By Jim Geraghty
Monday, January 27, 2025
“We have lost deterrence in multiple theaters around the
world,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned
in his confirmation hearing January 15.
Deterrence came back fast, at least in some
corners of the world. Last week, this newsletter reported on the
Houthis announcing they no longer intended to target U.S. or U.K. ships, and
this weekend, a stunning report in the U.K. Daily Telegraph indicated that the
Iranian mullahs suddenly want to avoid any move that the United States could
perceive as “provocative”:
Iran has ordered its proxy forces
across the Middle East to exercise caution as the Islamic Republic fears an
existential threat following Donald Trump’s return to the White House, The
Telegraph has learned.
Officials have told commanders of
Iran-backed militias to avoid provocative actions that could escalate regional
tensions.
Commanders have also been
instructed to maintain defensive positions while avoiding any actions that
could be interpreted as aggressive by US forces or regional allies. . . .
“Forces and allies in the region
have been instructed to act with caution as [the regime] feels an existential
threat with Trump’s return,” one senior Iranian official told The Telegraph
from Tehran.
“In Iraq and Yemen, forces
have been told not to target any American assets, and if they do, they are
explicitly warned against using Iranian weapons,” the official added.
“They have been told to keep
defensive positions for a while and to avoid any actions that might provoke the
Americans.” [Emphasis added.]
On a separate battlefield, I have lamented that U.S. policy under Joe Biden was defined by an irrational,
paralyzing fear of being “provocative” to Russia or “escalation.” Finally,
some of America’s enemies are now worried about provoking or escalating
conflicts with us.
About a week ago, a gunman assassinated two hardline Iranian supreme court judges who handled death penalty cases, clerics Mohammad Mogheiseh and
Ali Razini, at the Palace of Justice in Tehran. A bodyguard was also injured:
Asghar Jahangir, a spokesman for
Iran’s judiciary, separately told Iranian state television that the shooter had
been an “infiltrator,” suggesting he had worked at the courthouse where the
killings took place.
Later in the day, Jahangir told
state TV that others were involved. “In this regard, some individuals were
identified, summoned or arrested and investigations of them have begun.”
One of the few silver linings to the Iranian mullahs
being such brutal bastards for a generation is that they make a lot of enemies,
so when a couple of supreme court judges get gunned down, there’s a long list
of suspects — the exiled Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, anyone
who felt wronged by the judges’ decisions over the years, the Israelis, etc.
Right now, Iran’s enemies are like sharks that smell
blood in the water. And the Telegraph report includes this revealing
detail:
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s
85-year-old supreme leader, even appeared to be wearing a flak jacket at the
funeral of two judges who were gunned down in Tehran last weekend — reportedly
over fear of attacks.
With his robes bulging at unusual
angles, Khamenei was pictured this week standing over the coffins of the men
said to have been assassinated inside the supreme court by an “infiltrator”.
“The fall of Assad has
intensified fears [in the regime],” the official said. “There are now fears
they may not be able to hold onto the country after witnessing what happened to
Assad, which no one here expected.”
“A large-scale operation is
underway to identify and arrest Israeli spies and infiltrators and there are
concerns that they may have infiltrated high-ranking offices.”
Back on December 9, when the Bashar al-Assad skedaddled
to Moscow, this newsletter declared, “Much like the winning contestant
on that old NBC reality show, the Iranian regime is the biggest loser.” The
consequences of that loss are piling up.
Rubio, during his confirmation hearing:
Iran and that regime is at its
weakest point in recent memory, maybe ever. Their air defenses have been badly
damaged. Their Shia crescent that they were trying to create has been badly
damaged in Lebanon and Syria where they’ve been basically forced and driven
out. Their economy is in shambles. They now are on some days having 6, 8, 12,
9-hour blackouts. They are on the verge of potentially, if not having done so
already, having to pull back on the energy subsidies that they provide people
in that country that are incredibly popular, and it would be unpopular to
reverse. So, they’re in a lot of trouble. And now what we need to be wise about
is the following. I imagine that within that regime, and I’m just saying this
because of common sense, there are two schools of thought.
There’s one group that’s saying
now is the time where we need to find ourselves an off-ramp. Not that we’re
going to turn into really nice guys, but we’re really in trouble here. We need
to find an off-ramp and buy ourselves some time. And then there’s another group
that’s probably saying, now is the time to prove that we are a nuclear power or
nuclear capable power enriched from 60 to 90 and press go. And that’s how we’re
going to buy ourselves immunity from foreign action. And this is a tenuous
moment in that regard, but it’s one we need to acknowledge. My view of it is
that we should be open to any arrangement that allows us to have safety and
stability in the region but one in which we’re clear-eyed.
