https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/afghanistan-is-the-us-s-new-vietnam-1.622929


Contrary to the rhetoric, Washington is once again fighting a war that cannot be won with no plausible exit strategy

President Donald Trump’s Afghanistan policy speech underscored the capitulation of his nativist populism to conventional Washington thinking. More importantly, it demonstrated how Afghanistan has quietly emerged as America’s new Vietnam.

Afghanistan isn’t Vietnam in that tens of thousands of Americans are dying in a lost cause, or that the country is being socially and politically ripped apart over controversy about its wisdom and morality.

To the contrary, there is no meaningful national or even public policy debate about an Afghanistan strategy, and even the most informed experts haven’t been able to posit any serious alternative approaches.

But it is a new Vietnam in the sense that the conflict is simultaneously unwinnable – because neither the government nor the public is willing to consider committing the resources necessary to secure anything resembling traditional definitions of “victory” – and yet, conventional wisdom holds, it cannot be abandoned without intolerable domestic political costs.

This is the dilemma that confronted Lyndon B Johnson and Richard Nixon. Both knew the war could not be won, yet neither was willing to embrace defeat. Nixon acted only once he was sure that he could secure a far greater strategic victory by forging an anti-Soviet entente cordialewith China in the wake of North Vietnam’s triumph.

What Mr Trump is proposing is a new iteration of the very same George W Bush and Barack Obama policies he thoroughly derided in the past.

The United States will introduce a few more troops, but no one believes this can make a decisive difference with the Taliban controlling more than half the country. It may be enough to deny the Taliban an outright victory, but certainly not to defeat them.

Washington will also intensify pressure on Islamabad to try to coerce Pakistan into cutting its ties to radical groups in Afghanistan. This is unlikely to work. Pakistan enjoys strong support from China, and the US depends on Pakistan for supply routes into Afghanistan and much more.

Moreover, the Afghan war is, in part, a proxy conflict between Pakistan and India, and the Pakistanis lack any viable alternatives to these radical groups for securing their interests in Afghanistan. Therefore, the overwhelming likelihood is that Pakistan will largely ignore American pressure and Washington will largely ignore Pakistan’s noncooperation.

There are three plausible defenses, each tenuous, of Mr Trump’s approach.

First, it could be reasonably observed that he has inherited a fundamentally unmanageable situation from his predecessors: the war is inherently unwinnable in any meaningful sense, while also being very difficult to disengage from politically. So, practically, he has little choice but to proceed with this slightly tweaked existing policy.

Second, it could be argued that such extreme ambiguity is useful in such a conflict. And in dealing with the Taliban some degree of ambiguity probably has strategic benefits. However, this runs directly counter to the strategy of pressuring Pakistan with greater clarity and focus to disengage from the Taliban and, especially, the Haqani network. Even worse, it strongly contributes to the lack of clarity and honest public debate in the US about what the country is trying to achieve in Afghanistan and why: what in blood, treasure and energy this is worth; and what plausible alternatives, particularly involving disengagement, actually exist.

Third, many would say that even though Mr Trump’s long-standing scepticism about the Afghan conflict was one of his most reasonable consistent opinions, it’s still preferable that he is deferring to his national security advisers and military leaders in this case.

Does anybody really think that Mr Trump can, on his own, come up with a better strategy for either “victory” or effectively managed disengagement than these professionals? He has yet to demonstrate wise leadership on far simpler challenges, so an approach based on presidential improvisation is, in this case, a terrible idea.

But there is a striking irony at work. Mr Trump’s national security adviser, HR McMaster, is both a principal architect of the extension of retreading an Afghan policy designed to simply buy time and avoid defeat, and the author of one of the most insightful books about the failure of the military to speak truth to power during the Vietnam War.

In Dereliction of Duty, Gen McMaster outlined how military leaders at the time knew that Johnson’s politically driven strategy of systematically increasing military pressure on North Vietnam was doomed to failure. Yet, as he painstakingly details, they allowed Johnson’s domestic political agenda to shape strategic decision-making in a way that made success impossible and primed a disaster.

The stakes are far lower in Afghanistan now. Yet America is once again fighting an “unwinnable” and open-ended war with no plausible exit strategy. And the military leadership is once again deferring to domestic political considerations.

As for Mr Trump’s vainglorious rhetoric about a US “victory” and Taliban “defeat” in Afghanistan, this can only be described as blatant lying to the American people, since neither his policies nor any plausible alternatives can achieve either.

