Iran hawks have been agitating for open conflict with Iran for years. Tonight, the Trump administration obliged them by assassinating the top IRGC-Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani and the head of Kata’ib Hezbollah in a drone strike in Baghdad:

Hard to understate how big this is

• Qassem Suleimani is Iran’s most powerful mil figure in Region
• He runs Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq
• Both men designated by US as Terrorist
• Muhandis was at US embassy attack protest, calls himself “Suleimani soldier”

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) January 3, 2020

Source in #Iran tells me:
Senior Iranian diplomats are sharing Gen. Qasem Sulaimani's photo along w/death prayers for him. #Iraq

— Farnaz Fassihi (@farnazfassihi) January 3, 2020

Confirmed officially on Iraq state TV. Both killed pic.twitter.com/toaBJyEcxe

— Feras Kilani فراس كيلاني (@FerasKilaniBBC) January 3, 2020

U.S. officials tell Reuters that strikes have been carried in Baghdad on Friday out against two targets linked to Iran.

— Idrees Ali (@idreesali114) January 3, 2020

Reuters reports that a spokesman for the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq also confirmed the deaths:

Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force, and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis were killed late on Thursday in an air strike on their convoy in Baghdad airport, an Iraqi militia spokesman told Reuters.

Soleimani is a senior Iranian military commander, and he also happens to be one of the more popular public figures inside Iran. Killing him isn’t just a major escalation that guarantees reprisals and further destabilizes the region, but it also strengthens hard-liners in Iran enormously. Trump claimed not to want war with Iran, but his actions have proven that he does. No one who wants to avoid war with Iran would order the assassination of a high-ranking Iranian officer. Trump has signaled his willingness to plunge the U.S. into a new war that will be disastrous for our country, Iran, and the entire region. American soldiers, diplomats, and citizens throughout the region are all in much greater danger tonight than they were this morning, and the president is responsible for that.

It is hard to convey how irrational and destructive this latest action is. The U.S. and Iran have been dangerously close to war for months, but the Trump administration has made no effort to deescalate tensions. All that it would take to push the two governments over the brink into open conflict is a reckless attack that the other side cannot ignore. Now the U.S. has launched just such an attack and dared Iran to respond. The response may not come immediately, but we have to assume that it is coming. Killing Soleimani means that the IRGC will presumably consider it open season on U.S. forces all across the region. The Iran obsession has led the U.S. into a senseless new war that it could have easily avoided, and Trump and the Iran hawks own the results.

Trump supporters have often tried to defend the president’s poor foreign policy record by saying that he hadn’t started any new wars. Well, now he has, and he will be responsible for the consequences to follow.

Pete Buttigieg endorses do-somethingism in Syria:

America's leaders can no longer watch in silence as Assad and Russia attack innocent Idlib civilians. Inaction is a stain on our collective conscience. The international community must use all available tools at its disposal to stop this massacre and provide humanitarian aid. https://t.co/Ikz2U5HM12

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) January 2, 2020

Buttigieg’s foreign policy has become more conventionally hawkish over the last year, and here the former mayor seems to be embracing full-blown liberal interventionism. We see the familiar moralizing rhetoric, the condemnation of “inaction,” and the demand that something “must” be done without first asking whether there is anything constructive that can be done. What is Buttigieg really calling for here? It sounds as if he is proposing a “humanitarian” intervention that would put the U.S. in direct conflict with the Russian and Syrian governments. This is the same problem that has confronted interventionists in Syria for more than seven years. Are they prepared to use force against these governments, and if so how do they think that will improve the situation? If Buttigieg has an answer to that, I doubt it will be any more persuasive than the ones we have heard in the past.

The “all available tools” rhetoric had some foreign policy professionals asking what exactly Buttigieg wants to do:

What are “all available tools”?

What is “the international community” in this context, and how does this differ from a call for US action?

I’m skeptical.@PeteButtigieg needs to be a lot more specific if he thinks we need to be *more deeply involved* in Middle East wars. https://t.co/OEn5B8b8PI

— Jarrett Blanc (@JarrettBlanc) January 2, 2020

What does “all available tools” actually mean? Are we militarily intervening in Idlib? I doubt it.

