Spencer Ackerman reports on an attempted kidnapping of a Saudi government critic here in the U.S. in 2018 that was thwarted by the FBI:

A suspected agent of the Saudi government attempted to kidnap a regime critic on American soil, according to the critic and multiple U.S. and foreign sources familiar with the episode. The young Saudi man says the FBI saved him from becoming the next Jamal Khashoggi.

Abdulrahman Almutairi is a 27-year-old comedian and former student at the University of San Diego with a big social-media presence. After Almutairi used social media to criticize the powerful Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman over the October 2018 murder and dismemberment of Washington Post contributor Khashoggi, an unidentified Saudi man accompanied Almutairi’s father on a flight to collect Almutairi against his will and bring him back to Saudi Arabia, according to The Daily Beast’s sources.

The Saudi government cannot abide critics from their own country, especially when they have large followings online, but in trying to stifle and kill them they are doing far more damage to their government’s reputation than anything else could have done. The crown prince’s recklessness and ham-fistedness are useful in that they make it harder for Saudi government defenders in U.S. think tanks and newspapers to cover for them. The fact that they were willing to follow up the Khashoggi murder with an abduction on U.S. soil shows that the Saudi government believes they can act with complete impunity.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Saudi agents are willing to try to abduct critics of the government here on U.S. soil. After all, as my colleague Kelley Vlahos discussed in a recent post, this is the same government that helps Saudi nationals suspected of violent crimes to escape U.S. jurisdiction:

Thanks to a law quietly passed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and signed by President Trump in December, we now know that the Saudi government has helped an untold number of its citizens committing crimes here in the U.S. flee back to the Kingdom before facing justice.

This includes Saudis accused of assault, rape and manslaughter, including the 2013 hit-and-run of a 15-year-old girl. It is done, press reports indicate, right under the noses of the FBI, Homeland Security, and “other agencies,” who have not intervened, ostensively because of the special security relationship between the two countries.

If a government is prepared to work against U.S. law enforcement and abet the flight of accused murderers and rapists, it isn’t going to worry about committing other crimes against their own citizens on American soil. Fortunately for Mr. Almutairi, the Saudi government wasn’t allowed to get away with what they were planning in this case. The attempted kidnapping of Almutairi fits in with the Saudi government’s intensified efforts to crack down on dissent and stamping out criticism of the government among Saudis living abroad:

“Abduction is part and parcel of the way the Saudi government has operated for many years,” said Callamard, the U.N. special rapporteur. But until MBS became crown prince two years ago, “most victims were part of the royal family. It appears now that their kidnapping attempts are expanding.” Being a Saudi dissident living in America is no protection, she warned: “Absolutely, they will keep trying to lure people in the United States. The only reason why they haven’t succeeded is because the U.S. intelligence agencies are doing their job.”

The crown prince has presided over intensifying authoritarianism and repression in his country, and he has shown that he has no respect for international law or the jurisdiction of other countries in carrying out his vendettas against his critics. He is not going to “learn” or “evolve,” but will continue committing the same abuses for as long as he is in a position of authority. Mohammed bin Salman may very well be on the Saudi throne for decades to come, but no matter how long he is king he should have to do that without the benefit of continued U.S. indulgence and protection. The U.S.-Saudi relationship as it exists today should be brought to an end as quickly as possible. The current administration has neither the courage nor the wisdom to do that, but maybe the next one will.

A recent survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs finds that many Americans have a bizarre and distorted view of which country poses the greatest threat to the U.S.:

The percentage of Americans who say Iran is the country that poses the greatest threat to US security has increased from 10 percent last year to 34 percent in January 2020. Among a list of six countries, Russia (28%) now comes second to Iran as the one posing the greatest threat to US security, followed by China (16%) and North Korea (13%). In February 2019, Russia was named most frequently as the country posing the greatest threat (with 39%); in 2017, North Korea had that distinction (59%).

