Ashok Dhillon
May 7, 20187 min
The two major foreign policy milestones coming up for the Trump administration that will impact the rest of the World, are the Iran Nuclear Agreement, known officially as the ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and Trump’s threat to break it, and the North and South Korea Summit which will attempt to reach an consensus on the cessation of historic animosities between North and South Korea, and the USA, and the potential ‘complete de-nuclearization’ of the Korean Peninsula. Both of these foreign policy initiatives are being driven by Trump and America, and have far reaching consequences for countries directly involved in the ‘Deals’ themselves, and for the security of the larger World in general.
Trump’s approach to the two deals is characteristic of his personality, bullying, belligerent and contradictory. He does not believe in the traditional approach to resolving international problems through conciliatory diplomacy, but does believe in using America’s historic ‘Big Stick’ approach upfront, believing that there is no advantage to America being the most powerful country in the World, both militarily and economically, if that power is not used to cow opponents into submission on the military and the economic (trade) fronts.
In addressing Iran and North Korea, Trump has used physical threats and dire apocalyptical consequences as incentives for countries to conform to his wishes, as his most powerful tools of negotiations.
And, to prove that he was serious, in Iran’s case he threatened to pull the U.S. out of the Obama-led multi-country JCPOA, followed by the reinstatement of crippling economic sanctions; and in the case of North Korea he threatened total annihilation of the country if North Korea did not stop all nuclear and missile testing immediately.
The reaction from both countries was predictable – open defiance to Trump’s onerous threats and bellicose belligerence, with North Korea going a lot further.
North Korea’s young dictatorial leader Kim Jong-un went well beyond open verbal defiance, he accelerated dramatically the frequency and potency of his Country’s nuclear and missile program in spite of increasingly constrictive economic sanctions till the pressure from all sides, including China (North Korea’s primary backer), became too much to bear, at which point he backed off and went on a diplomatic campaign to ease the mounting pressure, including calling for a peace summit between the three countries, North Korea, South Korea and the United States. This will be the first meeting between an American President and North Korea’s ruling dictator from the ‘Kim Family Dynasty’.
Trump has been quick to take credit for the seeming change of heart of North Korea’s leadership even though prudence would dictate a wiser wait-and-see attitude, considering how many times very promising starts in the past have resulted in total failure; but that is not Trump’s personal or professional style, which has incurred frequent failures in his past. So Trump is bulldozing ahead, hoping for a miracle breakthrough - with dreams of the ‘Noble Peace Prize’ attached.
As for Iran, the deadline set by Trump to extricate America from the six (6) country JCPOA (The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action - or as more commonly called The Nuclear Agreement) was supposed to be May 12, 2018, but in true Trumpian-style to keep the World off-balanced he has changed the date to announce it earlier.
All indicators point to Trump decertifying the Iran Deal. It is not because JCPOA is truly bad or ‘disastrous – the worst ever’ as he has been proclaiming at every opportunity (he wouldn’t really know as he doesn’t seem to have ever read it), in fact it was a terrific achievement of Obama’s, but because Trump has stated he would, knowing the ultra-Right-Wing and conservative part of the American electorate, which considers itself as ‘the 12th Lost Tribe of Israel’ and is his core support base, and the ‘Hawks’ in the Republican Party would want him to.
Besides, Israel’s Netanyahu also wants him kill the Deal, and Netanyahu usually gets what he wants from the U.S. administrations, past and present. Barack Obama tried being a little more independent but in the end had to sign the biggest defence and weapons aid package for having the audacity to push back on Israel’s control of American Middle East Foreign Policy.
Those two camps, America’s ‘Conservative Right’, and Israel’s ‘Hardliners’, practically ensure Trump will carry through with his ill-informed, ill-advised move, based on American and Israeli strategy to dismember all strong Middle Eastern countries (Iraq-down, Syria-down & now Iran).
The decertification of the Iran Nuclear Deal, which by the way, Iran has adhered to in all its terms, verifiably, will in turn re-kick-in the crushing economic sanctions that Iran had suffered under for decades already, prior to the signing of the Nuclear Agreement. These economic sanctions punished the ordinary Iranian people, and not the Iranian leadership, who the American politicians love to hate, be it democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq removed by the CIA (Operation Ajax) and British Intelligence (Operation Boot) in 1953; or the Shah of Iran, installed and then deposed when he turned to protect Iran’s interests above America’s (1979); and finally to the present when the Mullahs and Iran went rogue and backed the Shia leaderships in the region, being majority Shia themselves, against the Saudi-led Sunni-majority around the World, and partnered up with Russia to counter American and Israeli Saudi-Sunni attacks in Syria and Yemen. Syria and Yemen have been systematically turned to rubble.
