Russia and the Return of Civilizations in the Near East – Part I

January 21, 2020

By Dr. David Wurmser
January 21, 2020

As the new year begins, the Middle East looks eerily similar to the way it has for the last several new years’ eves. Despite civil war in Syria and Libya, those who based their prognosis on the persistence of the reigning paradigm appear vindicated. That paradigm rested on several assumptions. First, the savviness of the rulers of the Arab states, along with the predictability of the traditional opposition (namely the Muslim Brotherhood) survived as the foundation for understanding the region. Second, the outlier power, both geographically and religiously, namely Iran, remains the greatest challenge. Third, the outlier revolt, namely ISIS or al-Qaida, while disturbingly resilient, failed to genuinely challenge the predominance of the ruling elites or established opposition of any Arab nation, and thus remains contained. And fourth, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains at the edge of eruption and thus begs resolution.

And yet, as George Elliott observed in Silas Marner, “The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.”

In fact, the warning signs of change are present that very little of what has been will continue to be. In short, as we enter the new year and decade, our understanding of the architecture of the Middle Eastern politics will founder, our imagination will be challenged, and an entirely new “shape” driven by hitherto ignored or nigh-invisible forces will define the Middle East.

In an article making waves, especially among those who are still seeking to realize their dream first articulated during the initial “Arab Spring” that Google and the internet would transform the region, Jonathan Alterman at the Brzezinski Center, believes his studies reveal a rise of individualism informing the current wave of demonstrations in the fertile crescent capitals.

Were such individualism to emerge, then it would indeed upturn the established order. And yet, such a rise in individualism would be startling since it contradicts the essence of familial, social, political, economic and religious life among Arabs Muslims, the culture of which is an amalgam of tribal and communal structures of safety and protection and a theological sense of being on the historically right side of revelation – itself also an intangible structure of protection. Neither pillar serves as a firm foundation for individualism, and in fact, gravitates against it. Thus, if there is indeed a rise in individualism, it would mean a cultural, religious and indeed civilizational shift in these communities. As such, the optimism in the liberal West that the Arab world is finally beginning to modernize would be warranted.

But cultures and civilizations do not easily change. In fact, the historical record shows that their persistence over eras and upheavals is stunning. Indeed, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the Ancient Regime, the underlying culture even after such a cataclysmic event as the French Revolution survived; its structures and patterns just assumed new masters derived from the disillusioned back benches of the old elites. Two thousand miles away, and a century later, the same observation could have been made about the Middle East after the Ottoman collapse: Arab-Ottoman elites, many of whom naturally even spoke Turkish rather than Arabic, who had become increasingly frustrated with the rise of Turkish nationalism rose to take over the residue of the Ottoman imperial administration after the war and became the new elite (in many ways not even new, but now just independent) of the old but now fragmented structures. Students of Russian history would probably make the same observations of the transition from Czar to commissar. Simply put, cultures, absent a millennially traumatic event or population shift, do not change much, and even then, only slightly.

What then are we to make of the rise of individualism Alterman appears to identify? What Alterman detects may be accurate, but something else is afoot than the rise of a classically liberal concept of individualism. Sadly – because it is not in the American interest either as a nation or as the leader of Occidental civilization – the Russian leadership may be ahead of the U.S. in understanding this idea. Thinkers and theologians like Alexander Dugin and Tikhon Shevkunov may or may not be close confidents of Vladimir Putin’s – there are conflicting assertions – but they and their associates clearly are attuned to Putin’s strategic mindset. Specifically, they view the course of history through the prism of the persistence of ancient culture and civilization in shaping identities and geopolitics, including in the modern era. 1

Russia envisions itself on the one hand as the true heirs to Byzantium (leaders of the Orthodox church, indeed all Christendom, in all variations), which explains why the greatest historians of the Byzantium were Russian, led by the greatest of them all, Alexander Vasiliev. On the other hand, some see Russia as the fusion of pre-Christian Mongolian and early (even pre-schismatic) Orthodox-Christian European identity, which its intellectuals call “Eurasianism.” Indeed, while Putin has focused on the post-Christian soul of Europe as evidence of its decline and fall, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin himself at other times defined Russian foreign policy as moored to it being a Eurasian bridge, which is both Mongolian and European.2 This “Eurasian” outlook divides the world into vertical axes, with Russia being the northern anchor of the axis reaching into the Asian Middle East, while western Europe moors the north of the axis spreading southward into Africa.

Part and parcel of the belief held by Russian theorists is that Russia is “Eurasian.” Russia also imagines itself as the savior of a perishing European civilization that has abandoned both its Christian and European civilizational foundations for a multicultural, liberal ratatouille with a chaotic and drifting identity. Russia offers itself as the model – pre-Renaissance Christianity and strong (authoritarian) leadership — for Europe’s return to sanity. Indeed, there is even a rebellion within the Russian church to establish a mythically pure version of the Orthodox church – represented by Father Tikhon Shevchuk – against the “corrupted,” Europeanized church clergy influenced by western ideas of liberalism since the Great Schism and Renaissance, an embrace which is seen as responsible for Orthodoxy’s long decline.