What is dangerously absent is an honest conversation about what’s at stake for Washington in Afghanistan, the price that’s worth paying, and how long the country is willing to sustain the longest war in its history.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/america-s-crisis-of-legitimacy-and-what-it-means-for-the-middle-east-1.621501

The US president has been willing to engage with the region, but his power has been rapidly undone by dysfunction

The developing and serious crisis of legitimacy confronting the presidency of Donald Trump could have significant implications for American Middle East policy. But Washington’s allies need a clear understanding of what is, and is not, at stake.

Mr Trump created a political catastrophe through shocking comments following the deadly white supremacist mêlée in Charlottesville, Virginia, that equated neo-Nazis with Americans opposing racism.

He’s now being treated as a pariah, including by natural allies like major corporate leaders, and a wide range of mainstream political and social figures, including key Republicans. Many former supporters have clearly given up on him.

Many are stepping forward to try to fill the void of national leadership without the authority of the presidency but sensing that Mr Trump is unwilling or unable to play that role.

He appears to have completely lost the respect of much of the Republican senate majority, without which his ability to govern will be effectively crippled.

Mr Trump now looks like a lame duck president after only eight months in office.

This crisis of legitimacy could have profound repercussions for the global US role.

One of the brighter spots of Mr Trump’s presidency thus far is the renewed commitment to engage with the Middle East in general, and traditional US regional allies, including Gulf Arab countries, in particular.

Among the important initiatives Mr Trump and his administration have been pursuing are Israeli-Palestinian peace, resolving the standoff between the Arab quartet and Qatar, coordinating the battle against ISIL, stepping up the US role in Yemen, searching for a more effective approach in Afghanistan and seeking to contain and roll back Iran.

Some of these important initiatives may be significantly undermined by Mr Trump’s dysfunctional administration.

Internally, the White House is in chaos. Mr Trump is haemorrhaging senior staff, most recently dismissing his chief strategist, Steve Bannon. This is in addition to a chief of staff, national security adviser, press secretary, two communications directors, and several other senior officials, who have all come and gone in mere months.

Hopefully this upheaval, including Mr Bannon’s removal, will prove necessary housecleaning by retired Gen John Kelly, Mr Trump’s new chief of staff. Mr Kelly has vowed to end factional infighting and impose discipline on the administration’s functioning. Mr Bannon took pleasure in backbiting, most recently his vicious campaign to unseat national security adviser HR McMaster by casting him as anti-Israeli.

However, under the overall circumstances, and given Mr Trump’s statements regarding the Charlottesville rally, it’s hard to imagine that even if Mr Kelly can control White House staff, there is much he can do to manage Mr Trump, who has decisively emerged as his administration’s own worst enemy.

Nonetheless, removing Mr Bannon should help lift the lingering aroma of Islamophobia from the Trump election campaign, given that Mr Bannon’s website, Breitbart.com, is a leading forum for anti-Muslim bigotry. Hopefully remaining Breitbart fanatics in the White House will also be shortly discharged.

Such overdue changes should help to clear the air between this administration and many Muslims.

Moreover, Mr Bannon’s version of nationalism, which he casts as “economic nationalism” but more closely resembles “white nationalism”, has a dangerously neo-isolationist bent. He strongly opposed many crucial American international commitments, and was agitating against deeper engagements in Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere.

Therefore, if Mr Trump’s version of an “America first” foreign policy is to, in practice, avoid becoming a further retreat by Washington from the international and Middle Eastern scenes, Mr Bannon’s removal can only be a good thing.

However, it will now be very difficult for Mr Trump to lead the kind of bold and energetic new initiatives that could significantly repair some of the drift and misdirection that has crept into American Middle East policy since the second term of Barack Obama.

More proactive, dynamic and intelligently assertive American approaches to resolving the conflict in Syria, rolling back Iran’s growing regional dominance, defeating terrorist groups like ISIL and Al Qaeda and effectively combating their ideology, and taking advantage of an important an unexpected historical opportunity to simultaneously advance Israeli-Palestinian peace and create a new strategic framework in the Middle East would all require and effective foreign policy team working under the guidance and political leadership of a strong and relatively popular president.

They would necessarily involve difficult choices that would have to overcome significant opposition. This can’t be done by an administration in chaos, and certainly not by a president enduring a virtually unprecedented crisis of confidence and legitimacy.

