{"id":39291,"date":"2018-05-14T14:30:57","date_gmt":"2018-05-14T04:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=39291"},"modified":"2018-05-14T14:14:20","modified_gmt":"2018-05-14T04:14:20","slug":"president-dangerously-trumps-good-sense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/president-dangerously-trumps-good-sense\/","title":{"rendered":"President dangerously Trumps good sense"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Donald Trump has just unshackled Iran from its commitment to mothball most of its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. He has wilfully unravelled a historic diplomatic triumph and arms control milestone\u2014which Iran signed in\u00a02015 not just with the\u00a0US, but with all five permanent members of the UN Security Council (plus Germany)\u2014and may have primed a new detonator in what\u2019s already the most combustible region in the world.<\/p>\n

The erratic US\u00a0president continues to unpick the legacy of Barack Obama, the predecessor he despises: withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership; pulling out of the Paris climate change accord; and now this histrionically muscular act of geopolitical arson\u2014in the same month that he\u2019s moving the US\u00a0embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, burying a two-state solution to the Israel\u2013Palestine conflict.<\/p>\n

Flanked by this chaotic White House\u2019s recent new signings\u2014ultra-hawks Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and John Bolton as national security adviser\u2014Trump has all but called for regime change in Iran. Bolton, lest we forget, doesn\u2019t believe in arms control<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This former ambassador to the\u00a0UN, who doesn\u2019t believe in multilateralism either, said on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in\u00a02003 that the\u00a0US would ease itself out effortlessly within six months, and more recently argued that the solution to Iranian nuclear ambitions is to bomb Iran<\/a>. Indeed the echoes of the build-up to Iraq\u2014and the shared belief in bombing your way to a better future\u2014are alarmingly uncanny<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What these pyromaniacs have actually done is to re-legitimise hardliners in Iran grouped around the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), the judiciary and the theocratic leadership. The 2015\u00a0accord re-energised the drive for change inside Iran. The IRGC and its supporters are now exulting after Mr Trump has come to their rescue by scuppering it.<\/p>\n

The pragmatist camp led by President Hassan Rouhani, architect of the accord, has been politically crippled. How can they still argue Iran should continue to honour an international deal the\u00a0US simply ripped up\u2014and systematically undermined<\/a> anyway through secondary sanctions\u2014or even stay inside the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran, with no atomic bomb, is a signatory but Israel, it nuclear-armed enemy, is not?<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s decision is also shredding the already badly frayed transatlantic alliance. He\u2019s not just breaking an agreement endorsed by the UN\u00a0Security Council. He\u2019s threatening key US\u00a0allies\u2014France, Germany and the UK\u2014and their companies and banks with sanctions unless they cease doing business with Iran within six months. China<\/a> and, to a lesser degree, Russia, may shrug this off.<\/p>\n

For Europe, this is an historic test. It was the\u00a0EU\u2014starting 12\u00a0years ago when Javier Solana ran its foreign policy\u2014that kept open lines to Tehran that enabled John Kerry to clinch a deal with Iran in Obama\u2019s second term. Twenty years ago the\u00a0EU successfully resisted US\u00a0attempts to punish European businesses under the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996<\/em>. That was under Bill Clinton, yet even George W. Bush sought to avoid clashes with its partners and continued the waiver policy.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0EU says it will act to protect its businesses. But the threat of excommunication from the US\u00a0market and banking system through the extraterritorial reach of the US\u00a0Treasury will shut down most trade and investment<\/a>. It will be hard for Europe to keep Tehran engaged and inside the nuclear deal unless it can offer some sort of quid for Iran\u2019s quo. But the alternatives are truly bleak.<\/p>\n

