https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-24/there-s-no-easy-way-back-to-the-iran-nuclear-deal?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

Technical and political complications stand in the way of Biden and Rouhani.

The outlines of a potential agreement between the U.S. and Iran are emerging from the indirect negotiations in Vienna. The two sides will probably succeed in their professed aim of resurrecting the nuclear deal secured by President Barack Obama and renounced by President Donald Trump. But how much that would practically accomplish is questionable.

Washington and Tehran say they’re prepared to return, on a “compliance for  compliance” basis, to the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action they agreed, with other world powers, in 2015. On the American side, that would mean the gradual lifting of economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic; on Iran’s part, it would involve scaling down uranium-enrichment activities and disposing of new stockpiles.

But turning the clock back is more complicated than it sounds, for both technical and political reasons.

The Biden team looks willing to drop nuclear-related sanctions while retaining others based on Iran’s support for terrorism, its human-rights violations and other malign activities — but not all of the sanctions fit neatly into these silos. After taking the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, the Trump administration imposed hundreds of new sanctions on Iran, many of which straddle these categories. It also made many older and re-imposed restrictions harder to revoke.

On the other side of the equation, even if Iran does get rid of its new stockpiles and downgrade its enrichment activities, its nuclear threat will not recede to the level achieved by the 2015 deal. That’s because, having breached the JCPOA’s terms, Tehran has made major strides in mastering sophisticated enrichment technology. Such knowledge, once acquired, can’t be unlearned.

This technological progress has significantly reduced the “breakout time” it would take Iran to manufacture a nuclear weapon, by some estimations to a mere six months.

This is crucial because the nuclear deal was essentially a chronological gamble. In 2015, the Obama administration wagered that 10-15 years of nuclear inactivity would facilitate political changes within Iran that would eventually help extend or improve the arrangement. Now that five years have passed and Iran has reduced the breakout time, those odds have obviously changed.  

The politics have changed, too — and, for the American perspective, for the worse. Hard-liners have consolidated their control of most of the levers of the Islamic Republic, and expect one of their own to win the presidential election in June. They may allow the lame-duck President Hassan Rouhani to secure a general understanding with the U.S. and other world powers, but would prefer to delay a full return to the JCPOA until after their man has been elected, so they can claim the credit for the economic benefits accruing from sanctions relief.

To that end, they are putting political hurdles in Rouhani’s path. They have attacked him for suggesting a phased return to the JCPOA terms, and have used their control of parliament to enact legislation narrowing his negotiating options. Rouhani has openly accused his domestic opponents of trying to sabotage his efforts to have the sanctions lifted.

What can the Biden administration do about any of this? In order to get around Trump’s “poison pill” sanctions, the U.S. is offering Iran a combination of formal and informal measures, including discretionary non-enforcement. These measures would in effect restore the status quo that existed between the signing of the 2015 agreement and Trump’s arrival in the White House. But other sanctions on terrorism and human rights issues will remain in place.

Such an arrangement may suit Rouhani’s successor, who would cash in on the economic dividend. The hard-liners will also be reassured by the fact that the Biden team has dropped its demand that Tehran commit to additional talks to extend the restrictions in the JCPOA and reckon with Iran’s missile program as well as its support for a range of violent, extremist militias in the Arab world.

This may get the JCPOA going again, but time and technology have greatly diminished the deal’s value. The challenge for the U.S. will be to achieve what Secretary of State Antony Blinken has described as a “longer and stronger agreement” with the Islamic Republic. For Biden, that promises to be a much higher mountain to climb.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/afghanistan-is-the-latest-example-why-the-us-needs-clear-policy-goals-1.1206035

For over a decade, US presidents have been vowing to end “forever wars,” especially by – at last – completely withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan.

Joe Biden has finally taken the plunge, announcing that the remaining 2,500 US troops in the country will be removed between May 1 and the symbolically resonant date of September 11.

This is obviously a US defeat, but of what kind exactly is ambiguous because the overriding US policy was never clearly defined or agreed upon.

This war, which began as a striking success but degenerated into an interminable debacle, reveals much about what has gone wrong with American national security policy-making.

Unlike the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Afghan war was necessary. It cannot be written off as a misbegotten adventure that was avoidable and likely to backfire.

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US by Al Qaeda, which were headquartered in Afghanistan and harboured by the Taliban, a military response was imperative.

No self-respecting power could allow such a deadly and ruthless threat to operate with impunity on the other side of the world, particularly when eliminating it was well within US capability. Consequently, the Afghanistan mission was relatively non-controversial when it began, as opposed to the invasion of Iraq.

Yet time and again, even when there is a consensus for a major American foreign policy initiative, there is an evident lack of agreement about what is the goal. As a consequence, it is often impossible to seriously measure the progress of a major initiative, not only “objectively” but on its own terms, simply because fundamental aims are not defined.

Any policy initiative that lacks clear goals and which can therefore be subjected to a systematic measure of success or failure, is destined to fail. Short of an implausible victory, it cannot succeed because Washington does not agree on what would constitute success in the first place. If no one agrees what success would look like, it cannot be achieved.

This was obviously true of the Iraq invasion from the outset, but it became quickly and increasingly true in Afghanistan as well. The initial US thrust into Afghanistan, led at first by the CIA and other irregular forces, in conjunction with anti-Taliban Afghan groups, was remarkably successful. Within a few weeks the Taliban were negotiating the terms of a de facto surrender.

That is precisely when the policy lost its initial coherence.

It made sense for the US to act forcefully in Afghanistan to eliminate the threat of Al Qaeda and deliver the Taliban such a blow that the organisation would never again harbour anti-American international terrorists.