Yet there is no reason to despair. Most American policies in the Middle East, such as core support for traditional allies, reflect a Washington consensus. Military-to-military relations, arms sales and technology transfers, intelligence and cybersecurity cooperation, trade and so forth will continue with Washington’s partners regardless of the crisis besetting the Trump administration.

So, the good news for America’s Arab allies is that, despite this genuinely significant political crisis, everything will go on more or less as usual. And the bad news is that, because of it, everything will go on more or less as usual.

http://forward.com/opinion/379938/freedom-means-freedom-for-everyone-including-nazis/

The white supremacist onslaught in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend was a horrifying, emblematic and possibly historic moment in our contemporary political culture. But among the many important truths it communicates, among the most significant and challenging is its reminder that the only cultural and political freedom that is truly meaningful is the freedom to be totally, outrageously wrong.

For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the spectacle of neo-Nazis from around the country descending on a peaceful southern college town to vent their hatred constitutes the apogee of everything that is most sick and destructive in our present American climate. They’re quite right.

Yet virtually all noteworthy figures that commented, except President Donald Trump, forthrightly condemned the white supremacists and their ideology.

Racial hatred has always been part of the American scene. But for decades it has been driven to the cultural and political margins. Unfortunately, the last presidential election, particularly the Trump campaign, gave racists a new sense of empowerment. The good news is that mainstream society, with the astounding exception of Mr. Trump, is united in expressing disgust.

Of course, the Charlottesville vehicular homicide terrorist attack, violence and other unlawful abuses deserve no protection and should be vigorously prosecuted.

But even the distinct possibility of violence can’t be used to suppress the promotion of outrageous perspectives without doing fundamental, and incalculable, damage to the very principle of freedom. The only form of freedom that really tests individual liberties is the freedom to be as wrong and offensive as imaginable in the eyes of most of society.

Liberty to express popular, or widespread, opinions, is no liberty at all. Where there is a strong, socially viable constituency to support and defend the expression of such perspectives, all but the most repressive societies will find room for them.

Even those most offended by the white supremacist rally should be grateful that the left-of-center American Civil Liberties Union legally defended it, and that, among others, honorable African-American police officers protected the “alt-right” bigots.

The current breadth and depth of American free speech has been hard-fought and hard-won.

As many on the right are quick to point out, campus speech codes, safe zones and bans on provocative speakers are eroding this principle at many universities. However, as Todd Gitlin importantly points out, there was no golden age of free speech on American campuses, particularly for liberals and the left. And as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor crucially adds, there still isn’t one, and campus restrictions on free speech are hardly of concern only on the right.

Efforts by both Democrats and Republicans to suppress the “BDS” campaign to boycott Israel is another important example of how vulnerable unpopular views can be to restrictions and unwarranted sanctions, including by the government.

The bromide that “the best response to objectionable speech is more speech” frequently encounters difficult gray areas. Private universities, private businesses and private associations all have a theoretical right to choose where they draw the line in maintaining a dignified, respectful, collegial and peaceable environment.

However, unless restrictions are drawn as narrowly as possible, the specter of de facto censorship looms quickly.

Any business, for example, that discovers that one of its employees, on their time off, enthusiastically participated in the Charlottesville racism-fest would have to choose between commonly-accepted standards of decency and collegiality and the principle that everyone is entitled to their own, private opinions, especially when not expressed at the workplace.

Civil society will probably always have to wrestle with such sometimes irreconcilable imperatives. Therefore, it’s essential that the law and the government maintain a strict neutrality on opinion, drawing any limits in the narrowest possible terms.

The United States has the broadest free-speech rights in the world. There are no prior restraints or official secrets here, unlike in most other democracies. Limitations on “fighting words” or inciting “imminent lawless action” have been drawn exceptionally narrowly. No civil tort is more difficult to win than a libel action. Freedom of association has also, typically, been robustly protected.

When hundreds of Americans are this publicly contemptible, it’s an important test of our basic commitment to their freedom to be so horribly, dangerously mistaken. It is just as important and principled to defend the right of racists to be this wrong as it is to denounce and oppose their hateful and immoral views.

It’s not that the racists might be correct. They’re plainly not. It is about maintaining a society in which no group, including the majority, claims a monopoly on wisdom — and in which space for the widest range of expression, including shocking ideas and some that just might prove unexpectedly insightful in the long run, is maintained.

