The US must urgently address China’s nuclear threat

December 07, 2022

By Ambassador John Bolton

This article first appeared in the Washington Examiner on December 7th, 2022. Click Here to read the original version.

The “peaceful rise” of China as a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs has long been Beijing’s mantra to conceal its extraordinary expansion of military capabilities. Its rapidly growing nuclear weapons arsenal, which makes it the third-largest nuclear power after Russia and America, urgently requires adapting U.S. nuclear and overall military strategy to respond to this increasing threat. This process has begun, but it remains dangerously inadequate and far too slow. The newly elected Congress provides a critical opportunity to raise the alarm about China, especially its nuclear capabilities.

Lulled for years by Deng Xiaoping’s stratagem “hide your strength, bide your time,” policymakers believed China sought only “minimal nuclear deterrence,” enough to deter nuclear attacks but not more. That is no longer true, if it ever was, as China replaces “hide and bide” with “wolf warrior” diplomacy. Testifying at his September confirmation hearing to lead the U.S. Strategic Command, Gen. Anthony Cotton said, “We have seen the incredible expansiveness of what they’re doing with their nuclear force, which does not, in my opinion, reflect minimal deterrence. They have a bona fide triad now.” By developing land, air, and sea delivery systems, China is acquiring a first-strike capability and the resilience to withstand a first strike and still respond with devastating nuclear force. This is not a “peaceful rise.”

The Biden administration’s nuclear posture review, in a declassified edition released later, agrees that America “will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.” Incredibly, however, the review asserts this threat will arise “by the 2030s,” which is manifestly incorrect. We are there now.

Undoubtedly the hardest strategic problem is dealing simultaneously with two near-peer nuclear powers, both in terms of deterrence and, if need be, actually launching nuclear weapons on two fronts. Cold War deterrence theory essentially assumed a bipolar U.S.-USSR scenario. Incredible intellectual and operational work went into thinking through deterrence in such circumstances and the consequent weapons and delivery system requirements both to maintain deterrence and to retaliate if it failed.

A tripolar nuclear world is far more dangerous and complicated. How do we deter two nuclear threats simultaneously? Will Russia and China act as allies or behave opportunistically? Will we have enough warheads and delivery systems to handle two separate nuclear crises? We are nowhere near able to answer these questions confidently, and Cold War history should teach that we are already well behind in responding, both conceptually and operationally.

Indeed, we can only say with certainty that substantial additional nuclear warheads and delivery systems are necessary — and sooner rather than later. America must also urgently progress beyond the limited national missile defense program then-President George W. Bush launched over 20 years ago. The reality is that comprehensive homeland defense measures capabilities are inescapable when facing the combined Chinese and Russian threats. Any other conclusion is irresponsible.

One trap to avoid is believing that arms control agreements with China will solve or at least mitigate its rising threat to Washington and our allies. We should quickly jettison the alluring view, already in the air, that arms control will restrain China any more than it restrained Russia or rogue states like Iran and North Korea.

During the Trump administration , we saw the implications of China’s growing nuclear capabilities in part because the New START agreement with Moscow would expire (unless jointly extended by the parties) in February 2021, which was rapidly approaching. Clearly, New START has failed badly, and its extension would inordinately benefit Moscow over Washington. Russia had repeatedly violated the treaty, it did not cover tactical nuclear weapons, with which Russia had a huge advantage, and it did not address more recent technological advances like hypersonic cruise missiles.

Most critically, however, there is no logic to bipolar nuclear arms control treaties in a tripolar nuclear world. Why should America continue to bind itself in a treaty with Russia if China is left completely free to increase its nuclear arsenal without limit? Moscow agreed to bring China into any future negotiations, but Beijing oh-so-politely demurred, explaining modestly that its nuclear forces were not nearly so extensive as to warrant including them in a successor to New START. That’s where things remain today, notwithstanding the Biden administration’s grave miscalculation in extending bilateral New START without any changes until 2026.

Continuing to invite Chinese participation in future nuclear weapons negotiations serves one important purpose. If Beijing still declines to participate, it will demonstrate its clear hypocrisy. And if China joins the negotiations, it will almost certainly gridlock them, thus forcing U.S. policymakers to realize that protecting the United States is a matter of strategy and hardware, not ephemeral arms control agreements. The next two years are a period of vulnerability for America but provide ample time for Congress and possible 2024 presidential candidates to lay out their arguments. Let the debate begin.

John Bolton was the national security adviser to President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

The US needs a sanctions policy revolution

December 01, 2022

By Ambassador John Bolton

This article was first published in The Hill, on December 1st, 2022. Click here to read the original article

For over three decades, economic sanctions against America’s adversaries have been a critical element of our foreign policy. Unfortunately, increasing evidence shows that, far too often, sanctions are poorly conceived and enforced. 

We have failed to appreciate that our sanctions’ targets are devious and creative, crafting successful evasion and mitigation strategies. We have been satisfied with sanctions as virtue signaling rather than real economic warfare. Unsurprisingly, therefore, sanctions are often only marginally effective or, even worse, self-delusional.

Most recently, Iranian drones used by Russia against Ukraine have been found to contain enormous quantities of U.S. and other Western components, including sophisticated elements of targeting and propulsion systems.

The sanctions and export controls involved here do not involve Iran’s nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs. But the robust pattern of Tehran’s drone-related counter-sanctions activity suggests its success in thwarting one sanctions regime are readily applicable to thwarting others.

Other ongoing examples of sanctions failure include Iran selling more oil internationally, especially to China, because of lax U.S. enforcement; not effectively empowering Venezuelans to overthrow the authoritarian Maduro regime because of inconsistencies in American policy; not bringing Russia to its knees in retaliation for its aggression against Ukraine; and not stopping North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

These and other cases exemplify the need for a cultural revolution in American sanctions policy as we face adversaries such as China that are major economic powers and greater threats. Failing to act now can cripple us later.

In 1919, Woodrow Wilson, eager for alternatives to military action and America’s most outspoken sanctions advocate, called them “a hand upon the throat of the offending nation,” and a “peaceful, silent, deadly remedy” that will “not cost a life outside the nation boycotted,” but which apply pressure that “in my judgment, no modern nation can resist.” Wilson was proposing economic warfare, not virtue signaling.

Today, however, Washington’s decisionmakers often sabotage their own efforts. One common mistake is to implement “smart” or “targeted” sanctions rather than broad and sweeping measures. Unhappily, the more precise the sanctions, the easier they are to evade.

During George W. Bush’s administration, for example, specified Chinese companies sanctioned for selling Pakistan missile components took evasive measures such as changing their names or creating cut-outs, thereby easily evading enforcement. That problem remains pervasive.

Far better to apply the broadest possible sanctions, such as Security Council Resolution 661 after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, declaring that United Nations members “shall prevent the import into their territories of all commodities and products originating in Iraq” (or Kuwait after the date of the invasion). No ambiguity or room for creative interpretation there.   

Another failure, unfortunately typical of both American and European sanctions, is providing long delays before sanctions take effect. After President Trump exited the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and announced resumption of U.S. sanctions, the renewed restrictions largely did not take effect for six months. In response to Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February, Europeans declared sweeping prohibitions on importing Russian oil and natural gas, yet those much-ballyhooed sanctions are only now coming into effect. 

Analogously, the Biden price-cap scheme for Russian oil exports is conflicted, trying both to restrain exports but also permit them under certain levels to avoid increasing global oil prices. You can’t have it both ways.

The argument for delays and other caveats is that businesses affected by sanctions need time to adjust. Instead, grace periods are far bigger gifts to the sanctions’ targets, furiously using the time available before the effective date to transact as much business as possible, while also preparing longer-term evasive and concealment mechanisms. 

Worse, to avoid “overcompliance,” Washington’s bureaucracies provide explanations about sanctions that are little more than roadmaps for sanctions violators to follow.

Briefly grandfathering existing contracts to allow affected companies to extricate themselves from existing agreements has merit, but there is no compelling reason to shield firms from prospective sanctions. It is rare indeed that rising political or economic tensions with foreign nations do not afford time to anticipate and protect against increasing risks, including through protective contract drafting. Political risk is a cost businesses must face in a less-than-perfect world. 

Perhaps most importantly, the State, Treasury and Commerce Departments, which administer sanctions and export controls, are simply not aggressive enough. Real-world experience and public-choice economic theory confirm that government bureaucracies have their own cultures, highly resistant to change and outside direction. 

