discussions.

“This administration will continue to aggressively target Iran’s malign activity, including their ongoing state support of terrorism, ballistic missile program, and human-rights abuses,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in imposing the new sanctions Tuesday.

Referring to the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mr. Mnuchin said, “We will continue to target the IRGC and pressure Iran to cease its ballistic missile program and malign activities in the region.”

The Trump administration is reviewing the nuclear agreement and its policy toward Iran, a move that has European allies worried about the fate of the deal.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the U.S. would meet its commitments as the review progressed and would press Iran to do the same. The U.S. will next have to certify Iran’s compliance with the deal in October, and some officials expect the review will be completed by then.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry condemned the new sanctions, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency. Iran will retaliate by placing its own sanctions on American entities, the ministry said, adding that those targeted would be named soon.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said Tuesday’s sanctions “poison the atmosphere.”

“That’s what they’re designed to do, actually,” he said in an interview with CBS. “They’re not designed to help anybody, because they know that none of them ever travel to the United States or will have an account in the U.S.”

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the 2015 nuclear agreement is formally known, was championed by the Obama administration as a way to obtain Iran’s agreement to significantly cut back its nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions. CONTINUE AT SITE

Last Friday marked the two-year anniversary of the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievement: the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that agreement was intended as a solution to Iran’s persistent nuclear ambitions, and as a vehicle to reboot the Iranian regime’s relationship with the world.

Two years on, it’s clear that the dead has indeed been transformative – for the Iranian regime, at least. For America and its allies, however, it has expanded the gravity of the contemporary threat posed by the Islamic Republic.

That’s because, although the accord between Iran and the so-called P5+1 powers was intended to be tactical in nature (dealing with just one aspect of the Iranian regime’s rogue behavior), the benefits that have been conferred to Iran as a result have been both extensive and strategic in nature. Most directly, as a result of the deal, Iran has gained access to some $100 billion or more in previously escrowed oil revenue – equivalent to roughly a quarter of the country’s total annual GDP. That, coupled with a surge in post-sanctions trade and Iran’s reintegration into various financial institutions, has set the country on the path to sustained economic recovery.

But the agreement has not succeeded in altering the behavior of Iran’s ayatollahs, as the Obama administration had fervently hoped. To the contrary, it has helped to reinvigorate the global ambitions of Iran’s radical regime. After laboring for years under international sanctions and with limited means to make its foreign policy vision a reality, the Islamic Republic is now in the throes of a landmark strategic expansion.

Long moribund as a result of international sanctions, the Iranian regime’s military modernization efforts have kicked into high gear, entailing plans to acquire tens of billions of dollars in new arms from suppliers such as Russia and China, as well as a significant expansion of its national cyber capabilities. Over time, this drive can be expected to significantly strengthen the Iranian regime’s strategic capabilities, as well as the potential threat that it can pose to U.S. and allied forces in the Middle Eastern theater.

Iran’s regional footprint in is also deepening. In Syria, Iran – working together with its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah – has played a key role in organizing pro-regime militias and coordinating the deployment of more than 50,000 pro-regime foreign fighters from Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration said it notified Congress late Monday that Iran is complying with the international nuclear deal reached two years ago, but the fate of the agreement remains uncertain as it is still under review.

The notification came despite a push by some within the administration to refuse to certify Iran’s compliance, people familiar with the deliberations said. That push began around midday and lasted into the evening.

The Trump administration has been reviewing the Iran deal for several months. President Donald Trump has attacked the agreement, reached in 2015, as a “terrible deal” for the U.S.

Despite the certification, the Trump administration will disclose on Tuesday that it is leveling additional sanctions related to Iran’s ballistic missile program and other behavior it considers destabilizing, senior administration officials said.

“Iran is unquestionably in default of the spirit of the of the JCPOA,” a senior administration official said Monday evening, using an acronym to refer to the nuclear deal.

The official said the administration intends to pursue a strategy “that will address the totality of Iran’s malign behavior and not narrowly focus” on Iran’s nuclear program.

A second administration official said the U.S. will be “working with allies to build a case for serious flaws in agreement, while also at the same time looking for ways to more strictly enforce the deal.”

Officials said they intend to make sure Iran is complying with a “stricter interpretation” of the deal than that of the Obama administration.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, speaking in New York on Monday, said the Trump administration was sending contradictory signals and Iran doesn’t know “which to interpret in what way.” CONTINUE AT SITE