This is essential to individual liberty and freedom of conscience, and to preserve space for the next great, and initially scandalous, insight, whatever it might be.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/iran-is-closely-watching-the-us-north-korea-stand-off-1.619060

Tehran’s sense of how far it can go will largely be shaped by what happens on the other side of Asia in the coming months

Donald Trump’s improvised and unconvincing threats about “fire and fury” and being “locked and loaded” notwithstanding, the crisis over North Korea’s growing nuclear prowess and reach is all too serious. And the confrontation provides a template for how a dispute over Iran’s analogous nuclear ambitions could play out in the future.

There are many important differences. Pyongyang is at least two decades ahead of Tehran in developing both nuclear warheads and missiles. North Korea has long since crossed the nuclear threshold. The argument now is over the scope and reach of their arsenal.

North Korea has a powerful, albeit exasperated, patron in China. Iran does not.

Yet there are many similarities. North Korea has demonstrated that with determination and brazen persistence, even a mid-level, isolated power can go nuclear and that this produces a significant independent deterrence to much greater powers. North Korea provides a model for Iran for protecting regime security from external threats and gaining leverage with great powers, in contrast, for example, to the fate of Saddam Hussein’s non-nuclear regime in Iraq.

Pyongyang and Tehran are both anti-status quo forces determined to reorder their regional environment to enhance their power and may be willing to go to almost any lengths to do so. Both are fanatical dictatorships, and potentially capable of self-destructive extremes – Pyongyang out of zealous nationalism and Tehran from religious millennialism.

The United States and the world order now confront a North Korean nuclear threat that is on the brink of going global, including intercontinental missiles capable of delivering warheads to much, if not all, of the American homeland.

Washington has four main options, singly or in combination: do nothing and rely on deterrence and mutually assured destruction; try to impose much tougher sanctions, preferably in coordination with China; negotiate, despite Pyongyang’s lengthy track record of broken promises; or take military action.

It is the first and last of these that will be of most interest in Tehran. The biggest difference is that Iran has agreed to mothball its nuclear, though not missile, development, for ten years in exchange for sanctions relief. Mr Trump says he intends to hold Iran non-compliant with the agreement after the next US review in 70 days, but evidence suggests Iran is living up to its commitments.

How such an American move might play out is unclear, but for now, Tehran and its adversaries seem to have many years to measure their options.

What can Washington do in Korea? The military possibilities are not as limited as many think, although the risks are daunting. Last year, Washington was deploying new “left of launch” technologies, apparently mostly electronic disruption, designed to thwart missile launches before or during deployment. If these ever really worked, Pyongyang seems to have found a solution. Washington could shoot down future North Korean missile tests, but that would initiate an armed conflict  in a very risky manner, ceding the initiative to Pyongyang.

Washington could try using conventional “bunker-buster” bombs to wipe out Pyongyang’s key assets.

Or, as suggested in a recent and highly controversial paper by scholars Keir A Lieber and Daryl G Press, Washington could use very low-yield, precisely targeted, tactical nuclear weapons to wipe out the major installations and small arsenal of an emerging nuclear power without producing much radioactive fallout or casualties far beyond that of a conventional strike. They argue that technological leaps in remote sensing and imaging, targeting accuracy and new cyber and data capabilities have quietly rendered such a nuclear counterforce strike an unexpectedly practicable option.

However, both conventional and nuclear counterforce options require that the target country doesn’t place key assets in urban areas, otherwise the likelihood of mass casualties returns. And they require the unlikely eventuality of virtual perfection in both intelligence and operations. If only one or two nuclear weapons survive, disaster would inevitably ensue.

Moreover, following any attack, North Korea is liable to unleash a vast and devastating conventional war with highly unpredictable consequences, including a massive assault on Seoul, a megalopolis of 25 million people. US rivals such as China and Russia, and even allies, such as South Korea and Japan, are likely to react with outrage if they are not party to any decision to act.

For now, Iran poses a much less serious conventional threat than North Korea, and its nuclear ambitions are both far behind Pyongyang’s and on hold. But, if need be, Iran could already wreak havoc by attacking its neighbours, trying to close the Strait of Hormuz, and causing other chaos. Its non-nuclear capabilities may grow quickly, no matter what.

Eventually, Iran is likely to initiate the next major global crisis over an emerging, radical and highly destabilising nuclear power – especially if no solution to the present Korean stand-off short of sanctions and long-term deterrence emerges.

