https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-23/lebanon-s-new-government-is-set-up-to-fail?srnd=opinion

Hezbollah, Prime Minister Hassan Diab’s main backer, doesn’t want him to succeed.

After more than three months of political wrangling amid the backdrop of massive street protests, Lebanon finally has a new government. But the cabinet assembled by Prime Minister Hassan Diab, almost entirely composed of Hezbollah’s allies, is unlikely to succeed.

Indeed, it may have been set up to fail by its own backers.

Hezbollah cannot be comfortable with an arrangement that puts it—along with its Maronite allies in the Free Patriotic Movement—front and center of the new government. The Iran-backed group has historically preferred a time-tested arrangement of power without responsibility: its rivals nominally ran the government, but allowed Hezbollah to maintain its independent militia and to exercise its will on all issues it deemed crucial.

In the new setup, Hezbollah finds itself in the unfamiliar position of responsibility. This means it risks being directly blamed for the state’s dysfunction, which it can do very little to fix.

Even most credible and competent government, with full public support, would be hard-pressed to deal with Lebanon’s multiple crises, especially with a looming default on bond payments. The lira has collapsed in value and banks have been forced to restrict the ability of ordinary account holders to withdraw their money, particularly in U.S. dollars. Basic services are moribund. The supply of electricity has become intermittent, and a telecommunications crisis, including Internet outages, seems probable.

Diab’s government was born under a bad sign—several bad signs, in fact. His nomination was met with intense opposition from the protesters, and this has grown even more intense since the 20-member cabinet was announced. It is also politically lop-sided: instead of the traditional blend of pro- and anti-Hezbollah factions, Diab is banking on only one side of the Lebanese equation.

Worse, the formation of the cabinet was midwifed by discredited political figures closely associated with the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, including Jamil Al-Sayyed, who was driven out of the political centerstage after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. If the growing Iranian influence in Beirut wasn’t bad enough, many Lebanese will be even more alarmed and dismayed by the return of Syrian leverage in their country’s politics.

It is certain to inflame the protesters, who for months have been demanding radical reforms and denouncing the entire social and political elite of the country. One of their few clear demands has been for a technocratic government of experts rather than political cronies. Diab claims to have assembled exactly such a “rescue squad,” but in fact his cabinet is almost composed mainly of political operatives or their proxies. Not even the large number of women in prominent roles will buy him much credibility on the street.

Nor can Diab expect much foreign help in bailing Lebanon out of its financial problems. The U.S. and Europe will be very cautious in providing aid to a pro-Hezbollah government. Diab says he’s headed to the Gulf Arab states soon, but they too will be uncomfortable with a pro-Iranian militia calling the shots in Beirut.

None of this can have escaped the attention of Hezbollah and its allies: They must know that this government cannot last very long. But they did not have a better option.

All political elites have been discomfited by the protests but Hezbollah stood to lose more than most from real reform. Setting Diab up for failure is the first step in a process that, it hopes, will restore the status quo. This has been Hezbollah’s goal since the protests began last fall. Its ideal outcome was for former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who resigned in October, to return to the job.

Now, Hezbollah is likely calculating that once Diab fails, it can step forward and propose, in the name of national unity, the reinstatement of Hariri, or the elevation of another politician acceptable to the international community—who would allow things to go back to the way they used to be.

The main obstacle to this will probably be the protesters, who may well hold out for a more thorough-going reform of Lebanon’s political structures and traditions. If so, Hezbollah will have to offer something more substantial than Diab’s government as a sacrificial lamb.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/trump-s-removal-from-office-is-far-from-certain-but-neither-is-his-acquittal-1.966947

A trial, like a war, is a social process whose outcome cannot be predicted and looks very different at the end than at the start.

On the eve of his impeachment trial which will begin in the Senate next week, time is clearly not on the president’s side, even if the rushed schedule, which suits both Republicans and Democrats, might be.

US President Donald Trump finally secured a Ukrainian criminal investigation announcement, although certainly not the one he was hoping for. He wanted Ukraine to investigate his rivals, but the Kiev government has announced a criminal probe into his allies instead.

Unsettling information continues to accumulate about the activities of the president’s close associates, particularly Mr Trump’s private attorney Rudy Giuliani and the latter’s operatives. Leaked text messages recently revealed, for instance, that this gang may have had the movements of former US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, under surveillance during 2019.

The people involved claim to have been joking, under the influence of alcohol, or “playing.” But these and other astonishing revelations leave little doubt that there is much more about the Ukraine scandal that remains to be discovered.

