The American Conservative

NBC News reports that Nikki Haley will be resigning from her position as ambassador to the United Nations:

In an unexpected development, President Donald Trump’s U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, plans to resign, NBC News has confirmed.

Haley informed her staff that she plans to resign. The news, first reported by Axios, comes ahead of an announcement she plans to make with President Donald Trump at the White House Tuesday morning.

Haley’s tenure as U.N. ambassador was fairly brief and not very successful. The Security Council did approve additional North Korea sanctions during her time there. Otherwise, she was known mostly for ineffectively promoting the administration’s Iran obsession, picking fights with most other states over Israel, and calling attention to how isolated the U.S. has become following the withdrawal from the JCPOA. Her last big effort at the U.N. was the Security Council session last month that was originally supposed to focus on criticizing Iran. The administration changed the subject of the meeting to nonproliferation, but that still allowed all of the other members to tout their support for the nuclear deal and criticize U.S. withdrawal from the agreement. If that was meant to be Haley’s crowning achievement before she left, it didn’t work out very well.

Trump’s decision to appoint Haley to this position struck me as odd from the beginning. Haley had no diplomatic or foreign policy experience, and beyond the usual knee-jerk “pro-Israel” reactions she did not have any record of talking or thinking about foreign policy. It is taken for granted that she took the job to build up her credentials on foreign policy, but her stint as ambassador has been so short that I’m not sure that it will do her very much good in future political campaigns. When she was appointed, I said that “this may prove to be a rather fruitless detour for the next few years.” Haley’s resignation after less than two years in the job suggests that she concluded that there was no point in sticking around any longer.

Husain Haqqani makes a tedious, unpersuasive case for continued U.S. involvement in the war on Yemen:

But from the U.S. perspective, losing Yemen to Iran permanently would only enlarge the threat Tehran poses to U.S. interests. If one side must win Yemen’s civil war, it would be in America’s interest that it is the legitimate government backed by U.S. allies rather than the Houthis backed by Iran.

Almost everything Haqqani says about the war is wrong or misleading. Yemen is in no danger of being “lost” to Iran. The Houthis are still not Iran’s proxies, and war supporters’ frequent repetition of this falsehood over the last few years has not made it any more true. None of the warring parties in Yemen is capable of winning the war outright, and continuing the war risks causing massive loss of life among civilians that can still be avoided. The “legitimate” government has virtually no support in the north or south of the country, and any enduring peace settlement will have to reflect that. There is no way that a government that is widely loathed can be put back in charge of all of Yemen, and the U.S. needs to recognize that the “legitimate” government lost its legitimacy in the eyes of most Yemenis years ago.

Haqqani objects to criticism of coalition war crimes:

The humanitarian criticism of the Arab coalition’s tactics has also led most observers to ignore that the fight against the Houthis is backed by a UN resolution supporting the restoration of the legitimate government’s control over Yemen.

Critics of the war don’t ignore that the Security Council passed this resolution. We are well aware that the resolution gave a green light to the coalition to cause massive suffering in pursuit of an unachievable political goal. The problem is that supporters of the war keep clinging to UNSCR 2216 as if its outdated and inflexible set of demands from three and a half years ago is still a valid basis for a political settlement today. That resolution has given the coalition political cover for waging an atrocious war that they cannot win, and it has encouraged the coalition and the Hadi government to reject any compromise that doesn’t get them everything.

Haqqani’s idea for what post-war Yemen should look like is completely unrealistic. He writes:

Consolidation of control of any part of Yemen by the Houthis would be as destabilizing as the rise of Hezbollah has been in Lebanon.

No matter what else happens, the Houthis are going to retain control of at least some of northern Yemen. That is where they are from, and there is no way that they are going to be forced to yield that part of the country. Insisting on depriving them of control of any part gives them no incentive to negotiate or compromise. If they can expect to have nothing once the war ends, they are going to keep the war going for as long as they can.

