Author: Daniel Larison

Russia and China have renewed their treaty of friendship, and their respective leaders claimed that the relationship was stronger than ever:

Beijing and Moscow have moved to consolidate ties by renewing a 20-year-old friendship treaty, weeks after the Russian and US leaders met in what was seen as part of efforts by Washington to drive a wedge between them.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin met by video link on Monday for a second time in a month, agreeing to extend the Treaty of Good Neighbourliness and Friendly Cooperation.

Putin said that Sino-Russian relations had reached an “unprecedented height.” Some of this may be exaggeration for effect, but it does reflect the extent to which Russia and China have drawn closer together since the turn of the century. It is worth noting that US relations with both states have deteriorated significantly during the same period, and US policies have contributed to bringing the two authoritarian powers together. When they signed their friendship treaty twenty years ago, Russia was still open to working with the US and western Europe, and China had not yet become Washington’s bête noire. While the US wasted the last twenty years setting the Middle East on fire, it also managed to antagonize the two major powers of Eurasia at the same time. You could hardly ask for greater strategic incompetence.

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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.

Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his home by gunmen earlier today. The last time that a Haitian president was assassinated, the U.S. intervened militarily and then occupied the country for the next 19 years. There is absolutely no good reason why the US should do anything like this again today, and I assumed that would be obvious to almost everyone, but we already have The Washington Post clamoring for intervention this evening:

Swift and muscular intervention is needed.

The Post prefers a U.N.-led intervention, but it goes without saying that a “swift and muscular intervention” in a country so close to the United States would almost certainly involve US forces if it were to happen at all. The editorial calls for a U.N. peacekeeping force, but knowing the abysmal record of UN peacekeepers in Haiti, including widespread sexual abuse of young girls, that seems like an invitation for more abuses at the expense of the civilian population. This is what the editorial describes as being “a far cry from perfect,” which may be the understatement of the year.

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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.

From The American Conservative:

Bruce Riedel calls for the U.S. to pressure the Saudi coalition to end their blockade of Yemen:

For the war to end, the Biden administration will need to lay out a political process that entices the Houthis to a ceasefire. A good place to start is the Saudi blockade, which is the cause of the humanitarian catastrophe. Washington should call for the immediate and unconditional end to the blockade and allow civilian traffic to Yemen’s ports and airports. The United Nations says that 16 million Yemenis are malnourished, and the situation is getting worse at an alarming rate.

The blockade is an offensive military operation that kills civilians. Opening the blockade would be an act of goodwill and expose the war to more outside observers. Linking lifting the blockade to a ceasefire is a recipe for prolonging the suffering of the Yemeni people. The two issues need to be decoupled.

The need to lift the blockade is greater than ever. The recent international donor conference raised less than half of the money that aid agencies desperately need to continue assisting the millions of Yemenis suffering from malnutrition and disease. The conference’s goal was $3.8 billion, and the conference donors offered up only $1.7 billion. Yemen has suffered from international neglect and inadequate humanitarian relief for the last six years, and things have only become worse over time. Six years of economic warfare, blockade, and international indifference have taken a staggering toll on the civilian population. Tens of thousands of Yemenis already live in famine-like conditions, and many more will fall into the same state in the near future if there is not a major, sustained relief effort. An estimated five million people are on the edge of starvation.

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From The American Conservative:

Laura Rozen reports on the Iranian announcement that their government will cease its voluntary implementation with the IAEA’s Additional Protocol next week as part of the legislation adopted following the murder of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh:

In a sign that some Iran experts said reflected the Iranian perception that it is taking the Biden administration too long to make a move towards returning to the Iran nuclear deal, Iran’s envoy said Monday he’d informed the UN atomic watchdog agency that Iran would cease voluntary implementation of the Additional Protocol on February 23.

“Act of Parliament will be executed on time (23 Feb) and the IAEA has been informed today to ensure the smooth transition to a new course in due time,” Iran’s Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Kazem Gharibabadi tweeted on Monday (Feb. 15). “After all, goodwill brings about goodwill!”