After 8 years of disastrous US policy in Syria, I’d like to see our politicians at least start using realistic/pragmatic rhetoric https://t.co/TB5O5yPLsw

— Ilan Goldenberg (@ilangoldenberg) January 2, 2020

Like other Buttigieg statements on foreign policy, the latest one suggests that he hasn’t thought things through very well. Buttigieg recently attacked Biden for his poor judgment in voting for the Iraq war authorization. That’s a legitimate and fair criticism of the former vice president, but what does it say about Buttigieg’s own judgment when he seems to be advocating for military action in Syria against two other governments? Buttigieg has no foreign policy experience to speak of, so he has resorted to using Obama’s argument that judgment is more important than experience. If he doesn’t have good judgment, either, why should anyone want to entrust him with the presidency?

David Sanger’s analysis of the president’s mishandling of Iran and North Korea calls attention to the failure of both policies:

But the events of recent days have underscored how much bluster was behind Mr. Trump’s boast a year ago that Iran was “a very different nation” since he had broken its economy by choking off its oil revenues. They also belied his famous tweet: “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”

Today the most generous thing one could say about those statements is that they were wildly premature.

It would be more accurate to say that those statements reflected just how divorced from reality Trump’s policies were and how much he and other administration officials had to lie to the public to cover that up. In other words, there was nothing but bluster. There was no evidence to support Trump’s claims about these states, and he made these claims to conceal the bankruptcy of his policies towards both. The president has been able to get away with these failures for most of the last two years because there have been relatively few high-profile incidents to remind us of how completely he has failed, but as 2020 begins we have been given more proof that “maximum pressure” has been a costly exercise in futility that has actually harmed U.S. interests.

Sanger continues:

Mr. Trump does not engage such arguments. He simply repeats his mantra that Iran will never be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons and that North Korea — which already has fuel for upward of 40 of them, much of it produced on Mr. Trump’s watch — has committed to full denuclearization, even though that overstates Mr. Kim’s position.

Sanger’s summary creates the impression that Iran is trying to obtain nuclear weapons, but that is not true. It is not enough to say that Trump “overstates” Kim’s position. He completely misrepresents it for his own purposes. The president torpedoed a successful nonproliferation agreement, but he wants us to believe that he is committed to nonproliferation. The president’s “mantra” on this score is no more than baseless propaganda, so we shouldn’t take it seriously. Likewise, his insistence that North Korea has agreed to something that everyone knows they never agreed to proves that he will say anything so long as he thinks it makes him look good. The problem here is not just that Trump gambled on bad policy goals and lost, but that he is determined to lie to the public about those policies for as long as he can. Trump has made sure that neither the Iranian nor the North Korean government can trust him, and he has proved to the American people that we can’t trust him, either. His foreign policy initiatives fail in no small part because no one believes what he says and no one is willing to take a chance by trusting him to honor the commitments he makes.

This NPR story on the Trump administration’s refusal to extend New START is a frustrating example of what happens when media outlets fail to acknowledge the transparent bad faith of one side in a debate:

Trump hasn’t ruled out renewing the treaty, known as New START. But he has made it clear that he would rather strike a bigger deal that includes different kinds of nuclear weapons — and that also brings China into the fold.

The report leaves the reader with the impression that the president genuinely wants a more ambitious arms control agenda (the headline refers to a “lofty nuclear treaty”), and the article then goes back and forth between supporters and detractors of this imaginary agenda. However, a cursory review of the administration’s record would show that they have had no interest in arms control agreements of any kind. Not only has Trump withdrawn from the INF Treaty rather than trying to save it, but he has indicated his intention to pull out of the Open Skies Treaty as well. When given the choice between preserving these treaties or ditching them, Trump is reliably in favor of ditching them. That is relevant information that never shows up in this report.