These wild fluctuations in public perceptions of the greatest threat to U.S. security obviously have no connection to changes in the capabilities or intentions of the states in question. Iran has not magically become more of a threat to the U.S. than China overnight, and the idea that it poses more of a threat to us than a nuclear-armed Russia is laughable. As far as I can tell, these public threat perceptions are driven almost entirely by the country that the president and other political leaders choose to cast as the bogeyman of the moment. If a third of Americans now consider Iran to be the greatest threat to our security when almost no one (6%) thought that three years ago, that unfortunately shows how easy it is to rile up a large portion of the public into believing in a threat that doesn’t exist. By all rights, Iran shouldn’t even be on the list of options, but thanks to a steady dose of administration propaganda and the usual hype from infotainment outlets it has catapulted to the top.

The dramatic change in the perception of the threat from North Korea is probably the most startling evidence of how much fear-mongering and threat inflation can distort things. In 2017, 59% said they saw North Korea as the greatest threat. Three years later, only 13% say the same. That huge decrease is not a measure of a reduction in the threat North Korea poses, but rather an indication of how much less attention the administration is paying to North Korea. As result, it measures how much less fear-mongering the public is exposed to. Once the “fire and fury” rhetoric subsided, the public perception of the North Korean threat faded as well. That’s not because North Korea suddenly posed less of a threat than it had before, but that in the absence of threat inflation from political leaders the perception of the threat dropped back to a much lower and more reasonable level. As the Trump administration’s Iran obsession has taken over and dominated their messaging over the last year and a half, the public perception of the supposed threat from Iran has grown quickly. The administration’s increasingly confrontational Iran policy drove the number up from 10% last February to 34% now. As the administration’s attention focused almost entirely on Iran to the exclusion of everything else, the other perceived threats diminished.

These sudden ups and downs in public threat perception show how divorced from reality Americans’ assumptions about foreign threats are. Neither Iran nor North Korea has any business being classed alongside major powers in the first place, and the idea that either one of them is more threatening to the U.S. than Russia or China is nonsense. Hard-liners that want to pursue aggressive and confrontational policies against these weaker states have every incentive to promote and indulge unfounded fears about the threat that they pose in order to scare people into supporting them. This has the effect of horribly distorting our foreign policy and causing the U.S. to neglect potentially much more serious problems while obsessing over manageable or non-existent threats.

New evidence has emerged showing that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was directed to target Iranian-born travelers at border crossings between the U.S. and Canada at the start of this month. The CBC reports:

U.S. border officers working at multiple Canada-U.S. border crossings were instructed to target and interrogate Iranian-born travellers in early January, said a U.S. border officer in an email obtained by CBC News.

The allegation follows reports that up to 200 people of Iranian descent travelling from B.C. — many of them Canadian or U.S. citizens — were detained and questioned for hours at the Peace Arch Border Crossing in Blaine, Wash., during the weekend of Jan. 4.

When the firstreports of the detentions in Washington came out, the CBP denied that there had been such an order. That seemed hard to believe at the time, and this new evidence shows that it was false. The CBP officer’s email states that Iranian-born travelers were to be targeted solely because of where they happened to have been born:

In it, the officer told Saunders that CBP’s Seattle Field Office — which covers the Canada-U.S. border from Washington State to Minnesota — directed border officers to ask Iranian-born travellers counterterrorism questions.

The officer claimed that the sole reason Iranian travellers were detained and questioned that weekend was due to their ethnicity. He alleged that the operation was unethical and possibly unconstitutional.

Iranian-Americans shouldn’t be subjected to this harassment from their government, and our government shouldn’t be singling out travelers solely because of their place of birth. It is unacceptable and a violation of their rights, and we should all repudiate this mistreatment. The report quotes one of the travelers whose family was detained along with her:

Negah Hekmati, an Iranian-born U.S. Citizen, was returning home with her husband and two children after a ski weekend in Canada. She said her family was held for questioning at the Peace Arch crossing for five hours during the early hours of Sunday.

“They had our car keys, they had our passports,” she said during a news conference on Jan. 6. “I am here today because of my kids. They shouldn’t experience such things. They are U.S. citizens and this is not OK.”

