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Best wishes,
Ishaan
Trump's incoherence on
North Korea and Iran
At the end of his visit
to the United States last week, French President Emmanuel Macron offered a
bit of candor. Despite his entreaties, Macron suspected that
President Trump would choose to eventually pull out of the nuclear deal
with Iran. The move, said the French president, would have little to do
with Middle East geopolitics.
“My view ... is that he will get
rid of this deal on his own for domestic reasons,” Macron told reporters, while cautioning
that jettisoning the agreement would be “insane in the medium to
long-term.”
Macron's conclusion — that Trump is
mostly driven to fulfill his campaign promises (and systematically unravel
the legacy of his predecessor) — is hardly a novel insight. But it's still
apt, especially as Trump champions the cause of diplomacy with North Korea
while decrying diplomatic efforts toward Iran.
Trump hails his administration's
campaign of “maximum pressure” on North Korea, which he claims formed the
backdrop to Friday's historic meeting between North Korean despot Kim Jong
Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. The summit, which took place on
the South Korean side of the DMZ, has led to positive noises about the “denuclearization”
of the peninsula and optimism about Trump's own planned meeting with
Kim.
But if Trump's stated
agenda with North Korea comes to fruition, it may not look that different
from the nuclear pact he seems intent on scrapping. The
deal forged between Iran and a group of world powers in 2015 followed not
just months of concerted negotiations, but years of wider diplomacy to squeeze Tehran and bring it to the
table.
They also suggest that Trump's
potential reneging of the Iran deal will shadow negotiations with Kim. “It
is difficult to imagine America’s allies once again investing Washington
with the authority they handed it over Iran,” wrote Max Fisher of the New York Times.
“Trump is asking Washington’s Asian allies to follow his lead on North
Korea just as he is defying European allies who are pushing
him to stay in the Iran deal.”
The Trump administration rejects
that idea. “I don't think Kim Jong Un is staring at the Iran deal and
saying, ‘Oh goodness, if they get out of that deal, I won't talk to the
Americans anymore,’" Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters during his debut trip through
the Middle East. “There are higher priorities, things that he is more
concerned about than whether or not the Americans stay in the [agreement].”
Still, it's curious
that while the United States is now preparing to extend an olive branch to
the North Koreans, it has placed itself on a collision course with Tehran.
Iran may be a human-rights abuser at home and a destabilizing presence in
the Middle East, but it is more open and tethered to the international
system than the totalitarian, pariah regime in Pyongyang. And unlike North
Korea, it has submitted to thorough international inspections and doesn't
actually possess nuclear weapons.
Trump himself has shown little
ideological consistency here: Long before he was president, he told CNN in 2011 that talks with the
Iranian leadership would be preferable to “killing millions of people.”
Holly Dagres, writing for the Atlantic Council, argued
that a diplomatic push by the Trump administration to engage Iranian
President Hassan Rouhani would disturb the regime's more hard-line
elements, including the influential Revolutionary Guards who
largely oversee Iran's foreign proxy wars.
“Had Trump taken this nuanced
approach, the hardliners in Tehran would’ve been shaken to their core. The
potential of good ties with the West, particularly Washington, would hurt
their standing in Iranian domestic politics. After all, part of the raison
d'etre of the Islamic Republic is opposition to US 'imperialism,'" Dagres wrote. “Instead, hardliners are
counting down to the May 12 deadline for Trump to renew sanctions waivers, hoping the president follows through on
his threats to withdraw from the [Iran deal]. This would validate their
argument that Iran can never trust the U.S. to keep its commitments.”
On Sunday, Bolton said the administration was pursuing “the
Libya model” with Pyongyang, referring to a process started in 2003
that pressured then-Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi to give up his nuclear,
chemical and long-range missile program. It was a curious analogy, given
that the North Koreans point to Gaddafi's death at the hands of a
NATO-backed rebellion as justification for maintaining their own nuclear
arsenal.
“It was fully exposed before the
world that ‘Libya’s nuclear dismantlement,’ much touted by the U.S. in the
past,” North Korea’s state media said in 2011,
“turned out to be a mode of aggression whereby the latter coaxed the former
with such sweet words as ‘guarantee of security’ and ‘improvement of
relations’ to disarm itself and then swallowed it up by force.”
Some analysts suggest Bolton and
his cohort are explicitly setting the table for talks to collapse. “Bolton
is willing to entertain some period of negotiations for the sole purpose
that, when they fail, he can discredit diplomacy and push for more
aggressive solutions,” wrote arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis.
That may allow Trump another
potshot at Barack Obama, the president who was ever wary of “aggressive
solutions.” But critics are right to be worrying about its profound risks.
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