The president’s lack of support for New START is a matter of record. He has been quoted as saying that it was a “bad deal.” If the president doesn’t see the value in preventing New START from expiring, it is doubtful that he is prepared to make the effort to secure a much more sweeping arms control treaty that includes three nuclear weapons states. It is much more likely that he doesn’t care what happens to the treaty, and he is using talk of a “bigger deal” to obscure his own role in killing the existing agreement.

The article extensively quotes Tim Morrison, who until recently was pushing the anti-arms control agenda from inside the National Security Council, but it doesn’t inform readers that Morrison is a thoroughgoing Boltonite who has been part of the push to exit all of these agreements. Spencer Ackerman reported on Bolton’s hiring of Morrison back in 2018:

Morrison possesses a hostility to negotiated restrictions on U.S. nuclear weapons that rivals Bolton’s own, as well as an expertise on nuclear issues undisputed by even his harshest critics. Among arms controllers, Morrison’s name is equivalent to Keyser Söze. A former State Department official called him “the hardlinest of the hardline on nuclear policy.”

Morrison is opposed to every arms control agreement that exists, so when he is saying that he thinks that a “better deal” with Russia and China is possible that should set off several alarms. Like the Iran hawks that tout a “better deal” in order to kill the JCPOA, Morrison floats the same thing as a means of getting rid of New START. Citing his opinion without offering any of that context gives readers the misleading impression that there might be some merit to the hard-line position. The desire to appear balanced in their coverage of this issue ends up giving their readers a very distorted picture. Hard-liners routinely take advantage of the fetish to provide balance at the expense of accuracy, and it is one of the reasons why our foreign policy debates are so bad.

Nicholas Eberstadt has written an exceptionally bad op-ed in The New York Times about North Korea. Here is a sample:

Yet many in Washington and various media outlets seem ready to blame Mr. Kim’s latest move on an American president they detest rather than on the time-honored North Korean playbook from which it is so obviously drawn. Blinded by their loathing of Mr. Trump, these people cannot see that his North Korea denuclearization policy has been more serious — and more promising — than those of previous administrations.

It goes without saying that the North Korean government is responsible for its own actions, but it has to be stressed that the coming crisis with North Korea was avoidable and the Trump administration squandered a major opportunity to lock in the testing moratorium that Kim just ended. One can say many things about Trump’s North Korea policy, but to call it serious simply isn’t credible. From the empty photo-op summits to the ongoing campaign to deceive the public about what North Korea has agreed to, the administration’s handling of North Korea has been equal parts frivolous and reckless. They have pursued an impossible goal and they have given North Korea no incentive to make any meaningful concessions. Trump’s phony “diplomacy” couldn’t have succeeded, and a real effort to find a mutually acceptable compromise was never made.

The president chose to meet with Kim on three different occasions. There is nothing inherently wrong with such meetings, but when these high-level meetings take place first before anything has been worked out they predictably lead nowhere. A year and a half later, he has absolutely nothing to show for any of that. Trump’s predecessors didn’t achieve denuclearization, either, but that is because the goal of eliminating North Korea’s arsenal is a fantasy. Trump’s failure is persisting in chasing after that fantasy long after it became clear that it was never going to happen. Instead of settling for a more modest compromise that might have restricted North Korea’s arsenal, he wasted the opening created by South Korea’s engagement policy and congratulated himself on his non-existent success. Now that Trump’s failed North Korea policy is blowing up in his face, the president certainly deserves a large share of the blame for his pseudo-engagement that yielded nothing of value. Even now he keeps imagining that North Korea signed a “contract” that obliges them to do something, but in reality they made no binding commitments.

Eberstadt’s recommendations are as bad as his analysis of how we got here:

What is needed now, in the words of David Maxwell, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is “Maximum Pressure 2.0.”

It is a sure sign of sanctions addiction when someone looks at the abject failure of “maximum pressure” and then concludes that the answer is even more economic warfare. For the true believer, “maximum pressure” cannot fail, it can only be failed. So Eberstadt treats us to a lecture about the need to “paralyze” North Korea’s economy, and to prove just how unhinged his proposal is he also suggests a missile buildup to threaten North Korea even more:

Now that the United States is out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, why not start placing medium-range missiles within reach of North Korea?

