Declinists should think long and hard about the implications of a real “coming home” of American power

This article appeared in The Daily Telegraph on August 18, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton

August 18, 2021

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan have left many wondering whether the “20 year war” was worth the blood spilt. Here, John Bolton, former National Security Adviser to President Donald Trump, gives his view

Using military force to destroy al Qaeda’s Afghan bases and oust the Taliban from power was necessary, legitimate and beneficial to the United States, not to mention Afghanistan and the world at large. No subsequent terrorist attacks have come close to matching the lethality and complexity of 9/11’s terrorism, a point nearly forgotten not twenty years after the dies irae.

An almost-unthinkable but very real tragedy, however, is that too many wrongly concluded thereby that radical Islamic terrorism had been defeated, not to rise again as a threat either in remote south-central Asia or globally. They are dangerously wrong.

America has not been “at war” in Afghanistan in any meaningful sense for many years, no more than it has been “at war” in Germany, Japan or other countries where U.S. forces remained after World War II until now. Rhetoric about “ending endless wars” and “war weariness”; the fantasy lure of “nation building” that rested on inaccurate and ahistorical analogies to the Marshall Plan; and the sequence of Donald Trump’s aberrational presidency, followed by Joe Biden, who never understood the strategic importance of a significant U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, have all wrought this unhappy moment.

Withdrawing U.S. and allied troops from Afghanistan is causing even greater tragedies: enabling a Taliban return to power, with globally-threatening terrorist bases likely flourishing there once again soon; shielding and thereby enhancing Iran’s nuclear menace; and threatening the radicalization of a nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Countless foreigners (and Americans) hope Washington’s withdrawal from Afghanistan encourages other U.S. drawdowns in the Middle East (already underway) and worldwide. Those declinists should think long and hard about the implications of a real “coming home” of American power. They’re going to miss us when we’re gone. So will we.

There was an alternative to following Trump’s policy. Now our enemies will look to exploit our weakness

This article appeared in The Daily Telegraph on August 16, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton

August 16, 2021

The rapidity with which the Taliban has effectively seized control of Afghanistan has stunned and embarrassed the Biden administration. Already a tragedy for the Afghan people, the situation will worsen, quite possibly catastrophically so. The Taliban has captured every major city, and President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country. The Afghan collapse is either a major intelligence failure or proof of congenital wishful thinking by Joe Biden and his advisers, probably both.

Worse, the collapse of Afghanistan’s national military is a debacle for America, Britain and our allies, posing a potential new world-wide threat. If, as now seems certain, al Qaeda, Isil and other terrorist groups take sanctuary in the country, we will have effectively returned to a pre-9/11 terrorist environment. 9/11’s twentieth anniversary was already heavy on our minds, and the confluence of events only makes the memories starker.

Observers had suggested ways to mitigate the damage caused by Biden’s withdrawal decision, or partially reverse it. They are now dreams. There was no chance Biden would reverse course, and now it is impossible. Iacta alea est.

Ironically, Biden’s withdrawal policy is virtually indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s, which was well underway when he left office. On Saturday, Biden himself admitted he was finishing the implementation of what Trump started. Biden claimed he had only two options: follow Trump’s blueprint or else considerably increase US combat forces in Afghanistan. This is a strawman argument, palpably false.

By August 2019, Trump was determined to leave this “endless war”. He hoped to exit before the 2020 elections, but he failed because of his perpetual intellectual disarray. So desperate was Trump to gain credit for the withdrawal, he wanted to invite the Taliban to Camp David to seal the deal, which his advisers viewed as near sacrilege. Trump was diverted from this theatre only because of a Taliban attack on a Nato convoy in Kabul.

Hoping to salvage his reputation from Trump’s ashes, former secretary of state Michael Pompeo has tried to distinguish Trump’s performance from Biden’s. Pompeo defends Trump’s withdrawal decision while criticising Biden for poorly executing it. Arguing that Trump’s plan was “conditions based”, Pompeo contends that US and Nato forces would have responded forcefully had the Taliban violated the deal.

Maybe. Maybe not. In the end, Biden, like Trump, had wanted to withdraw, and he did. History will label the US withdrawal “the Trump-Biden policy”.

Sadly, there is further irony here, and cruel irony indeed. After the US-led coalition overthrew the Taliban in 2001, Americans and others launched, mistakenly, a massive nation-building campaign. Today, this effort to show selflessness has been turned against the necessity of remaining in-country for strategic reasons. Many ask, reasonably, why we have spent so much to reshape Afghan society and construct a viable military, but have so plainly failed.

Others complain that the Afghan army folded without a fight. Kabul’s army was well-equipped and trained, but its morale was destroyed by the Trump-Biden withdrawal decisions, all of which was entirely predictable. In Afghanistan, we needed merely a partner military that could keep the Taliban sufficiently under control that Isil and al Qaeda did not obtain secure-enough sanctuaries to threaten us with renewed attacks. We didn’t need military perfection; a strong central government; or Afghanistan converted into a central Asian Switzerland. Today, this realisation comes too late.

The most fundamental mistake, which Biden reiterated on Saturday, is the notion we have been fighting in an Afghan civil war. To the contrary, we have been fighting a Western war against terrorists who happen to be in Afghanistan. Did Biden really believe we could leave it to Afghan surrogates to defend our vital interests? If our surrogates fail, as they have done, do we simply suffer the consequences of al Qaeda, Isil, and others conducting renewed attacks against us? We should certainly have others, like the Afghans, fight with us against the terrorists, and we did. But their inadequacy does not mean we throw up our hands and depart, giving the terrorists free rein.