Haqqani also complains that critics of the war focus too much on coalition war crimes:

But the threat posed by the Houthis has been eclipsed by denunciations of the Saudi air campaign against them, which is blamed for avoidable civilian casualties. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent certification to Congress that the Saudis and other Arab allies were making greater efforts to protect civilians has not dented that criticism.

The U.N. has reported several times that coalition airstrikes are responsible for the majority of civilian casualties. The Yemen Data Project has determined that roughly a third of all airstrikes hit non-military targets, and strikes on non-military targets have spiked upwards in the last few months in connection with the Hodeidah offensive. Opponents of the war denounce the air campaign because it is indiscriminate and has resulted in numerous documented war crimes against the civilian population. We also denounce it because it is the part of the conflict that the U.S. government actively enables through refueling and arms sales. In other words, critics of U.S. involvement focus on the part of the war that our government makes possible and therefore has the ability to stop. All parties to the war are guilty of war crimes, but our government aids and abets Saudi coalition war crimes and those are the ones that we can do something about. That is why critics of our support for the war call attention to them. The bogus certification offered by Pompeo has not “dented” our criticism because we can see that it is a lie. The coalition isn’t meeting any of the conditions created by Congress, and the only way to claim that they are is to ignore the extensive evidence of the coalition’s flagrant disregard for civilian lives.

The only realistic way to end the conflict is to accept that the coalition intervention has failed in its main objectives, namely the expulsion of the Houthis from Sanaa and the “restoration” of Hadi, end U.S. support for the coalition to force them to negotiate, and then support a diplomatic process that takes into account the interests of all Yemenis. The U.S. needs to lean on the governments that it arms and supports to halt their campaign, and the quickest way to do that is to halt all military assistance and arms sales right away. The antiwar resolution H.Con.Res. 138 offers an opportunity to do just that.

The official Trump administration responses on the Khashoggi case are about as tepid and toothless as can be:

Pompeo puts out a statement on Jamal Khashoggi: “We call on the government of Saudi Arabia to support a thorough investigation of Mr. Khashoggi's disappearance and to be transparent about the results of that investigation.” pic.twitter.com/wQHlAVcBQ1

— Kylie Atwood (@kylieatwood) October 9, 2018

Deeply troubled to hear reports about Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi. If true, this is a tragic day. Violence against journalists across the globe is a threat to freedom of the press & human rights. The free world deserves answers.

— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) October 8, 2018

It took the Trump administration six days since Khashoggi first disappeared before they provided any official response beyond generic expressions of concern. The vice president’s statement alludes to Khashoggi’s likely murder, but neglects to mention that the Saudi government is the one being held responsible for the violence done to him. Secretary Pompeo calls on Saudi Arabia to support a thorough investigation, as if they are not the prime suspects of any credible investigation that would take place. The messages coming from the Trump administration are scarcely better than boilerplate statements, and it shows that the administration has no interest in criticizing the Saudi government or in holding them accountable for their crime. The president’s remarks earlier in the day were even more feeble:

“I am concerned about it. I don’t like hearing about it,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “Hopefully that will sort itself out. Right now nobody knows anything about it.”

This isn’t something that is going to “sort itself out.” The Saudi government is denying everything and hoping that other governments’ inattention or indifference will let them off the hook for the crime. The Trump administration doesn’t want to challenge the Saudis on anything, and so it appears they are going to pay just enough lip service so they can say that they didn’t completely ignore it.

I have referred on occasion to Trump’s “Saudi first” foreign policy in the region, and I fear that we are seeing more of it on display this week. That “Saudi first” policy has wrought enormous damage on Yemen and the wider region, and it has closely bound the U.S. to a regional menace that believes it can act without suffering any consequences in its relationship with Washington. The Saudi government has had no reason to think that the U.S. would disapprove of anything it does because the Trump administration has given them carte blanche for the better part of the last two years. It is past time that Congress changed that and showed the reckless leadership in Riyadh that they have exhausted our government’s patience.