As a practical matter, this is almost certainly a non-starter since none of our allies would want to host such weapons, but the proposal shows just how unserious this entire argument is. If the U.S. started a missile buildup in the region, would that make North Korea more likely to give up part of its arsenal or would it encourage them to deploy more missiles of their own in response? We already know it is the latter. If the administration followed this terrible advice, it would make the crisis with North Korea much more dangerous and it would take us closer to the brink of conflict.

Thomas Countryman urges the president to extend New START:

And yet, Trump hesitates even to open discussions with Moscow on the modalities of an extension. As is his habit, he wants more—a bigger deal. Specifically, he wants to see a more expansive treaty, one that covers not only strategic nuclear weapons but also smaller, low-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons. More ambitiously, he wants to bring China into a new treaty and establish limits on its nuclear arsenal.

These are praiseworthy long-term goals that should be pursued. But Trump’s belief that China is currently interested in negotiations on a three-way nuclear arms control pact with Russia is a fantasy, much like his assertions that China bears the cost of U.S. tariffs, or that Mexico will pay for the U.S. border wall.

Much like the president’s feigned interest in a “better deal” with Iran, his interest in a “bigger deal” on arms control is just an excuse for hostility to the existing agreements. When he wants to renege on an agreement, he claims he is doing it because the agreement was supposedly inadequate and needs to be expanded. The expansion that he describes is so unrealistic that he can’t be serious, but the pretense of seeking an expanded deal provides political cover for an agenda that is purely destructive.

The president clearly has no desire to negotiate real arms control or nonproliferation agreements. If he were interested in that, he wouldn’t insist on making so many non-starter demands of the other governments. His unwillingness to offer anything meaningful to North Korea after a year and a half is further proof that he won’t settle for anything less than the other side’s capitulation. He seizes on the first pretext he can find to dismantle existing agreements, and in some cases he just violates the agreements for no reason at all. Trump has been heeding the bad advice of anti-arms control ideologues for the last several years, and that has meant that he would much sooner burn down the entire architecture of arms control rather than add anything to it. He seems personally predisposed to expanding the U.S. arsenal rather than keeping it under current restrictions, and that has allowed hard-liners to prevail time after time in getting him to scrap agreements that were working very well.

If New START isn’t renewed, it not only opens the door to a new arms race, but it will also have destabilizing effects on relations between the U.S. and Russia even if there is no new buildup:

Even if the U.S. and Russia don’t immediately build up their forces, the treaty’s monitoring and verification regime will be impossible to replace. The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that even the most advanced national technical means cannot substitute for the transparency provided by New START. Without it, Russian and American military planners will gradually lose confidence in their understanding of each other’s nuclear forces and intentions, incentivizing them to assume the worst-case scenario about their adversary’s nuclear capabilities and rush to match them.

Letting New START die is senseless and indefensible, and Trump could prevent the treaty from expiring with a minimum of effort. His refusal to keep the treaty alive will be one of the more consequential, damaging decisions he has made as president. We will be dealing with the effects of his irresponsible rejection of arms control for a long time to come.

The growing Iraqi backlash to the recent U.S. airstrikes escalated significantly with a massive protest that broke into the American embassy in Baghdad. Kelley Vlahos has already discussed this on our State of the Union blog:

Protesters have stormed the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and reportedly set fire to the main entrance area, shouting “Death to America” and “Down, Down, USA”.

The protesters are made up of members of the Popular Mobilization Forces, and they are demanding the expulsion of U.S. forces from Iraq. Far from “restoring deterrence,” the airstrikes have provoked a massive and hostile reaction that puts U.S. forces in greater jeopardy and completely undermines whatever influence the U.S. still had in Iraq. I said yesterday that this was Trump’s big Iraq blunder, and that may have understated how significant it was. The New York Timesreports on the protests:

Protesters broke into the heavily guarded compound of the United States Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday and lit fires inside to express their anger over American airstrikes that killed 24 members of an Iranian-backed militia over the weekend.