Therefore, Iran will meticulously scrutinise every detail of how this confrontation plays out. Tehran’s sense of how far it can go, what responses it can expect from Washington and the rest of the international community, and the options and limitations that a rising and radical new nuclear power must consider, will largely be shaped by what happens on the other side of Asia in the coming months.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/even-the-best-manager-may-not-be-able-to-rescue-trump-1.617004

The White House administration has been marred by so many shake-ups and scandals that damage control for the administration may prove too little, too late

The Trump White House often seems more like a surrealist movie, or an absurdist satire, than a normative political drama. But the latest plot twist is a familiar cliché: the Marines – or one of them at least – have landed.

After an especially nightmarish fortnight, Mr Trump must be hoping that his new chief-of-staff, retired Gen John Kelly, is charging to his rescue.

Mr Trump plainly hopes Mr Kelly can use his military bearing, experience and authority to impose discipline in this anarchic White House.

But can even an effective leader enforce meaningful order on Mr Trump’s seemingly cultivated, if not calculated, chaos? Or is it too late to salvage this presidency?

Mr Kelly has demanded – and appears to be demonstrating – full authority over White House personnel.

He dismissed the preposterous former communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, who served for only 10 days, and then fired the unqualified National Security Council intelligence director, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who was previously being protected by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Mr Kushner and his wife, Mr Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, reportedly accept that they report to Mr Kelly and that he controls access to the president.

But there is at least one key figure who may prove impervious to Mr Kelly’s authority, and that is Mr Trump himself.

Mr Kelly has already conceded that he shouldn’t bother trying to “manage” Mr Trump, including his bizarre tweets and obsessive consumption of trash television.

Indeed, reckless rhetoric and poor political judgment are the main reasons why, despite complete Republican control of government, his first six months have not yielded a single noteworthy achievement.

Serious erosion of support is developing, even among his base, including rank-and-file Republicans and non-college-educated white Americans. His approval ratings in all polls are at an all-time low and declining.

Moreover, he recently suffered a string of harsh rebukes from constituencies he believes are, or should be, key allies.

The Boy Scouts of America apologised for his shockingly inappropriate speech at their jamboree, which he turned into a self-serving political rally.

Police chiefs and associations indignantly denounced his remarks endorsing gratuitous violence against suspects during arrests.

The military rebuffed his Twitter announcement of a new ban on transgender individuals serving in the Armed Forces. Gen Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs-of-staff, said policy won’t change until he receives a formal command.

The obviously appalled military isn’t just refusing to take such outrageous orders via Twitter. Short of the outright refusal of a directive from the commander-in-chief and open insubordination, this is as dismissive as uniformed brass can be towards a president.

Senate Republicans couldn’t pass Mr Trump’s healthcare law, and are rebuffing his shrill insistence that they persist with the issue when they have already tried everything and failed. They are also dismissing his demands that they eliminate the filibuster rule and allow most major legislation to be passed by a simple majority vote.

The Senate Republican majority is proving extremely ineffective largely because this president doesn’t lead them. He inspires neither respect, nor, despite intensifying hostility and insults, fear. Given his collapsing poll numbers, and looking towards the midterm elections, many Republicans may even prefer openly confronting or dismissing Mr Trump than embracing him.

Amazingly, the only major legislation the Republican Congress has passed since the election is an anti-Trump measure locking in sanctions against Russia to stop him from potentially easing them – the clearest sign of distrust in his judgment on Russia-related matters.

Republicans also told Mr Trump he shouldn’t dare fire attorney general Jeff Sessions to try to quash Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian operatives.

Mr Mueller has now impaneled a grand jury. That doesn’t mean criminal charges are imminent, but it is an unmistakable sign of the scope of the investigation.

Mr Trump said Mr Mueller would be “crossing a red line” if he began to investigate the president’s finances and business dealings. That is almost certainly already happening, but there’s not much, if anything, Mr Trump can do about it.

Moreover, although Mr Trump’s lawyers indignantly denied it a few weeks ago, he is now widely reported to have personally dictated his son’s misleading public statement regarding a meeting Trump campaign officials had with Russian operatives during the last election.

The statement falsely claimed the meeting was merely about adoptions, when, in fact, the Russians had offered supposedly damaging information against Hillary Clinton as part of what they called their government’s “support” for his candidacy. Mr Trump reportedly insisted on the deception despite strong legal advice that his son should tell the truth.