Any concessions we make to the
Iranian regime, we should anticipate that they will use as they have used in
the past to build their weapons systems and to try to restart their sponsorship
of Hezbollah and other related entities around the region because they seek to
become the dominant regional power. That’s their stated goal, and it’s been
clear by the actions that they’ve taken.
The Iranian’s new “whatever you do, don’t provoke the
Americans” attitude is a welcome development, but it’s likely only going to be
a temporary reprieve from Iran’s aggression in the region. If Ayatollah
Khamenei keels over anytime soon — and remember, even Joe Biden can call him
old — Khamenei’s son Mojtaba is considered a front-runner to be the
next ayatollah. (Good thing the Iranians went through all that trouble to
get rid of the shah, just to get another hereditary monarchy, huh?) There are other options,
but it’s not like any potential ayatollah is going to push Iran into a more
moderate or pro-Western direction. At least for now, Iran is run by mullahs and
brutes and guys with deep-rooted issues toward women. (For this reason, our Noah Rothman argues that the only
long-term solution for the U.S. and the West regarding Iran is regime change.)
Rubio also added:
And let us not forget that this
is a group, these are individuals that have spent the last five years actively
and openly plotting the assassination of the president-elect and of multiple
members of previous administrations. Think about this for a moment. When is the
last time you heard that a foreign government is actively, openly and
admittedly seeking to assassinate the former Secretary of State, the former and
soon-to-be once again President of the United States and others? And that
people have been arrested for plotting that.
Good thing we’re protecting those former U.S. officials —
oh, wait.
And the sort of factoid that might interest only me: Iran
was only briefly mentioned twice during
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing.
‘The Most Powerful Person’ in 70 Years
A remarkable quote from an unidentified billionaire at
the Davos summit, quoted in the Wall Street Journal:
Trump occupied a grip on
the collective psyche of the power players gathered here, since his second
administration looms over all of the discussions and fireside chats. Their
decision-making ultimately depends on what he does in office. As one billionaire
and CEO in his 70s said with a bit of awe, Trump was “the most powerful person”
he’d ever seen in his life.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it over the weekend, the CIA, now under
the direction of John Ratcliffe, declared in a short released statement its
“analysts [are] saying they now favor the lab theory” for the origin of
Covid-19, “based in part on a closer look at the conditions in the high
security labs in Wuhan province before the pandemic outbreak.”
The U.S. intelligence community’s “gee, boss, we don’t know” answer to President Biden in August 2021 always emitted an odor. If
you’ve been reading me from the beginning, you know that a not-so-small mountain of circumstantial evidence pointed to a lab leak.
As I wrote when the 18-page report was
finally declassified and released to the public, the intelligence community
turned in “an oddly worded, frustrating document that seems to bend over
backward to give Beijing the benefit of the doubt”:
It seems to see nothing
suspicious in Beijing’s refusal to turn over data or fully cooperate with
international investigations. The fact that Beijing lied to the world for the first three to six weeks of
this pandemic, insisting that the virus was not contagious when it
obviously was, does not influence our intelligence agencies’ analysis at all.
It does not see any signs or indications of a coverup, despite the Wuhan
Institute of Virology’s yanking large swaths of data offline shortly before the
start of the pandemic.
And the agencies seem to
explicitly reject Occam’s Razor, the principle that of two competing theories,
the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. As far as we can tell
from this report, the U.S. intelligence community does not find it strange or
unusual that a random Chinese person, with no connection to the Wuhan Institute
of Virology, could have a spectacularly unlucky run-in with a bat or other
animal, and that that random Chinese person just happened to catch an
exceptionally rare, naturally occurring animal virus that infects, sickens, and
spreads among human beings like wildfire on the metaphorical doorstep of one of
the three labs in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel
coronaviruses found in bats. . . .
The intelligence community also does not think it is significant that “three
researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in
November 2019 that they sought hospital care.” The brightest minds of U.S.
intelligence have decreed that it is coincidental.
For a long time, people such as myself asked what the
point of the U.S. intelligence community was if 18 separate government agencies with amazing technology,
enormous resources, and thousands upon thousands of smart and highly trained
people couldn’t provide policymakers and the public
with clearer answers about life-and-death issues involving the secretive
actions of hostile foreign countries.
To quote the film Office Space, “What would
you say you do here?”
But judging from how the CIA’s public assessment changed
almost immediately after Trump took office, we now have good reason to fear
that the intelligence community’s assessments will change dramatically
depending upon who’s sitting in the director’s chair and what the man in the
Oval Office wants to hear.
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