Based on other reporting, it appears that the same order applied to all U.S.-Canada border crossings. Huffington Post reports on other examples of this harassment, including the experience of a group of Iranian-American women who were detained and questioned in Vermont on their return from Canada:

“It was very bothersome, but I kept answering the same questions,” Fariba said. “There is really nothing you can say or do to stop this. They made me feel very uncomfortable.”

Suri and her friends are trying to push out the memory of what occurred at the border and instead relive the happier moments from the trip. But it’s hard not to think about how they were singled out, particularly when they consider how quickly they accepted that the questions and demands were to be expected as Iranian Americans.

“The painful part for us after reflecting on the way home was looking at how we have accepted this,” Suri said. “That this was a normal thing for us to be subjected to and treated this way. It’s sad.”

Congress should investigate these incidents. They should demand answers from the CBP and the Department of Homeland Security on who was responsible for harassing U.S. and Canadian citizens solely because of their Iranian heritage. No group of Americans should be subjected to such harassment by government officials, and it is not something that any American should expect or have to become used to experiencing.

The Chinese government has restated its refusal to participate in any arms control talks with the U.S. and Russia:

But Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang accused the US of using China’s involvement as “a pretext to shirk and shift its own nuclear disarmament responsibilities”.

“China has no intention to participate in the so-called China-US-Russia trilateral arms control negotiations,” Geng said at a regular press briefing in Beijing.

China has never wanted to be part of a trilateral arms control treaty, and that isn’t about to change. The Trump administration has refused to extend New START, and it has used this idea of including China in a larger treaty as a smokescreen to justify killing the existing treaty. The administration’s feigned interest in a much more ambitious arms control treaty is a transparent attempt at distracting from their desire to let the last remaining major arms control agreement wither and die. Some current and former administration officials imagine that by delaying the extension of the treaty it somehow gives the U.S. additional leverage with Russia, but each day that the treaty’s expiration draws closer the less seriously Moscow will take U.S. demands.

New START has just one year left without an extension. Even if China were willing to talk, there is not remotely enough time to put together a new treaty and ratify it before the current treaty expires. Under the circumstances, the Trump administration’s stalling on the extension is obvious proof of their bad faith. Hard-liners in and around the administration are ideologically opposed to arms control agreements, and they have been eager to get rid of all of them.

Letting the treaty die would be one of the more irresponsible things that Trump has done as president. At best, this will have a destabilizing effect on U.S.-Russian relations and it will significantly reduce what our military knows about Russia’s nuclear forces. At worst, this will open the door to a new costly and ruinous arms race that puts the world in greater peril.

Maysam Behravesh explains why the Iranian government won’t budge under continued U.S. pressure:

While intense diplomatic efforts are underway to break this escalatory cycle of hostility and confrontation, Tehran will likely press ahead with its defiant behavior unless and until the Trump administration provides it with an “off ramp,” as any major deviation under current circumstances could cost the Islamic Republic dearly in terms of credibility, authority, and eventually survival. To put it in a nutshell, the U.S. “maximum pressure” campaign” has arguably locked Iran into a posture of “maximum resistance” from which it is structurally implausible, if not impossible, to break free as long as the former remains in place.

Behravesh makes a very strong case that the Iranian government cannot make concessions now because they have no political room to maneuver at home, cannot afford to alienate the regime’s core supporters, and dare not encourage the U.S. to believe that they can be compelled to give Washington what it wants. Iran’s government tried appeasing the U.S. five years ago with the JCPOA, and that has worked out very badly for them. It is understandable that there is no more appetite for further appeasement of an aggressive power.

There is also a matter of self-respect that hard-liners in this country never understand. Yielding to U.S. demands at this point would be a humiliation for any government, and especially for one that has defined itself in terms of resistance to the U.S. This is one reason why all three targets of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaigns have resisted and refused to give Trump an inch. Perhaps if the Trump administration showed any hint of flexibility and a willingness to offer incentives up front, it might be possible for the Iranian government to show similar flexibility. When U.S. demands are so excessive and unrealistic, there is not much chance of that.