Moreover, in many cases, particularly with financial institutions, the U.S. relies on self-enforcement, perhaps effective with domestic firms, but with little or no impact on shadowy operators abroad.

Enforcement resources are also limited. Notwithstanding the desires of many sanctions officials to be tougher, they simply lack the wherewithal. Moreover, enforcers are buried in agency bureaucratic cultures hardly known for swift, decisive behavior, and which do not reward economic warriors, who are often viewed as troublemaking pariahs.

We need serious consideration of shifting responsibility for detecting sanctions violations, and punishing or retaliating accordingly, to agencies with bureaucratic cultures better suited to real economic warfare. The most likely alternatives for sanctions enforcement would be the Defense or Justice Departments. Justice has investigative and enforcement capabilities, but we must also guard against an excessively legalistic interpretation of sanctions. Punishing adversaries broadly is the objective, not proving case-by-case violations judicially beyond reasonable doubt before punishment or retaliation are justified. 

Alternatively, Defense could establish a civilian-led “Economic Command,” paralleling the existing Cyber Command, European Command and the like. The military has conducted sanctions enforcement, including George W. Bush’s Proliferation Security Initiative, and its Iraq-related work under Security Council Resolution 665, authorizing “such measures commensurate to the specific circumstances as may be necessary…to halt all inward and outward maritime shipping” to guarantee compliance with Resolution 661. That is real enforcement, which we can undertake unilaterally under existing constitutional and statutory authorities. 

These are issues which the new Congress should carefully consider over the next two years, and which 2024 presidential candidates can and should debate.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Trump from 2018 to 2019, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and held senior State Department posts in 2001-2005 and 1985-1989. His most recent book is “The Room Where It Happened” (2020). He is the founder of John Bolton Super PAC, a political action committee supporting candidates who believe in a strong U.S. foreign policy.

Taiwan and the U.S. Need Statesmanship, Not Partisanship

November 29, 2022

By Ambassador John Bolton

This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on November 28th 2022. Click here to read the original article.

Taiwan’s local elections on Saturday weren’t exactly held under fire, but the threat from China was palpable enough. The island’s competitive voting contrasted sharply with the Chinese Communist Party’s National Congress in October, which effectively made Xi Jinping president for life. Videos of Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, being forcibly removed from the convention are historic, now underlined by scenes of the Chinese government repressing public protest over its draconian zero-Covid policies.

Taiwan’s local elections typically don’t foretell how the public will vote for the national government. Take President Tsai Ing-wen, who as head of the Democratic Progressive Party won re-election in 2020 by wider margins than in 2016, even though the Chinese Nationalist Party—the Kuomintang, or KMT—made significant inroads in 2018. The KMT again made major gains this election, including Taipei’s mayoralty, despite the DPP’s effort to nationalize the elections by stressing Beijing’s threat.

While Taipei’s domestic politics mirror those of other industrial democracies, few countries face so imminent an existential threat. National attention now turns to 2024, when Ms. Tsai’s last term ends. Shortly after Saturday’s results, Ms. Tsai resigned as DPP leader, opening the way for a new party chairman. All of Taiwan’s political leaders should emulate her approach: less partisanship and more statesmanship for crafting strategies to deter Beijing’s threat to Taiwan and the entire Indo-Pacific.

In the U.S., both parties recognize that Taipei expects Washington to help with the Chinese threat. Nevertheless, it is imperative that America convey its expectations of Taiwan and synchronize strategies. Prioritizing these conversations will decrease isolationist sentiment in the U.S., most recently on display in disagreements over arming Ukraine against Russia. America aids Ukraine because it advances our strategic interests, and Ms. Tsai and other Taiwanese leaders must make their case vigorously, as President Volodymyr Zelensky has done.

By demonstrating seriousness of purpose, Taiwan can refute one canard still alive in Washington: that Taiwan’s citizens are insufficiently committed to their own defense. Geostrategist Edward Luttwak recently wrote in these pages of “the persistent fecklessness” of Taipei’s military preparedness, while its “youth can continue to play video games.” Such criticism is unjustified and corrosive, as Taiwan can’t open itself to criticism that it is free-riding on U.S. political and military aid.

America must stop treating Taiwan’s defense as an exercise in developing a lengthy list of weapons systems to provide. Strategy is more than list-making, however estimable the list, especially given our recent failure to prioritize budgetary and operational matters. In the Ukraine case, the U.S. faces daunting logistical challenges in delivering weapons to Kyiv while also restarting or accelerating production lines to meet the needs of itself and endangered allies such as Taiwan. Promising weapons that are unavailable for several years is empty virtue-signaling. The depletion of U.S. arsenals directly affects our own security, a vulnerability that Washington can no longer ignore.

Taipei urgently needs comprehensive political thinking, too. Its political leaders and diplomats—many of whom are up against Beijing’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy—must begin planning and acting at higher strategic levels than before, integrating existing bilateral efforts into a global grand strategy. The same goes for the U.S. and its allies, who need more-comprehensive strategies to defeat the existential Chinese threat. China has a strategy and is obviously executing it.

Beyond Taiwan, Washington rightly has expectations of other Indo-Pacific allies. We must fully integrate Taiwan into rapidly emerging Indo-Pacific political and military structures for deterrence purposes. Taiwan isn’t merely a “customs territory” but a functionally independent state. Though most nations resist entertaining full diplomatic recognition for Taiwan, this isn’t currently an imperative. Significantly enhancing substantive, near-term political ties is both feasible and more important than the trappings of full diplomatic recognition. Israel has long mastered this complicated role-playing, and Taiwan and its Indo-Pacific neighbors have quietly engaged in the minuet for years.

Now, however, is the time for diplomatic rock ’n’ roll. Let’s prevent whining from isolationists that America didn’t realize what it was undertaking if, sooner rather than later, China provokes a crisis in Taiwan. Taipei is the epicenter of what for Washington could be another “present at the creation” moment—as Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, described the beginning of the postwar world. The U.S. and all its allies must be ready to perform.

Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.

Bibi Netanyahu Could Upend Biden’s Weak Foreign Policy

November 28, 2022

By Ambassador John Bolton

This article was first published in the 19fortyfive on November 28, 2022. Click here to read the original article.

Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, victor in its fifth national election in four years, is forming his seventh government (surpassed there only by David Ben-Gurion). Netanyahu’s coalition won a clear Knesset majority (by Israeli standards), 64 seats out of 120, but few recent governments have emerged easily. This new one is no exception, but the current tumult over Cabinet positions should not distract outside observers or Israeli politicians from what will follow thereafter.

For whatever is the duration of Netanyahu’s new government, and whatever the allocation of Cabinet positions, the critical reality is that Israeli national-security policy will rest essentially in his hands. He has firm, long-standing views on critical issues which will inevitably, and probably quickly, bring him into sharp conflict with President Joe Biden, both men’s emollient assurances to the contrary notwithstanding. How Washington responds to Jerusalem’s new government could materially affect Biden’s own foreign-policy legacy over what could be his last two years in office.

Even before then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned against an Iranian “nuclear Holocaust,” Netanyahu grasped that Tehran’s nuclear weapons were the existential threat facing Israel. In possibly his last term, Netanyahu’s top national-security priority will be ending, not simply managing, Iran’s threat. This is infinitely distant from Biden’s Iran policy, which venerates Barrack Obama’s inaugural address: “[W]e will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Tehran’s fist is today otherwise occupied, pummeling its own people. Still, it will continue menacing Israel and America unless and until the internal resistance finds ways to fracture the senior levels of Iran’s regular military and the Revolutionary Guards. Netanyahu undoubtedly sees Iran’s growing domestic turmoil as an opportunity for regime change, which Israel and others can facilitate. Simultaneously, Jerusalem can be preparing its military and intelligence services to attack Tehran’s nuclear program, something the White House simply refuses to contemplate seriously. Biden’s obsession with reviving the disastrous 2015 nuclear deal utterly blinds the White House to the potential for a more significant victory. If regime change prevails in Iran and the new leaders understand that seeking nuclear weapons endangers Iran’s security, the need to destroy the nuclear program will diminish substantially, perhaps totally. And the likelihood of a post-ayatollahs’ regime supporting international terrorism is highly remote.