Ineffectiveness is engendering disdain. Unpopularity is feeding on itself. Failure is breeding more failure.

Mr Kelly’s skills, therefore, may not be sufficient to break Mr Trump out of the concentric vicious circles swirling around him.

If Mr Trump remains his own worst enemy – by daily inflicting untold political damage via his Twitter account, among other things – even the best manager won’t be able to rescue him. The marines may, instead, sink “waist deep in the big muddy” and need to save themselves from a swelling political quagmire.

http://www.agsiw.org/scrapping-iran-nuclear-deal-mean-u-s-middle-east-policy/

President Donald J. Trump has reportedly instructed his national security and intelligence staff to find a rationale for declaring Iran noncompliant with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear agreement Tehran reached in 2015 with the P5+1, the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany. Reports suggest Trump believes the United States should withdraw from, or sabotage, the JCPOA. During his presidential campaign, Trump called the agreement “the worst deal ever negotiated.” However, in May his administration certified that Iran was broadly in compliance with its terms, while extending and even expanding non-nuclear sanctions against Tehran for its ongoing missile development and testing and support for terrorist groups and radical nonstate actors.

Trump is apparently frustrated that his team has not given him a plausible rationale for the United States to either abandon the agreement on the grounds of Iranian noncompliance or at least insist on a thorough renegotiation of its terms. He recently told The Wall Street Journal the administration had been “extremely nice” in concluding that the Iranians are living up to the agreement. He continued, “if it was up to me, I would have had them noncompliant 180 days ago.” Trump added he “would be surprised” if Iran is again found to be compliant with the terms of the deal after the next review by his administration in about three months. But what are the implications for U.S. foreign and Middle East policy should officials comply with this reported directive, and the administration scrap the deal or insist on its renegotiation?

The perspectives of Washington’s Gulf Arab allies are significant and instructive. Many Gulf Cooperation Council states were skeptical of the nuclear negotiations with Tehran, though they eventually supported the negotiations and cautiously endorsed the agreement after it was finalized. Their concerns are relevant not only because these countries are central to the realization of U.S. policy goals in the region, but even more because they are the parties most directly affected by Iran’s destabilizing behavior, which is the apparent basis for Trump’s reported instruction to his staff to find a basis for holding Iran noncompliant.

The United States and the rest of the P5+1, along with Israel, are primarily concerned with the potential emergence of Iran as a new nuclear power in the Middle East. While this outcome is also of concern to Gulf Arab countries, their national security anxieties regarding Iran are more directly linked to Tehran’s ongoing provocative conduct, especially its missile development and testing program and its support for destabilizing terrorist and militia groups in the Arab world. Indeed, their strongest concerns about the nuclear agreement were that it never addressed these activities. Their secondary concern was that the agreement could serve as the vehicle for a broader rapprochement between Washington and Tehran without a major change in Iran’s behavior, an eventuality that did not emerge under the administration of President Barack Obama and seems unthinkable under Trump. The rise of Iran as a nuclear power is a concern to them, but tertiary compared to the now moot issue of a broad security understanding between Iran and the United States, and the increasing problem of Iran’s military buildup and destabilizing conduct. Therefore, these are the countries with the greatest stake in the issues that are most frequently and ardently cited by the nuclear agreement’s critics, and that serve as the reason for Washington’s expanding menu of bilateral sanctions against Iran.

Despite these urgent concerns, Gulf Arab countries are not calling for the United States to abrogate or sabotage the JCPOA. Rather, like many other highly cautious supporters of the agreement, the consensus viewpoint among GCC countries is that it should be strictly and rigorously enforced. Yet countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are among those pressing most enthusiastically for Washington to adopt an increasingly tough attitude toward Iran. Why, then, wouldn’t they welcome the rapid demise of the JCPOA?