But having achieved that, almost immediately the US abandoned this clear, limited and achievable aim in favour of a quixotic effort to arbitrarily reshape Afghani governance.

Over the next two decades, Washington attempted to build a new, centralised and unified state based in Kabul that corresponded to American ideas of how Afghanistan ought to be governed. But these ideas had nothing to do with realities on the ground – what is possible, and what makes sense for the people of Afghanistan.

Worse, there was never any honest debate about why the US would seek, in effect, to rule Afghanistan from the other side of the world.

Why would any American cherish such an ambition?

And why would any Afghan be tempted to embrace such a project, other than for immediate self-interest?

The state-building agenda in Afghanistan was irrational, insofar as it offered few, if any, major strategic benefits. Worse, it never stood any chance of success. The whole project therefore made no sense.

The US position in Afghanistan has ebbed and flowed, but there has been a consistent deterioration in relative American power and leverage since the early crushing victory in November and December 2001.

The tragedy is that Washington could have secured favourable terms with the Taliban and other Afghan forces at that time and at a low cost regarding the imperative issue of international terrorism and other limited, focused and necessary demands.

Yet over far too many years and at a vast cost, US policy has consistently eroded Washington’s ability to secure such terms. The US is now leaving Afghanistan without any real, serious or enforceable commitments by the Taliban. It is a sorry tale that begins with an overwhelming victory at the end of 2001 and will end, later this year, in an ignominious strategic defeat.

Mr Biden is probably doing the right thing by swallowing this bitter pill, because after so many blunders, there is likely no cost-effective way to salvage US policy in Afghanistan.

Better, as in the case of Vietnam, to accept reality: that a conceptually flawed project, which could never succeed, has inevitably failed.

The biggest tragedy for Americans is not that what amounts to a Taliban victory in Afghanistan means that country will again become a major hotbed of anti-American terrorism. It probably won’t. It is that the lessons of this fiasco will almost certainly remain unlearnt.

As with so many other post-Cold War policy failures, this again illustrates that Americans need focused and limited consensus goals, to which they need to apply precise leverage, pressure and, if necessary, force required to achieve them – but no more.

The last time a major US success like that occurred was in Kuwait in 1991. And that was before it became clear that what had been a relative US foreign policy consensus had effectively collapsed along with the Soviet Union, not long after the USSR’s own Afghanistan fiasco.

What is needed is the kind of honest, serious policy conversation that is not rewarded in the American system, and which instead mostly incentivises the avoidance of blame which then hinders bold decision-making.

Most of all, it would require something that may not be possible: the restoration of a shared American vision. But even without that, major policies must have reasonable and shared aims.

Having clear, limited and achievable goals is not a guarantee of success. But without them, failure is virtually certain.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/biden-is-taking-modest-but-necessary-steps-to-revive-us-palestine-ties-1.1201279

The administration of Joe Biden is pursuing several ambitious innovations alongside considerable continuity with previous US government policies. In between the two, it is also working to reverse major deviations from long-standing American policies, including on relations with the Palestinians, by the disruptive administration of Donald Trump.

With last week’s announcement of the first major tranche of US aid for Palestinians since it was effectively zeroed out by Mr Trump in 2019, Mr Biden is taking the first major step towards rebuilding these all-but-obliterated ties.

The approach is notably modest.

Unlike various periods during the administrations of all his immediate predecessors – George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and even Mr Trump – Mr Biden has avoided making Palestinian-Israeli negotiations a priority. Efforts to revive negotiations with Iran and end the war in Yemen have special Biden envoys. There isn’t one for the Palestinian-Israeli process.

In an effort to pressure the Palestinians, Mr Trump effectively eradicated all official US ties to them.

The strikingly modest efforts to reconstruct them reflect decades of American failure to resolve the conflict or even prevent it from deteriorating, and the realistic recognition that there is little for Washington to work with on the ground and with leaderships on both sides, especially in Israel.

The Biden administration has resumed traditional US support for a two-state solution, effectively abandoned by Mr Trump. But it doesn’t harbour any illusions that this can be accomplished, or even seriously advanced, in the near term. It correctly views fixing Washington’s relations with the Palestinians as an essential early step to reviving broader peace diplomacy.

The new aid totals approximately $270 million, including $75m for economic development, $150m for the UN agency that cares for Palestinian refugees throughout the region, UNRWA, and additional sums for Covid-19 assistance.

Perhaps most suggestive is $40m being unfrozen from fiscal year 2016 for security assistance. Spending that will involve reopening the office of the US security co-ordinator in the West Bank that, in his drive to eliminate all US-Palestinian diplomatic relations, Mr Trump predictably shuttered.

No money will be directly given to the Palestinian Authority because of the “Taylor Force Act” signed by Mr Trump in 2018. It prohibits direct US funding for the PA because of financial support for the families of all Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, including those accused of violence, which is alleged to encourage and reward terrorism.

Palestinians are eventually going to have to reform this system to satisfy the US Congress, which will also have to change the legislation. But that’s not in the administration’s priorities list since the Act allows security assistance and indirect funding for Palestinians.

Last week, a senior State Department official told me that the administration views renewed aid as “an important step in re-establishing relations with the Palestinian people”, and said a range of other economic and diplomatic measures is being prepared.

The aid package effectively restores US support to the Palestinians to levels at the end of the Obama era. Other damage by the Trump administration will be harder to reverse. Reopening the Palestine Liberation Organisation mission in Washington, the de facto Palestinian embassy, unceremoniously padlocked by Mr Trump, was a Biden campaign pledge. But significant groundwork will be required to ensure that wouldn’t expose the PLO to significant legal liabilities, among other complications.

Eventually, however, a full restoration of US-Palestinian diplomatic relations will be essential for both sides.