Robert Einhorn makes some similar observations to the ones I made in a post last week about the Trump administration’s Iran policy:

In addition, today’s pressures will not be strong enough because U.S. demands go far beyond what any Iranian government would be willing or able to accept. Most Iranians resent the U.S. unilateral withdrawal from a multilateral deal they regard as equitable and working well. They would strongly oppose making major new concessions on core Iranian interests in the face of what they see as U.S. bullying. Iranian hardliners who in 2015 opposed the nuclear deal as giving away too much would fiercely attack any Iranian government that surrendered to U.S. demands.

So the Trump administration is trying to achieve much more than the Obama administration achieved in 2015—but with significantly less leverage. That is not a recipe for success. Unless the administration gets realistic about what is achievable, Iran will sooner or later leave the nuclear deal and start building up its nuclear capabilities.

I agree with all of this. I would just add that the Trump administration has given Iran every reason to believe that any offer of sanctions relief is duplicitous. Having already reneged on the nuclear deal and gone back on the previous commitment to provide sanctions relief, the Trump administration cannot now use sanctions to extract meaningful concessions from a government that has just seen them violate the earlier agreement. Unlike Trump’s past business practices, you cannot betray a negotiating partner and then bully them into coming back to the table to pay a much higher price than they already paid. No matter what you’re offering, you have already proven that you won’t honor the bargain.

The other limitation to any negotiations with Iran is that Iran made its major concessions on the nuclear issue when it implemented the requirements of the JCPOA. Even if Iran were interested in negotiations at some point in the future, they would first have to expand their nuclear program to give them something to bargain with. In short, insisting on new negotiations is a good way to cause the complete collapse of the existing agreement. Of course, the administration isn’t interested in negotiating with Iran in good faith, but rather wants to force its capitulation and the collapse of the regime. That is yet another reason why no self-respecting Iranian leader will want to talk to the U.S. as long as Trump is in office.

Pursuing unrealistic, maximalist goals is one of the recurring themes in this administration’s foreign policy, and it isn’t likely to change anytime soon. It is telling that the so-called “principled realism” of the Trump administration is defined by so many policies divorced from reality. That is a reminder that Trump’s “principled realism” is neither realist nor principled, and it also has nothing to do with advancing American interests.

Daniel DePetris reviews the first four months of Mike Pompeo’s tenure at the State Department:

His record as a diplomat and a communicator of U.S. foreign policy, however, is not so solid. Pompeo deserves enormous credit for taking personal ownership of the Trump administration’s diplomacy with North Korea. Whereas a secretary of state traveling to Pyongyang would once have been seen as a history-making moment, Pompeo has flown there so many times—the most recent being last weekend—that it barely bats an eye anymore.

It’s true that Pompeo has been very busy and has traveled extensively since he became Secretary of State, but for all his activity he does not have much to show for it. As DePetris notes, Pompeo has taken ownership of engagement with North Korea, but to date this has yielded very little. He created the Iran Action Group to implement the illegitimate reimposition of sanctions following the destructive decision to renege on the JCPOA, and he issued the list of preposterous demands that Iran will never accept. The Saudi coalition war on Yemen has intensified during this same period of time, and it has done so with U.S. approval and support. To a very large degree, Pompeo has been the public face of all three of these policies, and in all three cases there has been little or no progress to report. On most other issues, U.S. diplomacy has been MIA in no small part because the administration continues to deprive the department of resources and numerous positions in the department and abroad remain unfilled.

What stands out most in the few months that Pompeo has been at State is that he has told obvious whoppers to the public and Congress about important foreign policy issues. The worst of these in my opinion was the decision to lie to Congress when he provided the bogus certification to ensure that U.S. refueling of Saudi coalition planes continued without interruption. A close second would have to be his repeated false claims that North Korea agreed to “final, fully verified denuclearization” at the Singapore summit. These are cases where Pompeo asserted things that everyone could see to be false, and to date he has been allowed to get away with doing this.

