Author: Daniel Larison

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

NBC News reports on the bankrupt “Plan B” options being considered by the Biden administration if nuclear talks in Vienna aren’t successful:

As Iran and world powers prepare to resume negotiations next week on reviving a nuclear deal, the U.S. and its allies are already debating a list of “Plan B” options if the negotiations collapse, Western diplomats, former US officials and experts say.

With chances for a breakthrough at the talks in Vienna looking remote and Iran at odds with U.N. nuclear inspectors, US and European officials face a grim set of choices – from ramped-up sanctions to potential military action – as Iran’s nuclear program advances into dangerous territory.

These options are grim because they are also futile and destructive. We need to understand that piling on more sanctions or attacking Iran’s facilities will accomplish nothing except to kill more Iranians and convince their government that it needs a deterrent. The “Plan B” options being discussed are not serious options, because they stand no chance of preventing proliferation in Iran. Even if military action weren’t illegal aggression, it would still be folly. At best, these options would accelerate current trends in the expansion of Iran’s nuclear program, and at worst they would lead to regional war and proliferation. The only things that have won concessions from Iran are sanctions relief and compromise. Trying to increase pressure beyond “maximum pressure” means going in the wrong direction from where we need to go. This is a phenomenally stupid backup “plan,” and anyone advocating for any of these “grim choices” should be ignored.

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.

Richard Haass dismisses negotiations in Vienna to salvage the nuclear deal, and then makes this assertion:

And even if they do [succeed], any agreement will not resolve Iran’s push for regional primacy – or for nuclear weapons.

If Iran were seeking “regional primacy,” it lacks the power projection and resources to achieve it. Then again, there is scant evidence that Iran is interested in “regional primacy.” Their security strategy is not that ambitious. Iranian “regional primacy” or hegemony is a scenario that Iran hawks throw around to frighten people into supporting their bankrupt policies. Haass is simply engaging in threat inflation as a way to belittle current diplomatic efforts to resolve the nuclear issue.

There is also no evidence that Iran is “pushing” for nuclear weapons. Iran may want to have that option available in the future, but everything we have seen for the last 18 years points to a government that wants a developed nuclear program that stops short of building nuclear weapons. That may not be the optimal outcome, but it is the best one that is realistically available to us. If the administration wants to resolve the nuclear issue so that Iran doesn’t feel compelled to build a deterrent of its own, it would do well to ignore what Haass is proposing in this article. There is an achievable compromise to be had, but Haass and the Iran hawks aren’t interested in taking it.

Some of Haass’ article is little more than the typical whining that the JCPOA does not restrict things that it was never intended to restrict and never could have restricted. He trots out the old chestnuts of “regional activities” and ballistic missiles, which the Iranian government isn’t going to discuss in any case, and then faults a revival of the JCPOA for not addressing things that are far beyond the capacity of any nonproliferation agreement. These are silly and irrelevant objections to continued diplomacy with Iran, but Iran hawks hope that if they throw enough mud against the wall that something will stick.

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.

Sarah Chayes has written what may be one of the most dastardly op-eds I have ever read. She warns against providing aid to Afghanistan too quickly because that would reduce Western “leverage” over the Taliban:

Western countries should not move too fast. Just because we’ve failed to use our leverage in the past doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start now.

One way of thinking about the fraught matter of placing conditions on humanitarian assistance is to consider any offer to provide it as the equivalent of a treaty with a hostile foreign power. The nuclear deals with the USSR and Iran included not only conditions, but intrusive verification procedures. That’s the model that should be applied here.

Putting conditions on humanitarian assistance is always the wrong thing to do. In the case of Afghanistan, holding back resources that millions of Afghans need to survive the winter is monstrous and indefensible. It is not the fault of tens of millions of innocent Afghans that the Taliban won, and they should not be punished for the fact that the U.S. and its client did not prevail. Afghanistan faces a man-made famine if Afghanistan’s reserves are not unfrozen and aid does not resume, and this op-ed is the sort of twisted argument that lays the groundwork for causing such a famine.

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.