Reopening the US consulate in East Jerusalem, a de facto embassy to the Palestinians, also unsurprisingly bolted by Mr Trump, is more straightforward and appears under active consideration. Potential Israeli objections are the only practical obstacle.

So, it’s likely that, assuming the process moves forward, the de facto US embassy to the Palestinians will be reopened much more quickly and easily than the de facto Palestinian embassy in Washington.

However, the considerable current objections and political obstacles, particularly in Congress, to a broad restoration of US-Palestinian ties arose in the context of the mistrust and anger that Mr Trump’s pro-annexation policies, and outraged Palestinian reactions, engendered.

Gradual but steady improvement in ties should erode, and eventually eliminate, most of those obstacles, particularly if the PA addresses concerns regarding payments to prisoners’ families.

Israel has criticised renewed US funding for UNRWA, which, it claims, somehow perpetuates the refugee problem.

But the senior US official told me that, to the contrary, “the administration sees this as a renewed commitment to the US relationship with the Palestinian people, which is why the funding is not only aimed towards the West Bank and Gaza but for UNRWA, an important institution that provides services to the Palestinian people writ large”.

The official said a bumper-sticker summary of the Biden approach would hold that “advancing freedom, prosperity and security for both Israelis and Palestinians, in the immediate term and in tangible ways, is important in its own right and can help lead towards a two-state solution”.

Yet the Biden administration’s commitment to a slow but steady return to productive US engagement on a two-state, or any reasonable and viable, solution faces another serious challenge: strategic Israeli settlement expansions.

The Israeli government last week said an exceptionally sensitive Jerusalem settlement project in Jabal Abu Ghneim (which Israel calls Har Homa), long blocked by Washington, would go forward with 540 new housing units. Seeking to complete the encirclement of occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli governments have been attempting to build there since the 1980s. Any effective slow but steady revival of a two-state US policy is going to have to also involve restraining Israel in such areas, as many previous administrations have.

Mr Biden is doing the right thing by rebuilding relations with the Palestinians. And he is wise to do so carefully and purposively. Many Palestinians and their friends will understandably be dissatisfied. But in life generally, and especially in politics and diplomacy, things either get worse, stay unchanged, or get better.

For the first time in years, US policy towards the Palestinians just got noticeably better. Even if its scope is modest, that’s the very definition of good news.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-07/jordan-s-royal-ructions-should-alarm-its-allies

Palace intrigues against King Abdullah are a reminder of the kingdom’s importance and its precariousness.

A pledge by Prince Hamza to put himself “at the disposal” of King Abdullah II, his half-brother, appears to have resolved the feud within the Jordanian royal family that erupted at the end of last week. But the kingdom’s most serious crisis in decades was as a salutary reminder of both the importance and the precariousness of Jordan’s stabilizing role in the Middle East.

The events of the weekend remain murky and may never be fully disclosed. The kingdom has banned the publication of “anything related to the investigations,” which suggests the palace is keen to draw a line under the affair.

But the roots of the royal ructions can be traced back to 2004, when the king removed Hamza as crown prince, as a prelude to giving the title to his own son, Hussein. This was not unusual for Jordan — Abdullah’s father had made a similar switch in the succession on his death-bed — and Hamzah seemed to accept his demotion with equanimity.

But in recent months, he is reported to have grown strident in his criticism of corruption that he linked to his half-brother’s reign. Perhaps more alarming for the palace, he is thought to have reached out to powerful tribal leaders, whose support is crucial for the monarchy and has been the bedrock of its power for almost a hundred years.

Still, it came as shock to Jordanians when Hamzah released a video saying he was under house arrest. Several of his associates had been arrested, and government statements suggested there had been an attempted coup, with foreign connivance.

This set off inevitable speculation that Israel or Saudi Arabia had been involved. Israel is frequently blamed for mysterious unrest in Arab countries, especially those that are deeply enmeshed in the Palestinian issue. Saudi Arabia has also become one of the usual suspects for unexplained developments and one of Hamzah’s arrested associates is a Saudi.

But Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf monarchies were quick to issue statements of strong support for Abdullah. Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz offered help with what he described as “an internal Jordanian issue.” And the Biden administration reaffirmed American backing for the king, describing him as “a key partner.” 

But the coup against Abdullah — if that is indeed what it was — failed, it nonetheless brought royal tensions into the open, breaking with the Hashemite clan’s tradition of dealing privately with internal dissent. Plainly, all is not well in the kingdom as it prepares to celebrate its centenary this coming Sunday. The U.S. nonprofit Freedom House recently downgraded Jordan from “partly free” to “not free” in its annual assessment of the state of democracy worldwide. The report cited “harsh new restrictions on freedom of assembly, a crackdown on the teachers union [and] a lack of adequate preparations that harmed the quality of parliamentary elections during the covid-19 pandemic.”

The 100-year-old monarchy faces serious challenges at home and abroad. The Jordanian government’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has deepened the longstanding public dissatisfaction over endemic corruption and general economic malaise. By casting himself as a crusader against corruption, Hamzah might have scored powerful points against the status quo represented by his half-brother.

On the foreign-policy front, Jordan has long felt taken for granted by the U.S., Israel and Gulf Arab countries, all of which rely on the kingdom to play a quiet but essential regional role. The resentment in Amman deepened during the administration of President Donald Trump, when Washington seemed to go along with Israeli plans to annex large swathes of the West Bank. Jordanians regard annexation with existential dread because it could export Palestinian nationalism into the kingdom, given that over half its population is made up of Palestinians displaced by Israel in the 1948 and 1967 wars.

More generally, Jordanians feel they are punished for the relative stability of their country in a restive region, the non-squeaking wheel that doesn’t get much grease. The consequences of instability in its neighborhood are often visited upon the kingdom, most obviously in the form of refugees, whether from Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion or from Syria after the rise of the Islamic State and the subsequent civil war. 