Pompeo is different from his predecessor in that he will speak to reporters much more regularly, but he is even worse at handling tough and challenging questions. When pressed to explain why the Singapore summit declaration made no mention of verification, Pompeo snapped at the reporter and derided the question as “insulting and ridiculous and frankly ludicrous.” When he was recently asked about the report based on a State Department memo that said he issued the bogus Yemen certification to protect arms sales, he feigned outrage. Pompeo is much more talkative and gregarious than Tillerson, but he is more hostile to the press in his interactions with them.

Pompeo’s own inclination to see diplomacy as an all-or-nothing proposition hasn’t helped matters, and his ridiculous “swagger” P.R. campaign has been an embarrassment that makes current and former career diplomats cringe. It should come as no surprise that someone with no meaningful diplomatic or foreign policy experience has not been a particularly good diplomat.

The Wall Street Journal publishes a predictably toothless editorial in response to reports that the Saudi government has murdered Jamal Khashoggi:

The Saudi reformers have allies in Washington, but they will lose them if they aren’t transparent about Jamal Khashoggi’s fate.

If the latest outrage from Mohammed bin Salman changes anything, it should at the very least put an end to the absurd description of the crown prince and his allies as “reformers” once and for all. Reformer is a label that Western pundits and politicians use to describe foreign leaders when they want to express approval and support. It is often not intended to be an accurate statement about the leader’s record, but rather serves to distract from the worst parts of that record in order to sell the leader to Western audiences. Foreign leaders know that they can win a lot of supporters in the West just by saying the right things about a handful of issues, and as long as they keep up appearances their Western boosters will overlook or even defend the worst excesses.

All Mohammed bin Salman had to do was talk about moderate Islam and diversifying the Saudi economy and then emphasize his hatred for Iran, and his fans were immediately hooked by the promise of what he might do in the future. In return, they studiously ignored the many horrible things he was doing in the present, they shifted blame for the war on Yemen to others, or they made lame attempts to spin his purge as an “anti-corruption drive.” The problem for his fans was that Mohammed bin Salman’s pattern of reckless behavior didn’t stop and wasn’t limited only to his foreign policy debacles. The cruelty and incompetence that the Saudi coalition has displayed in the war on Yemen have been replicated in Saudi Arabia’s internal affairs as well. The kingdom’s intensifying repression and arbitrary arrests have scared off foreign investment, caused massive capital flight, and exposed the makeover that pro-Saudi P.R. firms have tried to give the kingdom as the sham that it always was.

The crown prince has already proven himself to be an impetuous, clumsy, inept, and brutal ruler, and no one should have any illusions at this point about what the Saudi government is going to be like as long as he is in power. The war on Yemen was the earliest, biggest, and most destructive proof of this, and there have been many more examples in the last three and a half years. By itself, Khashoggi’s murder should severely strain relations between Saudi Arabia and its Western patrons. As the latest in a string of outrages and crimes, it should force a serious reassessment of the current relationship that the U.S. has with Riyadh. That relationship is noxious, and it can’t be allowed to continue in its current form. We know in advance that the Trump administration will do the bare minimum it can get away with in response to the Saudi government’s murder of a journalist and U.S. resident, but this crime may be flagrant and appalling enough to turn many more members of Congress against supporting and arming the Saudis.

Turkish authorities now believe that the Saudi government murdered Jamal Khashoggi in their Istanbul consulate. Kareem Fahim reports for The Washington Post:

Turkey has concluded that Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent journalist from Saudi Arabia, was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this week by a Saudi team sent “specifically for the murder,” two people with knowledge of the probe said Saturday.

Turkish investigators believe a 15-member team “came from Saudi Arabia. It was a preplanned murder,” said one of the people. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation.

When the Saudi government continued claiming that they were not holding Mr. Khashoggi several days after he disappeared inside the consulate, that strongly suggested that they meant to kill him. According to initial reports, they had already murdered him and promoted the bogus story that he had left the consulate to serve as their extremely weak alibi. Considering the many other horrible things that the current Saudi leadership is responsible for, it is not surprising that they did this, but that doesn’t make it any less outrageous and despicable.