Finally, we hear constantly that we have “been there for 20 years,” it is America’s “longest war,” and “the endless wars must end”. This is simple-minded, albeit politically appealing. We have believed correctly that “forward defence” against the Taliban in Afghanistan is better than waiting to defend against terrorists in our own streets and skies. Unfortunately, our leaders have failed to explain why “forward defence” is the best way to protect our innocent civilians, although the process may take a very, very long time. Constantly predicting it will be over in a year or two has been counter-productive. Our side doesn’t get to decide when the terrorists give up. Our publics would understand this cost-benefit analysis if leaders properly explained it. They have before, in the Cold War, not for merely 20 years, but for over 45 years before the Soviet Union collapsed.

Proponents of withdrawal missed the point. We entered Afghanistan for core strategic reasons: to remove the Taliban government and destroy al Qaeda. We had substantial but incomplete success. We remained for equally compelling reasons: to prevent a recurrence of terrorist capabilities to strike America and its allies, and to watch more carefully developments in Pakistan and Iran. We do not want Pakistan to succumb to extremists similar to the Taliban, which would put an arsenal of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. In Iran we worry about the terrorist ayatollahs still avidly pursuing that same nuclear capability.

For the West more broadly, the Afghan withdrawal dangerously impugns our worldwide resolve. After four aberrant years of Trump, Biden pledged that “America is back” and would provide competent leadership. Having followed Trump’s erroneous exit policy, and then bungled it, Biden’s credibility also lies in tatters. Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran, are fully alert, looking for every opportunity to exploit US weakness. Doing good by the Afghans was a substantial collateral benefit of America, Britain and others pursuing our strategic interests, but it was not central to why we were there. Now our departure will imperil us all. This is a strategic lesson, which, I fear, we will learn at great cost.

The UK is in a unique position to unite the anti-Iran coalition around new expanded sanctions

This article appeared in The Daily Telegraph on August 10, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton

August 10, 2021

Boris Johnson is facing critical decisions on Iran. On July 30, an Iranian drone attacked the tanker Mercer Street, off Oman, murdering a British citizen. UK and US forces nearby, on high alert, subsequently foiled an Iranian attempted tanker hijacking. Last week, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei installed his protégé, torturer and executioner Ebrahim Raisi, as Iran’s new president, thereby reaffirming that its Islamic Revolution has not moderated.

Concomitantly, Joe Biden’s efforts to beg the US’s way back into the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”, are imploding. Biden has his own hard decisions to make. Not only is the JCPOA at death’s door, he has done little to counter Tehran’s conventional military aggression and support for terrorism. So fixed was his administration on resurrecting the flawed deal, it has no apparent Plan B.

The ayatollahs are on the move, and the West is spectating. Johnson, however, can play a key role; among the leaders of Europe’s three JCPOA signatories, he faces the fewest political constraints. Germany’s Angela Merkel ends her long chancellorship in just months, and France’s Emmanuel Macron faces stiff challenges in next year’s presidential elections. By contrast, Johnson’s majority would support a harder Iran line than what he inherited in 2016 as foreign secretary.

Biden has assured America’s friends he wants to strengthen alliance ties, not weaken them, Trump-style. But on the Iran issue, competing alliances have been at odds. Washington’s Middle East partners (Israel and the Gulf Arab states) are deeply threatened by Iran’s nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programmes, as well as by its support for terrorism and its belligerent Quds Force. On the diplomatic scoreboard so far, European allies have done better under Biden than those in the Middle East, which Biden prefers to downplay.

No such luck. Iran is not going away, and neither are the Taliban, al Qaeda or Isis. The central strategic objective, therefore, remains, as for decades, preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Conveniently, this has been the declared objective of all concerned, although mostly rhetorically for some given that the JCPOA was never going to achieve that goal. By bending their knee to Iran’s insistence that it retain and expand its uranium-enrichment capabilities, the “EU-3” (before the UK Brexited) guaranteed failure.

What Western leaders must do, and where Johnson could be pivotal, is reconcile the disparate approaches among the governments determined to prevent a nuclear Iran. Israel will not watch idly as its nuclear and missile programmes advance. A litany of fires, explosions, inconvenient accidents and more, which may or may not be Israel’s work, is already slowing Iran down, albeit not enough. With or without Bibi Netanyahu as prime minister, Israel’s vigorous strategy is unlikely to subside.

The ayatollahs deserve no moral equivalence in attacking civilian shipping because Israel is trying to eviscerate Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme, one of whose objectives is a nuclear holocaust for “the Little Satan”. If Israel’s critics have trouble getting this point, they should note that Gulf Arab states are granting Israel full diplomatic recognition while Jerusalem shreds Tehran’s nuclear establishment.

Iran’s real threat is not just its parade of malign activities, but the regime itself. Waiting for the Islamic Revolution to cool has proven a fool’s errand. Moreover, no Western state can afford to pretend that the Middle East must take a back seat because we need to deal more extensively with the 21st century’s existential threat, China. In fact, Beijing’s menace is now palpably interwoven with the Iran threat, given China’s enormous energy needs and its willingness to satisfy them from Iran.

The answer is for the anti-Iran coalition to agree that US and Israeli economic sanctions must remain in place, and be enlarged to, and be more strictly enforced by, European and Arab states. Acting unilaterally, Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign for three-plus years has had huge economic and political impacts. Anti-regime forces inside Iran are increasingly active and effective, despite brutal repression. Discreetly assisting the opposition and exploiting the fissures among the ayatollahs, who have not been so vulnerable since 1979, could precipitate their fall.

The alternatives have failed. Ready for something new, Boris?