For the West, Israel and Gulf Arab states, the Jordanian government is an important contributor to political and diplomatic initiatives, whether on the Palestinians, Iraq or Syria. They also rely on Jordanian intelligence services in the fight against terrorism and extremism.  

So the specter of instability in Amman should have set off alarms in capitals across the Middle East, and in Washington. A collapse of order could easily turn much of Jordan into a facsimile of parts of Iraq and Syria just over the border, with militias, ISIS-like terrorist groups, tribal warlords and other forces battling it out in a situation of protracted chaos. The Hamzah affair is a useful reminder of how much all the other parties stand to lose if, like many of its neighbors, Jordan begins to fall apart.

The government’s success in reining in Prince Hamzah may in the short run strengthen the king’s hand and undermine oppositional activities. The challenge for Jordan’s allies is to preserve the stability of the monarchy while pressing the palace for the political, institutional and economic reforms necessary to prevent a repeat of last weekend’s events.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-04/a-new-syria-process-cuts-out-iran-to-bring-in-gulf-arabs

The marginalization of the Islamic Republic would suit all the other parties involved.

The plot just thickened in the contest to shape post-conflict Syria: Russia, Turkey and Qatar have launched a new trilateral “consultation process” to promote a political solution to the 10-year civil war. Crucially, it does not include Iran.

The goal, it would appear, is to pave the way for broader Gulf Arab re-engagement with Syria, and a concomitant marginalization of Iranian influence.

Since the war was effectively resolved in December 2016 when pro-government forces overran opposition-held eastern Aleppo, most of the action has centered around the so-called “Astana process” that began in January 2017, in which Russia, Turkey and Iran have been negotiating over the spoils. But the Iranian involvement effectively kept out the Gulf Arab states, whose financial muscle is essential for the reconstruction of Syria — and whose diplomatic backing is critical to ending the country’s pariah status.

The new initiative is also an acknowledgment that the Astana process has, for all practical purposes, failed. The original troika have only held five meetings since 2018, and the four “de-escalation zones” they established were entirely disregarded by the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad who, with Russian and Iranian support, seized control of three of them. Nor was Astana able to prevent Turkey’s offensives in northern Syria in October 2019, or a confrontation in February last year between Turkish forces and Assad’s troops directly supported by the Russian Air Force.

Astana has produced no political progress in Syria and precious little reconstruction. So, it’s not surprising that Russia and Assad would seek another way forward, this time with Arab partners.

The Gulf states backed the rebel forces at the start of the war, but their unified stance against Assad has softened. The United Arab Emirates, for instance, has already reopened its embassy in Damascus and seems open to an accommodation with the regime. At the same time, Russia has been trying to get Arab states involved in the Astana process.

That was never going to happen while the two other states in the process, Iran and Turkey, remained hostile to the Gulf Arabs. The new forum cuts out the Iranians and seeks to build on recent Turkish efforts to mend fences with the Arab world. (In turn, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have signaled an interest in better relations with Turkey.)

The message from Moscow and Ankara to the Arabs is clear: Your rebel friends may have lost the war, but that doesn’t have to mean that your Iranian enemies will be the main beneficiaries. If you help this new process succeed, it will go a long way towards marginalizing Tehran’s influence in Syria.

This would suit Assad. The dictator currently depends on both Russia and Iran in securing his control of much of the country. But he would prefer a long-term arrangement in which Russia is the principal outside power in Syria, since Moscow’s demands on him are less onerous than Tehran’s.

Russia’s goals include maintaining its naval and other bases in Syria, securing its considerable investments in the country and using Damascus as the key to its renewed influence in the region. Iran wants to integrate Syria into a regional network of supplicant states, and to use it as a springboard to threaten Israel on one side and maintain its domination in Iraq on the other. Moscow would allow Assad a great deal of local authority; Tehran, on the other hand, would be a micromanaging overlord with designs on most of his prerogatives.

For its part, Turkey is primarily concerned about U.S.-backed Kurdish militias, along its border region in northern Syria. The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan regards these fighters as proxies of Kurdish terrorists and separatists operating within Turkey. So long as the Arabs don’t support the Kurds, Ankara would welcome their involvement in Syria.

As Turkey’s closest Arab ally, Qatar’s inclusion in the new forum was inevitable. Moscow and Ankara are clearly hoping to capitalize on the end of Doha’s isolation in the Gulf. The Qataris have deep pockets of their own, of course, but just as importantly, they might be able to bring other Arab states into the postwar arrangements in Syria. Qatar’s cordial relations with Iran were useful during the embargo, but its return to the Arab embrace gives it space to distance itself from Tehran.

Iran can be expected to fight tooth and nail to maintain its influence in Syria. Overstretched and impoverished as it is, the Islamic Republic has considerable leverage in Damascus, and a tried and tested formula of using proxy militias and co-sectarian politicians to protect its interests — as it does in Iraq and Lebanon. Tehran’s Arab opponents will have to be watchful that they’re not being played by Assad and Russia, and that the money and effort they invest in Syria really does mean a diminishment of Iran’s control.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/an-ambitious-biden-s-margin-for-error-or-bad-luck-is-close-to-zero-1.1197030

US President Joe Biden has breathtaking ambitions. The $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill is the most far-reaching legislation in 50 years to redirect assets to the poorest Americans, especially children. And he intends to go far beyond that spectacular start.

He is now promoting a massive $2tn infrastructure and climate change package. Securing that means operating at the Franklin Roosevelt-level of historic significance.

Since the 1960s, Democrats mainly emphasised social spending. Republicans have mostly promoted the interests of corporations and the wealthy. Both robustly fund the military and serve the special interests that support them.

