Akbar Shahid Ahmed reports on Biden’s belated reckoning with the Obama administration’s disastrous support for the war on Yemen and Obama’s continued silence on the subject:

What Obama has is a choice. He’s chosen so far not to acknowledge his culpability for what the United Nations calls the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian catastrophe or to try to publicly atone for it. He’s also assessed that the killing of a U.S. resident by a U.S.-aligned government with whom he worked closely — selling them more weapons than any other president — doesn’t meet the bar he’s set and Rice talked about. It’s possible to debate whether expectations of apology tours are fair or smart politics. It’s indisputable that the current situation is a curious one for a man whose moral authority is often cited as his defining characteristic.

“He should have never allowed support for the intervention back in 2015,” said Jehan Hakim, the chair of the Yemeni Alliance Committee, a Yemeni-American advocacy group. “The Yemeni community does not see the war in Yemen as a Trump war.”

“An apology is a moral imperative,” she added, but it’s only the beginning of a process of accountability that she said should include more aggressive support from Obama and his team for attempts to immediately end the U.S. role in the conflict.

U.S. support for the war on Yemen began under Obama and continued for almost two years without any public comment on it from the president. Obama administration officials spoke about U.S. support for the war, and they told some egregious lies about the war, but Obama himself said nothing. That policy remains one of Obama’s most shameful and destructive legacies, and it is a black mark on his foreign policy record that won’t be erased by anything he says now. It may be that Obama thinks that he can avoid scrutiny of this part of his record by not calling attention to it, but if so he is mistaken. Biden’s newfound opposition to the war should make it impossible for Obama to escape that scrutiny. It also requires Biden to explain why it took him so long to turn against such an obviously catastrophic policy.

Some former members of the Obama administration remain stuck in denial:

“It’s undeniable, as we have said, that the Obama administration’s approach did not succeed at limiting and ultimately ending the conflict in Yemen,” said Price. “You won’t find anyone who isn’t heartbroken at the tragedy that has unfolded there. But it’s also demonstrably wrong to argue that the Obama administration forged a glide path for the Trump administration’s approach toward Yemen. The two approaches are fundamentally different in terms of the strategies, objectives, and values that undergird them.”

This is preposterous excuse-making that isn’t fooling anyone. Trump inherited this policy from Obama, continued it, and then escalated it. If that’s not a “glide path,” what is it? What was “fundamentally different” about the Obama administration’s support for the Saudi coalition that distinguishes it so clearly from Trump’s? Trump has been an unabashed supporter of the Saudis in his public statements, but in practical terms the weapons sales and military assistance have been virtually identical. The current administration is more shameless in pushing Saudi propaganda, but the previous administration did plenty of that, too. The main difference seems to be that Obama administration officials were more likely to say privately that they knew the war would fail from the start, but for reasons known only to them they kept supporting it anyway. The Obama administration was also very well aware of the war crimes that U.S. support enabled, but just like the current administration they disingenuously claimed that U.S. support was making the Saudi coalition’s bombing campaign better:

The Obama administration has engaged in an “incomplete reckoning,” according to Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.

“We repeatedly provided evidence [of Saudi misconduct] to Obama administration officials, but they would insist, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, that the support they were providing was reining in the Saudis and helping improve their ability to comply with the laws of war,” she wrote on the Just Security blog last year. “This is not a case of hindsight knows best. The Obama administration should have known back then.”

Obama and other members of his administration have been given a pass for more than four years for their role in starting the disastrous policy of supporting the war on Yemen. The decision to back the Saudi coalition’s war was one of the worst policy decisions in decades, and Obama and his officials need to answer for it. We can agree that Obama’s successor took this terrible policy and made it even worse, but if it weren’t for Obama’s decision to side with the Saudi coalition there would have been no policy for Trump to continue.

