Author: Daniel Larison

Edward Luce has a very strange recollection of the last 15 years:

The US public turned against overseas militarism when the Iraq war began to go wrong under George W Bush. It has stayed that way ever since. Fifteen years on, it is easy to presume American “non-interventionism” has become the settled view of its people. But US history – and common sense – suggests that the climate can switch rapidly from cold to hot when confronted with new facts. Think of what happened after 9/11. Now imagine hordes of Ukrainians fleeing as Russian tanks churn up their towns this winter.

I wish it were true that there had been a sharp turn against “overseas militarism” back then, but this doesn’t describe public opinion or U.S. policies during the last 15 years. The public definitely did turn against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but within just a few years of withdrawing the bulk of U.S. forces from Iraq there was broad public support for bombing ISIS in Iraq and then in Syria. This supports Luce’s point that public opinion is fickle and changeable on these issues, but it also makes the rest of his column seem rather odd.

Luce imagines that China and Russia are intent on taking advantage of what he calls American “sullenness,” but this seems like an absurdly American-centric way of understanding their views. The Russian government is not convinced that the U.S. has turned non-interventionist. The current crisis is the result of their assumption that the U.S. and NATO are too involved in Ukraine, and the Russian government is now insisting that this change. There is misreading going on here, but it is a Western misreading of the causes of the crisis.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Emma Ashford is appropriately withering in her comments on the Biden administration’s Global Posture Review:

The main problem with the posture review is that it was completely irrelevant. I’m honestly not sure how the Pentagon managed to take a year to come to such insipid conclusions.

Kelley Vlahos and I talked about this for our show last week, and we had the same reaction that Ashford had. It is remarkable how the Biden administration goes through the motions of lengthy reviews only to conclude at the end that the status quo is basically fine. We knew that Biden was going to be a status quo president overall, but it is strange that they are content to keep almost everything they inherited from Trump in place. This was true of their miserable review of sanctions policy, and it is true of this review process as well. When the sanctions policy review came out, I said this:

The absurdly long wait for the completion of this review might have been warranted if it had produced anything of value, but it proved to be nothing more than a waste of time and effort. They could have skipped going through the motions of a policy review and just admitted up front that nothing important would change.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Giorgio Cafiero notes near the end of a new article on Israel and Iran that Iranian nuclear weapons are not a foregone conclusion if the Vienna talks fail and the agreement collapses:

Iran’s nuclear activities seem designed to be mainly about boosting the country’s standing and leveraging the fears that other powers have of the Iranian nuclear program. To continue achieving such goals, the Iranians do not necessarily ever need to acquire nuclear weapons and Iran could remain a nuclear threshold country if the JCPOA is not restored.

This is an important point, and one that needs to be emphasized as the prospects for a successful negotiation are dwindling. The nuclear issue is frequently framed as “letting” Iran get nuclear weapons or waging preventive war to stop that from happening, but there are other alternatives. It is not a given that the Iranian government will choose to build nuclear weapons even if the JCPOA collapses. They have not had anything resembling a nuclear weapons program for the last 18 years, and they have not made the political decision to develop these weapons despite being sanctioned heavily for most of the last 15.

The JCPOA was considered necessary to demonstrate that Iran intends its nuclear program to be peaceful, and to prove that Iran accepted substantial restrictions on their program that were not otherwise required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Many of those restrictions expired over time because Iran was never going to accept them in perpetuity. If Iran remained on the threshold but took no action to cross it, that is something that everyone should be able to live with. Preventive war wouldn’t prevent anything, since it would almost certainly provoke Iran to change its position and seek a deterrent.

If the nuclear deal isn’t going to be salvaged, that does not have to mean war or proliferation, but it will give Iran hawks an opening to start a war that will likely end with more proliferation. Salvaging the nuclear deal was still the best way forward, but there is clearly no political will in Washington or in European capitals to do what is necessary to save it. Having completely failed in upholding their obligations, the U.S. and its European allies will pretend that Iran is to blame for the fruits of their failure.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Fred Kaplan is puzzled by Biden’s failure to rejoin the nuclear deal quickly:

More puzzling than Trump messing things up, though, is why President Joe Biden – who, during the campaign, said he would bring back the deal – didn’t move to do so right after entering office this past January. He could have, accurately, blamed Trump for the mess, offered to lift the sanctions gradually if the Iranians dismantled their nuclear hardware gradually. Instead, for reasons that no one has clearly explained [bold mine-DL], the two sides got into a dispute over who should take the first step first.