Suddenly here is a major federal initiative for the country as a whole, the basic infrastructure of the US.

It goes far beyond traditional definitions of “infrastructure”, although it does provide considerable spending on roads and bridges, railways and public transportation, schools and affordable housing. Yet there are also vast investments in home and community care, universal high-speed broadband, the power grid, cleaner energy and electric vehicles.

Critics see a liberal laundry-list grab-bag, especially since the plan will supposedly be primarily funded through tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, effectively reversing former US president Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut. It would be another huge step in rearranging social and economic relations in the interests of ordinary people at the expense of corporations and the wealthy. And it would transform significant aspects of the living conditions of many Americans.

Passing anything like this will be extremely difficult given the Democrats’ razor-thin majorities in the US Congress.

Eventually, Mr Biden should be able to win the support of the House of Representatives, despite objections from several New York-area representatives who want to lift the cap on deductions for state and local taxes imposed by the Trump tax bill. The Senate, however, is an entirely different matter. And Democratic hopes of passing any such bill this year begin with a little-known official called the Senate “parliamentarian”.

The pandemic bill, like Mr Trump’s tax cut, was adopted by a simple majority under “budget reconciliation” – an unwieldy workaround to bypass the 100-member Senate’s otherwise inflexible 60-vote supermajority to allow legislation to move forward. This exception to the filibuster only applies to spending proposals, meaning that all or most of the infrastructure legislation will probably, but not certainly, qualify.

The main complication is that reconciliation, being supposedly a budget procedure, has never been used twice in the same year. Whether it can will be ruled on by Elizabeth McDonough, the Senate’s professional parliamentarian who referees issues of parliamentary procedure and the correct application of Senate rules.

Ms McDonough has already shown herself willing to thwart the re-empowered Democrats by correctly ruling that a minimum wage increase that had been intended for the pandemic relief bill exceeded the parameters of what is allowed under reconciliation and therefore had to be removed.

A simple Senate majority can always overrule the parliamentarian, but that’s rare and arguably improper. Ms McDonough is a fair-minded arbiter, and changing the rules – not overruling her impartial interpretations – is the appropriate response to an unwelcome ruling.

If she finds that the infrastructure bill can move forward despite reconciliation already having been used for pandemic relief, the really difficult problems commence.

Unless Mr Biden can win some Republican support, which seems exceedingly unlikely on this or any other significant legislation, he will need to hold every single Democratic vote in the 50-50 split Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie.

Some conservative Democratic senators from largely Republican-leaning states, especially Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, will find supporting such an expansive spending programme politically risky. Moreover, for the same reason they strongly oppose filibuster reform – to preserve their own centrality in Senate deliberations under current circumstances – they may be tempted to either greatly dilute the proposed legislation or simply oppose it altogether.

Mr Biden’s ambitions are at least as grand as those of Lyndon Johnson in the early 1960s. But he will have to somehow channel Johnson’s legendary parliamentary skills and powers of persuasion to prevail.

Prospects are even dimmer for another potentially historic bill, this one on securing voting rights, which would require reforming or bypassing the filibuster. That isn’t necessary for the infrastructure spending package. But the same block of all 50 Democratic Senate votes plus Ms Harris’ tiebreaker will probably be needed to secure either.

Yet the pandemic relief, infrastructure and voting rights acts – if all three passed – would almost certainly make Mr Biden a transformative president, probably beyond even Johnson’s legacy and closer to Roosevelt’s.

Such an achievement would be all the more remarkable because it can only be done by keeping the fractious and still ideologically diverse Democratic Party unanimously united behind extraordinarily bold spending plans. And in the unfortunate event any one of the several elderly Democratic senators passes away, his task would become even more daunting and perhaps impossible.

So his margin for error or bad luck is close to zero.

Yet Republicans lack a coherent rebuttal other than budget concerns. Since they evinced no interest in fiscal discipline during the Trump administration, that will be highly unconvincing for anyone paying attention to their stances. And a major infrastructure project would probably be broadly popular, including among Republican voters.

Such spending would generate huge numbers of good working-class jobs, which Mr Trump always promised but never really delivered beyond what the economy was already in the process of achieving. His endless but meaningless “infrastructure weeks” became a national joke.

If Mr Biden can hold the Democrats together, pass transformative legislation while defeating the pandemic, and avoid sustained, high inflation (the obvious danger of such huge expenditures), the Democrats would be in an extraordinarily strong position.

Typically, a new president’s party loses congressional seats in the first midterm, and Mr Biden cannot afford any losses in either the House or the Senate next year. But the historic exceptions have always come during times of crisis, and no one doubts there is one now.

If Mr Biden shows that sweeping government actions can solve big problems, the existing Republican playbook may be rendered obsolete. They will finally have to abandon the Donald Trump personality cult and categorically opposing almost everything, and seriously reengage with policy and governance.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/against-iran-the-us-needs-to-reactivate-its-cold-war-strategy-1.1192643

Since the so-called “Islamic revolution” of 1979, the problem of Iran has bedevilled every US president. Joe Biden is no exception. The challenge intensified following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. But at no point in the past two decades has the US developed a viable long-term strategy for dealing with Iran.

Mr Biden has placed Iran at the top of his international priorities. That gives him the opportunity to craft a strategy that learns lessons from his predecessors’ successes and failures. Most importantly, he could establish a broad framework that avoids fragmented or contradictory partial solutions and that bequeaths coherence to his own successors.

A persistent lack of coherence has been central to his predecessor’s failures.

Although George W Bush reviled the Iranian regime as part of an “axis of evil”, he greatly strengthened Tehran by, among other things, invading Iraq, leaving the country shattered and largely dominated by Iranian proxies.

