The White House's wishful thinking on Iran and North
Korea
The
Trump administration is feeling its oats.
President Trump and his lieutenants spent weeks applauding their strategy of “maximum pressure” on North
Korea, which they believe forced Kim Jong Un to agree to a historic
round of denuclearization talks on June 12. They also pointed to the absence of such pressure on Iran as
the reason Tehran is supposedly wielding its malign influence across the
Middle East, requiring the United States to scrap the nuclear deal.
On Monday, in a speech billed as his first major policy address, Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo hailed “the coming pressure campaign on the Iranian
regime.” Echoing his boss, Pompeo painted an image
of Iranian militias and agendas running rampant across the Middle East.
And, like Trump, he denigrated the previous administration's diplomatic
overtures to the Islamic Republic as a losing “bet.”
“We will track down
Iranian operatives and their Hezbollah proxies operating around the world
and crush them. Iran will never again have carte blanche to dominate the
Middle East,” Pompeo said before outlining a list of blunt demands of the
Iranian regime that included halting development of ballistic missiles and
ending support for militant proxies.
While many American allies in
Europe would also like to see the defanging of the Iranian regime, few
would consider Pompeo's demands as part of a coherent strategy or a viable Plan B to
compensate for the collapse of the nuclear deal.
“The list of requirements of the
Iranians asks for everything but conversion to Christianity and reads more
like a demand for unconditional surrender than an actual attempt at
negotiation,” Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council
on Foreign Relations, said to my colleagues.
Iran's foreign minister, Javad
Zarif, sneered at Pompeo's speech, calling it a “regression to old habits”
by a bullying superpower.
Federica Mogherini, the European
Union's foreign-policy chief, issued a more polite but no less stern
rebuke. “The JCPOA was never designed to address all issues in the
relationship with Iran,” Mogherini said in a statement, using the
official abbreviation for the nuclear agreement. “Secretary Pompeo’s speech
has not demonstrated how walking away from the JCPOA has made or will make
the region safer from the threat of nuclear proliferation or how it puts us
in a better position to influence Iran’s conduct in areas outside the scope
of JCPOA. There is no alternative to the JCPOA.”
“This is the Trump administration
making an offer Iran can only refuse, and was made in order for Iran to
refuse,” tweeted Rob Malley, the president of the
International Crisis Group. “Risks of regional escalation, already high,
just got higher.”
Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor
of international affairs, suggested Pompeo's demands echoed “the
Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in 1914,” which prefigured World War I.
Undeterred,
Pompeo used the tough words of a hawk who bitterly opposed the nuclear deal
and has a history of advocating regime change in Tehran.
“The Iranian regime should know that this is just the beginning,” he warned
on Monday. “After our sanctions come into full force, it will be battling
to keep its economy alive.”
But it's not clear how
the new program of U.S. sanctions will be any more stifling than the ones
slapped on Iran by the Obama administration to bring Tehran to the table.
And few experts believe that the Trump administration can cobble together the same kind of multilateral front that
coaxed Iran into curbing its uranium enrichment activities and submitting
to international inspections.
“After Trump’s decision
earlier this month to trash effective and verifiable agreement that had
near universal international support, other states have little motivation
to support a new U.S. sanctions regime,” noted Kelsey Davenport, the director of
nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association. “The United States
is not going to get that level of support this time around — not even for
its own sanctions.”
Of course, some of
Trump's key aides simply aren't that invested in the diplomatic path the
White House is supposedly laying out.
Bolton
is also casting a shadow on the White House's North Korea gambit. Though
Trump is keen on the potential publicity and TV buzz generated by the
planned June 12 meeting with Kim, White House aides have started to fear what many analysts had
assumed: North Korea is not actually serious about striking a deal in
Singapore. Few Korea watchers or arms-control experts believed Pyongyang
would actually surrender its nukes, and some worried that hawkish figures
at the White House were deliberately setting up the talks to fail.
Bolton, in particular, has been singled out for his saber-rattling against
North Korea — not just in Pyongyang, but also in Seoul. “In South
Korea, many people, regardless of their political orientation, are not fond
of John Bolton,” a senior official close to the South Korean president told my colleague Anna Fifield. “He seems
to think the U.S. can fight another war on the Korean Peninsula, so from
our perspective, as the people living on the Korean Peninsula, he is very
dangerous.”
It’s unclear what the maximalist
stance struck by Bolton and Pompeo will achieve other than pushing the
countries closer to military conflict. In the meantime, Trump may end up
looking weak by meeting Kim.
“The White House might be talking
about maximum pressure,” wrote arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis,
“but what’s really happening is that it is moving to accommodate Kim,
offering him the recognition he always believed nuclear weapons would
bring.”
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