It is understandable that so few Obama administration veterans want to talk about Yemen, and even fewer want to face up to the administration’s role in the catastrophe. It is one of their great failures. The war is indefensible. The humanitarian crisis created by the war remains the worst in the world, and it imperils the lives of millions of people. But it because it is such a horror show and because the destructive U.S. role began on their watch that they have to be made to confront what they did.

One reason that there is never any accountability in foreign policy is that officials are allowed to wash their hands of the disasters they helped to create after they leave government. Former presidents are never made to answer for the decisions they took while in office. U.S. policies can wreck entire countries, and the authors of those policies face no consequences of any kind. If we are ever going to change U.S. foreign policy to make it more peaceful and restrained, it is imperative that we begin holding people responsible when they pursue monstrous policies.

John Glaser and Christopher Preble have written a valuable study of the history and causes of threat inflation. Here is their conclusion:

If war is the health of the state, so is its close cousin, fear. America’s foreign policy in the 21st century serves as compelling evidence of that. Arguably the most important task, for those who oppose America’s apparently constant state of war, is to correct the threat inflation that pervades national security discourse. When Americans and their policymakers understand that the United States is fundamentally secure, U.S. military activism can be reined in, and U.S. foreign policy can be reset accordingly.

Threat inflation is how American politicians and policymakers manipulate public opinion and stifle foreign policy dissent. When hawks engage in threat inflation, they never pay a political price for sounding false alarms, no matter how ridiculous or over-the-top their warnings may be. They have created their own ecosystem of think tanks and magazines over the decades to ensure that there are ready-made platforms and audiences for promoting their fictions. This necessarily warps every policy debate as one side is permitted to indulge in the most baseless speculation and fear-mongering, and in order to be taken “seriously” the skeptics often feel compelled to pay lip service to the “threat” that has been wildly blown out of proportion. In many cases, the threat is not just inflated but invented out of nothing. For example, Iran does not pose a threat to the United States, but it is routinely cited as one of the most significant threats that the U.S. faces. That has nothing to do with an objective assessment of Iranian capabilities or intentions, and it is driven pretty much entirely by a propaganda script that most politicians and policymakers recite on a regular basis. Take Iran’s missile program, for example. As John Allen Gay explains in a recent article, Iran’s missile program is primarily defensive in nature:

The reality is they’re not very useful for going on offense. Quite the opposite: they’re a primarily defensive tool—and an important one that Iran fears giving up. As the new Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report entitled “Iran Military Power” points out, “Iran’s ballistic missiles constitute a primary component of its strategic deterrent. Lacking a modern air force, Iran has embraced ballistic missiles as a long-range strike capability to dissuade its adversaries in the region—particularly the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—from attacking Iran.”

Iran’s missile force is in fact a product of Iranian weakness, not Iranian strength.

Iran hawks need to portray Iran’s missile program inaccurately as part of their larger campaign to exaggerate Iranian power and justify their own aggressive policies. If Iran hawks acknowledged that Iran’s missiles are their deterrent against attacks from other states, including our government, it would undercut the rest of their fear-mongering.

Glaser and Preble identify five main sources of threat inflation in the U.S.: 1) expansive overseas U.S. commitments require an exaggerated justification to make those commitments seem necessary for our security; 2) decades of pursuing expansive foreign policy goals have created a class dedicated to providing those justifications and creating the myths that sustain support for the current strategy; 3) there are vested interests that benefit from expansive foreign policy and seek to perpetuate it; 4) a bias in our political system in favor of hawks gives another advantage to fear-mongers; 5) media sensationalism exaggerates dangers from foreign threats and stokes public fear. To those I would add at least one more: threat inflation thrives on the public’s ignorance of other countries. When Americans know little or nothing about another country beyond what they hear from the fear-mongers, it is much easier to convince them that a foreign government is irrational and undeterrable or that weak authoritarian regimes on the far side of the world are an intolerable danger.