Obtaining full Israeli diplomatic recognition across the Arab world constitutes a closely related Netanyahu priority. Iran’s nuclear, conventional, and terrorist threats reordered the priorities of all the other regional governments in ways the Administration has yet to grasp. These tectonic shifts in the Middle East’s geostrategic alignments engendered the Abraham Accords, normalizing Israel’s relations with four Arab states.

Ironically, Israel under Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia will be more closely aligned strategically than today either is with Washington. Even if Riyadh and Jerusalem do not achieve full diplomatic relations in the immediate future, widespread cooperation against the common Iranian threat is certain. Given Biden’s dim view of the Saudis (and other oil-producing and therefore climate-despoiling Arab monarchies), such politico-military teamwork, especially if it facilitates miliary action against Tehran, won’t improve US-Israeli relations any time soon.

The Abraham Accords demonstrate that the Palestinian issue has tacitly become a second-tier matter, particularly for the Gulf Arabs, which is hardly Biden’s view, and a major reason he shuns the Abraham Accords. Instead, his eagerness to resurrect the Iran nuclear deal is mirrored by his desire to resurrect the long-dormant “Middle East peace process,” and a “two-state solution,” for the Palestinians.

Even under the now-fallen Bennett-Lapid government (whose settlements policy was not far distant from Netanyahu’s), the Administration has repeatedly warned against any attempted Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and criticized Israeli settlement policy in that disputed territory. Controversies over the handling of the Temple Mount cannot be far behind, especially given the major role in Netanyahu’s coalition of decidedly pro-settler parties. The underlying Washington-Jerusalem divergence on the very legitimacy of a “two-state solution” promises nothing but controversy.

One issue on the front burner right now is the report that America’s Department of Justice will conduct an unprecedented investigation of the killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on the West Bank. In the hard-to-believe category, the White House and State Department quickly denied any knowledge of the investigation, and Justice and the FBI declined to comment. To justify jurisdiction for the probe, officials have quietly pointed to statutory authority regarding crimes committed against Americans overseas by terrorists(), but that authority is dubious in Abu Akleh’s circumstances. In any case, Israel will flatly not cooperate. This is the sort of spark that can inflame any bilateral relationship, but especially an already sensitive one.

To make matters worse, Biden has just created a Washington-based position at the State Department, a “special representative for Palestinian affairs”, that has already drawn criticism in Israel both for the new position itself and for the person named to fill it. Advocated as one more step toward “upgrading” U.S. relations with the Palestinian Authority, the new position looks nearly certain to become the locus not of advancing American interests regarding the failed Authority, but of advancing the Authority’s interests within the Biden Administration.

There are many other easily foreseeable potential flashpoints. Under its previous government, for example, Israel was widely criticized for decidedly underwhelming support for Ukraine, largely attributed to the need to mollify Moscow so Israeli strikes against Iranian and other terrorist forces in Syria could proceed unimpeded. And, during the recent campaign, Netanyahu called a deal to delineate the Israeli-Lebanon maritime border, thus enabling exploitation of undersea natural-gas fields, a “historic surrender”. There are more, such as the West’s tenuous relationship with Turkey, and how it might affect Israel. Netanyahu has yet to make many critical decisions, to which Biden’s responses are equally unknown.

Some say Biden and Netanyahu need each other politically, albeit for decidedly different reasons, so there is little to worry about. That is not what history teaches. And Netanyahu is likely a man in a hurry. Biden may be as well, writing a prescription for contentiousness.

Ambassador John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald J. Trump. He is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” You can follow him on Twitter: @AmbJohnBolton.

Missile Defense Is More Urgent Than Ever

November 14, 2022

As rogue states and powerful rivals grow more dangerous and belligerent, even Biden acknowledges its necessity.

By Ambassador John Bolton

This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal, on November 13th, 2022. Click Here to read the original article.

Iran now boasts that it possesses hypersonic ballistic missiles capable of defeating existing missile defenses—even in the U.S. While skepticism of the regime’s claims is warranted, it might not be bluffing. Russia’s military desperation in Ukraine has reportedly led it to supply Iran with captured U.S. and U.K. weapons in exchange for drones and to purchase arms from North Korea.

It is a small step for Russia from violating these international taboos to offering military assistance to rogue-state allies. Given China’s historical support for nuclear and missile proliferation and its enormous demand for oil and gas, you can imagine Beijing’s doing the same. And, unfortunately, it’s true that current U.S. missile defenses would be woefully inadequate to defend against significant ballistic missile strikes. But Washington must make enhancing our missile defenses a priority.

Even President Biden seems to understand what a vital task this is. As a senator, he stridently opposed George W. Bush’s decision in 2001 to scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and build out missile defenses. The Bush administration’s plans were, in Mr. Biden’s view, equivalent to “raising the starting gun that will begin a new arms race in the world.” But times change. The Biden administration’s Missile Defense Review, released late last month, attests to the “expanding and accelerating risk” missile technologies pose to the U.S., its forces abroad and our allies, as well as the heightened need for missile defense.

Mr. Biden’s mind has been changed by more than Iran, which accompanied its claims of missile advancements with a threat that those who meddle in the state will “pay the price.” As experts speculate that North Korea is readying a seventh nuclear test (its first since 2017), the administration worries that Pyongyang might graduate from testing nuclear weapons to using one against an adversary. A sign of this fear: Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently threatened that such a strike would mean “the end of the Kim Jong Un regime.”

North Korea’s missile-delivery systems, which like Iran’s are based originally on Russian SCUD missile technology, are improving rapidly as well. Tehran’s recent claims of advanced missile capabilities and its nuclear program in general have benefited from Pyongyang’s technical assistance. Iran is simply following North Korea’s lead. Pyongyang has been testing at a steeply accelerated pace, including a record-breaking 23 launches on Nov. 2, one of which landed near South Korean territorial waters. Subsequent North Korean tests included an intercontinental ballistic missile, which caused Japanese authorities to order civil-defense measures, although that launch was ultimately determined to have failed.

China and Russia pose a growing nuclear danger too. Both have made increasingly belligerent references to nuclear arms and offensive war. Yet the limited defenses America has built up have been consistently inadequate and are now simply not fit to meet that threat.

Washington has no excuse for how sparse its national missile defenses remain, two decades after freeing itself from the ABM Treaty. As our enemies pursued hypersonics and other threatening new technologies, America’s operational capacities for deterrence—and its will to retaliate with military force as deterrence requires—have declined. North Korea’s recent testing has led some pearl-clutchers to argue that we should acknowledge the dictatorship as a nuclear-weapons state. Yet it doesn’t take a hawkish attitude to see the immense value in improving our missile defenses. They are designed and deployed for defensive purposes and to protect the lives of innocent civilians. No president would hesitate to employ missile defenses in the event of an attack, especially a nuclear one, even if he feared retaliating against our adversary—contrary to our national security interests and deterrence policy.

We don’t need perfect systems to influence enemy risk calculations about taking offensive action against the U.S. Nonetheless, there is a significantly higher risk of missile strikes on the American homeland today than two decades ago, and our capabilities haven’t improved correspondingly. The U.S. needs greater accuracy in antimissile systems, and far more of them. Our defenses need to be deployed to deal with rogue-state threats, as well as China and Russia, and against all phases of hostile launches: boost, midcourse and terminal.

Such efforts will need to be far more ambitious than previous attempts. When Mr. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty 20 years ago, he created a missile-defense program to defend against “handfuls” of incoming missiles from rogue states and accidental launches from Russia and China, as was entirely appropriate for the threats at the time. Today, rogue state capabilities are more sophisticated, Russian rhetoric is becoming more belligerent, and China’s nuclear arsenal is growing rapidly. In response we must urgently increase our homeland missile defenses across the board, which will also have the collateral benefit of aiding our allies. The technology we develop to protect ourselves can be deployed to defend them too.

Today’s threat environment leaves no room for further delay and failure. Homeland missile defense should command top priority in our national security strategy.

Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.

Biden has it backwards on Iran, Saudi Arabia

November 01, 2022

By Ambassador John Bolton

Why does President Biden favor policies alienating Saudi Arabia, whose alignment with the U.S. dates from Franklin Roosevelt, while coddling Iran, our most dangerous Near East enemy?