The men did not enter the main embassy buildings and later withdrew from the compound, joining thousands of protesters and militia fighters outside who chanted “Death to America,” threw rocks, covered the walls with graffiti and demanded that the United States withdraw its forces from Iraq.

The situation remained combustible, with protesters vowing to camp outside the compound indefinitely. Their ability to storm the most heavily guarded zone in Baghdad suggested that they had received at least tacit permission from Iraqi security officials sympathetic to their demands.

The president has feebly insisted that the Iraqi government protect the embassy after ordering an attack that went against their wishes and violated their country’s sovereignty. It is a bit rich that he invokes international conventions when the president has made a habit of trampling on them and tearing them up. The host government should protect all diplomatic facilities, but then most host governments haven’t just been subjected to an armed attack on their security forces by the same state that now demands protection. You can’t violate another country’s sovereignty on Sunday and expect them to respect yours on Tuesday. For all of Trump’s national sovereignty rhetoric, it has always been clear that he thinks of sovereignty as a one-way street where the U.S. gets to do what it wants to everyone else and the rest just have to take it.

More dangerously, the president has blamed Iran for the consequences of his own bad decisions:

Iran killed an American contractor, wounding many. We strongly responded, and always will. Now Iran is orchestrating an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. They will be held fully responsible. In addition, we expect Iraq to use its forces to protect the Embassy, and so notified!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 31, 2019

That probably overestimates how much control Tehran has over the militias in Iraq that it supports, and it drives the U.S. and Iran closer to direct conflict when our government should be looking for a way to calm the situation down. The larger problem here is that Trump and his advisers routinely oversimplify every regional issue and see everything only in terms of Iran’s “malign activities.” They don’t see other countries in the region on their own terms and they don’t view local actors as having their own interests and agency, and that leads to lousy policies that keep blowing up in our face. Does Iran’s government have a hand in these protests? They likely do have some role in encouraging them. Would these protests be happening anyway because of the president’s foolish decision to attack and kill dozens of Iraqis? Of course. Blaming Iran for everything that we don’t like and holding Iran responsible for things that they can’t control is a good way to get into a disastrous war.

Trump keeps taking the U.S. and Iran to the brink of that war because he refuses to give up on his bankrupt and destructive Iran policy. He claims not to want this war, but everything he does makes it more likely. The increased tensions and greater instability that we have seen over the last eighteen months is a direct result of the president’s decisions to renege on the JCPOA and to launch a relentless economic war on the Iranian people. The crisis will persist and things will get worse if the administration uses only coercive and aggressive measures in its dealings with Iran. The Iran obsession has already been a costly failure for the U.S., and the longer that it goes on the higher the costs will be for everyone involved.

The New York Timesreports on the surge of anti-Americanism in Iraq following the recent airstrikes against an Iraqi militia:

While there has been some criticism of the militias’ attacks on Iraqi bases where Americans are stationed, most objections are now being leveled at the United States. The populist cleric Moktada al-Sadr, for instance, urged the militias to abandon “irresponsible actions,” saying he would work with them to use legal and political means to kick out the Americans.

Analysts also said the scale of the American attack — on five sites in two countries with two dozen people killed — made it likely that Kataib Hezbollah would feel compelled to respond and could rally anti-Americanism.

The heavy-handed U.S. response has done more to aid Iran than it has done to harm them. It has served as a distraction from Iran’s interference in Iraq, and it has focused public anger on the U.S. instead. It is typical that an action favored by Iran hawks ends up redounding to Iran’s benefit. Every time that hard-liners think that they are injuring the Iranian government they wind up doing them a favor. That was true in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and it has been true many times since then. Using force against an Iraqi militia may satisfy war-hungry ideologues at FDD, but it is a good way to alienate everyone in Iraq. Unless the goal is to drive Iraq’s political leaders closer to Iran, the Trump administration just made a major blunder. That is part and parcel of an incompetent and destructive Iran policy that has destabilized the region for no good reason.