Threat inflation advances with the inflation of U.S. interests. The two feed off of each other. When far-flung crises and conflicts are treated as if they are of vital importance to U.S. security, every minor threat to some other country is transformed into an intolerable menace to America. The U.S. is extremely secure from foreign threats, but we are told that the U.S. faces myriad threats because our leaders try to make other countries’ internal problems seem essential to our national security. Ukraine is at most a peripheral interest of the U.S., but to justify the policy of arming Ukraine we are told by the more unhinged supporters that this is necessary to make sure that we don’t have to fight Russia “over here.” Because the U.S. has so few real interests in most of the world’s conflicts, interventionists have to exaggerate what the U.S. has at stake in order to sell otherwise very questionable and reckless policies. That is usually when we get appeals to showing “leadership” and preserving “credibility,” because even the interventionists struggle to identify why the U.S. needs to be involved in some of these conflicts. The continued pursuit of global “leadership” is itself an invitation to endless threat inflation, because almost anything anywhere in the world can be construed as a threat to that “leadership” if one is so inclined. To understand just how secure the U.S. really is, we need to give up on the costly ambition of “leading” the world.

Threat inflation is one of the biggest and most enduring threats to U.S. security, because it repeatedly drives the U.S. to take costly and dangerous actions and to spend exorbitant amounts on unnecessary wars and weapons. We imagine bogeymen that we need to fight, and we waste decades and trillions of dollars in futile and avoidable conflicts, and in the end we are left poorer, weaker, and less secure than we were before.

Tom Cotton is a hard-line opponent of every arms control agreement, so it will not surprise anyone that he is leading the charge to abandon the Open Skies Treaty as well:

President Trump should end this charade by withdrawing from the treaty and diverting the hundreds of millions of dollars it wastes to valuable military projects.

Cotton’s case against the treaty is exceptionally weak, and it relies on falsely portraying the treaty as a giveaway to Russia. He ignores or dismisses the benefits that the U.S. and our allies get from the treaty, and feigns interest in saving money when there is almost no one more willing to throw money away on unnecessary military spending than he is. He exaggerates the significance of minor Russian violations and then uses them to argue for scrapping a stabilizing treaty that has been a great success for decades. Cotton’s complaints about minor violations are of a piece with his usual nitpicking about arms control and nonproliferation agreements. The specific complaints are always just a pretext for him to demand an end to the entire agreement. Cotton is an arsonist of arms control agreements who pretends to be a safety inspector. The moment he sees a fixable problem, he declares that it’s time to burn the entire place down.

Mary Chesnut and Robert Farley recently made a strong case for keeping the Open Skies Treaty:

The Open Skies Treaty, however, represents a low-cost answer to an age-old problem of international security, providing a mechanism for monitoring deployments of military forces and providing assurance to vulnerable nations. Discarding the treaty would represent a surrender to anti-arms control fetishism, rather than to a careful assessment of the security interests of the United States.

Anti-arms control fetishism sums up Cotton’s position very well. He pretends to fault existing agreements for their supposed shortcomings, but he really just wants to dismantle the agreements and looks for excuses to do it.

Leonid Bershidsky addressed another one of Cotton’s arguments a few weeks ago. Cotton maintains that the U.S. can gather all the information it needs through satellite reconnaissance, but Bershidsky explains why that isn’t as useful as keeping the overflight rights granted by the treaty:

Ryzkov wrote that between November and March, the area around Moscow, for example, has too much cloud cover for satellite photos to be useful, while an Open Skies surveillance plane can fly below the clouds, just 1,000 meters above ground. Besides, planes “enjoy much more flexibility in choosing flight paths,” as arms control experts Alexandra Bell and Anthony Weir wrote in a recent article defending the treaty. They continued: “The three to four days’ warning that observed countries get before a satellite overpass gives them ample time to move military assets. Treaty flights provide only 24 hours’ notice, increasing the odds that overflights capture an accurate assessment. Planes can also double back to provide a more comprehensive set of images than fixed-orbit satellites can.”

