Author: Daniel Larison

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

When Obama was president, hawkish foreign policy pundits and analysts promoted the fiction that he “abandoned” allies and “rewarded” adversaries. This was one of Romney’s main campaign themes in 2012. Their answer to this imaginary problem was that the U.S. should seek to have “no daylight” with its “allies” (by which they almost always meant just Israel and Saudi Arabia). Romney once went so far as to say that there should not be “an inch of difference” between the US and Israel, and applied this standard to all US relationships with its “friends and allies”:

You don’t allow an inch of space to exist between you and your friends and allies.

Romney’s dumb position in 2012 had become the more or less default hawkish view in the next presidential campaign. The hawks held that public criticism of these governments was a mistake that harmed US interests, and they argued that the US should be supporting these states far more than Obama had done. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that they thought the appropriate US response to any controversy involving a US“ally” was to offer knee-jerk support.

Continue reading “The Cost of Enabling Reckless Clients”

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Turkish authorities claim to have audio and video recordings that prove Saudi agents tortured and then murdered Jamal Khashoggi:

The recordings show that a Saudi security team detained Khashoggi in the consulate after he walked in on Oct. 2 to obtain an official document before his upcoming wedding, then killed him and dismembered his body, the officials said.

The audio recording in particular provides some of the most persuasive and gruesome evidence that the Saudi team is responsible for Khashoggi’s death, the officials said.

“The voice recording from inside the embassy lays out what happened to Jamal after he entered,” said one person with knowledge of the recording who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss highly sensitive intelligence.

“You can hear his voice and the voices of men speaking Arabic,” this person said. “You can hear how he was interrogated, tortured and then murdered.”

The existence of these recordings would explain how Turkish authorities knew what the Saudi agents had done to Khashoggi and how they had done it. Such recordings would provide definitive proof to support the charges made against the Saudi government. Our government should press Turkish officials to share this proof with the U.S. and their other allies. The fact that Turkey is willing to disclose that it has this evidence suggests that they are prepared to go to great lengths to keep the Saudi government from getting away with this. No one honestly doubts at this point that the Saudi government had the prominent critic murdered in their consulate, but evidence of the crime will lend support to efforts to hold the Saudis accountable.

Continue reading “Report: Turkish Authorities Have Recordings of the Consulate Murder”

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Hal Brands makes an extremely shaky assertion about recent Saudi recklessness and U.S. involvement in the Middle East:

Much of Saudi Arabia’s recent behavior has been linked to the rise of MBS, who seems driven by a combination of ambition, arrogance and recklessness. Yet it is not a coincidence that Saudi misdeeds have accumulated at a time when the US is widely seen to be drawing down in the Middle East.

The US has backed the Saudis and Emiratis in the war on Yemen from the start. The US has not been “drawing down” in the region, unless one wants to arbitrarily use the height of the Iraq war as the standard by which to measure our level of involvement. It is preposterous to suggest that Saudi misdeeds are the result of a US withdrawal from the region when no such withdrawal has happened, and it is even worse to make this claim when the US is actively aiding the Saudis in the commission of those misdeeds. Brands correctly says that “Saudi conduct since 2015 has been destabilizing in the extreme,” but omits that the US has been an accomplice in the worst of that destabilizing conduct.

Continue reading “Saudi Recklessness and the Myth of ‘Withdrawal’”

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Vali Nasr predicts that the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaigns against North Korea and Iran won’t succeed:

What North Korea is looking for is a step-by-step diplomatic process in which the United States offers concessions ranging from a declaration of peace on the Korean Peninsula to the lifting of economic sanctions. Instead, Trump’s national-security team is demanding full denuclearization before offering anything up in return. That looks to be what Washington has in mind for Iran as well.

Faced with this reality, Pyongyang or Tehran could see a benefit in resisting Washington’s pressure strategy.

The main flaw in the Trump administration’s approach to both states is that it pairs maximalist demands that the other side will never accept with “maximum pressure” tactics that depend on broad international support that doesn’t exist. Our government demands things that are politically impossible for any self-respecting government to agree to, and then sets out to punish the other side when it refuses to meet Washington’s absurd expectations.

Continue reading “‘Maximum Pressure’ Is a Dead End”

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave another one of his typical U.N. speeches last week in which he accused Iran of having a “secret atomic warehouse”:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told the United Nations on Thursday that his intelligence agents had discovered a “secret atomic warehouse” in downtown Tehran, escalating a growing confrontation with Iran and setting up a direct challenge to its government to open the facility to inspectors and prove it is not in violation of the 2015 nuclear deal.

Iran denied the accusation, and Netanyahu’s claim was subjected to widespread ridicule in Iran. The location of the facility that he identified was in a remote village whose name, Torquzabad, called to mind the Farsi expression for “nowhere land,” and the building that he identified as the warehouse is a former carpeting cleaning site. Holly Dagres describes the reaction from Iranians:

A group of young Iranian men wasted no time and visited this so-called nowhere land right after Netanyahu’s speech. “Don’t bother coming here – there’s nothing here,” they laugh in a video popularly shared on social media. Since the video, Iranians are now using the Persian carpet cleaning facility site as an opportunity to post selfies. At least two were featured on the frontpage of Iranian newspapers. Even the Chief of Staff for the Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, weighed-in on the speech on Twitter with the Persian hashtag #Torquzabad and a photo of himself and other high ranking officials laughing.

Continue reading “Netanyahu’s ‘Nowhere Land’ Blunder”

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Nicholas Kristof has written an excellent column attacking U.S. support for the war on Yemen:

The United States is not directly bombing civilians in Yemen, but it is providing arms, intelligence and aerial refueling to assist Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as they hammer Yemen with airstrikes, destroy its economy and starve its people. The Saudi aim is to crush Houthi rebels who have seized Yemen’s capital and are allied with Iran.

That’s sophisticated realpolitik for you: Because we dislike Iran’s ayatollahs, we are willing to starve Yemeni schoolchildren.

It can’t be emphasized enough that US policy in Yemen is both deeply immoral and irrational. Our government is a partner in war crimes and crimes against humanity ostensibly because of an exaggerated fear of Iranian influence, but even if the latter weren’t exaggerated there is no way to justify what is being done to the people of Yemen. US interests are not advanced in the slightest by the coalition’s war, but any limited benefit would be outweighed by the horrifying costs imposed on a country whose people have done nothing to us. Destroying and starving Yemen does nothing to harm Iran (a dubious goal in itself), but it is inflicting massive suffering on tens of millions of people and destabilizing the entire area for years and possibly decades to come. Even if the worst-case scenario is avoided and millions don’t die from famine, widespread malnutrition has already devastated the health and development of an entire generation.

Continue reading “Our Immoral and Irrational Yemen Policy”