By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday,
February 08, 2022
In Vienna, representatives from the
parties to the U.S.–Iran nuclear deal — which is either dead or dying — have
convened to jaw-jaw. Harold MacMillan once said (and Winston
Churchill did not) that jaw, jaw is better than war, war,
which it is — until it isn’t.
Under the Barack Obama administration, the
United States, Iran, and several other interested parties — Russia, China,
Germany, France, the European Union, and the United Kingdom — came to an
agreement that bore the simultaneously sterile and pretentious name “Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action,” five words that give the impression of saying
something without quite doing so. Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to some
limitations on its nuclear-development program, but not to the abandonment of
the program; in return, Iran was to receive relief from sanctions imposed
variously by the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations.
Like many of the big projects of the Obama administration, the JCPOA looked
better on paper than it turned out in practice.
Not that critics, especially on the right,
were especially impressed with the plan on paper. National Review writers railed against it, and, as a
presidential candidate, Donald Trump in his usual maximalist style called it
the “worst deal ever negotiated.” But as president, Trump had some trouble
getting out of JCPOA. Writing in National
Review in 2017, John Bolton, who would later serve as Trump’s national
security adviser, asked some uncomfortable questions:
Although
candidate Donald Trump repeatedly criticized Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear
agreement, his administration has twice decided to remain in the deal. It so
certified to Congress, most recently in July, as required by law. Before the
second certification, Trump asked repeatedly for alternatives to acquiescing
yet again in a policy he clearly abhorred. But no such options were
forthcoming, despite “a sharp series of exchanges” between the president and his
advisers, as the New York Times and similar press reports
characterized it.
Many
outside the administration wondered how this was possible: Was Trump in
control, or were his advisers?
At Steve Bannon’s request, Bolton drew up
a proposal for getting out of the JCPOA. The Trump administration, in
response, gave its usual kind of performance: a tantrum and a convulsion with
very little follow-up. Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, but left the hard work
undone. In his memo, Bolton had prescribed a program of sustained diplomacy
(“Early, quiet consultations with key players such as the U.K., France,
Germany, Israel, and Saudi Arabia” . . . “Prepare the documented strategic
case for withdrawal” . . . “A greatly expanded diplomatic
campaign should immediately follow the announcement, especially in Europe
and the Middle East” . . . “Develop and execute Congressional and public
diplomacy efforts to build domestic and foreign support,” etc.) but
very little of that happened at all, and practically none of it was executed
with any competence. Trump insisted that he had consulted extensively with U.S.
allies and that the United States and its critical partners were “unified in
our understanding of the threat,” which was obviously and transparently false.
The leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom put out a joint
statement of their “regret and concern,” insisting that the JCPOA had been
effective and that “the world is a safer place as a result,” which was also
obviously and transparently false. In the end, our European allies, along with
China and Russia, stuck with the JCPOA, though without the participation of the
United States this was effectively an almost purely formal matter.
About the JCPOA, the Europeans were wrong
on the substance, with Bolton having the better case:
The
JCPOA’s vague and ambiguous wording; its manifest imbalance in Iran’s
direction; Iran’s significant violations; and its continued, indeed,
increasingly, unacceptable conduct at the strategic level internationally
demonstrate convincingly that the JCPOA is not in the national-security
interests of the United States. . .
Even the
previous Administration knew the JCPOA was so disadvantageous to the United
States that it feared to submit the agreement for Senate ratification.
Moreover, key American allies in the Middle East directly affected by this
agreement, especially Israel and the Gulf states, did not have their legitimate
interests adequately taken into account.
But walking away — simply blowing up the
deal, denouncing it as a misadventure of the Obama administration, and then
reimposing sanctions — was not enough, in Bolton’s view:
U.S.
leadership here is critical especially through a diplomatic and public
education effort to explain a decision not to certify and to abrogate the
JCPOA. Like any global campaign, it must be persuasive, thorough, and accurate.
Opponents, particularly those who participated in drafting and implementing the
JCPOA, will argue strongly against such a decision, contending that it is
reckless, ill-advised, and will have negative economic and security
consequences. . . . We will need to assure the international community that the
U.S. decision will in fact enhance international peace and security. . . .