Cotton doesn’t even acknowledge this advantage of the treaty, because it would show how ridiculous his entire argument is if he admitted this. He whines about Russian restrictions of flight paths in a couple places, but doesn’t recognize the advantages of having virtually unlimited access to their airspace on short notice. Instead he calls the flights “a redundant capability,” which is completely false. The restrictions that Russia has put on flights over Kaliningrad have already been dealt with by imposing reciprocal restrictions on Russian flights over parts of the U.S. Bershidsky continues:

In the case of Kaliningrad, Russia insists the restriction is meant to keep surveillance planes from zigzagging back and forth and disrupting civilian flights — not much of an excuse but not really a deal-breaker. Besides, the U.S. has responded by not letting Russia fly over certain militarily important areas of Alaska and Hawaii. That’s adequate retaliation that hasn’t, however, led Russia to renounce the treaty.

Cotton asserts that “the Open Skies Treaty no longer serves to reduce tensions or build trust,” but every other member of the treaty disagrees with him and so do American arms control experts. Trashing the Open Skies Treaty would be bad for the U.S., bad for our European allies, and bad for international stability. Doing this in conjunction with letting New START die would be even worse. Trump has already signaled that he intends to withdraw from one treaty and it is likely he won’t extend the other one. If he does those things, he will be doing real harm to U.S. interests thanks to the advice of fanatical ideologues.

The House Judiciary Committee has released the two articles of impeachment that it has drawn up against the president. The two articles cover only the president’s abuses of power to solicit favors for his personal benefit and his obstruction of Congress in order to conceal those abuses. The first article of impeachment concludes by saying:

Wherefore President Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law. President Trump thus warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.

The case for Trump’s impeachment seemed quite strong more than two months ago, and the evidence provided to the House’s impeachment inquiry has strengthened it further. The president’s abuse of power is not in dispute. It is clear that he used the powers of his office in an attempt to extract a corrupt favor for his personal benefit, and this is precisely the sort of offense that impeachment was designed to keep in check. It doesn’t matter if the attempt succeeded. All that matters is that the attempt was made. It is also undeniable that he has sought to impede the investigation into his misconduct. The president has committed the offenses he is accused of committing, and the House should approve both articles of impeachment.

The president doesn’t have a credible line of defense left. That is why his apologists in Congress and elsewhere have been reduced to making increasingly absurd and desperate claims. The president’s defenders want to distract attention from the fact that the president abused his power, violated the public’s trust, and broke his oath of office, but these distractions are irrelevant.

The central question at the heart of this matter has always been whether we will tolerate the president corruptly using the powers of his office for personal benefit. The president’s defenders have answered loudly that they will tolerate corruption of the presidency. If we have any respect left for the Constitution and the rule of law, it is imperative that the president is not allowed to escape without facing serious consequences for his abuses. This is important not only to hold the current president in check, but it is also necessary to warn future presidents that such corruption will not be permitted to flourish.

Members of the House have been given a simple test of their fidelity to the Constitution. Are they enablers of presidential abuse of power and corruption, or will they do what their oaths of office require of them and hold a corrupt president in check?

The Washington Postcomments on the president’s Saudi First response to the Pensacola attack:

Mr. Trump has an inexplicable blind spot for Saudi Arabia. He has no trouble insulting in the vilest way people from other Muslim countries. He is hostile generally to people from “shithole” countries. After a terrorist attack in London, he said on Twitter, “These animals are crazy and must be dealt with through toughness and strength!” But when a Saudi carries out an attack on a U.S. military base, Mr. Trump becomes a spokesman and apologist for the king.

There is no question that Trump is unusually protective of the Saudi government even for a U.S. president, but I’m not sure that it is as inexplicable as all that. Like other anti-Muslim figures in his party, the president has a special regard for the Saudis because they are as anti-Iranian as he is. Perhaps more important for Trump is the fact that his son-in-law has cultivated a relationship with the Saudi crown prince. It was no accident that Trump’s first foreign trip as president was to Riyadh. Kushner was instrumental in persuading Trump to go there. Trump’s reflexive backing for the blockade of Qatar shortly after that visit was another result. The connection between the two princelings likely accounts for a significant part of U.S. foreign policy during the first three years of Trump’s presidency.