It might seem strange that much weaker states would put up so much resistance, but to understand this we would only have to look back at the U.S. habit of toppling governments that had already complied with Washington’s demands. When our government is bent on regime change, as it certainly is in Iran and Venezuela, it is natural for the leaders in the targeted regimes to assume that there is no point in talking to the U.S. The stakes for these governments are as high as they can be, and when the U.S. is offering nothing more than relief from the sanctions our government has imposed it is not worth taking the risk. Pressure causes resistance, and when the alternative to resistance is abject surrender we should expect almost any government to keep resisting as long as they can.

It is not an accident that “maximum pressure” kills diplomacy. That is what it is meant to do, and that is why hard-liners that detest diplomatic compromises are such big supporters. The administration’s pressure-only approach is designed to increase tensions and force confrontation. Of course, the more that a targeted regime believes that its survival and core interests are threatened, the less likely it is to agree to anything. The current administration obviously has no interest in a diplomatic solution to the crisis they have created with Iran, so it will be up to the next administration to abandon “maximum pressure” and try to repair at least some of the damage that has been done over the last few years.

Ahmad Jalalpour reports on the deteriorating conditions inside Iran created by U.S. sanctions:

Even though the official inflation rate stands at 41 percent, inflation for foodstuffs is running at 74 percent. In addition, the rent for housing units increased last year by more than 95 percent in Iran’s major cities. Meanwhile, the government has proposed raising wages by a meager 15 percent this coming fiscal year. This yawning discrepancy between wages and the cost of living has led to a catastrophic drop in living standards across the board, but especially for the more than 60 percent of the population categorized as poor or in the lower income brackets.

The plight of those sliding into the category known as “absolute poverty” is even more tragic. According to the Iranian Parliament’s Research Center, in fiscal year 2016–17 (calculated in the Iranian calendar), 16 percent of the population lived in absolute poverty, defined as living on or less than $1.08 a day. In 2017–18, the figure increased by an average of 30 percent. That figure must have risen even higher in the past year. [bold mine-DL] This means at least another 10 percent of the population has fallen into absolute poverty in just two years.

Iran sanctions have had a devastating effect on tens of millions of ordinary Iranians, and Jalalpour’s report is the latest to confirm how much harm sanctions are doing to the civilian population. U.S. economic warfare is an attack on innocent people in a vain bid to compel their government to do what Washington wants, and the only thing it is good for is making lots of people poorer and causing the sick and vulnerable to die for lack of proper treatment and medicine. We know that the supposed humanitarian exemptions don’t work in practice when no one in Iran can make necessary payments to bring in essential goods. The purpose of these sanctions has been to target and hurt the Iranian people as much as possible on the assumption that by causing them sufficient misery and hardship the people will do the regime changers’ work for them. Like everything else Iran hawks believe about Iran, this isn’t happening. Sanctions are impoverishing and killing people for nothing.

It is common now for many observers to point out that “maximum pressure” hasn’t achieved anything anywhere, but what often gets left out in these discussions is how much senseless destruction economic warfare is causing. Our government is committed to an Iran policy of collective punishment against an entire nation in which causing destruction is the point. The effect on public health in Iran has been severe:

The public health situation is particularly shocking, warranting immediate action by the international community. Technically, medicine and medical supplies are exempted from US sanctions. However, sanctions on Iranian banks as well as on all forms of financial transactions have meant that even if Iran were to buy imported items with its now-meager petrodollars, it can no longer reimburse importers for their sales. Of course, the government can resort to clandestine means to do so, but the purchased items in that case would be far more expensiveThe end result is the same: It is as if there is a near-total sanction placed on medicine and medical supplies for Iran.

While Iran produces many drugs domestically, on average some 40 percent of chemicals used in the ingredients are imported. That may not seem like a terribly high figure, except that even with just 2 percent of its chemicals missing or tainted, a drug is usually rendered practically useless. This means that the government must either devote its dwindling foreign exchange income to buying from international suppliers at much higher rates, or else use shoddy sources instead. Both options have been disastrous. The first has led to severe scarcity and black markets, while the second has led to a shocking toll in human lives and general health.