Within hours of Trump\u2019s decision\u2014which had been egged on by Israel and Saudi Arabia\u2014the Israeli air force struck what it said were Iranian targets south of Damascus (satellite imagery of which had been provided to Fox News in late February, a procedure now considered virtually a prelude to an air strike<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Israel has stood apart from the Syrian conflict, but attacked more than 100\u00a0times what it says are Iranian arms depots and convoys in Syria intended for Lebanon\u2019s Hezbollah, the Shia paramilitary power Tehran has sharpened into its regional spearhead. But the 8\u00a0May attack took place after Trump\u2019s nuclear demarche.<\/p>\n

Tehran evidently felt it had to reply. On 9\u00a0May, its Quds Force, the expeditionary unit of the IRGC, fired 20\u00a0missiles into the Golan Heights, Syrian territory that Israel occupied and annexed after the 1973\u00a0Arab\u2013Israeli war. Israel responded with a devastating wave of air strikes it claims hit all of Iran\u2019s assets in Syria\u2014the worst confrontation in Syria since\u00a01973 and the first direct conflict between Israel and Iran, raising the spectre of a new regional war spinning out of the vortex of the Syrian civil war.<\/p>\n

These may be warning shots. Israel has said it won\u2019t tolerate Iran and its proxies establishing a permanent presence in Syria, where alongside Russia\u2019s air force they have salvaged Bashar al-Assad\u2019s regime from the rebellion that began in\u00a02011. Nor can it live with Hezbollah\u2019s growing arsenal of missiles that can reach deep into Israel, especially if fitted with precision guidance that it says Iran is enabling at facilities in both Syria and Iran.<\/p>\n

Iran, which has gradually built a Shia corridor through Iraq to Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean, has crept ever closer to Israel\u2019s borders. It\u2019s also using its paramilitary muscle to consolidate political power and win a degree of legitimacy through popular endorsement of its proxies and allies at elections this month in Lebanon<\/a> and in Iraq.<\/p>\n

The sudden and brutal eruption of Islamic State after\u00a02014, and the perception that US\u00a0allies such as Saudi Arabia were betting on Sunni jihadism, has also won Iran and its friends prestige, especially among the region\u2019s minorities, as a shield against IS\u00a0barbarism.<\/p>\n

Iranian propaganda exploited this, pushing a story that but for Iran and its \u2018resistance\u2019 forces such as Hezbollah, the black banners of the jihadis would be flying over Baghdad and Damascus, and\u00a0IS would have broken into Beirut. Like all good propaganda, it contains a kernel of truth. But even the hardliners in Tehran are pragmatic. They\u2019ll want to respond but not put at unnecessary risk their regional gains.<\/p>\n

Yet there\u2019s now a clear danger that the game of chicken going on close to Israel\u2019s borders could turn Syria\u2014and probably Lebanon\u2014into a battlefield between Israel and Iran. Some strategists think this would be so destructive, including to Israel, that a sort of balance of terror will prevent it. Others speculate<\/a> that\u2014precisely because each side can so badly damage the other\u2014both might be tempted into a first-strike offensive.<\/p>\n

President Trump, cheering for regime change, has made a bad situation very much worse. As the International Crisis Group argues in a recent analysis<\/a> of Iran\u2019s regional motivations, \u2018the negotiations that led to the nuclear deal \u2026 succeeded not only because sanctions had inflicted acute pressure on Iran\u2019s economy, but also because the\u00a0US took regime change off the table\u2019.<\/p>\n

The power that may be best placed now to talk Israel and Iran down is Russia, which maintains links with both sides. Trump, with the self-satisfied flourish of the signature he so delights in showing the camera while surrounded by fawning courtiers, has largely written the\u00a0US out of the script.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump has just unshackled Iran from its commitment to mothball most of its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. He has wilfully unravelled a historic diplomatic triumph and arms control milestone\u2014which …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":436,"featured_media":39294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1428,247,240],"class_list":["post-39291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-donald-trump","tag-iran","tag-israel"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPresident dangerously Trumps good sense | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/president-dangerously-trumps-good-sense\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"President dangerously Trumps good sense | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Donald Trump has just unshackled Iran from its commitment to mothball most of its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. 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