This view of history as the re-assertion of culture and civilization of a millennium ago (not just pre-World War I) has led Russia’s strategists, who are also stripped of any notion of the universal aspiration of individual freedom, almost effortlessly to identify trends in the Middle East largely still invisible to Western eyes or distorted by our unflinching confidence in the spread and eventual triumph of universal human freedom. Specifically, we in the West continue to look at the Middle East as a collection of over 20 states, currently under stress, and rend by regional rivalries over ideologies, such as Arab nationalism, Islamism, or Sunni-Shiite tensions, but still operating within the framework of the Sykes-Picot post World War I partition. Moreover, we in the West still view Israel as the odd-man out, Turkey as no longer a wholly Middle East state, but a Europeanizing work in progress. Warts and all, we still view this structure as a workable foundation of a slow march toward modernity and “normal” international politics.

In contrast, while Russia almost certainly continues to view these ideological rivalries as relevant, it also views them being played out through deeper, more primordial structures. Being attuned to the resilience and power of culture and civilization to move history, Russia sees more clearly than we do that the region already is entering the post-Sykes-Picot system. The Middle East state system is in collapse and emerging in its wake are several core civilizational entities around which the region will be defined going forward. The control of, or alliance with, either Russia or the West with those core civilizations will determine the course and fortunes of those ideological rivalries.

So, the trend toward individualism – which is more accurately described as a revolt of individuals against the abusive state – is marked not by traditional rivalries, such as Shiites revolting against Sunni rule or vice versa, but Shiite Lebanese, Iraqis and Iranians revolting against Shiite rulers. And yet, at the moment, we do not see this spreading into Amman, Riyadh, Doha, Manama or Dubai. The explanation may well be that domination in the fertile crescent of Arab identity, which in the end remained ultimately nomadic and thus entirely social, is being rattled by the temptation — which is driven by rejection of the abysmal state of governance across the Muslim world — of nostalgic forms of identity, such as Persian, Pheonician/Crusader, Byzantine. Attended by an untethered sense of social belonging and identity caused by failed governance, the populations of older civilizational remnants appear to be re-asserting their attributes against the Arab, essentially nomadic overlay, which is inherently more familial, tribal or communal.

In contrast, upheaval in societies at the heart of Arab culture to the south of the Arab Crescent (such as in Amman), or among Sunni tribes across the Asia Middle East, appears to seek new structures of patronage to fulfill a distinctly non-individualist identity and reestablish stability and safety. It is a retreat into looking for the framework of the comforting, all-encompassing father-leader-family sort. Hence the attraction of the ISIS/al-Qaida model, as well as some sort of weird love-hate attraction to Israel and the West emerging since they represent “safety.” They are not running away from “tribe,” “father” or “family,” but seeking to replace it with another version.

In these nostalgic forms of opposition, inherently urban populations – such as those in the fertile crescent cities — assume a greater self-motivating, self-guiding, and self-realizing form, namely individualism. As such, what Alterman discerns may not be first sign of the entry into the Islam of what the West would like to see as enlightened modernism, but really the beginning of the nostalgic re-assertion of the urban civilizations of the fertile crescent, with all the chaotic and often individualistic elements of urban culture, against their Islamic overlay with its heavily nomadic overtones of community-based structures of protection. Indeed, these demonstrators in Beirut and Nabatiyah, in Baghdad and Najaf, and in Tehran and Mashhad, are employing the language of asserting rights, not seeking protection. They accuse their rulers of having stolen from them, trampled on them and violated them – namely the language of a sovereign citizen (i.e., member of a city) challenging his government. In contrast, demonstrations among counterparts in other parts of the Middle East appear to focus more on accusing rulers of having failed to provide security for their person, protect their families, deliver them proper welfare, or act with sufficient noblesse and fairness to their communities – all forms of language appropriate for tribal members petitioning a chief.

So what are those cultural-civilizational centers which are emerging and which the Russians appear to have more adeptly identified than we? In the Asian Middle East (east of Suez), there are primarily three urban cultures/civilizations —the Byzantine remnant, the Indo-Persian ancient “Aryan” cultural-civilizational bloc, and the Jews resurrected in Israel — and two additional nomadic-imperial cultures/civilizations – the Ottoman-Mongolian revival carrying the banner of Islam and Sunni Muslim (tribal) Arab culture. We will examine how Russia’s civilizational concept of foreign policy, interacts with each in Part II of this series

Learn More About Dr. David Wurmser

Citations
1: https://www.memri.org/reports/contemporary-russian-thinkers-series-–-russian-anti-liberal-philosopher-alexander-dugin
2: https://www.memri.org/reports/understanding-russian-political-ideology-and-vision-call-eurasia-lisbon-vladivostok

Answering Erdogan’s Ambitions

December 17, 2019

By Dr. David Wurmser
December 17, 2019

Over the last several years, President Erdogan consolidated his grip on the structures of power, security, law, education and public discourse in Turkey. And yet, he recently suffered a humiliating electoral setback when an opposition leader was elected as mayor of Istanbul. Undaunted, President Erdogan used his domination of courts to annul the election, but during the rerun, he lost again but this time with so much larger a margin that he had no choice but to concede. Since his electoral defeat in Istanbul, he has turned his attentions increasingly into a more aggressive foreign policy along three fronts: first, an escalation of his involvement in Libya against Egyptian-supported factions; second, an invasion of northern Syria and now third, a controversial assertion of vast Turkish maritime claims subjecting the entire eastern Mediterranean Sea to Turkish domination.