Jalalpour’s report is consistent with everything we have been seeing and hearing from other reports over the last year and a half. There is no shortage of accurate information about what sanctions are doing to the Iranian people, but the victims of the economic war our government wages on them are mostly invisible to Americans. We almost never hear about the thousands of Iranian cancer patients that died last year because sanctions deprived them of the medicine they needed, and so there is little or no urgency here to put a stop to this monstrous policy.

Jalalpour continues:

Doctors in Iran’s hospitals tell countless horror stories about making do with fewer drugs, fewer spare parts for their medical equipment, and a much larger pool of people with serious medical conditions. “It really seems like I’m in a field hospital in a war zone at times,” said a surgeon working in a midsize town in southwestern Iran. “We have daily quotas of how much anesthesia we can administer each day. At the same time, there are days when you just can’t turn away many patients. So what do you do? You become creative and do a lot of praying.” According to this surgeon, it is not unusual at his hospital for an ob-gyn to perform a C-section delivery with localized anesthesia.

Sanctions are an aggressive measure that a much more powerful government uses to hurt a weaker country, but the politicians and policymakers that support them rarely have to answer for the destruction that they cause. Sanctions allow interventionists to wage war on other countries without having to acknowledge what they are doing, and that frees them from the scrutiny and unpopularity that come with military intervention. The next administration has to halt the economic war and end this policy of collective punishment. Every day that the economic war continues, our government will be responsible for the lives ruined and ended because of these sanctions.

The Guardianreports that Mohammed bin Salman was personally involved in hacking Jeff Bezos’ phone:

According to sources who have spoken to the Guardian, the message sent to Bezos on that Tuesday 1 May from the personal account of the crown prince contained a video file – of what, it is not clear.

But a forensic technical analysis of the file has found that it is “highly probable” it contained malware that penetrated Bezos’s mobile phone and exfiltrated a large amount of data within hours.

Bezos, it seems, had been hacked.

The Guardian has no knowledge about the precise nature of the material that was allegedly taken or what was done with it.

The apparent hack took place in May 2018 during the crown prince’s grand tour around the U.S. back when he was still being feted as a great reformer. It isn’t all that surprising that the Saudis would try to compromise the businessmen and other prominent figures that met with the crown prince, but it shows the arrogance and recklessness of the crown prince that he thought he wouldn’t be found out. The Saudis were already suspected of being responsible for publicizing personal information about Bezos last year in retaliation for the Post‘s extensive coverage of the Khashoggi murder and their intensified criticism of other Saudi crimes and human rights abuses, and this latest report supports that conclusion.

Iyad el-Baghdadi, the prominent political activist who has also been threatened by the Saudi government, says that this story is just the tip of the iceberg:

This is the investigation I worked on all of last year, and it's the reason MBS wants me dead. A lot more coming. https://t.co/KjoCov6tN9

— İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي (@iyad_elbaghdadi) January 21, 2020

If the crown prince took advantage of his personal communications with Bezos this way, it is reasonable to assume that he has done the same thing with many others. It seems safe to assume that he would have done the same thing with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. It well-known that Kushner has also communicated frequently with the crown prince via WhatsApp, so there have likely been many opportunities for the Saudis to gain access to Kushner’s devices and private information. There is no telling how badly compromised Kushner may be, but if he is it would help to account for why he and his father-in-law have been such constant and shameless defenders of the Saudis over the last three years.

The Saudi government has been intensifying its efforts to intimidate critics and suppress dissent in recent years, and they have become more aggressive in targeting critics wherever they may be in the world. According to el-Baghdadi, the Bezos hack is directly related to this ongoing campaign of intimidation and threats. This is just the latest evidence of the kind of government that the crown prince is running, and it is another reminder of why the U.S. should disentangle itself from the relationship with the Saudis as quickly as possible.