There were many directions that the United
States might have gone after leaving the JCPOA. David French
and Eli Lake each argued for regime change in Tehran, with the United States assisting and encouraging liberal-democratic
opponents of the ayatollahs’ regime. “The most urgent task now for Trump is
increasing the odds of success for Iran’s democracy movement,” Lake wrote. “We
must beat Iran on the battlefield,” French insisted, “not by invading or
declaring war but instead by ensuring the endurance and ultimate victory of our
allies in the proxy conflicts raging across the Middle East. We must not
abandon our allies in Syria, and we must not cede even an additional inch of
territory to the combined Iranian/Russian/Assad forces in that country’s
northeast. We should provide prudent and proper aid to Israeli efforts to
weaken Iranian-backed forces in Syria and Lebanon. And we must work to curb
Iranian influence in Iraq.”
That was excellent advice, which the Trump
administration mostly ignored, abandoning our
Kurdish allies in Syria. The
Biden administration, which is much closer to the Trump administration on key
issues such as national security and international relations than either camp
would care to admit (this should not surprise us — Trump is very much a man of
Biden’s generation and spent much of
his adult life as a big-city Democrat), continued the policy of general retreat, abandoning Afghanistan to
the Taliban. Biden makes the necessary conventional Atlanticist noises about
diplomacy and multilateralism and such, but, like Trump, he views U.S. global
security leadership mainly as a heavy national burden for which Americans go
unrecompensed. (If you think American leadership costs us too much, wait until
you see how much Chinese leadership costs us.) We could say with charity that
he does not bring quite as much passion or ambition to the issue of Iranian
nuclear ambitions as he does to the project of putting money into the pockets
of his labor-union cronies.
The Obama-Trump-Biden progression contains
many similar sequences. Take the so-called Affordable Care Act, another Obama
project that, like the JCPOA, was a sloppily built and poorly conceived program
that would have required something close to perfect execution to produce
something like a reasonably successful result. Republicans would have liked to
have done the same thing with ACA as they did with JCPOA: repeal it and walk
away without providing a better way forward. The Trump administration spent
four years being two weeks away from announcing its big health-care proposal
(Kubla Khan kept 5,000 mastiffs, and he still didn’t have enough dogs to eat
all that homework), but Republicans could never really build any consensus
behind anything except repealing the ACA, and they lacked the political will
even to do that.
There is a lot to be said for Republicans’
being the Party of “No.” (Sometimes,
there’s a case for being the Party of “Hell,
No!” but there is also a time to be the Party of “No, Thank You.”)
“No” is the most important thing for conservatives to say. But it isn’t enough.
Consider another Obama administration initiative, the illegal and
unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The Trump
administration rescinded that one, too, and was right to do so. But, then . . .
what? Programs such as DACA create their own constituencies, and these do not
simply evaporate when one presidential action is negated by a subsequent one.
As with the JCPOA, there were many ways that we might have
gone after DACA, but what happened in fact was that we ended the program and
then did approximately squat.
The Obama administration cooked up JCPOA.
The Trump administration killed it. The Biden administration is working
halfheartedly to revive it or something like it. And the result is that Iran is
today a much more advanced and capable nuclear power than it was in 2015 when
JCPOA was signed. Among other things, Iran has produced a substantial amount of
60-percent-enriched uranium, which has no civilian purpose and serves only as a
marker on the road to a nuclear weapon. “In other words,” as Senator Bob
Menendez put it, “Iran has already done most of the heavy lifting.”
It is good and necessary to say “No” in
both domestic and foreign affairs. It is the part after “No” that is giving us
some trouble. Sanctions are not entirely useless, but the
examples of Cuba, North Korea, and Iran must force us to conclude that they are
not the economic or diplomatic equivalent of bunker-busting weapons. Echoing
earlier bombastic rhetoric, Senator Menendez threatens Russia with “the mother
of all sanctions” instead of the “mother of all bombs,” and it is not quite the
same thing. But there is a great deal of diplomatic territory between sanctions
and bombs. Unfortunately, it requires sustained effort and offers very little
near-term political reward.
And if you will forgive me for closing
with the repetition of two things I keep coming back to, we have trouble with
the part after “No” for two main reasons: The first is that our foreign
policy is comprehensively dominated by domestic politics; it
is healthy and normal that domestic politics should influence foreign policy to
some considerable extent, but there must be something left over that is still
foreign policy itself unless our foreign affairs are to be completely absorbed
by the totemic contests of our ongoing domestic tribal rivalry. The second is
that the United States does not seem to know what it wants — from Iran, from
Russia, from China, from any other international relationship. We are like the
decadent Romans denounced by Coriolanus, citizens “that like nor peace nor
war.” But our relationship with Iran is at the moment neither peace nor war,
and that not-peace/not-war is going to be even uglier, more complicated, and
more dangerous if Tehran acquires nuclear weapons. We do not have very many
attractive options right now, and we will have even fewer against a nuclear
Iran.