In Libya, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) -led Turkish government, armed and supported (possibly even with mercenaries) the shrinking number of factions aligned with the Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA) head, Fayez Sarraj, including the Samoud Faction led by Muhammad ben Dardaf, one of the leaders of the raid on the US embassy in Benghazi until his recent untimely demise. After several Turkish shipments and agents were intercepted and exposed, Erdogan’s foremost strategic rival, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah as-Sisi, countered by launching a campaign to destroy the GNA via its own Libyan proxy, General Belqassim Haftar, whose Libyan National Army (LNA) exploded out of eastern Libya to take all but a small part of Western Libya surrounding the capital city of Tripoli. Ankara’s moves also met with significant pushback from France and the United States, both of whom shifted to a far more neutral position between the two Libyan blocs.

Although largely defeated in Libya last Spring, Erdogan has not yielded; he escalated his ambitions and surged strategically.

In Libya, the AKP-led Turkish government regrouped and escalated its involvement. Pro-AKP papers even boasted that Ankara was supplying the GNA with sophisticated and banned weapons as well as bragged that Turkish commanders were orchestrating and perhaps even directly participating in attacks on Haftar’s forces. 1

Absent a US response, Russia has taken its own advantage of the strategic vacuum.

Russia had during the Obama years exploited US opposition to Haftar and its coldness to Egypt to establish relations with the LNA. In September, Moscow saw Turkey’s escalation as an opportunity to escalate its own assistance to Haftar, to the point at which its mercenaries are reportedly present now in Libya. 2

In October, Turkey invaded Syria to depopulate a border cordon of “hostile” populations, such as Kurds, Armenians and other Christians (including in Ras al-Ayn to which Armenians refer as their “Auschwitz” for the slaughter of 80,000 Anatolian Armenians there in 1916). Turkey again ran up against a Russian response, as Moscow saw its own interests challenged in supporting the Assad regime and restoring his realm. Turkey was allowed to establish its border cordon, but at the cost of coming right up against Russian troops.

Finally, in November, Ankara signed the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) agreement with al-Sarraj’s Lilliputian Libyan realm. Far from a technical agreement adjusting and codifying maritime lines, the deal attempts to upturn the architecture of stability and security in the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey has not yet published the agreement and map which it deposited to the United Nations on December 7, but its diplomats and journalists have revealed most of its parameters. 3 Using a questionable argument about continental shelves and extending its zone out 200 miles from them, these maps:

annex a cluster of Greek islands (the Kastelorizo cluster) to Turkey,
strip the Greek islands of Rhodes and Crete of all their waters to the west,
wrap around Cyprus to such an extent that almost no territorial waters are left to the Greek entity in Nicosia, and
cut into waters claimed by Egypt to bring the Turkish line to abut Libya’s and bring it within 100-200 KM of the Libyan coast.

These claims reduce almost the entirety of the eastern Mediterranean to a Turkish maritime economic exclusionary zone which severs the remaining waters of Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and Syria from the west. Perhaps even more alarming is that Turkey’s maps erase whole island clusters (Kastelorizo) that are part of Greece, suggesting Ankara may intend their occupation.

Moreover, the former secretary general of the Turkish Defense Minsitery, Umit Yalim, also laid claim last year to most of the Greek island of Crete, and the islands surrounding it, stripping Crete of any territorial waters and opening up the waters to the west of Crete as a further expansion of Turkish territorial claims.

“At the present time, Greece should immediately evacuate and surrender to Turkey three quarters of the Island of Crete along with the five Turkish islands, being Gavdos, Dia, Dionisades, Gaidhouronisi, and Koufonisia, that surround it and which it holds under occupation. It should also immediately evacuate all its military units, including the Iraklion Air Station, which is in the Turkish region of the Island of Crete.” 4

The context, imagery, and climate surrounding Erdogan’s moves are as disquieting as the actual moves themselves. Turkey’s Libyan adventures, its invasion of northern Syria, and its assertion of a maritime zone at the expense of Greece, Cyprus, and Egypt are attended by the threatening language and symbolism of imperial expansion swirling under President Erdogan. President Erdogan himself often engages in inflated rhetoric, but he also uses two particular newspapers as his mouthpieces, namely Yeni Safak (the official AKP party paper) and Yeni Akit, and several favored commentators in its pages, especially Ibrahim Karagul (editor-in-chief of Yeni Safak) and Harun Sekman, to telegraph his ambitions and condition the Turkish people.

The language employed mixes foreboding despair with swaggering confidence. On the one hand, Turkey is portrayed as besieged by the world powers and their agents who are obsessed with and conspiring to destroy Turkey. After the EEZ deal, Ibrahim Karagul wrote:

“[E]nemies … were encircling Turkey and making plans to corner it in Anatolia and tear it to pieces. They were dividing the Mediterranean, completely eliminating Turkey from this sea – which was once a Turkish Lake – and making it impossible for us to breathe … All the countries that stood against the Ottomans in World War I were now on the anti-Turkey front in the Mediterranean” 5

The imagery of a historic siege sharpened early last summer, when Karagul described sending a drilling ship – provocatively named Barbaros Pasha after the Ottoman admiral who defeated Genova and consolidated Turkish control of the eastern Mediterrenean in the 16th Century — into Cypriot waters:

“There is no option other than to strengthen Turkey’s hand and make extraordinary defense preparations. … The threat is coming directly from the West and targeting Turkey’s existence. Sieging Turkey from the Mediterranean, the Aegean and the north of Syria, building fronts within the country are all preparations …” 6