Republicans are suddenly tougher than Democrats on Russia and China. The Trump era is truly over.

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on July 27, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
July 27, 2021

The politics of American foreign policy are reverting to their modern norms, illustrated by two recent Biden administration decisions and the attendant reactions. Donald Trump’s idiosyncrasies and the Democratic opposition produced some aberrations in the traditional positions of the two major parties, confounding allies and adversaries alike. Now, Republicans and Democrats are essentially reverting to the status quo ante.

Last week, responding to Chinese hacking of Microsoft’s email systems, Washington orchestrated pronouncements by European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization members condemning the attacks. The statements, however, were not uniformly critical of Beijing’s actions.

These statements amounted to little more than what diplomats call “a stiff note.” More significantly, at least publicly and to date, there have been no retaliatory measures: no sanctions (unlike after recent cyberattacks by Russian entities) and no cyber response. The White House press briefer uttered the palpably false words “We are not holding back.” Of course they were, and Beijing understood it.

Mr. Biden also acquiesced to the completion of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The administration had previously said it opposed the project, even while waiving sanctions that could have crippled it. (Mr. Trump also had opportunities to stop the pipeline, but didn’t.) Mr. Biden’s final surrender means the U.S. is done trying to stop Nord Stream 2.

In both cases, there was immediate criticism. Republicans were dismayed by Mr. Biden’s flaccid answer to China’s cyberattacks and incandescent about Nord Stream 2. Had these same decisions been made by Mr. Trump, Democrats would have taken the offensive, accusing Mr. Trump of coddling Xi Jinping and reprising the clamor about “Russian collusion.”

In reality, the two political parties are simply returning to their traditional stances. Mr. Trump’s posture on Beijing was confused and inconsistent, from yearning for “the biggest trade deal in history” to imposing tariffs when the chimerical deal disappeared. He criticized the Wuhan origin of the coronavirus when politically advantageous but never censured China on North Korea, Hong Kong, human rights or much else.

Mr. Trump didn’t take a “hard line” on China; he was as opportunistic there as on everything else. No one can say with confidence what a second Trump term would have brought. Nonetheless, seeing Mr. Biden’s weakness, Republicans re-emphasized their opposition to China’s growing economic, political and military threat.

Even under Mr. Trump’s helter-skelter decision making, his Republican advisers repeatedly recommended strict sanctions against Russia, which he often approved, albeit unhappily. Republican officials also recommended and obtained U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies treaties, and a tough negotiation approach to any renewal of the New Start Treaty. Mr. Trump’s absence empowers congressional Republicans to express themselves with full force against Mr. Biden’s supine position on the pipeline.

One might say these aren’t real policy realignments, only evidence of the opposition doing what comes naturally: opposing. Internal divisions also remain, primarily among Democrats, facing their left wing’s foreign-policy onslaught, especially regarding Israel. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump’s influence is receding in Republican national-security circles, and it won’t be back, as further demonstrated by issues beyond China and Russia.

Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, thereby effectively implementing what Mr. Trump wanted and would certainly have done in a second term, has met with near-total Republican rejection in Congress. This is a reversion to the norm.

On North Korea, no clear Biden policy has yet emerged. In public, his approach so far looks much like President Obama’s “strategic patience,” which led to eight years of Pyongyang’s progress toward deliverable nuclear weapons. At least it comes without Mr. Trump’s showboating summit diplomacy, which did little but provide photo-ops to one of the world’s worst dictatorships.

Ironically, on issues where Mr. Trump closely followed traditional Republican lines—Iran, Venezuela and Cuba—Mr. Biden is having trouble reverting to the Democratic norm. Despite frantic efforts to rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the president may be realizing how abject his surrender to Tehran would be, and may be backing off. And if he wants a prayer of carrying Florida in 2024, Cuba and Venezuela policies that look like Mr. Obama’s are sure losers.

Only six months into Mr. Biden’s term, politics are reverting to familiar contours. Mr. Trump is increasingly visible only in the rearview mirror.

This article appeared in The Daily News on June 29, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 29, 2021

Since taking office, President Biden has unswervingly sought to have the United States rejoin, as rapidly as possible, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA). Through indirect negotiations conducted by other JCPOA parties, Biden has offered Iran concessions and adjustments that make an already dangerous agreement even riskier. He has been deterred only by the negative domestic political blowback he will justifiably encounter if and when America re-ups.

Now, however, significant new developments give Biden the opportunity to reverse the Gadarene haste with which he has pursued re-entering the JCPOA. He should seize the chance to pause his efforts, if not reverse them entirely.

Most importantly, Israel’s new government, led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, has expressed the urgent need to consult with Biden and his senior advisers. Bennett’s governing coalition is held together by little more than antipathy to former Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. If the parties break apart, it could well precipitate new elections, resulting in significant losses of Knesset seats for many of them, and even bring Netanyahu back to power. Biden, like Presidents Obama and Clinton before him, is no friend of Bibi’s.

President Joe Biden speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Friday, June 25. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Bennett is at risk here. Formerly a senior Netanyahu adviser, he aligns closely with his predecessor’s Iran policy. Moreover, Israel generally is far readier to continue using force against Tehran’s nuclear program than Biden’s team may appreciate. If Bennett deviated from Netanyahu’s approach, it would be a mortal political mistake, perhaps fracturing his party and his coalition. Biden needs to tread cautiously, or he places Bennett in an untenable position.

For America, rejoining the JCPOA (which Donald Trump exited in May 2018) would be a massive mistake. Obviously, Iran wants Biden back in the deal to obtain relief from our devastating unilateral economic sanctions. Tellingly, however, there has never been a shred of evidence Iran has made a strategic decision to renounce its nuclear ambitions.

