In the Wall Street Journal Richard Goldberg and Mark Dubowitz recommend scrapping the Iran nuclear deal to defang North Korea:
Former Obama-administration officials warn that if Mr. Trump abandons their Iran nuclear deal, North Korea will view the U.S. as an untrustworthy partner. The opposite is true. The North Korean dictator wants to talk because the Trump administration’s campaign of maximum economic sanctions pressure is working.
But if the president agrees to a fictional fix to the JCPOA, or if he responds to a stalemate by backing down from the threat to reimpose maximum economic sanctions, North Korea will see Mr. Trump as a paper tiger. Conversely, if North Korea sees that Iran is held to tough nuclear and missile standards, backed by the credible threat of crippling sanctions, Mr. Trump will be better positioned to make it clear to Pyongyang that he means business.
The path to a denuclearized Korean Peninsula thus runs through Tehran. If Mr. Trump fixes the fatal flaws of the Iran deal, or even if he scraps it because the Europeans balk, his high-stakes North Korean gamble may yet succeed. Even if it doesn’t, he’ll have stopped Iran from following North Korea’s path to nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
While I continue to be skeptical of the Iran nuclear deal, I don’t think it should be scrapped. The costs to us are already sunk costs. They were heavily loaded to the beginning of the deal. The benefits were mostly backloaded. Abandoning it now would be foolhardy.
I seriously doubt that President Trump will wring any concessions from Kim Jong Un. Even deified dictators have political considerations and I believe that either Kim is playing to his or he believes his own advance press and in his supreme power as a negotiator.
Maybe I’m naive, but instead of blowing up the Iran deal, the US should check if there’s interest between the Iranians and Saudi’s for a informal detente and deescalation in their various proxy wars.
Both countries seem to have high amount of domestic discontent in part due to poor economic conditions, both need economic reform and investment, and their foreign adventures are taking attention and resources from that. And both have to deal with an increasingly aggressive Turkey. But then again, the motivations that drive Mideast decision makers is very foreign to me.
I most concerned with the rumors John Bolton is going to replace McMaster as National security adviser. Embracing hawks all around won’t lead anywhere good.
I have a $100 bet with friend that Bolton ends up in office with Trump somewhere during Trump’s tenure. Talking tough is important to Trump and his followers. Results? Meh. Anyway, Bolton is a real tough guy so you just know he will end up with Trump at some point.
(Kind of a variant on the chickenhawk argument, which most of the time I don’t support, but I really do think there exist politicians who avoided military service when they were younger who try to make up for it by being especially hawkish and hanging around with generals or using military to support their ideas. Trump is one of those in my estimation.)
Steve
“The path to a denuclearized Korean Peninsula thus runs through Tehran.”
More stupid. This whole op-ed is yet another example of the vacuous state of the foreign policy establishment.
CuriousOnlooker:
Way back in the 1970s there was something called the “Twin Pillars” policy. We kept two Middle Eastern powers close.
One was Shi’ite Iran under the Shah and the other was Sunni Saudi Arabia. We tried to maintain a balance between the two. Then the Iranian Revolution happened and we were left with just one pillar and we tried to pretend some sort of balance could be maintained.
I am not wishing for the past; just observing that the situation has changed significantly in the last few years and policy makers ought to update approaches.