I see former UN Ambassador John Bolton, committed neocon and someone who has failed to impress me over the years, has decided that it’s better to destroy the United States’ reputation, and therefore its future, than to continue the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran, as CNN/Politics reports:
John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN who at one point was a candidate to lead the State Department, claimed in a National Review op-ed published Monday that his plan for the US to exit the Iran nuclear deal had to be presented publicly, because staff changes at the White House have made “presenting it to President Trump impossible.” …
In a memo drawn up after a July directive from Steve Bannon, the recently ousted White House chief strategist, Bolton pushes for selling the idea of leaving the Iran deal to the public in a “white paper” and lays out a strategy for the “campaign” and its “execution.”
Bolton has been frustrated at the rise of more traditional foreign policy thinkers within the White House, such as Mattis and Tillerson, who have favored remaining in the deal. The agreement curbs Iran’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Iran remains under multiple sanctions for terrorism-related activities.
“Trump can and should free America from this execrable deal at the earliest opportunity,” Bolton writes.
Where proponents of the deal, including lawmakers and former Obama administration officials, see the pact as a way to get visibility on Iran’s nuclear activities, and, at least for the time being, stop it’s nuclear program, Bolton sees only danger.
“The JCPOA is a threat to US national-security interests, growing more serious by the day,” Bolton writes, though he doesn’t offer evidence. “If the President decides to abrogate the JCPOA, a comprehensive plan must be developed and executed to build domestic and international support for the new policy.”
Abrogate is just a fancy word for failing to keep your word – i.e., dishonor. Some folks may think there’s no reason to consider there to be honor among nations, but this is a false assumption. The simple fact of the matter is that nations assess other nations for their reliability, for their predictability. If they negotiate a good faith treaty with some other nation, what are the chances that the other nation will keep its word, will honor the treaty, and will follow through on all the consequences of that treaty?
Well, those chances can be assessed in two ways – first, by looking backward at the past performance of the other nation. Has it kept its word before, or does it try to weasel out? What is its general inclination towards honorable behaviors?
But past performance is no guarantee of future performance, so they also must assess current leadership.
And I’ll tell you what, when someone like Bolton irresponsibly starts yacking about some plan to dishonor the United States, and our chief foreign relations guy is this amateur hour, incurious man Trump, that’s really frustrating. Because treaties and other agreements between nations is how we encourage trade, and it’s how we discourage war. Without them, tariffs go up, and we end up fighting multiple, draining wars.
And we’re no longer Reagan’s famous “shining city upon a hill.” We’re no longer the principled nation to which other nations can look for leadership. We’re just the heavily armed bully, running around looking for victims.
And bullies get taken down, eventually.
All that said, if they can catch Iran cheating, fine, great. If they’re cheating according to the standards in the JCPOA, then Iran has abrogated it and we’re no longer bound. Then it’s all legit, and I will sigh and wonder what Iran thinks it’s going to get out of this. But if Bolton and his allies use cheating to get what they want, that just blackens the soul of the United States. And the article indicates no cheating by Iran has been discovered yet, and that Bolton’s assertions about dangers to the United States are without evidence or argument. So far, Bolton’s case appears empty to me.
On a side note, I quoted the CNN article because it provides some basic fact-checking, rather than Bolton’s remarks directly. Context is important. Maybe I’ll get around to reading Bolton’s unvarnished remarks tomorrow. Or maybe a reader will be kind enough to provide a summary for me?