Instead, the basic playbook for rogue regimes seeking deliverable nuclear weapons calls for them to make extravagant, highly- publicized promises forswearing nuclear weapons, while never following through with actual performance. Like all prior iterations of this diplomatic performance art, the mutual pledges of “action for action” benefit the proliferator. North Korea and Iran have successfully followed this playbook for decades.

The economic steps directly benefitting the proliferator come first (ending sanctions and releasing frozen assets, as in the JCPOA, or providing economic assistance, as in the 1994 North Korea Agreed Framework). Coming only afterward is what Washington should seek, and what never seems to happen: the complete, verifiable, and irreversible destruction of the nuclear-weapons program, as prior presidents have described their North Korea goals.

“Reaching agreement” with Iran, especially the way Biden has pursued it, thus means giving the ayatollahs much of what they want. The result will endanger America and close allies and friends globally, not just in the Middle East.

Here is where Biden’s face-saving opportunity to cut his losses arises: Jerusalem has sought urgent, critically important, consultations with Washington on the implications of America rejoining the JCPOA. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid (also deputy prime minister and co-leader of the new government) met Sunday in Rome with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Biden’s subsequent invitation for Bennett to visit the White House provides exactly the right moment to talk about Iran.

Moreover, Iran has a new president-elect, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner’s hardliner, and likely successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. JCPOA supporters believe U.S. reentry can be agreed upon before Raisi’s Aug. 3 inauguration, arguing he would benefit from the economic good times expected to roll if U.S. sanctions are lifted. By contrast, blame for failing to resurrect the JCPOA, if that transpires, can be laid on Hassan Rouhani’s outgoing regime.

This approach is a trap for the United States, but one Biden can readily avoid. He can capitalize on the opportune coincidence of new governments in both Israel and Iran to implement a pause in the re-entry negotiations for extended consultations with Israel and Arab allies. He could use, say, six months to gauge whether there is any change for the better — or the worse — in Iran’s international performance, not just in nuclear matters, but in its support for terrorism and conventional military belligerence across the Middle East.

Washington need not be in a hurry to grace Tehran by jettisoning sanctions, which are its principal leverage. Even if Biden remains obsessed with returning to the JCPOA, he loses little by waiting until the end of this year, while appreciably aiding Bennett’s new government.

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on June 21, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 21, 2021

The Biden administration is working hard to re-enter the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Readers of David Albright’s “Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons,” however, will realize that it is Washington, not Tehran, that is pursuing a truly perilous course.

Mr. Albright, since 1993 the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, neither advocates nor opposes re-entering the deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That is precisely why his careful, meticulous recitation of the full reality of Iran’s efforts, its “incessant dissembling and falsehoods” and its careful camouflage and concealment is so compelling.

Mr. Albright concedes that many years ago he was “skeptical of the seemingly exaggerated claims by Western governments” about Iran’s program. He now says that “the Iranian revolutionary regime is fundamentally a criminal operation.” For decades, “Iran has systematically violated its commitments under the [1970] Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.” Even nominal concessions from Tehran, including the JCPOA itself, occurred “under great pressure, with an underlying, unrelenting intention of preserving and advancing its nuclear weapons capabilities.”

“Perilous Pursuit” is the most comprehensive unclassified recounting of Iran’s nuclear aspirations ever written. Mr. Albright had generous access to the “nuclear archive” collected by Israel’s Mossad in an almost unimaginably daring 2018 raid on Tehran. This extraordinary archive embodies in detail the so-called Amad Plan, Iran’s late-1990s crash nuclear-weapons program. Mr. Albright and his team at I.S.I.S., aided by Israeli and U.S. intelligence analysts, found that the nuclear archive fills many gaps in the West’s knowledge.

As Mr. Albright shows, key Amad Plan activities continue today, both clandestinely and disguised as part of Iran’s “civil” nuclear efforts. Take the Natanz enrichment facility, discovered in 2002: “In a pattern that would repeat itself many times . . . Iran simply called it a civil site and allowed the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] to inspect it.” This may seem like retreating, but Mr. Albright exposes the nuclear jujitsu: “While withdrawing from safeguards or cheating on them would incur a cost,” calling Natanz a “civil” facility and allowing inspections or monitoring “was a price [Iran] found worth paying to keep them.”

Until revealed in the nuclear archive, Iran successfully lied about, or concealed from the IAEA, its uranium conversion and enrichment facilities, nuclear-core development plants, exploding-bridgewire testing units, and more. It asserted that the Gachin uranium mine and milling facility was for domestic rather than military purposes, and concealed both the location and the military purposes of the Fordow underground uranium-enrichment facility.

“Perilous Pursuit” eviscerates the idea, central both to negotiating the JCPOA and rejoining it, that the IAEA, an independent agency part of the United Nations system, can adequately pierce the falsehoods and cover-stories Iran has woven for decades. Time after time in Mr. Albright’s account, Tehran stonewalls the IAEA, underlining the point that it is not an intelligence agency. IAEA depends vitally on its members to supply sensitive information, yet as a U.N. body, its membership includes the very countries, like Iran, suspected of violating the non-proliferation treaty. (Imagine a police department with a mafia office at its headquarters.) Enumerating all that the IAEA has repeatedly missed indicts not the agency, but those seeking to endow it with capabilities it has never had and never will. Relying on it for verification and compliance reveals naiveté about the ayatollahs and unfamiliarity with the IAEA. Serious verification must rest with U.S. intelligence, not U.N. agencies.

