Day: March 3, 2019
Dim future
The Wilson Center held a panel discussion on February 26 exploring the future of the US-Iran relationship . The panel included Robin Wright, journalist and USIP-Wilson Center Distinguished Fellow, Michael Singh, Managing Director and Senior Fellow at Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Robert Malley, President and CEO of the International Crisis Group.
Wright claims that Iranian Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif wanted to resign for several reasons. Internally, jealous rivals surround him and sought to impeach him in the parliament (but the issue never came to a vote). He is realist but does not represent the majority; the Supreme Leader and the hardliners are on top of him. Zarif was upset for not being invited when Bashar Assad turned up in Tehran for a meeting with the Supreme Leader. Externally, he failed to sustain the nuclear deal and prevent the Trump administration re-imposition of sanctions. He was also unable to respond to the pressure of Western governments to release a dual national American detainee in Iran or get Iranian banks to comply with international banking standards that were imposed post 9/11.
Singh pointed out that US administrations from Jimmy Carter until now had some engagement with Iran, but it was President Obama who took relations in a different direction with the nuclear agreement. At odds with US policy and interests, Iran does not operate according to conventional norms. It resorts to proxy wars in Lebanon, Yemen, and Bahrain. These destabilizing actions in the region seek to keep Israel and Saudi Arabia focused on border problems and not Iran itself. Iran has wanted the US out of the region. Obama sought a balance of power in the Middle East between US friends and Iran. That did not happen, and more chaos is coming . While there are shared interests between the US and Iran on counter-narcotics in Afghanistan and ensuring a stable government in Iraq, the ways they pursue those interests tend to be diametrically opposed.
Malley asserted that Democrats and Republicans have engaged with Iran using a mix of coercion and engagement. Both have failed to establish normal relations with Tehran. Even Trump tried to meet Rouhani at the UN. Historically, the US relationship with Iran was not built on a strong basis: take for instance the hostage crisis, the ousting of Mosaddegh, and US support for the Shah.
Most importantly, the Iran-Iraq war, in which almost every country including the US backed Iraq, had a psychological impact on Iran’s attitude toward the US and the region, which is not only polarized between Iran and Saudi Arabia but also between Iran and Israel. Iran wants to play a key major role, but the US has deep strategic interests in oil, support for Israel, and counter-terrorism. Iran believes US backing for Tehran’s foes is an obstacle to its natural weight in the region: Iraq in the past or Saudi Arabia and Israel today.
According to Malley, the one agreement that could have sustainably changed Iranian behavior is the JCPOA. It was better to have that agreement, defuse the nuclear crisis, and prevent a catastrophic war. The JCPOA succeeded because there was pressure and a realistic outcome that Iran and the US with difficulty could accept. Without it, the future is dim.
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Right move, wrong reasons
President Trump’s walking away from his summit with Kim Jong-un has won praise from many, including Democrats and me. Trump was unwilling to give Kim the sanctions relief he wanted for the limits Kim was willing to accept on North Korea’s nuclear program. All eminently reasonable. Certainly Kim was offering far less than what the Iranians agreed to, in a deal Trump condemned and from which he withdrew.
But there is a problem. Trump is still thinking he can get Kim to give up all his nuclear weapons, in exchange for economic benefits, especially foreign investment. Neither proposition is credible.
Nuclear weapons are Kim’s guarantee of regime survival. That’s why the US intelligence community has been doubting he would ever give them up. South Korea and the US need to be extra cautious in dealing with him so long as Kim has the capability of using them. Precisely what Kim was offering is unclear, but it definitely was not the surrender of all his nuclear capabilities. He hasn’t even provided the inventory of his nuclear infrastructure required to begin a serious conversation.
Just as important: Kim has no interest in opening the Hermit Kingdom to the kind of foreign investment Trump has been offering. He doesn’t want Trump-style hotels, American tourists, or sharply increased standards of living for the North Korean worker. His is a totalitarian regime that demands loyalty above all, not economic development or free media. His visit with the Vietnamese after the Hanoi summit signaled his real interest: maintaining his personal monopoly on politics while allowing limited private enterprise. It’s the Chinese model, more or less, of authoritarian capitalism, but without foreign direct investment.
The US needs to keep Kim’s goals in mind as it gets ready for another try at an agreement. He has his red lines. While Kim still holds absolute power in North Korea, we are not going to get the complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization (CVID in the trade) we ultimately seek. At best we’ll get some limits on future production of nuclear weapons and missiles in exchange for limited sanctions relief, in the context of a process that has more far-reaching goals.
Even that may be more than we can hope for unless the sanctions regime is restored to its previous strength and tightened further. That would require Chinese and Russian cooperation that has been evaporating. Beijing isn’t going to get back on board until the tariff war is ended. Trump will soon be accepting much less than he hoped for on that front. Moscow is a tougher case: Putin will want a price for any enhanced cooperation on North Korea. Relief from sanctions on Russia will surely be on the table in that negotiation, but the Congress stands in the way of the loosening Trump would like to provide to Putin.
I doubt though that Trump will be looking any time soon for an agreement on the North Korean nuclear program. More likely he’ll hope that we forget Pyongyang has nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them to the US. He hyped that threat when he thought doing so could give him an easy win. Now that Kim is happy with the domestic and international legitimacy he achieved by meeting twice with the President of the United States, it will be much more difficult to achieve any agreement. Trump made the right move but for the wrong reasons. Kim outplayed him.
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