There appears to be a lot of saber-rattling in Washington nowadays! You have Secretary of State Mike Pompeo listing a set of demands aimed at Iran so that it would become everything but a puppet state of the U.S. One has John Bolton, Trump’s new national security adviser, who is a well known hawk in and around the capital. A lot of the administration’s critics think that these two would rather skip with the diplomatic niceties and skip straight to military action.
Then we have the European allies, China and Russia who all signed on to the Iranian Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the nuclear deal, in 2015. What Pompeo and Trump fail to understand is that the deal was aimed primarily at limiting Iran’s nuclear program by placing restrictions on it and having International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors set up a system that allows the U.N. watchdog to inspect nuclear-related sites in Iran. It was never intended to influence Iran’s general regional policy issues which would have to done through other separate foreign policy initiatives. Of course, Israel never liked the nuclear deal, which did not directly stop Iran from testing or firing ballistic missiles, and persuaded the Trump administration to go it alone. By scrapping the deal, the U.S. will reimpose U.S. sanctions, further hurting the average Iranian. Iran’s government is resolved to resist the American demands, even at the eventual expense of its economy. An anti-American stance can only help the radicals obtain more control of Iran’s politics.
As for North Korea, Kim Jong Un is playing Trump like a fiddle. Anyone who knows anything about his regime, understands that he is not willing to give up his nuclear arsenal. Signing any peace treaty would require addressing issues regarding the U.S. military’s presence in South Korea, possibly with its transfer of wartime operational control to South Korea and United Nations forces in South Korea. Kim also now sees how the U.S. treated the nuclear deal with Iran and will not trust the Americans with any similar deal for North Korea. Kim is also using the current military exercises by the U.S. and its allies in the region as an excuse to potentially pull out of the planned June meeting with Trump. Trump is now caught in an awkward situation where political promises were made and expectations were raised as to some form of eventual deal in the region. The ball is now in Kim’s court.
All of this signifies that American foreign policy is in a mess. Other than moving toward military actions, show me a strategy that makes sense. The complexities of foreign policy development have been left to overly simplistic approaches and negotiating tactics. Even the influence of the most powerful nation on earth won’t be enough to rescue this situation from the heap of manure on which it’s built. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be working in the State Department these days.
FROLITICKS 