Trump is considering expanding the cruel and unnecessary travel ban to include as many as seven more countries. Nahal Toosi reports:

President Donald Trump may expand his controversial travel ban with an announcement expected as early as Monday, the three-year anniversary of the original order, which targeted several majority-Muslim nations.

The list of countries is not yet final and could be changed, but nations under consideration for new restrictions include Belarus, Myanmar (also known as Burma), Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania, according to two people familiar with the matter.

A draft being considered by the Trump administration would place immigration restrictions on the additional seven countries, but not necessarily completely ban all citizens of those nations from entering the United States.

Nonetheless, any new restrictions are likely to strain ties with the affected countries, some of which assist the U.S. on issues like fighting terrorism, and some of which Washington has been trying to court for strategic reasons.

Like the first three versions of the ban, an expanded ban doesn’t have any legitimate security justification. The expanded list is even more bizarre than the first group of states. There isn’t even a remotely plausible connection to terrorism in most of these countries, and in those countries where there are jihadist groups the governments are partners with the U.S. in combating them. Placing additional restrictions on people from Nigeria and Tanzania is likely to interfere with the work of humanitarian and religious groups. Adding these countries to the list is just going to damage U.S. relations with all of them in exchange for nothing. The expanded list doesn’t do much to counter the criticism that the travel ban is directed against predominantly Muslim countries since Muslims make up a large part of the population in most of the countries on the new list as well.

This ban is the worst kind of security theater that ends up penalizing innocent ordinary people from the targeted countries while doing nothing to make the U.S. the slightest bit more secure. The fact is that the U.S. is already extraordinarily secure from terrorist threats from overseas. In this case, national security is just being invoked to provide cover for creating unnecessary barriers to visitors from these countries.

The current travel ban has no merit, and expanding it makes no sense. We have already seen over the last three years how much harm the travel ban has done to thousands and thousands of families who have been separated by the president’s decree, and it is practically guaranteed that an expanded version will cause more misery and hardship to many thousands more from the countries that are added to it. The travel ban needs to be rescinded, not expanded.

Ben Taub has written an exhaustive report on the case of Omar Ameen, an Iraqi refugee living in the U.S. who was falsely accused of a murder in Iraq that he could not have possibly committed. Taub’s report makes clear that Mr. Ameen has been railroaded by our government and that the so-called evidence against him is untrue, but it is still likely that he will be extradited back to Iraq where his life will be in danger:

On December 4th, some two dozen federal employees from the F.B.I., the D.H.S., the State Department, and the Justice Department filed into a courtroom in Sacramento for Ameen’s extradition hearing. Wittingly or not, they and their departments have been co-opted into a campaign to extradite an innocent man to almost certain death, in order to make a racist talking point appear to be slightly less of a fiction.

The key point in the story is that committing the crime would have been physically impossible for Mr. Ameen, who was residing in Turkey and in the middle of his refugee application process at the time. The victims’ parents have also stated that Ameen is innocent of the crime. Ameen is the victim of a false accusation that seems to have been spread by someone with a vendetta against his family, and that false accusation was then accepted at face value and reproduced by American and Iraqi officials. By all other accounts, Ameen has been a law-abiding refugee who fled Iraq because he was in fear for his life, and now he is about to be sent back because of outrageous lies.

The government is aware of evidence that provides Ameen with an alibi, but they have kept that evidence secret on spurious national security grounds:

“The government is vehement that we not disclose this fact on the public docket,” Galloway replied. He held his head in his hands. “I—I—I cannot believe this argument is being made. I just can’t. There’s nothing about that sentence that jeopardizes national security. It jeopardizes their case.”

Hemesath’s secret filing reveals that, “subsequent to the arrest of Ameen, the United States came into possession of potentially exculpatory alibi information.” The evidence, which appears to have been collected as part of a surveillance operation on an unwitting target, reveals that “an individual believed to have been co-located with Ameen in Turkey during the pertinent timeframe claims that Ameen never left Turkey.”