We should assume that the extensive pro-Saudi and pro-Emirati lobbying efforts that have been working overtime in Washington during this same period have contributed to the president’s almost comical subservience to the interests of these client states. Ben Freeman describes the effects of these efforts in distorting U.S. foreign policy:

As foreign lobbyists are writing our representatives’ speeches, and even writing our laws, this considerable influence largely pushes U.S. foreign policy in a much more militarized and interventionist direction. Two of the biggest spenders on influence in America—Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—have, for years, focused their lobbying and public relations efforts on maintaining U.S. military support for their war in Yemen and continuing the flow of U.S. military weaponry to both countries.

The president has been one of the loudest defenders and strongest supporters of continued backing for the war on Yemen, and he has gone out of his way and abused his power to expedite arms sales to these governments. Trump’s record has been filled with doing favors for the Saudi government that his apparent enthusiasm for arms sales alone can’t explain.

We are daily becoming aware of the extent of the administration’s corruption, and we still do not fully know the role of foreign money and influence from these countries in shaping the administration’s policies. If a president consistently puts the interests of another government ahead of American interests, there is probably something else going on beyond extremely bad foreign policy judgment. Trump’s absurd pro-Saudi bias is not inexplicable, but it is still in need of a fuller explanation. The rest of the answer is more likely found in lobbying and the president’s family and business ties. Whatever the full explanation turns out to be, the ever-closer embrace of the Saudis has been a disaster for U.S. foreign policy, the people of Yemen, and the stability of the region.

Trump’s fourth National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, appeared on Face the Nation yesterday, and he made a number of troubling statements that reflect some of the biggest flaws with the administration’s foreign policy. When he was asked about the Pensacola attack and the shooter’s possible terrorist ties, he said this:

So, my point is it looks like terrorism. We’ll have to see what the FBI investigation shows, what his motivations were. The Saudis have promised full cooperation with the investigation. We’re going to take them at their word [bold mine-DL].

Why would our government take the Saudis at their word? The Saudi government has spent the last several years routinely lying about their responsibility for war crimes in Yemen. They have funneled U.S.-made weapons to militias and designated terrorists as part of their war effort in direct violation of the agreements they made with the U.S. They lied for weeks about what Saudi agents had done to Jamal Khashoggi, and they have spent more than a year denying the crown prince’s obvious role in that murder. The Saudi government has given the U.S. promises and assurances in the past that proved to be worthless. Why is this time any different? No one can seriously take the Saudi government at their word at this point, so it is significant that this is the administration’s position. The administration’s credulity when it comes to Riyadh’s promises and statements is itself discrediting.

O’Brien’s answers on North Korea were no better. He continues to recite the talking point that Kim committed to denuclearization at Singapore:

We were able to convince Kim Jong Un to- to come to a- a summit. At that summit, Kim Jong Un promised to denuclearize North Korea. And we expect him to live up to the promise he made at the summit in Singapore. And- and we hope he’ll do so.

The Trump administration’s expectations remain completely disconnected from reality. Kim made no such promise at Singapore or anywhere else. The conceit that Kim made a promise to denuclearize requires ignoring the text of the Singapore statement itself. It is disturbing that the president and top administration officials keep spreading this falsehood and seem to believe it themselves, and it is frustrating that they are never called out for it. It is unreasonable to expect another government to fulfill a promise that it never made. Insisting that the other party in a negotiation agreed to something that everyone knows they didn’t agree to is bound to be taken as proof that our government has been acting in bad faith all along.

At the close of the interview, O’Brien reiterates the administration’s preposterous demands for Iran:

We’d like to sit down and talk to them. But the sanctions and the maximum pressure are not going to be let up until Iran abandons its nuclear program and abandons its malign activities in the region.