Biden’s recent visit to Riyadh, pursuing his political priority to reduce gasoline prices before November’s elections, unmistakably failed. Criticizing Riyadh for meddling in domestic U.S. politics, the White House, despite its own obvious political motivations, threatened unspecified “consequences,” saying it will “reassess” U.S.-Saudi relations due to the Kingdom’s “decision to align their energy policy with Russia’s war.”

Congressional Democrats immediately revived proposals to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia because of Yemen’s civil war and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Today’s oil-pricing tensions did not arise in a vacuum, although the administration is trying to make it appear that way. In fact, Biden may simply have believed he had a deal when he didn’t, reminding us that international-affairs scholars Simon & Garfunkel once warned “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

And it is more than obvious that Iran is Russia’s real Middle East ally, as its supply of “kamikaze” drones demonstrates. Reprisals against the Saudis now would cause lasting strategic damage to Washington, in fact enhancing Moscow’s influence in Riyadh.

Biden’s badly misguided Middle East policies are reaping predictable results. In 2020, he was rhetorically brutal to the Saudis, saying “I would make it very clear we were not going to in fact sell more weapons to them. … We are going to in fact make them pay the price and make them in fact the pariah that they are.”

He emphasized there was “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia,” pledging to “end the sale of material to the Saudis where they’re going in and murdering children.”

That was strike one from the Saudi perspective, although later, as president, Biden did authorize some Saudi arms sales.

Strike two was candidate Biden’s overall campaign against the oil-and-gas industry. He described climate change as “the existential threat of all time,” essentially advocating putting Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing Arab states out of business. Biden wants to reduce reliance on carbon-based fuels through all possible means, notwithstanding the complex dependence of advanced industrial society on precisely those fuels. The merits of Biden’s views are debatable, and their likelihood of success dubious, but his hostility to the industry, foreign and domestic, is open and notorious.

Speaking of existential threats, strike three from Riyadh’s perspective was Biden’s obsession with rejoining the gravely flawed 2015 Iran nuclear deal. For a candidate who stressed the importance of repairing America’s international alliances, Biden paid little heed to the fears of Israel and the Gulf Arab states. They view Tehran’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons, ballistic-missile delivery systems and support for terrorists, like Hamas, Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels, in just that light. They rightly fear that Biden’s blindness to Iran’s multiple threats, so reminiscent of President Obama, reflects an upside-down view of the Middle East that endangers not only them but the United States as well.

For the Saudis, these three strikes alone easily justified rebuffing Biden’s recent supplications. Riyadh says its subsequent decision to restrict oil production rests on economic analyses unrelated to U.S. politics, a disagreement unlikely to be resolved soon. The real question is what Washington does next. Eliminating or restricting U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, as Sens. Menendez (D-N.J.), Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and others urge, likely with White House support, is precisely the wrong approach.

Yemen’s tragic civil war continues because of Iran’s persistent efforts to meddle in the Gulf Arabs’ backyard. It is Iran’s surrogates in Yemen, using weapons supplied by Tehran, that have targeted Saudi and Emirati civilian sites like airports and oil installations. Tehran keeps the Houthis threat alive to obtain the incalculable strategic advantage of enveloping the Gulf monarchies through a continued Iranian military presence in Yemen. The arms shipments that should cease are from Iran to the Houthis, not U.S. sales to Saudi or the United Arab Emirates. The civil war would likely find at least partial resolution shortly thereafter.

Moreover, the region’s truly momentous strategic question now is whether Iran’s ongoing demonstrations, sparked by Tehran’s “morality police” murdering Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, will grow sufficiently to threaten the regime’s legitimacy and very existence. After years of widespread opposition to the ayatollahs’ economic mismanagement, these new country-wide demonstrations are being reinforced by increasing numbers of striking workers in the oil-and-gas and manufacturing sectors.

Western reporters outside of Tehran are rare, but reports in Farsi on social media, including cell-phone pictures and videos, show the resistance continuing and strengthening. There is word of security forces refusing orders to suppress the resistance or fleeing confrontations with emboldened demonstrators.

Ground truth is hard to come by, but no one should underestimate the fierceness with which the ayatollahs will try to cling to power. Indeed, their savagery just in the six weeks since Amini’s murder has left over 200 civilian dead and thousands injured.

The White House is utterly tone deaf, at precisely the moment when domestic opposition to the ayatollahs has reached levels unseen since they seized power in 1979, to pressure not Iran but Saudi Arabia. Riyadh and other Arabs can quietly and effectively assist Iran’s resistance, especially the Arab and Sunni ethnic and religious minorities, and provide safe-havens outside Iran for the resistance to organize, plan and grow into a real counter-revolutionary force. If the ayatollahs fell, their successors would not likely sell drones to Russia.

Even former President Obama has admitted he was wrong not to have done more to aid the protesters against Iran’s thoroughly rigged 2009 presidential election. Biden likes to say, “don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” He should apply the same logic to the Middle East, which should make the choice easy for his administration.

High U.S. gasoline prices are due to Biden’s own inflationary fiscal policies (and the Federal Reserve’s sustained low-interest rates), as well as restrictions on domestic oil production. Post-election, Biden should stop blaming Saudi Arabia and look in the mirror. John Bolton was national security adviser to President Trump from 2018 to 2019, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and held senior State Department posts in 2001-2005 and 1985-1989. His most recent book is “The Room Where It Happened” (2020). He is the founder of John Bolton Super PAC, a political action committee supporting candidates who believe in a strong U.S. foreign policy.

Republicans are wrong to isolate the US from Ukraine

October 28, 2022

This article was first published in the Washington Examiner, on October 28th, 2022. Click here to read the original

By Ambassador John Bolton

Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine seems an unlikely trigger to awaken long-dormant strains of isolationism within the Republican Party. The worst conflict in Europe (and the largest refugee flows) since World War II, endangering bordering NATO members, threatening global economic disruption and hardship, and involving rogue states like Iran and North Korea to support the Kremlin, obviously implicates vital U.S. interests.

While outright Republican opposition to U.S. aid to Ukraine is currently insignificant, Representative Kevin McCarthy’s recent comments about the conflict have rattled many U.S. allies. Democratic support for negotiations with Russia will rattle them more, notwithstanding the progressives’ embarrassing reversal for being caught saying what they actually believe at the wrong time.

As with any national-security issue, delineating what is at stake for America is the critical first step. Ukraine presents a powerful and straightforward case for the United States to provide material assistance for Ukraine to defend its freedom and independence. This is not “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing,” in Neville Chamberlain’s words. Nor are the consequences of American inaction confined to Ukraine. Were Moscow to prevail (or even maintain the status quo ante bellum), further Kremlin aggression against other former Soviet states and perhaps even NATO members would be more likely. China would see a failure of American resolve in Europe as an open invitation to belligerence in the Indo-Pacific.

We have made some progress, but much more lies ahead. There are no U.S. troops in combat, our weapons systems are proving themselves in battlefield conditions, Russia’s military capabilities are being debilitated, and Putin’s regime faces intense domestic criticism. Defense Secretary Austin characterized Vladimir Putin’s strategy as “moving his forces into a wood chipper,” adding later, “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Still, President Biden’s policy leaves much to be desired, starting with his public uncertainty about America’s response to a “minor incursion” by Russia. That is where Republican criticism is warranted: not on what the Administration has done, but what it has not done to conclude the war successfully, while increasing economic and military costs on the Kremlin.

Many neo-isolationists criticize American aid to Ukraine on budgetary grounds, asserting that the costs are too high given our pressing domestic needs. The real spending problem during both the Biden and Trump Administrations, however, has been an utter lack of fiscal discipline on domestic spending, thereby significantly contributing to the inflation now raging. The current percentage of GDP spent on national defense is substantially below levels sustained in earlier threatening times.

Ronald Reagan knew a thing or two about national priorities. Even while cutting domestic budgets, he gave the Pentagon more than it asked for, to the liberals’ dismay. At the 1982 recommissioning of the USS New Jersey, he said, “Yes, the cost is high, but the price of neglect would be infinitely higher.” Announcing his iconic strategic defense initiative the following year, he emphasized “we must not be misled by those who would make defense once again the scapegoat of the Federal budget.” That is the responsible approach.

A related complaint is that President Biden is not protecting the southern border from illegal immigrants, and that attention to Ukraine is therefore unwarranted. This is simply a non sequitur. Failure to resolve one critical national interest does not justify failure to address others.