The Redemption of Mike Pence
Writing under the headline “Good for Mike
Pence,” my colleague Phil Klein observes: “It
has become all too common for Republicans, confronted with obviously false and
reckless statements by Donald Trump, to either defend him or look the other
way. So it’s good to see that Mike Pence has criticized Trump — forcefully and
by name — for claiming that as vice president, he had the authority to overturn the
election.” A subsequent National
Review editorial bearing the headline “RNC Should
Take a Lesson from Mike Pence” adds: “We commend the example of Mike Pence.”
I do not disagree with my colleagues in
their general assessment, but I am not ready to hold up Mike Pence as a
commendable example. It is not as though January 6 came out of nowhere. Mike
Pence was an enthusiastic and exceptionally sycophantic servant of one of the
worst administrations this country has ever suffered under, and he spent four
years making excuses for the dishonesty, immorality, and incompetence of the
administration — and the man — he served. That kind of stink does not wash away
easily.
The state of Mike Pence’s soul is between
him and his God. The state of his judgment is between him and us. And Pence has
shown himself to have extraordinarily poor judgment. As Donald Trump comes
unraveled in his enforced retirement, a great many of his oxpeckers and apologists are rat-paddling away from that sinking ship as
fast as their little rat feet will take them, and I find it impossible to
admire Pence, at this late hour, for the grace and urgency of his rat-stroke.
So, yeah, good for Mike Pence for clearing
the lowest possible bar in Republican politics. Hooray.
Words About Words
Marc Short, formerly chief of staff to
Mike Pence, laments that President Trump was surrounded by “snake-oil
salesmen.” Which is true in the sense that Bozo was surrounded by clowns. But,
that notwithstanding, how is it that “snake oil” came to take on its current meaning?
Snake oil was, in fact, an actual folk
remedy in the United States dating back for many years. It may have been
brought to the United States by railroad workers from China, where snake oil
still is used as an arthritis remedy. Snake oil was offered as a cure for
everything from hearing loss to toothaches. Professional physicians came to be
vocal critics of the snake-oil salesmen — not because snake oil is snake oil,
but because products advertised as snake oil often contained no snake oil at
all. In fact, the makers of Clark
Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment were fined — $20! — under the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 for mislabeling
their product, which was made from beef fat. Publicity surrounding that case
probably was the origin of snake oil’s gradual transformation into a term of
abuse.
I get the feeling that this will be a
history that continues to be worth knowing.
Rampant Prescriptivism
Today, I will turn this feature over
entirely to a reader, who observes:
I’m listening to you and Charlie discuss
the lack of political diversity within the parties, and you keep referring to
them as homogenous. I believe the word you want is homogeneous. Homogenous is
a technical term the biologists came up with to talk about tissues that had
common origin (or purpose or some such), which goes beyond merely being similar
like the prior term homogeneous. Apparently, they confused even themselves
so they invented yet another word — homologous — to replace
it, and now we’re almost never correct to use homogenous. I
first discovered this once upon a time when writing about homogeneous transforms
and coordinate systems to characterize robotic control systems. I realized I
didn’t know why they were called that. I investigated to make sure I used the
right version of the term. Interestingly, homogeneous comes
from the Greek suffix genos so I’m not sure where the extra
“e” comes from, anyway. My Latin is not good enough to know whether to blame
the early scientists’ Latin for it. I’ve noticed a trend toward dropping the
last “e” in recent years that I assume is because we all grew up with homogenized
milk in our school lunches, and that sounds like such a better syllabic pairing
with homogenous than with homogeneous. But what kind of prescriptivists would
we be if we went with what sounds better instead of with how some 17th-century
scientist butchered a Greek neologism in a Latin text?
Guest Beast
In Closing
Apparently, we live in a time in which
Americans need it explained to them that the way you treat a peer-reviewed
scientific journal is not the way you treat a podcast from the guy who used to
eat bugs on Fear Factor. It is almost as if this is not about what
everybody is saying it’s about!
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