The 2015 nuclear deal was Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement but it was both flawed and limited. The agreement merely postponed a reckoning over Iran’s nuclear ambitions for about a decade and resolved nothing. It also left Iran’s other destabilising policies, particularly its support for a network of sectarian armed gangs in neighbouring Arab countries, completely unaddressed.

If anyone in the Obama administration was hoping that the sanctions relief and international legitimacy provided by the nuclear deal would moderate Tehran’s behaviour, they were deeply disappointed.

Donald Trump promptly charged in the opposite direction, walking away from the agreement in 2018 and imposing a thoroughgoing regime of “maximum pressure” sanctions. But while the sanctions created significant economic hardship for Iran, Tehran’s regional behaviour became more belligerent than ever.

Because reality is complex, it isn’t automatically true that Iranian setbacks translate into American successes. Indeed, Mr Trump found no formula for achieving anything through the considerable pressure and leverage he accumulated.

Mr Biden inherits this legacy of profound confusion on one of his key priorities.

He clearly wants to revive nuclear diplomacy and even the 2015 agreement, but insists important lessons were learned from the failures and eventual collapse of the Obama approach.

The good news is that the Biden administration isn’t rushing into anything, and may even be dawdling a little.

The bad news is that senior administration officials may be so fixated on preventing Iran from going nuclear that some appear to think that this is the only really serious problem confronting Washington in the Middle East and that everything else is relatively minor.

Yet a single-minded fixation on reviving or even “fixing” the deal would trap Washington in the same fragmentary and contradictory framework responsible for 20 years of failure.

In an important new essay, Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace suggests a modified version of the “containment” policy the US deployed towards the Soviet Union and its network of allies to provide a rational, unifying structure to the US approach towards Iran over the long run.

Shifting to such a “Cold War” model begins by recognising that a meaningful rapprochement between Washington and an unreconstructed Islamic Republic is simply impossible. Opposition to the US is hardwired into the core identity of this regime.

Expecting anything else is naive.

Such a radical transformation in Iran’s worldview and policies towards the US and the rest of the Middle East would surely signal the end of the Islamic Republic as it has existed since 1979. Whether such a change is viewed as revolutionary, imposed on the state from outside the regime, or evolutionary, with existing structures taking the lead in such a shift, is irrelevant semantics. The resulting reality would be the same and utterly transformational.

Therefore, two key realities must be simultaneously acknowledged.

First, such a transformation must be the long-term goal of the US and its allies, because real reconciliation with this regime as it stands is not possible. But, second, such a change, no matter how vital, cannot be imposed from the outside.

The Obama administration appeared to be hoping that the nuclear agreement would strengthen “moderates” and encourage evolutionary change. It didn’t. The Trump administration seemed to be hoping “maximum pressure” would result in regime collapse. Not even close.

Neither aspiration was realistic, and the resulting policies were at least somewhat misguided and ultimately ineffective.

The containment framework Sadjadpour suggests would, drawing on the US’ broadly successful Cold War policies towards the Soviet Union, have three main prongs. It would seek to bolster US allies; undermine Iran’s own network of support; and use both carrots and sticks to influence Tehran’s policies. Its purpose would, eventually, be to provide a framework for fundamental, but domestically driven, change inside Iran.

Mr Biden’s goal of an early return to the nuclear agreement fits nicely into this framework, as long as it’s not an end in itself. So might a far broader diplomatic engagement with Iran if possible.

But the US would have to take care to strengthen ties to its own regional allies, all of which have a stake in keeping Iran non-nuclear.

Also indispensable would be major efforts to combat and fragment Iran’s regional network of violent gangs, primarily by strengthening the dilapidated Arab state structures that Iran’s militia proxies prey upon.

This approach also requires the careful reconceptualisation of both sanctions and engagement with Iran, all carefully tailored to promote Iranian civil society and turn social, political and nationalist aspirations against the regime itself.

The keys would be persistence, patience and the understanding that Iranians will only change their system when they are ready and on their own terms. Clearly there’s already a great deal to work with in Iranian society, but that can only be done with subtlety and a clear vision.

Such a framework can provide coherence and flexibility, allowing what might otherwise be contradictory impulses and policies to become mutually reinforcing.

Without a guiding strategic concept, based on the largely successful American approach to a far more challenging and dangerous Soviet adversary, Washington is likely to continue to stumble from one miscalculation and missed opportunity to another.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-28/india-and-pakistan-the-uae-is-seeking-a-new-role-as-peacemaker?sref=tp95wk9l

The tiny Gulf state dubbed “Little Sparta” has scaled back its military projection.

Nicknamed “Little Sparta” by American generals like former U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the United Arab Emirates is widely acknowledged as a small country that punches far above its weight in military terms. But the tiny Gulf state also has outsized ambitions as a peace broker.

Its de facto ruler, Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, was the prime mover in last year’s Abraham Accords between Israel and several Arab states. Going further back, Emirati diplomats played a key role alongside their Saudi counterparts in mediating the 2018 peace deal between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The UAE’s latest peacemaking project is arguably its most audacious ever. As Bloomberg reported last week, the Emiratis brokered the negotiations between India and Pakistan that led to an unexpected February 25 announcement that the South Asian rivals would respect their 2003 cease-fire agreement, despite heightened tensions between them.

The UAE is hoping to facilitate an exchange of ambassadors between New Delhi and Islamabad and restoration of trade links between the two countries. More ambitious still, it is aiming to secure a viable understanding on Kashmir, which has been the flashpoint for several wars since their 1947 partition upon independence from British rule.