Now, with Republicans poised to gain control of one or possibly both houses of Congress, we cannot afford casual remarks that rattle allies and unwittingly comfort adversaries. On national security matters, the microphone is always on. This is a time for statesmanship, for the “arguments of states and kingdoms” that Edmund Burke once begged British parliamentarians to consider, rather than abstractions about monarchical rights that were irreparably alienating the American colonists. Statesmanship by members of Congress regarding American national security is even more important today, in the absence of sound presidential leadership. Or, as Burke might now say, “think big picture.”

What does Republican statesmanship on Ukraine look like? Listen to Sanna Marin, Finland’s Prime Minister. Responding to a reporter’s question, she answered, “The way out of the conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine. That’s the way out of the conflict.”

Party leaders who have spoken clearly, like Senator Mitch McConnell, strongly endorses continued support. Equally unequivocal are potential 2024 presidential candidates like Mike Pence, Senators Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, and others. Donald Trump, by contrast, described Putin’s rationale for invading as “genius” and “pretty savvy.”

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party no longer has a Scoop Jackson or Joe Lieberman wing, and progressives would happily purge the last remaining stalwarts. Accordingly, the risks for America are extraordinarily high if the Republican Party succumbs to its own isolationist virus on Ukraine. To paraphrase colonial leader John Parker at Lexington Green, if the isolationists mean to have a war over Republican foreign policy, let it begin here.

No wonder the Brits voted Leave

October 24, 2022

This article first appeared in Politico Europe on October 24th, 2022. Click Here to read the original article.

By Ambassador John Bolton

John Bolton served as the 25th United States Ambassador to the United Nations, and as the 26th United States National Security Advisor from 2018 to 2019. 

Watching the United Kingdom’s ongoing political turmoil is hardly edifying, neither is it any measure of London’s long-term international standing.

All democracies experience periodical political unrest, especially under constitutional systems where executive authority depends on parliamentary majorities. In response to contemporary doomsayers, the British can rightly say their democracy did much better during the 20th century than those on the Continent.

Forecasting what now lies ahead for the U.K. requires starting with the broader international political environment. Earlier this year, the United States and its NATO allies failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine. Notwithstanding the West’s enormous efforts after February 24, the foundational historical reality is their collective failure to prevent Moscow’s attack ab initio. Nuclear deterrence, after all, brought us through to victory in the Cold War, yet the Alliance seemed clueless about how to establish deterrence against a conventional attack. 

Worrying about governmental instability is entirely proper, but if governments cannot fend off external threats, whether they are stable or unstable ultimately means very little. And the consequences of failing to deter Russia in Ukraine are small change compared to failing to deter future belligerent actions by China along its extensive Indo-Pacific periphery. 

When we look at the international threats now looming, it helps keep Britain’s political dustup in perspective.

Moreover, following the Kremlin’s attack, there’s a strong, indeed compelling, case that Great Britain has been the leading foreign power supporting Ukraine. Under the triumvirate of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, London was at the forefront of political resolve and leadership, and on a per capita basis — along with Poland and the Baltic republics — Kyiv’s largest supplier of military assistance. 

Of course, aggregate U.S. assistance, particularly including intelligence, has been much larger, but British political resolve and commitment have been consistently robust. There was no talk or uncertainty about a “minor incursion” by Russia, as from U.S. President Joe Biden in the perilous days before the invasion, and no hesitations afterward about what to provide to Ukraine, and how much, as in Washington and European capitals.  

That both Johnson and Truss fell from power without impairing the U.K.’s focus on its Ukraine objectives is a telling point regarding the underlying strength and resilience of Britain’s place in world affairs. 

More generally, there is no credible argument that any other European government is currently doing better in international matters. True, the British pound fell during the tumult and uncertainty of Truss’ government, but has anyone noticed the euro is still below parity with the dollar?

In France, President Emmanuel Macron had to ram his government’s budget through, using extraordinary constitutional provisions because parliament wouldn’t act, and his own legislative support may be cracking under the strain. (To be candid, of course, America’s federal budget process hasn’t worked for many years either.) 

In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is struggling with the consequences of decades of misguided energy policy in a coalition government that often seems paralyzed. He has repeatedly faced questions as to whether Germany is up to leading Europe, or even keeping its economy vigorous and its citizens warm this winter.

Meanwhile, who knows what will happen with Italy’s new coalition government? And so on.

The real trouble in the U.K. is the unwillingness of many Brits to accept the verdict of the 2016 independence referendum. This ongoing internal political debate has been significantly exacerbated by the European Union and its members, seeking reprisals against Great Britain’s temerity in exiting the EU. The Inquisition must have inspired the determination of many European political leaders to punish London’s heresy, in large part to discourage others from even considering breaking free. The prevailing mood in Brussels seems to be that the more unpleasant it can be made for the U.K., such as turning the Irish border question into a crisis, the better.

No wonder the Brits voted Leave.

Within Britain, there’s now a kind of Donald Trump problem. The former U.S. president refused — and still refuses — to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election (notably, almost no other election outcomes, at any level, across the U.S. were contested). Similarly, many British Remainers simply will not acknowledge that they lost in 2016. In Parliament and in the courts, Remainers tried to sabotage legislation implementing the Brexit referendum’s result and will not abandon hope of another vote.

Even the many Remainers who publicly said that they accepted the results, didn’t really feel it in their hearts. For example, they continued adhering to the fiction that, before Britain’s formal exit occurred, EU treaties and regulations precluded London from negotiating bilateral trade agreements that could be brought into effect once full independence was achieved. But this was nonsense. The British people had announced, by their votes, that the U.K. was leaving. 

To accept being bound by requirements that were unenforceable and unreasonable in the circumstances tied Britain’s hands when it could have secured dozens of bilateral trade deals. Would Brussels have then behaved worse than it is now?

Similarly, the British, especially the Conservative Party, shouldn’t conclude that Truss’ tax proposals, however badly mishandled, are doomed forever. Currently, little is understood about what the Truss government did or did not do in its rollout strategy, but whatever is later revealed will simply detail the tactics and mechanics of how bad politics derailed good policies. It will say nothing about the merits of the plans themselves, other than the fascination that U.S. and European Establishments have with keeping taxes high and interest rates low. Perhaps they really do fear economic growth. The moral is to remember the courage that Margaret Thatcher (“The lady’s not for turning”) and Ronald Reagan showed in their tax-cutting days.

We shall soon know Britain’s next prime minister, and how they intend to proceed. For all the dire warnings about the Conservative Party’s imminent demise, remember who their opposition is: the Labour Party. That alone should lift their spirits.

“Land of hope and glory . . . God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet!”

The Israeli-Lebanese Maritime Deal: A Study in Flawed Assumptions

October 20, 2022

By Dr. David Wurmser

The problem with the Israel-Lebanon maritime agreement just concluded is not only its content, but the surrounding arguments promulgated to justify it in the public eye. There may be secret provisions to the agreement that render it an achievement, but the public disclosures of the terms and rationale for the agreement fall far short, and in some cases are flat out wrong or are invented assertions. One might be tempted to excuse these as public roll-out efforts, which are often akin to putting makeup on warthogs, but some of the public statements from Israel meant to justify the agreement go beyond mere spin and become outright misrepresentations. And worse, some reveal a deeper cause for concern about the underlying defense and foreign policy conceptions informing Israel’s security establishment.

The agreement at least is an historic first…Not.

The United States negotiator, US envoy Amos Hochstein asserted the agreement as historic since it is the first agreement ever between Israel and Lebanon.¹ An impressive achievement indeed, if it true. But it isn’t. In fact, there was an agreement – several to be accurate – between Israel and Lebanon. The Rhodes Agreements of 1948 established a de facto demarcation line, which is what was just reset under this agreement although this is heralded as the first such line established between the two nations. Second, like this agreement, it actually was both sides’ putting their signature to paper through an intermediary, the United States, so this agreement breaks no new ground in terms of tacit recognition of Israel.