I have no inside information about this, but it has seemed pretty clear that the reason that the Biden administration refused to go first and make concessions was that they were deathly afraid being attacked by Iran hawks for being “weak.” It was also because many Democratic foreign policy professionals had bought into the genuinely stupid idea that Biden should use Trump’s illegitimate sanctions as “leverage.” This is how we ended up with Biden administration officials talking about the fantasy of a “longer and stronger” follow-on agreement instead of focusing intently on reviving the existing one. They were so preoccupied with keeping Menendez and regional clients quiet that they missed the opportunity to undo Trump’s mess early on. Dragging their feet on sanctions relief also seems to be typical of the Biden administration’s foreign policy as a whole. Fearful of being accused of “rewarding” Iran, they presided over almost a year of drift and inaction while they kept saying that “the ball is in Iran’s court.” In other words, it was a combination of political cowardice and lack of flexibility.

For their part, the Iranian government insisted on the U.S. going first because the US was the party to the agreement that first violated. As far as they were concerned, the one that broke the deal should take the initiative to repair it. That was a fairly reasonable position for them to take, since they had been in compliance with the deal before the US launched its latest economic war on them and they had shown remarkable patience in waiting for a change in administrations so that the agreement could be salvaged. Once Raisi took over as president, that created additional delays and problems, because the new Iranian government was determined to be less flexible than its predecessor, so they ended up mirroring US inflexibility with their own. During this period, Israel continued its sabotage campaign, and Iran responded to this with further expansions of the nuclear program, and the Biden administration then used these responses to sabotage as pretexts for refusing to provide sanctions relief.

In the end, the problem boils down to one of pride and the pathetic fear of appearing “weak” in the eyes of domestic opponents. No one wanted to take a first step because that would supposedly reflect an eagerness to make concessions, and so instead we get a nine-month staring contest where everyone loses. There are few things weaker than refusing to salvage a good agreement because of a fear of seeming weak. Sometimes worthwhile diplomatic achievements require taking a little political risk, and the political leaders that can’t or won’t take those risks end up looking both weak and foolish.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

The top official in the Biden administration working on the Middle East gets something important very wrong. Brett McGurk said this last week:

And when it came to military force for behavior change, that is a pretty fuzzy objective for a military force. When it comes to military force to prevent a country from obtaining a nuclear weapon, that is a very achievable objective.

It’s not clear why McGurk has such confidence in the efficacy of military force to “prevent a country from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” In the two previous cases when the Israeli government used force to attack nuclear facilities, it caused one of the targeted states to intensify its work on acquiring nuclear weapons. The Osirak bombing ended up backfiring badly. It was post-Gulf War inspections that led to the dismantling of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program that the Israeli strike had encouraged.

The 2007 strike on a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor apparently did not have the same effect, but no one seriously thinks that the Iranian nuclear program today is comparable to the Syrian one. Destroying Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would not be a simple undertaking of a few airstrikes. It would involve a major air campaign lasting weeks at least. The human toll from such a bombing campaign has been estimated to run into the tens of thousands, and that number could rise if the conflict escalated. Even if it “worked” in the short term, an attack could set off a major conflict whose costs would exceed any possible benefit. Golnaz Esfandiari reported on this almost a decade ago:

“People talk very callously about the prospect of military strikes, and they frame it in the geopolitical fallout, the geo-economic fallout, what will happen to the oil price and all of these issues. But nobody has ever talked about the humanitarian consequences of a military strike on Iran,” Molavi says. “Those humanitarian consequences are grave, so I think this report fills a very important vacuum. It needs to be read by policy makers at the highest levels in Western governments; it needs to be read in Israel; it needs to be read all over the world.”

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Walter Russell Mead tries his hand at being a conspiracy theorist:

Our adversaries – and some of our allies as well as several American policy makers and commentators – believe that a polarized America is locked into decline and retreat. This is not, the revisionist powers feel, a good reason to offer Mr. Biden help in rebalancing his commitments. On the contrary, it is the time to double down on their assaults on the American world order. The logic is so obvious that they don’t need to coordinate their response. If America stands tall in the South China Sea, the revisionists will chip away in the Black Sea. If we toughen our stance in the Baltics, they will push harder in the Balkans. If we try to escape the Middle East, they will drag us back in.

Mead is suffering from the ideologue’s affliction of trying to force world events to fit his preconceived notions. Many things are happening at the same time, and so he decides to link them all together and to assert that the governments in different parts of the world must be working in concert with a common goal in mind. Nothing has happened in the last year that requires us to subscribe to this paranoid view of the world. Mead is attributing made-up motives to the leaders of these governments because it is convenient for his argument and easier than doing the work of trying to understand why these things are happening.

If tensions are rising between Russia and Ukraine, it is not because Putin is “doing what [he] can to keep the president from focusing on Asia.” It is happening because of Russian frustrations with ongoing U.S. and NATO involvement in Ukraine. Iran is taking a harder negotiating position over the nuclear deal because they have a new administration headed by a notorious hard-liner. It is not because Iran desires to “drag” the US back into the Middle East. Obviously, the Iranian government has had a decades-long goal of getting the US to reduce or end its presence in the region, so keeping the US focused on their part of the world is the last thing that they would want. Each government is acting according to its own perceived interests and is pursuing longstanding policy goals that have nothing to do with a US “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.