Unfortunately, our intelligence community’s credibility also gets its share of shredding here, having missed much of what Mossad purloined. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of Iran, for instance, was perhaps the most intellectually dishonest, politically distorted U.S. intelligence “analysis” ever. It was not really an NIE but propaganda, intended to forestall harsh measures George W. Bush was thought to be considering. We need a forensic review of the NIE’s perverse tradecraft, especially examining whether the drafters were politically motivated, an anathema to intelligence professionals.

The NIE promulgated the dangerously mistaken notion that, in Mr. Albright’s words, “Iran’s nuclear weapons program ended in 2003, with no work taking place after that date.” At that time, Tehran faced U.S. troops to the east and west, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and growing international criticism. Hassan Rouhani, then secretary-general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, now in his final days as president, promised full disclosure and suspension of key nuclear operations, all the while denying any were weapons-related. But, as Mr. Albright stresses, this “merely served as a tactical retreat, not an abandonment of [Iran’s] nuclear weapons ambitions.” Indeed, “Iran kept the international spotlight” on its civilian cover-story, “successfully using it as a distraction from [its] better hidden, unambiguous nuclear weaponization work,” as nuclear-archive documents clearly demonstrate.

Mossad’s haul deals a mortal blow to any fancy that Tehran ever came clean on nuclear issues. The archive, let alone what remains classified or still in Iran, also destroys the “What about Iraq?” riposte when discussing Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. As Mr. Albright says, the archive proves the program “can no longer be viewed as existing only in the past.” Obama’s JCPOA negotiators were profoundly wrong not to resolve the many unanswered questions about the euphemistically termed “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear work. We are still paying for that mistake.

Joe Biden is proceeding quickly and blindly to rejoin the nuclear deal. “Perilous Pursuit” should make him pause. U.S. sanctions and Israel’s kinetic activity against Iran’s program have done more to degrade and deter Iran than any diplomacy. That is the path to pursue, not more credulous deal-making.

This article appeared in The Washington Examiner on June 19, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 19, 2021

Iran’s hard-line mullahs left nothing to chance in Friday’s presidential election.

The man they wanted to win, Ebrahim Raisi, did so handily against a carefully limited field of rivals. In 2017, Raisi lost to outgoing President Hassan Rouhani, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was obviously determined to correct that mistake. Western media call Raisi a “hard-liner,” as if conveying important information.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, however, the spectrum of Tehran’s leadership has ranged broadly all the way from “hard-liner” to “extreme hard-liner.” Raisi falls in the latter category. Rouhani fell in the former, but it pleased many Westerners to consider him a “moderate,” essential to enacting the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal.

Yet, in 2005, as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Rouhani mocked those very admirers. The New York Times, no less, reported that “in a remarkable admission, Mr. Rouhani suggested … that Iran had used negotiations with the Europeans to dupe them. … ‘While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment … in Isfahan. … By creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work on Isfahan.'”

Some things never change. Those who portrayed the “moderate” Rouhani as Iran’s real boss should contemplate whether the term “supreme leader” means what it says. It does have a certain ring to it.

Khamenei is only the second to hold the title, succeeding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. Raisi is widely believed to become the third supreme leader; he is unlikely to forget the power of those two mellifluous words. Now facing a weekslong presidential transition period in Tehran, the Biden administration will undoubtedly worry most about whether it can beg its way back into the JCPOA, from which Washington withdrew in May 2018.

Resurrecting this deal is a near-religious priority for the Biden team, many of whose key figures were intimately involved (or at least entirely supportive) of President Barack Obama’s efforts to negotiate it. Although few specifics are publicly known, there is little doubt that the only limiting constraints on what Biden is prepared to give away to the mullahs are the negative domestic political consequences for surrendering. And make no mistake, those domestic U.S. political consequences could be enormous. Whatever minor modifications may occur to the deal, Iran will insist that key provisions and understandings remain unchanged. For example, there will be no renewed efforts to get the facts on the benignly termed “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program. In 2015, Iran made this concession a precondition to any deal. And don’t expect international inspectors to get any more access than the inadequate levels they now enjoy. Most importantly of all, Biden isn’t even contemplating clawing back Obama’s critical concession that Iran be allowed to enrich uranium to reactor-grade levels, a giveaway without which Iran would have rejected any deal.

President Lyndon Johnson once termed an analogous provision “more loophole than law.” Once a country can enrich to reactor-grade levels of U-235, it is nearly 70% of the way to weapons-grade enriched uranium. Going from 3-to-5% to 20%, or even 60%, enrichment levels merely marginally worsen the original, fundamental mistake of allowing enrichment at all. The pattern is clear: Obama accepted Iran’s insistence on even debilitating concessions because he was so determined to “succeed” and achieve a deal, any deal.

During Biden’s first five months, no one in the White House has pretended that Iran has made a fundamental strategic decision to abandon pursuing nuclear weapons. With good reason. All the available evidence shows that Iran continues to do whatever it takes to possess deliverable nuclear weapons as soon as feasible.

Of course, Iran wants the United States back in the deal. Without that, Tehran will not get relief from America’s devastating sanctions, far more effective than any of the 2015 negotiators ever envisaged. The sanctions have created enormous public dissatisfaction inside Iran, but Biden seems blind to the leverage thereby provided, so zealous is he to rejoin. Nor is there any visible effort by Biden’s advisers to design or justify a “larger” deal to replace the failed JCPOA. If sanctions are lifted, and substantial economic benefits flow again, Iran will even more actively pursue nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs; support for terrorism in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria; and increased conventional military activity across the Middle East.