This is the bankruptcy of the “maximum pressure” campaign in a nutshell. There is the usual feigned interest in talking combined with the extreme and completely unrealistic demand for surrender, and if Iran refuses to surrender it will continue to be strangled with economic warfare. O’Brien’s statement shows that the administration’s Iran policy remains as inflexible and destructive as ever.

If one were looking for some sign that a post-Bolton Trump administration had improved its foreign policy, this O’Brien interview is extremely discouraging.

An extensive investigation by The Washington Post into a trove of confidential documents has found that the government has been deliberately misleading the public about the war in Afghanistan with dishonest claims of progress senior officials knew to be untrue:

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.” [bold mine-DL]

The interviews are the byproduct of a project led by Sopko’s agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as SIGAR, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.

The revelations in the report show that our political and military leadership has been constantly violating the public’s trust for the sake of perpetuating a futile war. Their efforts to distort and conceal the evidence of the war’s failure have served to warp the debate over U.S. policy in Afghanistan to the detriment of U.S. interests and at the cost of American and Afghan lives. Instead of telling the public the truth that the war was unwinnable, our political and military leaders have worked to keep Americans in the dark about the conflict as much as possible.

These documents have come to light now only because the Post sued to force SIGAR to release them:

Under the Freedom of Information Act, The Post began seeking Lessons Learned interview records in August 2016. SIGAR refused, arguing that the documents were privileged and that the public had no right to see them.

The Post had to sue SIGAR in federal court — twice — to compel it to release the documents.

Considering how damaging this information is to the credibility of the government, it is not surprising that there was such resistance to making these records available to the press.

Some of what the investigation uncovered was already familiar to anyone who has been covering or writing on the war. The war had the shifting and unrealistic goals, and it continued to be fought for unclear reasons. There was also basic confusion about who the enemy was and was not:

The Lessons Learned interviews also reveal how U.S. military commanders struggled to articulate who they were fighting, let alone why.

Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll? According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.

As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe.

“They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live,” an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team told government interviewers in 2017. “It took several conversations for them to understand that I did not have that information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: ‘But who are the bad guys, where are they?’ ”

The ill-advised pursuit of “nation-building” also led to a spending spree that achieved little except to fuel monumental corruption that our government then chose to tolerate:

The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption.

In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers — allies of Washington — plundered with impunity.

Throughout all of this, one administration after another has committed to keeping U.S. forces in Afghanistan with no end in sight, and military leaders routinely tell us that progress is being made and that it would be irresponsible to withdraw. When a war has become divorced from U.S. interests and has become an end in itself, the only way to justify its continuation is to ignore the reality and create a useful fiction by distorting and spinning the evidence:

In Afghanistan, with occasional exceptions, the U.S. military has generally avoided publicizing body counts. But the Lessons Learned interviews contain numerous admissions that the government routinely touted statistics that officials knew were distorted, spurious or downright false.

The report confirms what many of us have known for some time. The war in Afghanistan cannot be won. Our political and military leaders have been lying to us about the progress of the war practically since it began, and those lies have kept the U.S. needlessly at war for more than 18 years. It is long past time that Americans demand accountability for this colossal waste, and that begins by demanding that the U.S. bring its involvement in this war to an end.

Daryl Kimball makes another appeal to the Trump administration to save New START:

If the president truly seeks to avoid an arms race, maintain a cap on the Russian nuclear arsenal, and begin the work to bring China into the nuclear disarmament enterprise, the first and best step is to promptly agree with Russia to extend New START by five years.

Russia has offered to agree to a five-year extension immediately before the end of the year. If Trump agreed to this, the treaty could be kept alive through 2026. It would be extremely easy for Trump to take Putin up on this offer, and in this case cooperation with Moscow would earn the president praise. It would be an important win for U.S. interests, and it would be something that the president could legitimately take credit for. Unfortunately, none of that is happening.

There is no sign that the president is serious about preserving the treaty. The new Posteditorial calling for a treaty extension puts it bluntly:

Russian officials have been raising the prospect of an extension for more than a year. The Trump administration does not appear to have engaged Moscow in any serious negotiations toward an extension.