And throughout, time is traversed as if collapsed into one moment; what happened in 1546 is as valid and active as in 2019, both in terms of the acute conspiracy against the Ottoman empire and the glorious Ottoman response. In other words, the verdict of the entire Ottoman empire’s half-millennium history, survival and legacy is being played out here and now under Erdogan. Karagul again:

“Consider it as part of a great showdown. Turkey’s game-changing legacy being propelled into action once again, the reconstruction of the multinational front aimed at eliminating this, and every location within our reach becoming battlefields of this showdown. Think with the destinies of the battles of Preveza [1538] and Lepanto [1571] in mind. It is as though the millennium-old political history has been carried over to the present and squeezed into a few years. This is the kind of struggle we are putting up … [E]very activity, every intervention, every defense from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, from the Red Sea to the coasts of the Caspian should be considered a global intervention aimed at ‘stopping Turkey’ and an area of resistance against it. The vastest international coalition after the Çanakkale war is surrounding Turkey.” 7

On the other hand, Turkey is portrayed as a global power, on par with the superpowers.

“[W]hen we include our seas, territorial waters, continental shelf as well, Turkey’s surface area grows to an extraordinary scale. This leads to radical changes when we look at the map… This massive country grows greater in our eyes… If we take into account Turkey’s ethnic area, we see a spectacular power from Europe to Asia, the Middle East to the depths of Africa.”

And its aims are equally vast, causing the world’s powers quake in fear:

“We are rediscovering the ‘memory’ that allows us to see the region, political history, our nation’s political codes, our history-maker and region-builder role, our perception of Turkey, our perception of the Ottomans and Seljuks, and to see all these in a single picture… This means great changes not only for Turkey but the entire region. It means tremors, earthquakes are on the way. It means the entire established order will crumble… The Seljuks are back; the Ottomans are back; the showdowns from World War I are back; the Anatolia defense is back; the claims of past centuries are back; in brief, everything that belongs to us is back. We have seen that they are all ours, they belong to us.” 8

Erdogan himself on December 9 placed Egypt, Israel and Cyprus on notice that the development of their hydrocarbons assets in the Levant and Nile Delta basins demand Turkish approval, since any gas transmission structure from the fields in either of the three countries would now have to pass through Turkish maritime claims:

“With this new agreement between Turkey and Libya, we can hold joint exploration operations in these exclusive economic zones that we determined. There is no problem, …Other international actors cannot carry out exploration operations in these areas Turkey drew (up) with this accord without getting permission. Greek Cyprus, Egypt, Greece and Israel cannot establish a gas transmission line without first getting permission from Turkey.” 9

Evoking the Ottoman golden age of dominance in the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey is again on offense and schooling the great powers in Turkey’s global superpower capabilities through the painful lesson of humiliation. Karagul wrote in early December:

“Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha returns after 473 years… The real ruler of the Mediterranean is back. The Turkey-Libya deal changed the nautical map; the Sevres Plan [Which Divided The Ottoman Empire In 1920] blew up in their face … The deal between Turkey and Libya not only ruined all plans over the Mediterranean but it also showed the world that Turkey has a Mediterranean map.” 10

And the commentators increasingly dispense with the word “Turkey” to describe the country and employ ever more often instead the term “Ottoman” to both evoke and blur the distinction between nationalism and Islamism. The drilling ship, the Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha, was described not as a Turkish vessel, but as an “Ottoman frigate.” 11

President Erdogan signals his policy to his ranks through these editors and journalists, and at times to the broader population. As such, these series of articles should be seen less as analysis or observation, but potentially as a blueprint crafted by Erdogan himself.

While it is foremost a European interest to respond to this, the EU will unlikely follow through on its initial protests. Erdogan will assert his leverage, which includes: 1) threatening to open the mass immigration floodgates of refugees to Europe, a threat against which Europe really has no response, therein terrifying the EU’s elites, who fear a strong populist European anti-refugee reaction, and 2) threaten to release ISIS terrorists. Europe is simply not equipped to confront such threats effectively, so they will feel immense pressure to de-escalate. Ankara will feel emboldened and act yet more aggressively toward Greece because of this, and Erdogan’s dangerous transformation of his nation culturally by enflaming imperial ambitions and revanchism will accelerate.

A strong American response could bring this imperial chest-thumping to an end, especially were the US fleet to take up a presence near the “erased” islands of Kastelorizo and craft a coalition among several eastern Mediterranean allies under American leadership. While not militarily negligible, Turkey does not have a history of suicidal military adventurism. Nor is its current rise fueled by real power projection, but by indulgence. Turkey’s population is divided, with Erdogan always in danger of losing his grip electorally, as the elections in Istanbul showed earlier this year. Indulgence-delivered victories validate his leadership, but military conflict resulting in failure would indict it – and Erdogan appears to understand that.

And yet, Russia appears more likely to act than the U.S. as its moves in Libya and in Syria recently suggest. During the Obama administration, when tensions first emerged over Turkish attempts to assert its presence in Greek Cypriot waters, the United States not only failed to defend its NATO ally, Greece, over Cyprus, but subcontracted to the Russians to send a carrier (Admiral Kuznetsov) and missile cruiser to stand Ankara down. Since then, the Russians have had a standing fleet in the eastern Mediterranean. Yielding again to the Russians to restrain Erdogan would continue the Obama-era policy of abdicating to a Russian naval presence based in Syrian ports the traditional stabilizing role provided by the US Sixth Fleet.