Indeed, there was even a previous peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon signed on May 17, 1983. This was not a peace treaty dictated to Lebanon by Israel, but one negotiated under the auspices of the United States Special Envoy for the Middle East, Morris Draper. It contained provisions for buffer zones under the control of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and even contained security cooperation between the LAF and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to ensure deconfliction and to prevent third parties from using the territory to trigger conflict between the two nations. The treaty collapsed because the Syrian government, who occupied Lebanon but had been momentarily thrown on their heels by the Israeli invasion, recovered and toppled the Lebanese government and then installed a puppet regime in Beirut to move parliament under a new Speaker, Hussein al-Husseini, to formally revoke the treaty. Ironically, the previous Speaker, Kamel Assad, had championed the agreement with Israel, and had come from a prominent Lebanese Shiite family in Bent Jbail in the heart of the Shiite community of southern Lebanon, so his ouster became the main target not only of Syrian efforts to sabotage the agreement but of an Iranian campaign to destroy the traditional Shiite leadership of Lebanon and seize from it the mantle of the “Shiite Awakening” (which under Imam Musa al-Sadr’s leadership preceded the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979 by a half decade) and to pave the way for replacing the old elite with a new Hizballah-based Iranian Islamic revolutionary monopoly.

In short, there is nothing new or historic about the agreement. In fact, it aimed far lower and achieved far less than its predecessor agreements.

Well, then it strengthens Israel strategically by codifying an American security guarantee…Not.

The agreement erodes, and even endangers, US support for Israel for three reasons.

First, it is rather baffling that the strongest ally of the United States in the region should need a security guarantee from the United States bought through confessions to its enemy. Israel says that were it not for the agreement, there could well be war with Hizballah, which is also one of the most inimical and murderous entities to the United States, not only Israel. Lebanon at this point is a captive state dominated by Iran through Hizballah. Standing with Israel against Hizballah and the Hizballahi-run Lebanon should emerge from an inherent American interest and should not require either Israeli concessions or the imprimatur of Lebanon to validate it. In other words, the agreement does not display tightening and elevating US-Israeli strategic cooperation but reflects the fallen state of those relations – rather than emerging from a strictly bilateral understanding – that it now requires some sort of purchase from Israel’s enemy and a string of Israeli concessions to allow for its codification.

Second, the agreement ostensibly codifies the red lines and casus belli for Israel’s and the US’s responses if Israel’s waters or fields are again threatened. The fact that the Lebanese government has said it recognizes no such delineation as legally binding only hours after the deal was reached is disturbing enough, but in terms of US-Israeli relations, the true parameters of danger can be illustrated through a cautionary lesson from the end of the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon/Hizballah war of how this “commitment” could easily boomerang to haunt Israel gravely and potentially even cause the United States to cross Israel strategically in the future. After a month of war with Hizballah, Israel was seeking an exit. Israel’s foreign minister at the time, Tzippi Livni, turned both to Washington and to France, since they were seen as able to sway Lebanon, to help secure a ceasefire resolution through the United Nations. John Bolton was the US-UN ambassador, and I was the point of contact for the Vice President’s office.

France sought almost immediately to craft a UN resolution that would be legally binding – an idea onto which Israel’s security and foreign policy establishment quickly seized, believing that it would finally be able to cap and regulate Hizballah’s presence in Lebanon in such a way that its threatening behavior would be met with an international response. In essence, Israel tried to substitute its freedom of action and the power of the IDF for an international security guarantee to leash Hizballah and secure its norther border.

The United States, through the efforts of Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams and US UN Ambassador John Bolton, resisted the pressure of Foreign Minister Livni and the French, and torpedoed this effort. The fear that motivated us – and disturbingly not Israel’s defense and foreign affairs elite – was that it would clearly commit the US to side against the party that was internationally labeled as the violator of the ceasefire. One does not have to be a historian or Middle East scholar to know that the international community will not declare either Hizballah’s rearmament and redeployment onto the border a casus belli and justify an Israeli – let alone international – preemptive strike.

And then, a Hobson’s choice would be thrust upon Israel. Either Israel would have to acquiesce without any response to Hizballah’s buildup, or it would have to preempt but risk (really a certainty, not risk) its being labelled the aggressor which would trigger the legally binding provisions of response of the United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1701. In short, were UNSCR 1701 legally binding, then Israel would soon have found itself in a situation where it would be unable to act preemptively to prevent further build-up and threatening movements of Hizballah unless it would be willing do so – in the opinion of the international community – in violation of the legally binding resolution to which the United States would have been bound to uphold. To prevent this trap, US Ambassador Bolton stood his ground and forced through a tough but non-binding resolution, much to the chagrin of the French and Israelis. Of course, the moment the ceasefire was signed, Iran began resupplying Hizballah and Hizballah began deploying dangerously toward the south. One can only imagine how impossible it would have been for Israel over the last 17 years to continuously slice Hizballah down to size as it has by using force – including against depots and shipments, let alone against leadership. Israel would long ago have been subject to the very provisions it had sought to subcontract its defense to a outside entity through legal commitments.

Unfortunately, the current Israel-Lebanon agreement falls into the very trap which was avoided under UNSCR 1701. In fact, it is an even worse trap since this agreement fails to clearly define the behaviors by Lebanon that would trigger the security commitments. There is a failure in the agreement to define what would constitute a material violation on the Lebanese side, but it does clearly define Israeli commitments under the agreement, many of which are impossible to uphold if Lebanon or Hizballah act without such clearly defined legal restrictions. As such, this agreement threatens the exact same nightmare scenario as the Israeli-French proposal in 2006, which was rejected as the basis for UNSCR 1701.

Third, and perhaps most disturbing, is the assumption underlying this – that entangling the United States into a commitment to defend Israeli interests strengthens the Israeli-American relationship and reinforces the American strategic backstop – should not be taken as a given. In fact, it is worth examination.

For years, Israel’s defense elites have been seized by the conception that the support of the US government is an essential component of any strategic move or substantial military action, the key to which the Israeli government and security establishment believes demanded launching a full court campaign of convincing Washington’s elites in the corridors of power.

On one side, there is a” Zionist” problem with this outlook. One of the most refreshing and important aspects of the solidification of Zionism and the mooring of Israeli identity was the idea that it represented the rejection of the Diaspora “Galut” Jew – a person whose institutionalized weakness and disempowerment distorted the soul and left him at the mercy of the non-Jewish world and attempting futilely to make peace with his implacable haters. Israel’s defense establishment in recent years seems to be too burdened by the idea that it cannot act without approval from the United States in critical moments. This is most evinced by its belief that the Iran problem ultimately requires an American solution. But if it does, then what happens when the US refuses, or the US simply withdraws from the region, or the US enters an introverted or isolationist stage. The whole point of Zionism was that Israel’s fate is in Israel’s hands regardless of what others demand of it.

But on the other side, there is an equally large “American” problem. The support of the American leadership for Israel in America generally comes from the strong foundation of public support and sense of cultural affinity which Israel enjoys broadly in the American population. Part of this emerges from the unique Judeo-Christian roots of American identity which views itself as the New Jerusalem and seeks guidance culturally from its Christianity (even secular Americans still culturally respect their Judeo-Christian foundations). But part of this also emerges from the respect Israel has earned through its actions and its fierce independence – and distinctly NOT from appreciation of a history of seeking prior permission.

Indeed, Americans are increasingly displaying signs of exhaustion in bearing the burden for the defense of other nations who appear unwilling to bear the burden primarily themselves for their own defense. Very few American administrations in the last four or five decades, for example, have avoided a welling demand in the public for greater defense-burden sharing from our European allies. Israel has long stood out precisely because it never asked for American troops or entangling security guarantees. It was precisely the idea that when Israel acts, it does so because it is so important that it bear the burden alone. This independent determination and willingness to pay the price reminds Americans of themselves and convinces Americans popularly, and thus the leadership particularly, that they should support Israel both during specific episodes and in a more general sense.

Transforming Israel from strategic asset to albatross – from an independently-minded ally to a dependent obligation – is perhaps one of the greatest threats to public support, and through it the leadership’s support, for Israel that can be imagined. And yet, consistently over the last several decades, Israel’s defense establishment has tried to entangle the United States in Israel’s defense structure, thankfully all stillborn, through various schemes that could damage Israel’s brand image and erode American respect. This includes through the years:

the idea of American guarantees in Judea and Samaria (even deployments to protect Israel) in exchange for Israel‘s withdrawal during the Oslo period,
Israeli acquiescence during the Obama administration in American diplomatic efforts on Iran or to entice Israel to join the International Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and accept a regional nuclear weapons free zone in the region by offering a nuclear umbrella (Hillary Clinton) in exchange for Israel’s surrendering its reported nuclear capability,
the idea of deploying US troops to the Golan Heights to secure Israeli withdrawal from there in the mid-1990s, and now

These efforts all never came to be, making this agreement the first to really be accepted by Israel since Eisenhower’s security guarantee to Israel in 1957 for withdrawing from the Sinai. The fate of that guarantee leaves room for anxiousness.