Whether U.S. reentry happens before or after Raisi is inaugurated is immaterial. If there is any chance whatever Biden might be dissuaded from his crusade, Raisi’s election provides him a face-saving excuse to back away. Don’t hold your breath over he will avail himself of the opportunity.

The US President’s incoherent strategy makes the forthcoming summit a worrying one for the West

This article appeared in The Telegraph on June 13, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 13, 2021

Joe Biden’s first summit with Vladimir Putin this week comes relatively early in his new administration, so early it is fair to ask whether Biden is ready for it. If he does not yet know his goals regarding Russia and how to achieve them, far better to wait than to risk making pronouncements untethered to reality.

Biden, though, doesn’t have forever, although since his inauguration, he has engaged in a random walk. He has, variously, called Putin “a killer”; gratuitously extended the deeply flawed New START arms-control agreement; imposed sanctions for Russia’s chemical-weapons attack against opposition leader Alexei Navalny; waived economic sanctions that would have stopped Nord Stream II, Russia’s undersea gas pipeline to Germany; responded inadequately to Russia’s egregious “Solar Winds” computer hack, and others; and sanctioned Russia for interfering in Ukraine, while stressing how restrained these measures were.

Biden says he wants “a stable, predictable relationship” between Moscow and Washington, but his actions and statements to date reveal no gyroscope. Accordingly, while the Geneva summit may produce new American initiatives, don’t count on it. Putin is no novice, and the odds favour him springing new Russian gambits, for example articulating his framework to negotiate New START’s successor. There is no indication that Biden is prepared to respond on this critical strategic issue between the two countries, one enormously important to the UK and other nuclear-weapons states.

In domestic political terms, Biden wants to be seen as tougher on Russia than his predecessor, which is not hard to do rhetorically. Donald Trump was unwilling to criticise Russia for fear of giving credence to the narrative that he colluded with Moscow in the 2016 election. Trump was wrong politically: legitimate criticism of Russia would have enhanced his credibility, not diminished it. And Trump did little or nothing operationally to stop Nord Steam II, where even his rhetoric was anti-Moscow.

Considering the recent deluge of cyber attacks in America we are entitled to wonder if, without publicity, Biden has reverted to Barack Obama’s dangerously naïve approach to cyberspace. The Obama Administration hog-tied potential offensive US cyber operations in a web of decision-making rules that, as a practical matter, essentially precluded significant offensive activity. Those rules were changed substantially in 2018. American officials publicly welcomed being unleashed to take steps that protected the 2018 mid-term Congressional elections from Russian cyber interference, and hopefully later ones as well.

Has Biden disarmed the US in cyberspace, and have the Russians taken advantage? If so, Washington is making a potentially fatal strategic mistake. No one is looking for more hostilities in the cyber world, but the way to prevent conflict is to discourage adversaries from taking belligerent action for fear of the costs Washington will impose upon them. If the costs are seen to be high enough, they will back off. This is deterrence, which works in cyberspace as in all other human domains. Putin understands this point, but Biden has yet to prove he does.

After the G7 summit, Biden will be attending a Nato heads-of-state meeting in Brussels before his meeting with Putin. This choreography is correct: confer first with friends and allies, and then meet with Putin. The G7 meeting has focused heavily on finally exiting the coronavirus pandemic and economic recovery, and also planning against the danger of future biological-weapons and epidemiological threats.

This is entirely appropriate, but it is hardly a platform for serious consideration of wider geostrategic issues, let alone for coherent consideration of facing Vladimir Putin across the table. At Nato, Biden will be a comfort compared to the aberrational Trump, but no alliance strategy on Russia is likely to emerge.

Other than returning to normalcy, albeit merely on process, what does Biden have to say at such meetings on, for instance, Belarus, a new focus of the bipolar Nato-Russia struggle for advantage in Europe? What is his view on the increasing Russian (and Chinese) military attention to the Arctic? Biden’s Russia policy simply has not come into focus, which is troubling, even if not-quite-yet debilitating.

In short, Biden is taking a substantial risk in meeting Putin if he is only following a process of choreography, while seeking diaphanous goals like “stability” in the Washington-Moscow relationship. The wily and well-prepared Putin will have a very clear agenda, specific objectives, and the focused attention and energy to pursue them. Biden should hope the luck of the Irish is with him in Geneva.

This article appeared in The Washington Examiner on April 26, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
April 26, 2021

Despite the headlines, President Joe Biden is not the first United States president to declare that the Ottoman Empire’s mass killings of Armenians, beginning on April 24, 1915, constitute genocide. President Ronald Reagan did so in his April 22, 1981, proclamation of “days of remembrance” for the Nazi Holocaust.

He emphasized that “like the genocide of the Armenians before it and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it, and like too many other such persecutions of too many other peoples, the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.” Whether Biden’s announcement marks a significant departure from the reticence of other presidents remains to be seen. Although the gruesome historical reality is undisputed, even Reagan’s administration was reluctant to highlight his statement, fearing disruption of relations with Turkey, a key NATO ally.

The pundits immediately characterized Biden’s remarks as merely symbolic, which may prove to be correct. Biden supporters contend that he was underlining the importance of human rights in his foreign policy, but that misses the critical point: ignoring the imperative need, and opportunity, we now have for strategic realignment in the Caucasus. Rewriting history, even to correct it, is too transient an exercise of governmental authority unless more substance follows. International political logic explains Washington’s past hesitations. Turkey’s Cold War role in NATO was critical for immutable geographic reasons, such as anchoring NATO’s line in Europe against the Warsaw Pact and controlling the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. Thereafter, of course, the Soviet Union broke apart, almost all for the better, radical Islamist terrorism arose, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took power in Turkey, almost all for the worse.