[When Iraq’s Saddam Hussein tried to be too independent and forge his own way and agenda, America destroyed Saddam and Iraq (and found no Weapons of Mass Destruction).]
So the Trump and American agenda is not to bring peace, law and order, justice or freedom to Iran. Nor is the agenda to curtail Iran’s troublesome meddling in the Middle East as there can be no bigger meddler there than the U.S. and Israel themselves - as all the recent wars and pre-emptive strikes have shown; nor is it to curtail Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism, as the biggest terrorist groups, Al Qaeda and ISIS are all Sunni, which is Saudi-led Islam, and Iran is Shia, but it is to bring the last independent large country that is Shia-led, to heel, so its assets and geo-political influence is manageable and pose no possible threat to Israel. For that purpose Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen have been destroyed; now it’s Iran’s turn.
The most blatant falsehoods have been that Iran’s regime is dictatorial and keeps its people suppressed and that it keeps aggressively pursuing the development of the Nuclear Bomb (as per Netanyahu and the Right-Wing Hawks in the U.S.) Both those narratives are blatantly misleading. Saudi Arabia’s leadership is far more religiously extreme and generally restrictive than Iran’s (Iran holds regular elections, Saudi doesn’t even think about it) but Saudi is America’s and Israel’s darling because it has sold out to both - for ‘No Criticism’, regardless of its extremism (Al Qaeda & ISIS), 9-11 attack, where most of the attackers were Saudi, and lack of freedoms. Also, both Israeli Intelligence and the CIA have repeatedly confirmed that Iran never seriously pursued nuclear weapons program, and never came close to developing a Nuclear Bomb, unlike North Korea. And yet the relentless propaganda is pushed to justify the destruction of Iran.
But, Iran now has Russia and China in its corner and both are signatories to the JCPOA, along with Britain, France and Germany.
Trump, America and Israel can still do serious damage to Iran in an open and clandestine war, but Iran is not entirely alone, this time even the Europeans are sympathetic to its predicament of having adhered strictly to the terms of an international agreement, but being punished nevertheless at the whim of an American President who is motivated by his personal agenda of playing to his core home-base, and of course the compulsion to destroy the previous President Obama’s signature and internationally recognized achievements.
So, Trump’s self interest induced action of pulling out of the Iran-Deal will create a lot of uncertainty and trouble for everyone, and possibly result in another war that will kill tens of thousands, maybe more, innocent people, and destroy another country that really hasn’t done anything that its fierce critics and opponents, the U.S. and Israel do not do on an almost daily basis, which is to act in its own self interest, without of course invading anyone.
[By the way, neither the U.S. nor Israel is willing to even discuss the possibility of materially reducing, let alone giving up their massive nuclear arsenals.]
As for North Korea, maybe Kim Jong-un and the North Korean leadership has had a change of heart, but if the past actions of the country and its leadership are anything to go by, it would seem highly unlikely. North Korea, it would seem, is playing for time and the stay of the intense pressure from its prime backer China, and the U.S.-led international sanctions against. It might be prudent to bet that Kim Jong-un will try to negotiate his way out of the crippling sanctions by promising to hold any further development of its nuclear and missile programs, and the reductions in hostilities between it and South Korea, for relief from the worst of the sanctions.
It will probably set the stage for such an outcome by forwarding, as it has already indicated, terms that it knows will be impossible for the U.S. to accept and fullfill in their entirety.
From there North Korea will probably fight a retreating action, exacting big and small concessions along the way, knowing and counting on Trump’s reluctance to admit defeat in front of the watching World, even though Trump has tried to prepare his base and the World to that possibility, as is his wont, to try to hedge all possibilities so he doesn’t get caught losing, even though losing has been a major part of his history, both now and in the more distant past.
North Korea will have China and to a lesser degree Russia in its corner in these negotiations, plus it already has nuclear capability, which it knows gives it the advantage of ‘ultimate deterrence’ for the worst case scenario.
So the American ‘Wild Card’, Trump, is going to add greater uncertainty to the Global geo-politics. On the one hand he is going to demonstrate that America can and will break multi-country signed international agreements to suit the personal agendas of its politicians. On the other hand, it will try and convince another government to give up its most cherished achievement to date, the attainment of ‘nuclear deterrence’ in the cause of peace, through a similarly negotiated Nuclear Agreement. The inherent contradiction in these actions has been pointed out to Trump and his team, but as is expected their response is that they can and will accomplish the near impossible, as only they can do it. And if they can’t? Well, in Trump’s oft repeated words, ‘that’s ok too’. Except for the World it is not - because it creates chaos - as it has done in America. And who wants that - except Trump.