Mohammed bin Salman is a despotic war criminal, and he has presided over the destruction and starvation of Yemen for the last three and a half years. He is responsible for war crimes against thousands and thousands of innocent Yemenis, so we should assume that he is more than capable of ordering the murder of prominent critic of his policies. Unfortunately, this appears to be what he has done. This is what comes from giving a destructive, destabilizing government a blank check and unstinting military and diplomatic support. The U.S. and most other Western governments have refused to criticize the Saudi government over its conduct of the war on Yemen, its domestic crackdowns, its human rights abuses, and the increasing repression under Mohammed bin Salman’s de facto rule, and so the Saudi government assumes that it can get away with doing whatever it wants wherever it wants. That needs to stop, and the U.S. has considerable leverage with the Saudis that it can and should use to stop it.

The Saudi government should pay a steep price for this latest outrage, but it remains to be seen whether any Western government will hold them accountable for Mr. Khashoggi’s murder or any of the Saudi government’s other crimes. The U.S. should at the very least condemn the murder and sanction the Saudi officials that can be linked to it, and if the Trump administration won’t do this Congress should act. Blocking all further arms sales and withdrawing U.S. support for the war on Yemen were already the right things to do, and this crime gives members of Congress one more reason to do them. Congress should consider other measures to hold the crown prince and his officials personally to account for Mr. Khashoggi’s murder, including travel and financial sanctions. Western pundits need to stop talking Saudi Arabia as an “ally” and acknowledge that it is a regional menace that is becoming even more repressive than it was in the past. Ideally, Mohammed bin Salman’s Western fan club would disband and apologize for their unwarranted enthusiasm for a cruel and incompetent authoritarian.

Sen. Chris Murphy responded to the news of the murder this evening:

If this is true – that the Saudis lured a U.S. resident into their consulate and murdered him – it should represent a fundamental break in our relationship with Saudi Arabia. https://t.co/hgCchEZRtJ

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) October 6, 2018

Saudi Arabia behaves like a reckless rogue state, and so the U.S. should treat it accordingly.

Tougher U.S. sanctions will enrich the IRGC. Esfandyar Batmanghelidj explains how reimposed sanctions will benefit the IRGC while Iran’s economy and people suffer.

How the U.S. could lose a war. Steven Metz considers some of the possible scenarios of how the U.S. could suffer a defeat.

This should be a column by Jamal Khashoggi. The Washington Post runs a blank column to call attention to the unjust detention of Jamal Khashoggi.

Esfandyar Batmanghelidj warns that stricter U.S. sanctions will be a boon for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) while the rest of the population suffers:

Importantly, the evidence that sanctions line the pockets of the IRGC is stronger than the evidence that sanctions relief benefits Iran’s proxies. In his May 2017 testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Lt. Gen. Vince Stewart, then-director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, gave his assessment of Iran’s use of its proceeds from sanctions relief, telling the committee that “the preponderance of the money [has] gone to economic development and infrastructure.”

To this end, the Trump administration’s characterization of its sanctions policy is dishonest, at least in its presentation of the intended and unintended consequences of the policy. If limiting the financial means of the IRGC and its proxies were the intended consequence of the sanctions policy, the current strategy would be falling short while very demonstrably having the unintended consequence of unduly harming the Iranian people through economic hardship.

In this formulation, the administration is failing to achieve its stated goals despite the ample evidence that its chosen strategy will not work. But if you flip the intended and unintended consequences, a more likely explanation becomes clear. The boon for the IRGC is the unintended consequence of a strategy that is designed foremost to put pressure on the Iranian economy at large [bold mine-DL].