Learn More About Dr. David Wurmser

Citations

1: https://www.yeniakit.com.tr/haber/libyadaki-ser-ittifakina-turk-darbesi-bae-ve-haftere-osmanli-tokadi-931595.html
2: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/world/middleeast/russia-libya-mercenaries.html
3: https://www.ekathimerini.com/247070/article/ekathimerini/news/turkish-diplomat-posts-map-with-anakaras-view-of-continental-shelf and http://www.dailysabah.com/politics/2019/12/01/experts-eastern-mediterranean-deal-with-libya-signals-turkeys-future-deeds-in-region/amp
4: https://www.memri.org/reports/former-secretary-general-turkish-defense-ministry-writing-prior-turkish-president-erdoğans
5: https://www.memri.org/reports/celebrating-turkey-libya-agreement-editor-akp-mouthpiece-pens-historical-blueprint-return
6: https://www.memri.org/reports/turkish-pro-government-daily-turkish-oil-exploration-ship-sent-north-cyprus-ottoman-frigate
7: https://www.memri.org/reports/turkish-pro-government-daily-turkish-oil-exploration-ship-sent-north-cyprus-ottoman-frigate
8: https://www.memri.org/reports/celebrating-turkey-libya-agreement-editor-akp-mouthpiece-pens-historical-blueprint-return
9: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-libya-erdogan/erdogan-says-turkey-and-libya-can-hold-joint-exploration-in-eastern-med-idUSKBN1YD23G
10: https://www.memri.org/reports/celebrating-turkey-libya-agreement-editor-akp-mouthpiece-pens-historical-blueprint-return
11: https://www.memri.org/reports/turkish-pro-government-daily-turkish-oil-exploration-ship-sent-north-cyprus-ottoman-frigate

Secretary Pompeo Remarks to Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS

February 08, 2019

Secretary Pompeo delivers remarks at the State Department on the fight against ISIS and the future of Syria.

This article appeared on C-SPAN on February 6, 2019. Click here to view the original page.

John Bolton Unveils Trump Administration’s New Africa Strategy

December 17, 2018

In a speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., National Security Adviser John Bolton unveils a newly approved strategy toward Africa.

This article appeared on C-SPAN on December 13, 2018. Click here to view the original page.

John Bolton on National Security Strategy

December 17, 2018

National Security Adviser John Bolton discussed the Trump administration’s strategy on Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia at an event hosted by the Alexander Hamilton Institute.

This video appeared on C-SPAN.com on October 31, 2018. Click here to view the original page.

Bolton Warns Iran: If You Cross Us There Will Be ‘Hell to Pay’

October 06, 2018

This article appeared in The Jewish Voice on September 26, 2018. Click here to view the original article.

National Security Adviser John Bolton on Tuesday issued a warning to Iran, telling the regime in a fiery speech in New York that there will be “hell to pay” if it continues on its current course.

“If you cross us, our allies, or our partners … yes, there will indeed be hell to pay,” said Bolton, who was quoted by Fox News, in a speech before the United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) annual summit.

“According to the mullahs in Tehran, we are ‘the Great Satan,’ lord of the underworld, master of the raging inferno,” Bolton said. “So, I might imagine they would take me seriously when I assure them today: If you cross us, our allies, or our partners; if you harm our citizens; if you continue to lie, cheat and deceive, yes, there will indeed be hell to pay.”

“The ayatollahs have a choice to make. We have laid out a path toward a bright and prosperous future for all of Iran, one that is worthy of the Iranian people, who have long suffered under the regime’s tyrannical rule,” added Bolton.

Iran, he continued, “brazenly supports the criminal Assad regime in Syria” and was “complicit in Assad’s chemical weapons attacks on his own people.” He also called Iran the world’s “worst kidnapper of US citizens.”

Bolton also dismissed the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran, saying it was “the worst diplomatic debacle in American history.”

President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran deal in May. Recently, the President signed an executive order officially reinstating US sanctions against Iran.

The deal contained numerous provisions — including “weasel words,” Bolton said Tuesday — that White House officials found insufficient, such as limited inspection mechanisms to ensure Iran’s compliance with the deal, as well as sunset provisions that would lift various restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in as little as 10 years.

The deal “did nothing to address the regime’s destabilizing activities or its ballistic missile development and proliferation. Worst of all, the deal failed in its fundamental objective: permanently denying Iran all paths to a nuclear bomb,” continued Bolton.

“The United States is not naïve,” he stressed. “We will not be duped, cheated, or intimidated again. The days of impunity for Tehran and its enablers are over. The murderous regime and its supporters will face significant consequences if they do not change their behavior. Let my message today be clear: We are watching, and we will come after you.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Trump addressed the UN General Assembly in New York City and slammed the Iranian regime, noting its leaders “sow chaos, death, and destruction” and “do not respect the sovereign rights of nations.”

“We cannot allow the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism to possess the planet’s most dangerous weapons. We cannot allow a regime that chants ‘Death to America,’ and that threatens Israel with annihilation, to possess the means to deliver a nuclear warhead to any city on Earth. Just can’t do it,” he said.

“We ask all nations to isolate Iran’s regime as long as its aggression continues. And we ask all nations to support Iran’s people as they struggle to reclaim their religious and righteous destiny.”