The two nuclear-armed neighbors are locked in what may be the world’s most dangerous faceoff. The latest round of tensions began two years ago when 40 Indian soldiers were killed in a suicide bomb attack, claimed by a Pakistan-based terrorist group, in Kashmir. India retaliated by launching air strikes inside Pakistan. Since then, the leaders of the two countries, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Imran Khan, have blown hot and cold, with little progress toward peace — until last month’s announcement.

In many ways, the Emiratis are uniquely qualified to mediate between the two countries. It has strong trade and commercial ties to both, and is home to millions of Indian and Pakistani expatriate workers. And since the conflict is rooted in mistrust between Hindus and Muslims, the UAE’s credentials are strengthened by its aggressive promotion, at home and abroad, of a separation of politics and religion.

Kashmir has been a consistent rallying cry for terrorist groups and radical Islamist organizations, such as Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Taliban, which the UAE considers its most dangerous opponents. Helping to defuse the conflict would allow the Emiratis to strike a significant blow against violent extremists.

The South Asian initiative also plays into the UAE’s pursuit of other important foreign-policy objectives. It helps to deepen the partnership with Washington by paralleling American efforts to resolve the conflict in neighboring Afghanistan, where India and Pakistan have competing economic and security interests. At the same time. amity between its allies is doubly desirable for the UAE as American appetite to act in the Middle East appears to be waning.

In recent years, the UAE has shifted its attention away from military projection to diplomacy, investment and other forms of soft power. Most of the regional conflicts through which it has sought to advance its interests militarily, either directly or through proxies, are resolved or stale-mated, or have otherwise passed the point of diminishing returns.

The UAE has greatly reduced its footprint in Yemen and drawn down its forces in the Horn of Africa. It is looking to scale back in Libya, where it provided both air cover and material support for the rebel forces of Khalifa Haftar; the Emiratis are now backing a political solution to the civil war.

The UAE has also sought to reduce tensions with Iran and is leading Arab efforts to reengage with the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, having concluded that the war there has effectively ended and that the only way to advance Emirati interests is through political, diplomatic and commercial means.

The UAE is hoping that India and Pakistan will take a similarly enlightened view of their conflict. If they do, some of the credit will redound to the Emiratis. And if not, “Little Sparta” will be credited for at least trying to make peace.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/the-latest-test-for-us-democracy-is-which-americans-get-to-vote-and-how-easily-1.1188511

American democracy keeps lurching from one existential crisis to another. Republicans and Democrats are now gearing up for a titanic struggle over voting itself.

It is partly an extension of the conclusive but bizarrely unresolved 2020 presidential election.

Despite US President Joe Biden’s decisive victory, Republican leaders continue to either bluntly claim or strongly imply that the result was tainted by widespread fraud. Former US President Donald Trump failed to overturn the outcome despite the most sustained effort to invalidate an election in US history.

In fact, the election was one of the cleanest ever, and saw the broadest public participation in a century.

Most Republicans believe Mr Biden won because of fraud, but only because most of their political and media leaders have relentlessly trumpeted this lie.

Mr Trump notes that 74 million Americans voted for him, a considerably larger number than in 2016 (when he still lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million), and mocks the reality that Mr Biden got over 81 million votes. Obviously Mr Trump was an extremely polarising figure who convinced vast numbers to support him but a considerably larger group to vote him out.

That is simply unacceptable to him and many other Republicans.

Whether or not they endorse the “stolen election” mythology, Republicans have launched a massive state-level campaign to restrict ease of, and access to, voting throughout the country.

This attack on voting rights is unprecedented, at least since segregation and the systematic denial of African-American voting in the South until the 1960s.

Republican lawmakers in 43 states are pursuing 253 bills to significantly restrict voting access. They claim to be defending “election integrity,” as if there had been a significant degree of fraud in the last election. And, with breathtaking cynicism, they cite doubts among their supporters about the 2020 election, unfounded suspicions that these leaders themselves promoted in stark contradiction of the established facts.

Since Mr Trump’s defeat, a number of Republican leaders have effectively dropped all pretense that they seek to limit fraud rather than votes. They have plainly concluded that their only reliable path to national victory under current circumstances is to restrict by all possible means the number of Americans who participate in elections.

Many of these new state bills seek to end early voting, greatly restrict postal voting, and eliminate Sunday voting (favoured by African-American churchgoers), among other egregious measures. The obvious targets are ethnic minorities and the poor. Money purchases convenience, time and flexibility. The less cash you have, as a practical matter the harder it is to accommodate rigid rules and schedules.

Since there is a strong correlation between poverty and some core Democratic constituencies, particularly African-Americans and Latinos, restrictions that make voting more difficult for poorer people are assumed to be useful to Republicans.

Moreover, African-Americans and other minorities are much less likely to carry the kinds of identification documents some new rules would demand. The racial subtext is unmistakable.

Democrats, too, are confronting the issue, but at the federal level.

The House of Representatives recently passed a sweeping voting rights bill that would nationally mandate measures such as 15 days of early voting, unrestricted postal voting, automatic voter registration, and other provisions intended to maximise the number of Americans who vote.

This horrifies most Republican leaders. Texas Senator Ted Cruz even claims that Democrats are trying to ensure that “illegal aliens” and “child molesters” vote in large numbers. Such absurd hyperbole aside, most Republicans agree Democrats are trying to slant the playing field dramatically in their favour, and they are indeed.

Republican attitudes were summed up by Mr Trump last year, when he warned against “levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

As he acknowledged, Republicans now fear they simply cannot prevail if there are high “levels of voting”. Following recent defeats, particularly stunning losses in formerly reliably Republican Georgia, the Republicans are seeking at the state level to make voting more difficult.

With equal certainty that high turnout favours them, Democrats are pushing in the opposite direction at the federal level.