It shouldn’t surprise us that people resent having their country and security forces attacked by a foreign government:

And while the militia is closely tied to Iran, many Iraqis see it primarily as an Iraqi force and were angered by an attack on it by an outside power.

“We are talking about a foreign force attacking an Iraqi force,” said Maria Fantappie, the senior adviser on Iraq for the International Crisis Group.

When we cut past the rhetoric about “self-defense,” we see that the U.S. launched an assault on members of Iraqi security forces without the Iraqi government’s permission. Imagine if we had invited another government’s military into our country, and then they take it upon themselves to attack our people over the the objections of our government. That is what the U.S. just did to Iraq. At best, it was an abuse of the privilege that the Iraqi government has granted the U.S. by allowing our forces to operate on their soil. At worst, it was a flat-out act of aggression against a partner government. If we were in their position, we would be outraged and we would have every right to be. The smart thing to do now is to apologize to the Iraqi government and remove the remaining U.S. troops from Iraq as soon as possible.

Hawks claim that the U.S. will discourage further attacks by hitting Kata’ib Hezbollah with airstrikes in multiple locations, but that is very likely wrong:

The United States may have been trying to send a message that killing Americans was a red line not to be crossed, said Ranj Alaaldin, director of the Proxy Wars Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Doha, Qatar. But the toll of its attack was likely to yield “more intense and expanded operations” against Americans.

“What the U.S. intended and what the U.S. will get could be two very different things,” he said.

The U.S. is usually very bad at understanding how adversaries see things and anticipating how they will respond. Our leaders assume that they are “restoring deterrence” when they are goading the other side to take more aggressive action. They think that smacking the other side in the face with a few airstrikes will cow them when it naturally just makes them angrier. Hawks refuse to see things from the adversary’s side, and so they are constantly misjudging what will and won’t provoke more attacks. A continued American military presence in Iraq at this point is just asking for trouble. The Iran obsession makes American troops less safe, and it is going to get more Americans killed if it isn’t reined in now.

The backlash in Iraq to U.S. airstrikes on an Iraqi militia over the weekend is growing. Even Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has condemned the airstrikes:

The “illegal practices carried out by some sides” must not be used as a reason to violate Iraq’s sovereignty, Sistani’s office said in a statement.

“The Iraqi authorities alone are entitled to deal with these practices and take the necessary measures to prevent them. They are called upon do so and to ensure Iraq does not become a field for settling regional and international scores and that others do not interfere in its internal affairs,” Sistani said.

The airstrikes have met with widespread condemnation from Iraq’s political leadership and from other militias that belong to the Popular Mobilization Forces. The Iraqi government understandably sees the strikes as a violation of their sovereignty, and the U.S. action has inflamed nationalist sentiment against the presence of American troops. Washington may see these militias primarily as Iran-backed groups, but they are also part of Iraq’s security forces and an American attack on them will naturally be perceived as an assault on Iraq.

The Iraqi government said it will be reviewing its military cooperation with the U.S.:

Iraq announced Monday after an emergency meeting of its National Security Council that it will “review” its relationship with the United States as a result of the strikes.

A spokesman for the Iraqi government said top officials had pleaded with the United States not to go ahead with Sunday night’s airstrikes against the Kataib Hezbollah militia, in which at least 25 militia members were killed and more than 50 injured.

The administration’s escalation was unwise and dangerous. As usual, the Trump administration did not think through the consequences of their actions. They have managed to create a new crisis with the Iraqi government and they may very well have triggered a new insurgency against U.S. forces. The costs of the Trump administration’s destructive Iran policy keep increasing. Because of that policy and the predictable resistance to it, the U.S. and Iran remain dangerously close to an unnecessary war. The latest escalation shows the folly of a policy focused solely on coercion and punishment. If the U.S. and Iran are to navigate the current crisis successfully, our governments have to establish channels of communication to prevent small clashes from expanding into a larger conflict. Better still, the U.S. should extricate its forces from Iraq so that they are no longer potential targets.