Bolton Speech Underscores Trump Administration Putting America First On The Global Stage

October 06, 2018

This article appeared at The Hudson Institute on September 17th, 2018. Click here to view the original article.

National Security Advisor John Bolton delivered a blockbuster speech at an event hosted by the Federalist Society last Monday, about how monumentally dumb and dangerous the International Criminal Court is for America.

The ICC is a multinational organization established by the Rome Statute. President Bill Clinton signed on to the statute in 2000 but never submitted the international treaty to the Senate. President George W. Bush then unsigned the treaty. President Barack Obama never signed the treaty, but he was friendly to it and cooperated with the ICC.

Bolton made the Trump administration’s position on the ICC ultra-clear in his speech:

“The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court. We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us.”

It was a powerful rejection of the court. But that’s not all it rejected, and to singularly focus on the ICC misses larger principles that will surely guide the administration’s decisions about other international agreements. Three principles stood out.

The United States Is Not the Peer of Somalia

First, not all countries are equally bad or equally good; the United States is a force for good and rejects the notion that the United States, just like other nations, must be constrained.

“The largely unspoken, but always central, aim of its most vigorous supporters was to constrain the United States,” Bolton said. “The objective was not limited to targeting individual US service members, but rather America’s senior political leadership, and its relentless determination to keep our country secure.”

Second, American sovereignty abroad means possessing the ability to act freely in the world, and we must ultimately remain governed by our own Constitution. Bolton said:

“The court in no way derives these powers from any grant of consent by non-parties to the Rome Statute. Instead, the ICC is an unprecedented effort to vest power in a supranational body without the consent of either nation-states or the individuals over which it purports to exercise jurisdiction. It certainly has no consent whatsoever from the United States. As Americans, we fully understand that consent of the governed is a prerequisite to true legal legitimacy, and we reject such a flagrant violation of our national sovereignty.”

Third, international law, treaties, and agreements, while not necessarily useless, are not intrinsically good, either. Nor are they ultimately responsible for restraining evil.

“The hard men of history are not deterred by fantasies of international law such as the ICC. The idea that faraway bureaucrats and robed judges would strike fear into the hearts of the likes of Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Stalin, and Gaddafi is preposterous, even cruel. Time and again, history has proven that the only deterrent to evil and atrocity is what Franklin Roosevelt once called ‘the righteous might’ of the United States and its allies — a power that, perversely, could be threatened by the ICC’s vague definition of aggression crimes.”

ICC Isn’t the Only Agreement Being Reconsidered

This brings us to another newsy decision by the United States that made fewer and smaller waves than the ICC speech this week. The United States refused to certify Russia’s advanced Tu-214ON surveillance plane for inspections under the Open Skies Treaty. The Open Skies Treaty came into force in 2003. Its purpose is to foster transparency and to help verify compliance of other arms control agreements.

The U.S. government hasn’t issued a statement in response to the reports that it has denied certification of Russia’s surveillance plane, but it should not be missed that Russia has a long history of violating treaties and has continually and recently violated the Open Skies Treaty. In a congressional hearing last June, Secretary of Defense James Mattis said he was very concerned about Russian compliance. “We will be meeting with State Department and National Security staff here in the very near future. There certainly appears to be violations of it [the Open Skies Treaty],” he said.

Mattis was rather cryptic in the open hearing, but just a few months before the hearing the State Department published a report that outlined some of Russia’s violations, including prohibiting certain overflights. If the United States has decided it will no longer look the other way when Russia so brazenly violates the treaty, this supposed refusal to certify the surveillance plane is just the beginning.

Countries like Russia should take Bolton’s speech seriously. This administration is taking stock of agreements and treaties that do not serve American interests first. If a treaty is not serving the interests of the American people today, even if it did at some point in the past, and if it is constraining the United States while adversaries violate it, there is a good chance that treaty is close to its expiration date. So be it.

U.S. Officials Scrambled Behind the Scenes to Shield NATO Deal From Trump

August 15, 2018

This article appeared in The New York Times on August 9, 2018. Click here to view the original article.

WASHINGTON — Senior American national security officials, seeking to prevent President Trump from upending a formal policy agreement at last month’s NATO meeting, pushed the military alliance’s ambassadors to complete it before the forum even began.

The work to preserve the North Atlantic Treaty Organization agreement, which is usually subject to intense 11th-hour negotiations, came just weeks after Mr. Trump refused to sign off on a communiqué from the June meeting of the Group of 7 in Canada.

The rushed machinations to get the policy done, as demanded by John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, have not been previously reported. Described by European diplomats and American officials, the efforts are a sign of the lengths to which the president’s top advisers will go to protect a key and longstanding international alliance from Mr. Trump’s unpredictable antipathy.

Allied ambassadors said the American officials’ plan worked — to a degree.

Click here to finish this article on nytimes.com.

Russian assault on ‘American idea’ enables Trump to take tough action

February 19, 2018

This article appeared in The Hill on February 19, 2018. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
February 19, 2018

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s efforts are far from over, and definitive conclusions about his work must still abide the day. Even so, Friday’s announcement that a federal grand jury in Washington had indicted 13 Russian citizens and three Russian entities for interfering in the 2016 elections and thereafter is highly significant, domestically and internationally. Mueller must still prove his wire fraud, identity fraud and other charges beyond a reasonable doubt, but the indictment alone powerfully reflects a wide-ranging investigation.