Simply put, Americans get tired of supporting nations that are not willing to defend themselves, and Israel is in danger through this constant tendency among Israel’s defense elites to slide into that category.

Equally disconcerting, however, is that while the primacy of maintaining Israel’s freedom of strategic maneuver has been rhetorically loudly tempted by virtually every Israeli politician, it took bold leadership to act on that conviction at the political level since the underlying defense establishment conception is that securing American approval transcends strategic maneuver. This ossified conception has gripped and dominated Israel’s defense elites since 1970, and it has left along the way a horrific trail of failure behind it starting with 1973. Strategic maneuvers and independence of action, including the ability to launch strategic preemption, is a critical, if not one of the two most critical, pillars of a proper Israeli defense strategy (the other pillar is strategic depth through buffers to allow for mobilization). Dependency and habitual reliance on “the green light” from Washington devastates that pillar.

Ah, but it reinforces deterrence…Not

The agreement exposes several deeply disturbing ideas that afflict the Israeli defense establishment about strategy and deterrence, some of which in truth reflect a more broadly-shared decay in Western strategic thinking.

The logic of the specific agreement as publicly stated is deeply flawed and troubling. All of its logic and assumptions are in one form or another a rendition of the belief that by bolstering Lebanon, you will create conditions for their severing their ties with Iran — or at least reducing them below other national objectives that gravitate toward a Beirut-Tehran rupture. It rests on two assumptions. 

First that deterrence is a foundational strategy, but that the enemy might lack enough value that it renders it impossible to effectively threaten enough to deter. Thus, the more value the enemy is given by Israel which he would lose in war, the stronger the deterrent. This logic has been applied to the Palestinians as well, and it has proven entirely erroneous. The US tried a diluted and tenuous version with the Soviets in the 1970s, and it ended in failure with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan‎.

Indeed, just this week it was revealed that one of the core conceptions underlying the German government’s support (under Angela Merkel) for the Nord Stream II natural gas pipeline from Russia was that by giving Russia so great an economic interest, it would stabilize Russian European relations, make war impossible, and increase energy security for the European continent – an almost verbatim duplicate of the Israeli arguments regarding the Lebanon agreement. Of course, we all know how well these German assumptions panned out on February 24, 2022.

Second, proponents rely on a bedrock assumption that the enemy, in this case Lebanon, has any agency. That somehow it has power of decision to go to war, to make peace, to cease hostility, and that only if the incentives were great enough, then they would really cast the Iranians away and enter the promised utopia. Lebanon is a captive nation and has no agency, as did neither Czechoslovakia, Hungary nor Poland and others during the Cold War. No matter what we would have given the Czechs in 1945-1989, it would never have resulted in their choosing to bolt, because ‎it was not a choice over which they had power to make. So too Lebanon. I have yet to meet a single Lebanese who does not wish dearly to rid themselves of Iran, they do not need a gas field to do so, but they are desperate because they have no power or control over any decision. 

Moreover, if Hizballah’s centrally held value is to survive, and Iran’s centrally held value is to dominate Lebanon through Hizballah, then any attempt to develop a foundation of any sort for Lebanese independence inherently becomes a target for Hizballah’s and Iran’s ire – and their determined sabotage. In that way, it is precisely because the fields could become a foundation for reducing Lebanon’s dependence on Iran that it raises the latter’s interest in escalating hostilities, precisely to sabotage that movement. In other words, unless Hizballah is already neutralized and Iran’s clench broken, these moves toward building a Lebanese economy of separation will be still born, or even invite attack … unless the moves can be incentivized to be in Hizballah’s and Iran’s interest. The only pathway for that would be to allow these fields to become a structure for enriching and laundering money in times when they face international ostracism and sanctions. But that would then mean that this agreement — reached at time when the Iranian people are braving bullets to oust their tormentors – becomes a vehicle whereby Israel has allowed funding for the internally repressive and externally aggressive apparatus (including the Huthis, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, let alone militias in Iraq) serving the Islamic Revolution to be infused with new sources of income.

Third, is a corollary to the last point. Could perhaps it arise that if Hizballah financially benefits from the gas proceeds — since no Israeli official has as yet argued that it will be possible to insulate the money from Hizballah skimming ‎– then perhaps it might lead to a split between Hizballah (who will enjoy the revenue proceeds) and Iran‎ (which will not)? But this betrays a highly questionable assumption regarding the interwoven and symbiotic nature of Hizballah-Iranian relations. Hizballah relies on Iran on so many levels, financial being only one. Hizballah’s uniqueness with respect to other Shiite factions in Lebanon has always been that it is essentially an Iranian appendage, but that this quisling status was masked through its alignment with the reigning ideological construct of the Iranian regime, the “Valeyat e-Faqeh” or Rule of the Jurisprudent. The Valeyat e-Faqeh must be understood as a revolutionary movement within Shiite Islam, and thus does not genuinely enjoy the theological support of Lebanon’s Shiite religious establishment. Without Iranian overlay, the clerical establishment of Hizballah would be superseded and wiped out by the older Shiite establishment, much of which still exists in Iraq. Remember the founding charter of 1985 of Hizballah:

“we, the Umma of Hizballah, consider ourselves a part of the state of Iran…We are committed to the orders of one leadership, represented by the Valeyat e-Faqeh, the Supreme leader.”  

The most prominent clerics of Lebanon, such as the Ayatollah in Tyre, have far greater following and Silsalah (pedigree), oppose the idea of the Valeyat e-Faqeh. They would seek to diminish and subordinate Hizballah clerics’ influence in a heartbeat. The same can be said of Amal against Hizballah. Indeed, in an attempt at subordinating and fusing Amal with Hizballah, Hizballah made Shaykh Subhi al-Tufayli for two years (1998-91) the Secretary General of the Hizballah. Tufayli was a valued student of the father of the Shiite Awakening, the vanished Imam, Musa al-Sadr. But he opposed Iran’s revolutionary reigning theology of Valeyat e-Faqeh, which strongly suggested – given that he was that the most senior and genuine actor that was present at the creation of the Shiite Awakening in the 1970s – that Musa al-Sadr himself would likely have been opposed to the Iran’s definition of Shiism. This profoundly threatened the Iranian regime which was trying to usurp the mantle to itself of being the father of the Shiite Awakening and the successor to Imam Musa al-Sadr. Indeed, Iran was already on thin ice in terms of the Shiite Awakening since its key strategic ally at the beginning of the revolution in Iran was Yasser Arafat and the PLO, who is largely believed among Shiites to have ordered the assassination/disappearance of Imam Musa al-Sadr and executed him via his ties to Qadhafi in Libya, who was the other Arab leader with whom the Iranian regime established an early strategic partner. As such, the threat of Tufayli’s opposition to the Iranian regime was clear and present, and as such he was removed and ostracized. Without Iran’s heavy hand, not only would old Shiite patterns almost instantly resurface and consume Hizballah, but Iran’s usurped mantle of leading the Shiite Awakening would be exposed and collapse.

As such, Hizballah does not have an indigenous basis to survive its competition with other Shiite trends. There is no Hizballah possible without its being an interwoven part of Iran’s dominance, and vice versa, there is no Iran in Lebanon without Hizballah. As such, trying to create a Hizballah-Iran wedge is like trying to seduce an arm to sever itself from a body. Neither Hizballah nor the arm even have a central nervous system and brain independent of the mother body.

Finally, as a last thought about whether this agreement strengthens Israel’s deterrence. Israel’s government has trumpeted that were there no agreement, then there would be war and that Israeli gas fields would be threatened. This is all but an admission that Hizballah’s threats against Karish – backed up by the flying of a few unarmed Hizballahi drones that Israel shot down – drove Israel’s government to concede vast maritime rights and even its sovereign territorial waters as essentially a protection payment against the Hizballah mafiosi-like threat. The logic underpinning the idea that this strengthens deterrence in the future frankly simply eludes me.