There is simply no way that Ameen could have done what he is accused of:

Barbour interviewed more witnesses in Brussels and Istanbul, then went to the immigration office in Mersin. Ameen and his Iraqi friends were required to sign in each Thursday; failure to do so would have put at risk not only their resettlement applications but their legal status in Turkey. The office provided her scans of Ameen’s sign-ins, narrowing the window of time to commit the murder to a logistical impossibility. “To win the literal lottery of life and then say, ‘Great, let me put all that at risk so I can travel more than six hundred miles across Syria and Iraq and kill a guy first’—it doesn’t make any sense,” a former C.I.A. officer, who spent years working in Iraq, told me. “At that point in time, to get through that many checkpoints in Syria, you’d have to have separate fixers for dealing with the Turks, the Free Syrian Army, various other rebel groups, and then ISIS—and that’s before you even get to Anbar, which is, you know, hostile. You’d have to bribe or shoot your way through certain fucking death a thousand times, there and back.”

There is very little time before the decision on Ameen’s extradition will be made:

Hemesath has asked Brennan to certify extradition immediately. He has given Barbour and Galloway until January 29th to present their final argument, after which he will issue his ruling. “I feel like we’re watching Omar’s murder in slow motion,” Galloway said.

The government’s treatment of Omar Ameen has already been a disgrace, and if they send him back to Iraq they are condemning an innocent man to death. It is horrifying to consider how easily this man’s life has been wrecked by false charges and inept investigators.

The failure of Trump’s pseudo-engagement with North Korea is now complete:

North Korea declared Tuesday on the global stage that it will no longer adhere to its moratorium on nuclear and missile tests, citing “brutal and inhumane” sanctions led by the United States on its regime.

“We found no reason to be unilaterally bound any longer by the commitment that the other party fails to honour,” Ju Yong-chol, a counsellor at North Korea’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva, reportedly said during the U.N.-backed Conference on Disarmament.

The Trump administration’s unwillingness to offer North Korea meaningful sanctions relief over the last year and a half made it very likely that North Korea would resume the testing that they voluntarily halted in 2018. The North Korean government has been as clear as it could be for months that the U.S. had to change its approach by the end of 2019 in order to continue negotiations. The administration blew off this warning, and now they will have to live with their consequences of their neglect.

Trump’s mishandling of North Korea has brought us to this point. There was a small window of opportunity to lock in North Korea’s testing moratorium as part of an arms control agreement, and that window now appears to be closed. If the administration had pursued genuine engagement with a realistic set of demands, U.S.-North Korean talks might have produced a modest but worthwhile agreement. Unfortunately, the president isn’t interested in real diplomacy, and as usual he preferred stagecraft to statecraft. Between the president’s vanity and his advisers’ fanaticism, this administration was never going to make any progress with North Korea.

There is a crisis coming with North Korea, because as soon as North Korea resumes testing Trump will falsely accuse them of “violating” a non-existent agreement and tensions will spike again. This could have been avoided if the Trump administration had been willing to settle for something much less than North Korea’s capitulation and disarmament, but thanks to Bolton and Pompeo the president squandered that chance at Hanoi. Trump’s phony diplomacy was never going to succeed because he expected North Korea to give up everything in exchange for nothing, and he has dangerously personalized the issue to such a degree that he is likely to take the end of the testing moratorium as a slight.

Trump’s approach to North Korea was flawed from the start, because he mistakenly believed that sanctions pressure was responsible for bringing North Korea to the table. The president and his advisers could not admit even to themselves that it was North Korea’s successful nuclear and missile tests that had brought the U.S. to the table. That mistake then encouraged the administration to refuse any sanctions relief even in exchange for limited North Korean concessions, and that gave the North Koreans no incentive to continue with the talks. Trump imagined that he was compelling Kim to surrender when every temporary gain was something that Kim did for his own reasons. Now the temporary gain of the testing moratorium is about to vanish, and the Trump administration is still busy lying to everyone that Kim agreed to denuclearization at Singapore. A policy so divorced from reality could never achieve anything. Now we see once again what happens when hard-liners’ maximalist demands are allowed to define negotiations.