It should come as no surprise that reimposed sanctions will work to the IRGC’s benefit, because this is just what happened before the nuclear deal. Regime insiders are able to take advantage of the difficulties created by sanctions and use their connections to enrich themselves while the rest of the country is impoverished. When legal trade is restricted or cut off, those that profit from illicit trade are in a position to gain the most. As Batmanghelidj says:

The IRGC and its proxies are enriched by smuggling and enabled by sanctions. The Trump administration seems all too eager to feed this seven-headed dragon.

Iran hawks have wrongly portrayed sanctions relief under the nuclear deal as a boost for the IRGC when the exact opposite is the case. Punitive sanctions help Iran’s hard-liners, and it is the civilian population that endures the collective punishment that the U.S. is meting out. Strengthening Iran’s hard-liners at the expense of the population is a cruel and stupid policy, but it is consistent with an administration that seeks confrontation with the regime and has nothing but contempt for the people. It is fitting that the same people that denounce the JCPOA for the supposed “windfall” it provided to the Iranian government are pursuing a policy that will add to the fortunes of the IRGC. At the same time that the administration makes unrealistic demands that Iran should cease all of its “malign activities” and claims to stand with the people, it is strangling ordinary Iranians while it makes Iran’s hard-liners rich.

Vali Nasr predicts that the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaigns against North Korea and Iran won’t succeed:

What North Korea is looking for is a step-by-step diplomatic process in which the United States offers concessions ranging from a declaration of peace on the Korean Peninsula to the lifting of economic sanctions. Instead, Trump’s national-security team is demanding full denuclearization before offering anything up in return. That looks to be what Washington has in mind for Iran as well.

Faced with this reality, Pyongyang or Tehran could see a benefit in resisting Washington’s pressure strategy.

The main flaw in the Trump administration’s approach to both states is that it pairs maximalist demands that the other side will never accept with “maximum pressure” tactics that depend on broad international support that doesn’t exist. Our government demands things that are politically impossible for any self-respecting government to agree to, and then sets out to punish the other side when it refuses to meet Washington’s absurd expectations.

Trump and Bolton’s enthusiasm for unilateralism and their contempt for diplomacy make it even more difficult to sustain international cooperation. As soon as North Korea started engaging in talks with the U.S. and South Korea, Russian and Chinese support for sanctions started to melt away. As long as Iran complies with the JCPOA, there is no international support for reimposing sanctions on them. On the contrary, other parties to the agreement are going out of their way to find mechanisms to keep Iran in the deal over U.S. objections. Both North Korea and Iran have positioned themselves to appear as the more reasonable party in their dealings with the administration, and the U.S. has emphasized its inflexibility and excessive demands. That has had the effect of provoking resistance against the U.S. from the targeted governments and the other major powers at the same time, and especially on Iran it has left the U.S. isolated and embarrassed. The administration’s tantrum of terminating the old Treaty of Amity with Iran yesterday was a sign of their frustration that their policy is failing on its own terms.

It is natural and predictable that external pressure leads to resistance and defiance. We would do the same if we were in their position and they were the ones making excessive demands of us. Iran’s government shows no sign of being interested in giving in to the administration’s demands:

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed Thursday “never” to allow the Islamic republic to bow to the demands of its enemies, at a time of increased tensions between Tehran and Washington.

“To entertain the idea, as desired by the enemy, that the only solution is to hand ourselves over to the enemy, is the worst act of treason towards the Iranian nation, and that will not happen,” Khamenei said in an address to tens of thousands of members of the Basij, an Islamic volunteer militia, broadcast live on state television.

Hard-liners in the U.S. consistently fail to take national pride into account when they try to bully other governments into capitulating to their demands, and they fail to appreciate how much a targeted regime is willing to suffer if they think that their national security and/or regime survival are on the line. Our government thinks that it can compel other states to sell out their perceived security interests by creating tougher economic conditions, but that is a bargain that we would never make.

That is how the U.S. ends up making ridiculous demands for the other side’s surrender when there is no chance that they will comply, and it sets the U.S. up for failure and increased hostility between our government and theirs.