In the Caucasus, three small states, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, are sandwiched between three large, incompatible ones, Russia, Turkey, and Iran, whose interests quite often run counter to the U.S. We cannot unpack the region’s political complexity here, but the key point about Armenia since independence from the Soviet Union is its too-tenacious loyalty to Russia. Locked in a desperate territorial, ethnoreligious struggle with Azerbaijan, deeply fearful of conflict with Turkey, and justifiably wary of Iran, Yerevan looked to Moscow for support. Doing so resulted in an Armenian foreign policy that is otherwise totally inexplicable. For example, on April 21, at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Armenia, along with the likes of Russia, China, and Iran, voted unsuccessfully against a resolution stripping Syria of its vote in the organization for using chemical weapons against its own people. Three decades of pro-Moscow policy has been wholly misguided.

Armenia’s highest international priority, the conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, is an outgrowth of Moscow’s Soviet-era internal boundary drawing, yet another failed effort to answer what Marxists called “the nationalities question.” When its most threatening recent crisis arose, the 2020 flare-up with Azerbaijan, which was aided by Turkey, Armenia’s dependence on Russia proved almost entirely worthless. Armenia suffered significant military reversals, but contrary to Yerevan’s expectations, Moscow essentially imposed a cease-fire that nearly collapsed Armenia’s government and acknowledged its territorial losses. With friends like that…

Armenia’s attachment to Russia has been tragic, especially given the large number of Armenian Americans who could have focused Washington’s attention on the plight of their ancestral homeland. During a 2018 visit to Yerevan, I asked Armenian analysts why this had not happened. Several pointed to the Armenian American focus on getting U.S. recognition of the genocide rather than on contemporary realities. Whether right or wrong, Biden nonetheless has an opportunity to place a higher U.S. priority on Armenia’s plight. The Armenian American community should now focus on the negative consequences of Yerevan relying on Moscow, and Washington should worry more about bringing peace and stability to all three Caucasus countries. We have no interest in any of them aligning with, or being exploited by, the regimes in Iran, Russia, and Turkey.

Certainly, Erdogan’s Turkey is dangerous for Armenia, but grounds for hope exist. Dissatisfaction with Erdogan is rising, reflected in his party’s defeat in key 2019 local elections, such as Istanbul and Ankara, making Turkey’s looming 2023 presidential race critical for its future direction. It is premature to dismiss Turkey as a NATO ally, at least until we see if Erdogan permits free and fair national elections, which will happen only under Western pressure and scrutiny. Turkey itself should long ago have recognized the Armenian tragedy, but its internal politics have made that impossible. Washington should not underestimate the difficulties of change even now, but Erdogan’s departure opens many possibilities for Turkey to rehabilitate itself.

No one seriously believes that Caucasus politics is anything but complex. Inadequate U.S. attention for three decades after the Soviet Union’s dissolution, however, has not made it any easier. If Biden’s genocide statement is more than domestic U.S. politics, an increase in awareness can only bolster Washington’s position in the region.

A full withdrawal from Afghanistan is a costly blunder and failure of leadership.

This article appeared in Foreign Policy on April 19, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
April 19, 2021

U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw the United States’ remaining military forces from Afghanistan rests far more on domestic politics than on national security strategy. In 2020, he campaigned on the issue. He said last week, “It’s time to end the forever war.” We should “be focused on the reason we went in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again. We did that. We accomplished that objective.”

Biden sounds like his predecessor, Donald Trump, whom I served as national security advisor. That’s no surprise, as Biden is carrying out Trump’s policy with only slight modifications. Media coverage of Biden’s April 14 announcement has noted widespread public support for bringing the troops home. The American people are tired of foreign military engagements, or so the pundits tell us; they’re tired of Afghanistan, tired of Iraq, tired of Syria, tired of terrorism, tired of the Middle East—just plain tired. The chattering classes agree, academics agree, Democrats almost unanimously agree, and even some Republicans agree.

They are all wrong.

The basic national security goal that all U.S. leaders must pursue is to define their country’s strategic interests and how to protect them. Politicians must then justify how they propose to defend the country against external threats and to muster the necessary resources. When leaders do not explain hard realities, the public’s resolve flags, which politicians then use to justify their own hesitancy to make hard decisions. In effect, weak politicians switch cause for effect, levying responsibility on the people instead of themselves. Under Trump and former President Barack Obama, and now perhaps Biden, it wasn’t the public that was weak but its leaders, who were unwilling or unable to do their job.

Afghanistan proves the point. If the Taliban return to power in all or most of the country, the almost universal view in Washington today is the near certainty that al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and others will resume using Afghanistan as a base of operations. On April 14, Biden said that terrorism had evolved since the 2001 assault on the Taliban and that “the threat has become more dispersed, metastasizing around the globe.” Of course it has. That’s because the United States and its NATO allies have substantially denied al Qaeda its preferred safe haven for 20 years. Terrorists had to go elsewhere, seeking Middle Eastern or African zones of anarchy, because they had no choice. But make no mistake: Afghanistan, more remote particularly from the United States, is their preferred staging ground.

Washington didn’t create the threats, and the withdrawal won’t make them disappear.

In Biden’s own words, the United States obviously cannot “ensure” that terrorists will not again use a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan as a base to strike the U.S. homeland. Biden recognizes this danger by saying the United States will maintain “our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region” to guard against a future strike. Blunt geography, however, shows Biden is wrong to think that the United States can have comparably effective counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering assets after departing Afghanistan. After all, Osama bin Laden settled there after being expelled from other countries precisely because its remoteness made it attractive. The map hasn’t changed.