The logic is straightforward. Whatever their reservations about the nuclear agreement, Gulf Arab countries understand that the ideal scenario for Iranian hard-liners would be for the JCPOA to collapse in the near future, with Washington being blamed by most, if not all, of the international community. This would mean that Tehran would have reached the agreement and permanently undone the international sanctions regime under Obama, only to be freed from complying with its terms under Trump, with virtually no chance that the comprehensive sanctions, particularly as imposed by China and Russia, could be resurrected. Tehran will then be free to resume nuclear weapons research and development, without the threat of coordinated, comprehensive international consequences that the agreement put into place. Any hope of restructuring broad international sanctions, which would be challenging under the best of circumstances, would be virtually dashed if Washington were perceived as having unilaterally scrapped or deliberately sabotaged the JCPOA.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker acknowledged the danger stemming from the emerging Trump approach to the agreement when he noted that it is vital that any collapse of the deal be squarely blamed on Tehran and not Washington. “You want the breakup of this deal to be about Iran. You don’t want it to be about the U.S. because we want our allies with us,” he noted. The trouble with Trump’s apparent plan to find some way of declaring Iran noncompliant and, in effect, nullifying the agreement, is that there is every reason to believe that Iran is in fact complying with its terms. Mark Fitzpatrick has persuasively debunked the main existing claims circulating in Washington that argue that Iran is substantially out of compliance with its commitments. After all, like its six interlocutors, Tehran concluded that placing its nuclear weapons program essentially on hold for more than a decade in exchange for sanctions relief was a fundamentally rational bargain. Tehran, therefore, has no urgent reason or need to cheat on these commitments.

Corker and others have suggested that a dispute over inspections of Iran’s military facilities and undeclared nuclear sites could provide the basis for Washington to accuse Iran of being responsible for a collapse of the nuclear deal. According to The Washington Post, the Trump administration is planning on testing the “strength” of the agreement, Iran’s intentions, and, presumably and probably most crucially, the reactions of the five other members of the P5+1 to such a dispute. However, it is doubtful that many in the international community would be persuaded that such an argument – particularly if Iran is perceived as offering credible objections within the terms of the agreement or alternative proposals for addressing Washington’s concerns – would justify scrapping or thoroughly renegotiating the JCPOA. Moreover, any such quarrel could become as much of an argument among P5+1 states rather than one primarily with Iran.

The argument in favor of the JCPOA for U.S. foreign policy was, and remains, clear: Without this delay Washington and its allies would, sooner rather than later, face the untenable choice of accepting Iran’s rise as a new regional and international nuclear power or embarking on an open-ended and highly unpredictable military response to try to prevent that. The agreement forestalls this double bind of undesirable options for at least a decade. The gamble inherent in the JCPOA is that in 10 years’ time something fundamental may change. The Iranian regime could be different by then, quite possibly for the better. The regional environment may be less dangerous. Iran’s Middle Eastern rivals may be able to create, with U.S. support, a new security architecture that persuades Iran not to pursue a nuclear option when the JCPOA expires, or that can deal with the potential for a renewed Iranian push for nuclear capability in a more effective way. As Obama continuously argued, if none of these positive developments transpire, and even if negative ones emerge, the essential nature of both U.S. and Iranian options and capabilities will not be radically transformed and, at worst, Washington will be facing a similar dilemma to the one it did in the years immediately leading up to the nuclear agreement.

Iran’s destabilizing activities warrant serious concern and mandate robust policies to deter and thwart such conduct. According to the State Department, Iran is the world’s leading state supporter of terrorism and the primary force seeking to destabilize the Middle Eastern status quo. Moreover, Tehran opposes many if not most long-term U.S. policy goals in the region, and the interests of Washington’s Arab, Israeli, and even Turkish partners. But it’s hard to see how unilaterally abrogating or sabotaging the JCPOA would effectively combat Iran’s regional agenda.

To the contrary, the most likely effect of such an action would be Tehran’s return to the aggressive nuclear weapons development program that has been mothballed in recent years without serious prospects of a return to comprehensive international sanctions. And, under such circumstances, it is hard to imagine significant new deterrents being imposed on Iran’s support for terrorism or regional destabilization. The United States would have to either essentially accept Iran’s development as a nuclear power, because it would have given up the main instrument that has effectively restrained Tehran, or embark on an extremely risky, unpredictable, and potentially deeply destabilizing military gambit.

Few countries have more to lose in such a scenario than Washington’s Gulf Arab allies, which is why they have urged the United States to rigorously enforce, but not scrap, the nuclear agreement. This perspective, and the logic that underlies it, should be carefully heeded as the Trump administration weighs the consequences of declaring Tehran noncompliant with the nuclear deal without strong and compelling evidence that would be persuasive to the international community. As long as the JCPOA is in force and being implemented, Iran will not become a nuclear power and there is therefore no need for a dangerous and unpredictable military confrontation. Without it, such a conflict, or the equally alarming and unacceptable emergence of Iran as a nuclear power, could become inevitable.