Domestically, the political ramifications for Donald Trump are clearly beneficial. After more than a year of public accusations, uninformed speculation and prodigious leaking by members of Congress and the media, the indictment contains no Trump-related allegations of knowing involvement in or support for Moscow’s pernicious activities. Both the indictment itself and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s accompanying press conference describe the Americans manipulated by the Russian saboteurs as “unwitting” or “unknowing.”

Nor does the indictment allege that Russia’s machinations, which began in 2014, well before any announced Republican or Democratic candidates for the presidency, influenced the election’s outcome. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) previously put Moscow’s social media spending in proper perspective: The known $100,000 of Russian expenditures amounted to a mere 0.005 percent of the approximately $81,000,000 of total social-media outlays by the Clinton and Trump campaigns. Facebook vice president Rob Goldman himself tweeted that the majority of Moscow’s spending occurred after the election.

The safest conclusion based on currently available public information is that Russia did not intend to advantage or disadvantage any particular candidate and that Russia was not “supporting” anyone for president. Instead, its saboteurs sought to sow discord and mistrust among U.S. citizens, undermining our constitutional processes and faith in the integrity of our elections. Advertising or demonstrations for or against Trump or any other candidate were means to the Russian end of corroding public trust, not ends themselves.

Mueller’s indictment, while likely not his last, nonetheless undercuts both ends of the logic chain that many Trump opponents hoped would lead to impeachment. There is, to date, no evidence of collusion, express or implied, nor can it honestly be said that Russia was “pro-Trump.” What Trump rightly feared earlier, based on his political instincts, was that the notion of clandestine Kremlin support for his campaign would morph into the conclusion that his campaign must have colluded with Moscow.

Such cooperation has yet to find anything like real evidence to support it, but the danger of people jumping to that conclusion was both obvious and continuously stoked by anti-Trump media reporting, asserting or implying repeatedly what Russia and Trump were purportedly up to. Typically, the media’s ideological excess is their own worst enemy. They would rather play “gotcha” on Trump’s skepticism of Russian involvement than recognize that their fantasies of bringing down his administration are now undermined.

Accordingly, Mueller has afforded Trump a not-to-be-missed opportunity to pivot from worrying about unfair efforts to tar his campaign with the “collusion” allegation, toward the broader growing danger of Russian subversion. What happened in the 2016 campaign was graver even than the “information warfare” alleged in Friday’s indictment. This is, pure and simple, war against the American idea itself.

Hence, the international ramifications of the special counsel’s indictment: The White House can and should now pivot to the real task ahead, which is dealing strategically and comprehensively with Russia’s global efforts to enhance its influence. Interference in America’s election, much as it necessarily focuses our attention, is only a part of Moscow’s disinformation operations. Russian agents have repeatedly interfered in European elections, although the exact scope remains uncertain.

The Kremlin has conducted cyberwarfare against the Baltic republics, and old-fashioned conventional aggression against Georgia and Ukraine, including annexing Crimea. In the Middle East, during the Obama administration, Russia cemented a de facto alliance with Iran, built and expanded military facilities in Syria, sold weapons to U.S. allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and propped up Bashar Assad’s dictatorship in Syria.

Moscow has blatantly violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, while rapidly modernizing and expanding its strategic nuclear capability. Heretofore under President Obama, Vladimir Putin hardly had reason to fear that anyone would push back on anything. Finally, because of the overhang of the “Trump collusion” heavy breathing by his political opposition and the media, the Trump administration has neither developed nor deployed a coherent Russia policy.

But it’s never too late to start. Putin’s global aspirations are not friendly to America, and the sooner he knows we know it, the better. It is not enough, however, to file criminal charges against Russian citizens, nor are economic sanctions anywhere near sufficient to prove our displeasure. We need to create structures of deterrence in cyberspace, as we did with nuclear weapons, to prevent future Russian attacks or attacks by others who threaten our interests.

One way to do that is to engage in a retaliatory cyber campaign against Russia. This effort should not be proportional to what we have just experienced. It should be decidedly disproportionate. The lesson we want Russia (or anyone else) to learn is that the costs to them from future cyberattacks against the United States will be so high that they will simply consign all their cyberwarfare plans to their computer memories to gather electronic dust.

In Eastern and Central Europe, the White House needs to expand its efforts to strengthen NATO’s hand by persuading all its members to spend the bare minimum necessary for the alliance’s military resources. At the Munich Security Conference this past weekend, for example, a luncheon discussion on Ukraine produced many solemn pronouncements on Russia’s “violations of the rules-based international order.”

This was music to Moscow’s ears. Let Putin instead hear the rumble of artillery and NATO tank tracks conducting more joint field exercises with Ukraine’s military. That, and much more, will get his attention. An analogous response is warranted in the Middle East, where the White House is already laying a foundation for more robust responses to Russia’s probes. At rare moments in politics, unexpected events produce opportunities which must be seized before they disappear. The Russia indictment is one of them.

North Korea wins, America loses, with our Olympic appeasement

February 13, 2018

This article appeared in The Hill on February 12, 2018. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
February 12, 2018

Appeasing authoritarianism comes in many forms. All of them are ugly. Some are obvious and extremely dangerous, and some are subtle, indicating a mindset portending future danger because of a propensity to ignore reality. Opening the 23rd Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, prominent American media outlets displayed the latter appeasement mentality in full measure, becoming stenographers for North Korea’s propaganda machine. Reflecting boundless gullibility, representatives of our free press stepped up to carry Pyongyang’s message.