And what exactly is the United States doing today in Afghanistan? To the proponents of withdrawal, it has been 20 years of endless, daily, bloody combat. But this narrative is false, especially during the last seven years following the transition of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force into Operation Resolute Support. Afghanistan remains extraordinarily dangerous, and there have been casualties, but the last U.S. combat death occurred in February 2020. Moreover, there is no proof of real financial savings from withdrawing the approximately 3,500 remaining U.S. military personnel; the costs for Washington may well increase after the withdrawal because of the greater distances that must be overcome for any future operations.

Moreover, U.S. allies are performing a key mission in Afghanistan: training, advising, and assisting the Afghan National Army and other security forces. This is not combat. The roughly 10,000 troops from NATO members and nonmembers deployed as part of Resolute Support are a much-reduced presence from the International Security Assistance Force’s peak of 130,000. Their departure alongside that of U.S. troops is a severe blow to a free Afghanistan.

Concededly, the United States has spent enormous sums on so-called nation-building activities in Afghanistan, with precious little to show for it. It never should have been the United States’ objective to create a Central Asian Switzerland, even if it had the ability to do so, which it does not. But it is an even graver mistake to conclude that because Washington wasted resources on the wrong objective before, withdrawal is now justified. The United States hasn’t engaged in nation-building for many years and has long moved beyond these costly mistakes.

Supporters of withdrawal assert that the United States has tried long enough to enable the Afghans to defend themselves and that U.S. responsibilities are over. Those making this argument miss the key point that it is U.S. security that is at stake, not Afghan military competence. Washington and its allies are not there to protect Afghans against Taliban solely for their sake but to protect against the terrorist threat to Western nations that has previously emanated from the petri dish of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and would do so again.

To that end, the United States concentrates on gathering information on possible terrorist threats through a variety of mechanisms, not just the military. It is, however, the military presence and a considerable logistical base that enable much of this critical work. And it is in-country U.S. armed forces, which can scale up rapidly, that provide confidence that no sustained terrorist threat can reemerge while the United States remains. Removing the troops removes a key predicate.

Biden, having in effect tacitly admitted that the United States has not achieved its basic objective of safeguarding the homeland, then complains that new objectives have been established. That is true; reality has changed since the initial victory over the Taliban and al Qaeda. But it is hardly a radical departure for the United States to remain overseas for long periods when it has substantial interests there, even if those interests change dramatically. Biden is quick to say he is restoring U.S. leadership in NATO—yet there have been no complaints that the United States has had troops garrisoned in Germany for over 75 years since destroying the Third Reich. The same goes for Japan and South Korea. With U.S. troops remaining in those places, Trump could say that Biden is not following their shared rhetoric to end “forever wars.”

Long-term deployments in dangerous places can be required by long-term threats to the United States. Washington didn’t create the threats, and the withdrawal won’t make them disappear. The war against terrorism is unlike 19th-century conventional warfare not because the United States made it so but because the terrorists did. Even conventional warfare is changing, as we are seeing in cyberspace and the varieties of asymmetric and hybrid warfare being developed and deployed by adversaries hoping to leverage their smaller strengths against Western weaknesses. The war against terrorism is open-ended in the same way the struggle against international communism was open-ended. Many of the same people who disliked having to defend the United States in the Cold War—and their ideological successors—dislike having to defend the country against terrorism. Too bad the United States’ enemies won’t give it a break.

Among other reasons to stay in Afghanistan is keeping watch on the risks emanating from Iran and Pakistan. These are clear cases where geographic proximity has no substitute. Iran’s continuing nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs; its unwavering support for terrorist groups such as the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah; and its belligerent conventional military activity around the Middle East all mark it as an aspiring regional hegemon whose near neighbors have become increasingly anxious. Afghanistan is an excellent, proximate location to keep an eye on things inside Iran. Moreover, a Taliban takeover, which could lead to a distinctly fragmented pattern of Afghan government, would undoubtedly increase Iran’s influence in western Afghanistan as before, to the United States’ distinct disadvantage.

Perhaps Biden is turning into a modern-day George McGovern, the Vietnam-era Democratic presidential nominee who made “come home, America” his mantra.

A U.S. withdrawal may be even riskier with respect to Pakistan. If the Taliban resume control in Kabul, this can only encourage the Pakistani Taliban and other Islamist radicals, including within the Pakistani intelligence services. Since Partition in 1947, Pakistan has never had a reliably stable government. Instead, to paraphrase the famous jibe against Prussia: Where some states have an army, the Pakistan Army has a state. If Islamabad’s government fell to the radicals, terrorists would possess a significant number of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, not only threatening India and others but also risking the proliferation of nuclear weapons to terrorists worldwide. For Washington, this is perhaps the most dangerous consequence of the Taliban retaking power in Afghanistan, yet it rarely receives significant attention.

Moreover, ignoring the follow-on effects of a U.S. Afghanistan withdrawal on Iran and Pakistan does not augur well for Biden administration’s national security policies globally. The United States’ continuing and probably growing strategic struggle with China and Russia, the critical need to prevent the further accumulation of weapons of mass destruction by North Korea and Iran, and the threat of proliferation more broadly should be matters of enormous concern. Weakness and self-congratulation are often contagious.

Recently, media commentators have breathlessly proclaimed that Biden is governing much further to the left in domestic affairs than most people predicted. Perhaps the same is coming true in the international arena—and Biden is turning into a modern-day George McGovern, the Vietnam-era Democratic presidential nominee who made “come home, America” his mantra. Unfortunately, that call is a dream, not a strategy. It is not a dream that ends well.