The Russians may as well be talking to the wall. No one in the administration is listening to them, and the president’s incoherent ramblings on the subject aren’t helping. The fact is that the president has been against the treaty since he became president, and Bolton’s baleful influence just reinforced Trump’s existing hostility to any agreement bearing Obama’s signature. As president, he has repeatedly mused about expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal, so he would make for a very odd supporter of an arms reduction treaty.

Hard-line opponents of the treaty have been encouraging the president to abandon it. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton is the loudest anti-treaty voice in Congress, and here he cites a former Trump administration NSC official’s disingenuous case against extending the treaty:

Future arms-control agreements must limit both Putin’s massive tactical nuclear arsenal and Xi Jinping’s growing nuclear ambitions. Anything less isn’t real arms-control. https://t.co/bVI3mP2Uxg

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) December 6, 2019

Republican hard-liners have opposed New START from the beginning because it was supposedly inadequate, but in truth they would very much prefer no arms control at all. Much like hawkish opposition to the JCPOA, the feigned interest in a stronger arms control agreement is just a cover for their opposition to any and every treaty that might be negotiated. Hence the impossible demand to include China in the treaty when China has never been party to any of the treaties between Washington and Moscow. It is an obvious pretext for killing a successful treaty for the sake of a fantasy offered up in bad faith.

The only “real arms control” available right now is the existing treaty that Cotton and others like him want to let die. Renewing an already ratified treaty would be the diplomatic equivalent of a layup for Trump, and he ought to do it. Regrettably, there is no reason to expect that he will.

The president is still clinging to the fantasy that Kim Jong-un agreed to disarm at the Singapore summit, and he is threatening North Korea if Kim “fails” to honor the agreement he never made:

Kim Jong Un is too smart and has far too much to lose, everything actually, if he acts in a hostile way. He signed a strong Denuclearization Agreement with me in Singapore. He does not want to void his special relationship with the President of the United States or interfere…. https://t.co/THfOjfB2uE

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2019

….with the U.S. Presidential Election in November. North Korea, under the leadership of Kim Jong Un, has tremendous economic potential, but it must denuclearize as promised. NATO, China, Russia, Japan, and the entire world is unified on this issue!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2019

Nothing is less likely to convince Kim and the North Korean government to make concessions than threatening them with the loss of “everything” (i.e., regime change). Much depends on what Trump chooses to define as “hostile” behavior from North Korea. If he thinks that North Korea made a meaningful commitment to disarm and then concludes that they are reneging on it, that spells serious trouble for the new year. Trump is absurdly wrong to say that the Singapore summit produced a “strong denuclearization agreement.” It produced no agreement at all, and even the vague statement that did come out of the summit doesn’t suggest that North Korea is willing to disarm. The U.S. and North Korea are on the cusp of a completely avoidable crisis, and Trump will bear a significant portion of the blame for it.

The president also overrates the importance of his relationship with Kim. Kim has little or nothing to show for negotiating with Trump and probably sees no reason to do Trump any favors in an election year. The reality is that North Korea made no such commitment to disarm, and their government’s patience has all but run out. The end-of-year deadline that they have talked about for months approaches, and the U.S. negotiating position remains as hopelessly unrealistic as ever. The U.S. and North Korea are already well on their way to resuming the tit-for-tat insults and provocations that we saw in 2017.

The open secret of Trump’s failed North Korea policy is that much of “the world” hasn’t been on board with “maximum pressure” for more than a year. The Trump administration has wrongly assumed that pressure tactics brought North Korea to the table, and they wrongly assume that pressure tactics will compel North Korea to make significant concessions. North Korea was willing to engage for a time when they thought that some sanctions relief might be offered, and now that sanctions relief obviously won’t be forthcoming they aren’t going to bother with further talks. There was an opening here for a modest arms control agreement that would reduce or at least cap North Korea’s arsenal, but because of their foolish maximalist goals the Trump administration squandered that opportunity.