Virtually North Korea’s entire purpose for participating in these Winter Games was to generate just such reactions. Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship is seeking propaganda advantage of South Korean President Moon Jae In’s “sunshine policy” to make inroads into global public opinion, to split Seoul from Washington and Tokyo in dealing with Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs, and to distract America and the international community from the imminence of North Korea’s ability to target any spot in the world with nuclear weapons.

By agreeing to a “unified” team marching in Pyeongchang’s opening ceremonies, flying a flag showing an undivided Korean Peninsula, by forming a joint women’s ice-hockey team and by sending a large delegation of North Korean officials and “citizens” to support their athletes, Kim Jong Un played on the naïve and the gullible, of whom unfortunately there are all too many in both America and South Korea. The capstone of Kim’s propaganda campaign was the invitation to President Moon to visit Pyongyang for an inter-Korean summit. Delivered by the North’s nominal top official, Kim Yong Nam, and Kim Yo Jong, sister of the current dictator, the invitation was accepted reflexively.

Most noticeable initially about U.S. press coverage of these carefully programmed developments was the near-uniform lack of historical memory. Because the media either did not know or did not care about this history, the reporting carried the breathless excitement of something “new” that might lead to a diplomatic resolution of North Korea’s nuclear threat.

But Korean athletes have three times before marched as Olympic unified teams (in 2000, 2004 and 2006), under prior South Korean presidents who originated and followed “sunshine policies.” Moreover, there have been two earlier intra-Korean summits, in 2000 and 2007. Neither the unified Olympic teams nor the summits in any way impeded North Korea’s relentless progress toward achieving its goal of deliverable nuclear weapons.

Moreover, diplomatic progress is not possible here because Pyongyang’s purpose is not to “open a dialogue” for the umpteenth time with Seoul, Washington or Tokyo, but to conceal and distract from its menacing activities. Having the media fall for the “rapprochement” line rather than seeing the concealment motivation was precisely Kim’s objective. The U.S. media fully met his expectations. And then some. Vladimir Lenin is often credited with coining the phrase “useful idiots,” but even he would not have predicted the rhapsodizing we have seen.

Take, for example, a report by Morgan Winsor of ABC News describing the cheerleading cadre accompanying North Korea’s athletes: “Clad in coordinated outfits of red with white and blue accents, North Korea’s throng of more than 200 cheerleaders are stealing the spotlight at the 23rd Winter Olympic Games” as they “chant, sway and dance in unison.” I am assuredly not an aesthetics expert, but I saw the cheerleaders as a depressing manifestation of George Orwell’s novel, “1984,” not something that steals spotlights by their “synchronized chants” on behalf of the Korean team. Their “coordinated outfits” didn’t do anything for me either.

National Review editor Rich Lowry had it right when he tweeted to ask why ABC News didn’t realize “that what they are charmed by here is probably as close as you can get to a hideous real-world version of the ‘Handmaid’s Tale?’” Make no mistake, the well-fed visages of the cheerleaders mark them as among North Korea’s most privileged. Of course they perform vigorously. You would too in a society where lack of fealty to the regime is often a death sentence.

Next, enthralled by the combined North-South female hockey team, CNN reporter Aimee Lewis reported as matters of fact that “this women’s team became a tool for rapprochement” and that “not even the wildest optimist could have predicted recent events.” What exactly has happened recently? The joint team lost 8-0 to Switzerland, and many South Koreans resent that several of their female ice-hockey players were displaced by Pyongyang’s athletes. Without any reference to the vanishingly insignificant impact of this precise pattern in three previous Olympics, the real news is the number of reporters with the attention span of fruit flies.

Finally, consider the lionization of Kim Yo Jong, currently under U.S. sanctions for her role heading the ruling party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department. CNN’s Lewis dug into her trove of clichés to call her “the first member of Pyongyang’s ruling dynasty to set foot in the South” since the Korean War. Ruling dynasty? Sort of like the British royal family? There was, in truth, coverage of the brutal, dictatorial ways of the “ruling dynasty.” But reporters and their editors know, as does the North’s propagandists and scammers generally, that what typically matters most is what grabs quick headlines.

CNN wasn’t finished, however. Joe Sterling, Sheena McKenzie and Brian Todd wrote ecstatically that “if ‘diplomatic dance’ were an event at the Winter Olympics, Kim Jong Un’s younger sister would be favored to win gold.” She is the Ivanka Trump of North Korea, they “report,” and “not only a powerful member of Kim Jong Un’s kitchen cabinet, but also a foil to the perception of North Korea as antiquated and militaristic.” Words fail here.

While the media fun was unfolding, Pyeongchang’s Olympics organizers reported that their computers may have been hacked, and they are now investigating. Maybe those cheerleaders have other skills as well. Have reporters done any investigative work to ascertain where North Korea, under so much “pressure” of economic sanctions, found resources for the Olympics? Were they subsidized by South Korea, China or others, as has so often tragically been true, thereby subsidizing the dictatorship?

When P. T. Barnum allegedly said “there’s a sucker born every minute,” he may have been understating the problem. Not that you’d know it from our establishment media.

Securing America’s Interests In a Challenging World

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