For the last five years, Iran had been following this more rigorous protocol that permitted the IAEA to inspect its facilities on short notice. If the other parties to the agreement had kept up their end of the bargain, Iran was due to ratify the Additional Protocol and make this arrangement permanent in two years’ time. Next week’s deadline has been known for months, but the Biden administration seems oddly unconcerned that it is about to pass. It should be possible to give Iran incentives to delay or cancel this action, but that requires signaling to Iran that the U.S. is serious about rejoining the agreement and fulfilling its commitments. To date, the administration’s public messaging has been poor and inadequate. The insistence that the US will reenter the JCPOA only after Iran resumes full compliance has been met with disbelief in Tehran. It makes no sense for the government that violated all of its commitments to make demands of one of the governments that is still a party to the agreement, and by refusing to rejoin the agreement first Biden is jeopardizing the agreement’s survival for no good reason.

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From The American Conservative:

Peter Beinart makes a good case that broad sanctions regimes are immoral and destructive:

Why are policies that have proved so ineffective and immoral so hard to undo? Because abandoning them would require admitting hard truths: North Korea will not abandon its nuclear weapons. Iran will remain a regional power. Mr. Assad, Mr. Maduro and the Communist government in Havana aren’t going anywhere. America’s leaders would rather punish already brutalized populations than concede the limits of American power.

Like other forms of open-ended, desultory warfare, broad sanctions that affect entire countries need to be brought to an end. Just as we repudiate military attacks on civilian targets, we need to renounce economic warfare whose main and sometimes only victims are innocent civilians. The U.S. has enormous power to damage the economies of other countries, but exercising this power by strangling tens of millions of people with sanctions is inherently abusive and wrong. Pointing to the economic wreckage that sanctions create, as sanctions advocates often do, is akin to boasting about committing indiscriminate bombing of cities. As Beinart says, sanctions typically don’t achieve the goals that their supporters seek, but the more important point is that we cannot justify the means of impoverishing and starving people by pointing to the ends that these cruel policies might serve.

The US does need to recognize the limits of its power, but more than that it needs to recognize that there are some things that it has no right to demand even if it might be able to coerce another government into doing it. The fundamental error of the “maximum pressure” campaigns that have been waged against Iran and Venezuela, among others, is that it is taken for granted that the US has the right to dictate their internal and external policies. Our government does not have that right, and it never did. When a government is presented with such extreme ultimatums that threaten its independence or even its survival, it is always going to dig in and refuse to give any ground. Sanctions cannot possibly achieve such maximalist ends, and by pursuing such ends the US makes a mockery of its past commitments to respecting the independence and sovereignty of other countries.

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From The American Conservative:

Yesterday the president delivered his first foreign policy address since taking office, and he chose to give it at the State Department. The location underscored Biden’s message that “diplomacy is back,” and the visit there afforded him to the opportunity to praise the work of Foreign Service Officers in an earlier set of remarks. The speech included the important announcement that the U.S. would halt its support for Saudi coalition “offensive operations” in Yemen, and it mentioned New START, the arms reduction treaty that had been due to expire today, and he noted that the US and Russia had finalized the five-year extension of the treaty earlier this week.

On Yemen, Biden stated that the US would cut off support to offensive operations, and he said that this included “relevant arms sales.” As I said yesterday, this is a good start and an important first step. The president mentioned the new Yemen envoy, Tim Lenderking, and said that the envoy will “work with the U.N. envoy and all parties of the conflict to push for a diplomatic resolution.” Biden emphasized the importance of diplomacy and humanitarian relief, and he said simply, “This war has to end.”

One of the main themes of the speech was the president’s emphasis on the importance of allies. He listed a number of allies, almost all of which were formal treaty allies, and he did not refer positively to any of the clients in the Middle East that are often mistaken for allies. The list was presumably not intended to be exhaustive, but it suggests that Biden puts more stock in genuine treaty allies than he does in other states.

Notably absent from the speech were any references to the nuclear deal or Iran policy as such, and there was likewise no discussion of ongoing US wars except for our involvement in the war on Yemen. It may be that these issues were not addressed because the administration is still getting up to speed and filling out the relevant teams of officials, but it could also be that these omissions reflect a lack of urgency on the administration’s part. North Korea and Venezuela also went unmentioned.

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