Both sides are undoubtedly motivated by what they perceive as politically advantageous. But there is no denying that Republicans are frantically seeking to practically disenfranchise as many qualified voters as possible. With increasing frequency, the mask drops and they openly admit their goal is to lower turnout.

Republicans are, in effect, attacking democracy, or at least voting.

Right-wing anxiety about too many people voting is nothing new. In the 1960s, conservative guru William Buckley insisted the problem in the South was not too few Blacks voting but too many Whites.

A familiar semantic ruse notes that the US was established as “a republic” not “a democracy”.

That is true, but only insofar as, at the time of the founding, “democracy” suggested Athenian plebiscites on almost everything, while representative government with a strong default to majoritarian rule was precisely what was understood by a “republic”. Now, we call the system a “democracy”.

Depending on the fate of the filibuster, as I recently explained in these pages, Republicans may block the voting rights bill in the Senate, and even restrict voter access in some states.

But seeking to disenfranchise millions of Americans – now probably the issue on which, nationally, Republicans are most united – is not only unacceptable and embarrassing, but also surely doomed as a partisan strategy.

What’s being overlooked is that even Mr Trump did better than expected among African-American and Latino men, among others.

So, there is no reason to assume that a principled conservative agenda can’t ever defeat liberals, including among minority groups in a diverse and equitable society. But Republicans would have to significantly alter course.

They are probably right to fear that an increasingly authoritarian, philosophically anti-democratic, and effectively white supremacist agenda will ultimately doom their ability to compete nationally in the emerging multi-ethnic and multicultural America.

Yet as David Frum has argued, Republicans appear more willing to compromise democratic principles than these disturbing tenets. That could prove the gravest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-16/yemen-is-more-complicated-than-biden-thinks

Ending the war is not merely a matter of persuading the Saudis to leave.

The two main goals of President Joe Biden’s Middle East policy are clear enough: resuming nuclear diplomacy with Iran and ending the war in Yemen. But as Washington begins to engage with Yemen seriously, after four years of sustained disinterest under President Donald Trump, it is learning that the realities of that conflict are very different than many Americans imagined — and that the administration’s objectives will be hard to achieve.

 During the Trump presidency, Yemen was primarily viewed as Saudi Arabia’s problem. The war was cast as the consequence of Saudi aggression — specifically, Riyadh’s leadership of the Arab alliance against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. As a result, it was assumed that ending the fighting was just a matter of compelling the Saudis to get out of Yemen.

This view served a political purpose: Democrats, in particular, used Yemen as a stick to beat Trump for his see-no-evil defense of Saudi Arabia, and especially its day-to-day ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In Congress, there was a bipartisan effort to punish Riyadh for the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Yemen. But Trump’s veto power frustrated demands for the withdrawal of American support for the war in Yemen and ending U.S. arms sales to the Saudis.

Now that they are in power and Biden is actively seeking solutions, the Democrats are having to reassess their previous analysis of the problem. Biden’s special envoy on Yemen, the veteran diplomat Tim Lenderking, a highly respected veteran U.S. diplomat, is confronting the stark reality that ending the war isn’t about convincing the Saudis to go — they’ve wanted to, for several years. 

The main challenge is convincing the Houthis to allow the Saudis to leave on reasonable terms.

Having expended enormous resources in Yemen, Riyadh will want to leave behind some sort of power-sharing agreement between the Houthis and the internationally recognized government led by President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. The Saudis also need guarantees that the Houthis will cease cross-border raids and rocket attacks. 

But the Houthis, a Shiite militia that overthrew the Hadi government in 2015, have never shown any serious interest in peace. Since the war has gone fairly well for them, they have little incentive to stop fighting. And their Iranian patrons are certain to press them to keep the Saudis bogged down. The conflict in Yemen has given Tehran plausible deniability while repeatedly striking at its main regional rival in its exposed underbelly.

In theory, it shouldn’t be that difficult to incentivize the Houthis to come to terms. A political agreement would have to recognize and institutionalize the power they have accumulated over the past five years. 

However, there are a number of serious challenges. Since the war started, no one has been able to ascertain what the Houthi bottom line is, much less what kind of deal they might accept. Not only are they fanatical in the extreme —their rallying cry is “God is great! Death to America! Death to Israel! A curse upon the Jews! Victory for Islam!” — they are also internally divided. Their representatives at previous peace talks apparently did not represent the views and commitments of commanders on the ground.

Another problem is Hadi, who has his own history of recalcitrance. He is fearful of losing authority and exclusive international recognition, but unable to mount a serious military counterattack. Persuading the president to come to terms will be only somewhat less difficult than corralling the Houthis.

And then there are the Iranians, who seem perfectly happy to keep supplying the Houthis with arms while pronouncing piously about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. 

The Biden administration has begun with an interesting mix of carrots and sticks, including the resumption of humanitarian assistance to areas controlled by the Houthis. It reversed Donald Trump’s last-minute designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization in order to facilitate diplomatic contacts with Lenderking. Biden also ended U.S. military support for the Saudi-led coalition. 

But more recently, the Treasury Department imposed targeted sanctions on two senior Houthi leaders. And Lenderking has begin to openly question the rebels’ desire for peace.

American patience is being tested by a Houthi offensive against Marib, the government-held city in a hydrocarbon-rich region around 100 miles east of the capital Sanaa. The rebels have rejected U.S. calls for a cease-fire, and seem oblivious to the plight of hundreds of thousands of Yemeni refugees who live in tent cities in and around the city.

Ironically, it is the Saudis and their allies who may represent the best hope of preventing the Houthis from unleashing what the United Nations fears will be a fresh humanitarian catastrophe in Marib.

In Yemen, as the Biden administration is discovering, there are no good guys — or, as yet, good options.