‎Well, Israel is emerging as a strategic gas player, and this unlocks that potential…Not

The Israeli government has argued that it needed this agreement to bring its Karish gas field on-line. Hizballah, sometimes itself and sometimes channeled through Lebanon’s voice, has threatened every Israeli gas find exploration and development until now, and insists that it now has an agreement with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to attack Israeli fields in a future conflict. Lebanon last year threatened to act against Israel’s giant Leviathan field, at times claiming it was part of its territory and at times because it accused Israel of stealing its gas through horizontal drilling. In short, there was nothing different about the Karish field from all the previous fields, and Israel has in an unencumbered way thus far developed all those fields thanks to the superior defense capabilities of its navy. And in the end, it is the maintenance of those capabilities that will continue to be the foundation for the security needed to develop Karish. It is thus hardly believable that for some reason Karish could not be developed when others were because Lebanon did not green-light it. Moreover, even the Lebanese admit that Karish was never really on the table in these talks, and that they never seriously claimed Karish. In other words, it is unclear how this agreement makes it easier in any way to develop Karish.

Broadening the aperture, one notices that Israel is at the edge of perhaps one of the greatest moments of strategic good luck it has ever faced. The sudden, great dependency of Europe on finding new sources of gas, combined with the presence of gas in Israel and the ability offered to bring yet more gas through Israel to Europe, position Israel to become a critical gas transmission hub of about 60 to 80 billion cubic meters of gas per annum. But Israel is deliberately denying its territory for transmission by:

Sabotaging the UAE’s desire to build a transmission pipeline for gas through the Eilat-Ashqelon pipeline company rights of way,

Pushing export of Israeli gas through Egypt,
surrendering territory in which it is possible substantial more gas may yet be discovered,
Wasting a precious year of exploration by imposing an inexplicable moratorium, and
Pushing the robust evolution of Lebanese gas which will compete with Israeli gas in Europe and could itself offer as the competing‎ location of being a hub for gas from Iraq, Syria and Lebanon — thus effectively forfeiting for Israel this immense strategic gift over which it had no competition until the Israeli government created it via Egypt and Lebanon.

Taken together, there is no way to avoid concluding that out of ideological reasons (possibly environmental), Israel’s government has deliberately retarded and diminished the potential for finding, producing and exporting gas, let alone to position Israel as a vital national asset in becoming the core east-Mediterranean gas hub.

Indeed, Israel may have just unlocked the potential for a large alternative gas hub structure anchored to Qatar and Turkey just announced its intention to become the new gas hub for Europe (although including Russian gas). This unlocks the potential for Qatar to lead an effort to connect its own gas structures to the eastern leveraging the Lebanese gas fields to connect to a Turkish-based pipeline structure into Europe. Six months ago, this was not a conceivable state of development since Lebanon was considered too unstable, the legal infrastructure in Lebanon was rickety, sanctions afflicted the development of the fields, as did the irresolution of the demarcation line with Israel. Israel, and Egypt — who is in tension with Turkey and would be loath to build a pipeline that crosses Turkish waters or territory — for that matter, thus had no effective competition for becoming a gas hub. And now, suddenly Lebanon may well emerge as the gas hub, leaving Israeli gas stranded beyond its current structure.

Competition is a natural part of life, and Lebanon certainly had the potential to become a competitor along these parameters all along, about which Israel could do nothing other than expedite its own development – which it curiously has been extremely slow to do (or even outright eager to halt) over that last year. But what is mystifying is why Israel, after having spent a year stalling its own exploration and export infrastructure development, decided to remove a pound of its own flesh to encourage Lebanon to compete with itself in a way that may render Israel’s potential hydrocarbons strategic importance for Europe dead in the water.

In the end, why did the Israeli government agree to this deal, and why does it do so with such gusto? One can certainly attribute it to cynical political calculations — especially given that this is the annual election season in Israel. Indeed, the rise of cynicism is a phenomenon worthy of examination in and of itself because it afflicts many Israeli politicians as ideas and ideologies fade in currency in organizing political parties

But attributing this solely to election cynicism skims over the depth of the problem herein exposed. The government’s public justifications for the deal are possibly heartfelt and genuine. Indeed, they likely are since they reflect deeply held, but equally dangerous, flawed conceptions governing Israel’s strategic imagery, the evidence for which stretches back for decades already. One shape or form of the arguments forwarded to explain this dal have appeared at various levels of development as far back as a half century and reflect a serious, long-term deterioration in the solidity and rigorousness of Israeli strategic thinking and analysis. Moreover, it is not one “conception” that bedevils the planners and analysists, but a collection of conceptions which have remained beyond critical examination because of a stilted historiography, or narrative, of events and Israeli strategic history that prevents either realization or reexamination of thought.

In other words, what disturbs most about this agreement is not only its terms, but what it exposes about the problematic state of strategic thinking governing Israel’s defense establishment.

Are Iran’s despotic ayatollahs about to fall?

October 19, 2022

By Dr. David Wurmser

After years of oppression, Iranians are fighting back. To succeed, the West must support their struggle

This article was first published in The Telegraph on October 18th, 2022. Click Here to read the original article.

The murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman arrested and tortured by Iran’s “morality police” for violating the country’s mandatory hijab law, triggered demonstrations in Iran that now in their fifth week with no signs of abating. Iran’s theocratic, militarised, authoritarian regime is under more domestic pressure than at any point since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

It is, therefore, imperative to assess how the ayatollahs might finally be overthrown and what kind of government would follow. The key issue is whether today’s widespread protests constitute not merely a new Iranian “opposition,” but a real counter-revolutionary force.

Starting in Kurdistan province, but quickly spreading nationwide, the protests have increased in size, scope, and sophistication. The regime has responded brutally, but the ayatollahs also seem paralysed by the extent and fearlessness of the demonstrators. Supreme Leader Khamenei knows he has a serious problem, even as he tries to blame America and Israel.

The hijab protests are direct ideological challenges to the regime’s legitimacy, That is why the stakes are so high, far higher than in earlier protests such as in 2009 against fraudulent elections. Today, the regime itself is under assault.

The protests encompass all economic strata. It is not merely the revolt of educated, urban middle classes, but the “real Iran,” out in the countryside where Western journalists are rare. These average citizens, appreciating that having economic policies dictated by religious fanatics is less than optimal, have shouted “death to Khamenei,” rather than “death to America [or Israel].”

Ethnic and religious differences are also important. Iran’s exact ethnic mix is uncertain – minorities are reluctant to proclaim their status publicly – but the best guess is that Iran is only fifty per cent or slightly more “Persian,” with significant ethnic and religious minorities including Azeris, Kurds, Turkmen, Arabs, and Baluchis. There are meaningful numbers of Sunni and Sufi Muslims. Ongoing government discrimination against the Kurds and other minorities is particularly harsh.

Recent sympathy strikes by oil workers, amplifying their own economic grievances, are perhaps even more significant. Many remember that the oil workers’ 1978-79 rising against the Shah signalled that his days were numbered. If discontent in the vital petrochemical industry increases, shutting off significant production, Iran’s government would be crippled.

The Mahsa Amini demonstrations are therefore an accelerant to existing grievances. The interrelationships among the various discontents are complex, but ironically strengthen the resistance by significantly complicating the government’s ability to surveil and suppress the protests.

Contrary to regime disinformation, however, the uprisings are in fact completely spontaneous. That is bad news for the resistance because their communications across the country are totally inadequate, impeding agreement on day-to-day tactics, let alone broader goals. The good news about not having a centralised command structure is that the regime can’t stamp out the protests merely by eliminating a small number of leaders.

The demonstrators face hard questions which they must begin resolving soon if they hope to avoid becoming just another footnote to the history of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

To become counter-revolutionaries, the protestors must decide on their ultimate objectives and how they intend to achieve them. Specifically, they need effective mechanisms to develop regime-change strategies and then put their plans into motion. To the extent resistance networks already exist inside Iran, regime opponents must put aside their own disagreements and either join those networks or form more effective ones. Otherwise, opposition political fratricide will doom the larger project. “Divide and conquer” is a concept well known to authoritarian regimes.

The outside world must also help, starting with offering tangible resources, particularly in communications capabilities. There is a lot of virtue signalling from Western capitals, which stokes the psyches of those doing the signalling, but accomplishes little more. For example, despite supportive rhetoric, the White House is still obsessed with rejoining the misbegotten 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Nor are the British, French or German governments, the agreement’s other Western partners, paying much attention.

This much change, immediately. Carpe diem.

John Bolton is a former US National Security Adviser

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Are Iran’s despotic ayatollahs about to fall?