The obvious need for additional information, and the well-known sources from which it could be obtained, will be at the heart of what is only the third presidential impeachment trial in US history.

Democrats are insisting that there is no such thing as a trial that does not involve testimony by witnesses and the subpoenaing of relevant documents. The impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives was akin to a grand jury investigation or the preparation for an indictment, which the House adopted in the two articles of impeachment adopted on December 18.

Indeed, there has never been an American impeachment trial without witness testimony or new documents, including both previous presidential impeachments. Yet such an unprecedented scenario is exactly what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues are hoping to engineer.

Mr McConnell and most of his GOP colleagues have made it clear that they intend to acquit Mr Trump no matter what, and that they are not interested in any evidence whatsoever. Indeed, he derisively says that House Democrats did a “rushed and incomplete job” and are asking the Senate to “do their homework for them.”

This elides the obvious point that the House’s motivation for handing the Senate a remarkably incomplete file to support the “high crimes and misdemeanours” (for which presidents may be impeached) is that the White House has flatly refused to share any documents with the impeachment inquiry. Furthermore, it has attempted to block all executive-branch officials from testifying. Some relatively junior or former officials testified anyway, but all the key witnesses who dealt directly with Mr Trump have not been heard from, and a raft of crucial documents remains unexamined.

Mr Trump has asked the Senate to quickly dismiss these charges, and while Mr. McConnell doesn’t appear ready to do that, he is clearly determined to prevent any more information coming to light. Given the revelations in the past few weeks, and the obvious fact that Republican senators have no idea what else may be discovered, their anxiety is understandable.

During the House hearings, a parade of witnesses managed to paint a remarkably intricate picture of a president determined to hijack US military aid to Ukraine to secure the announcement of a baseless criminal investigation into the son of his political rival, Joe Biden. But because the White House successfully blocked all the senior-most potential witnesses, the president’s own role was not described in great and direct detail.

Obviously, if Mr Trump and Mr McConnell were confident he had done nothing wrong, they would welcome a closer examination of the facts.

The problem is particularly acute for Mr McConnell. As damning recent revelations demonstrate, additional facts are liable to put him in an impossible situation, given that he simply does not care what the president may have done and is determined to acquit him no matter what.

Worse, Mr Trump knows exactly what he did and didn’t do, but Senate Republicans don’t. They really have no idea what remains to be discovered and what is already on the record is bad enough to place them in an awkward position. Despite their best efforts, this problem is only likely to get worse.

Like war, a trial is among those social processes in which the outcome and, in retrospect, the underlying realities appear very different at the end of the process than they did at the beginning. Mr McConnell knows this, and that explains his insistence on a short and essentially meaningless “trial.”

Even though he commands a Republican majority in the Senate, he may not get his way, at least not entirely.

Mr Trump’s Senate trial will hinge upon the procedural rulings of a Senate majority, with Chief Justice John Roberts serving as a tiebreaker when necessary. In practice, this means that only three or four Republicans need, at any stage, to side with Democrats on a motion to hear certain witnesses – one example being former national security advisor John Bolton, who has said he would testify and that he has significant new information.

As things stand, few if any Senate Republicans appear willing to convict Mr. Trump and remove him from office. However, a small group might be amenable to siding with Democrats, and possibly the Chief Justice, in insisting on additional testimony and documents. Once that process is unleashed, there is no telling where it might lead.

Under the current circumstances, it’s very hard to imagine the Senate voting to convict and remove Mr Trump from office, despite an already strong case that he did, indeed, abuse the powers of his office for personal political gain and, as his defiant attitude suggests, would likely do so again.

But one thing is certain on the eve of this momentous Senate trial: anyone who has complete confidence in its outcome and impact is living in a fool’s paradise.

What we are about to witness is a process that isn’t wholly predictable or under anyone’s firm control.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-15/iran-u-s-confrontation-fosters-gulf unity

The prospect of war has had a calming impact on squabbling GCC states.

As they breathe a collective sigh of relief that the U.S. and Iran have not stumbled into a war in their backyard, the bickering Gulf Arab countries have been reminded they still have powerful common interests.

The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman – have worked to reduce tensions since the targeted killing of Qassem Soleimani and several key henchmen.

One of the biggest disagreements within the GCC has been over attitudes towards Tehran. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE, along with the U.S. and Israel, make up the core of the international coalition opposing the Islamic Republic. Oman, Kuwait and Qatar maintain much better relations with Iran.

Oman has long served as a mediator in disputes with Iran; Muscat hosted some of the initial meetings that eventually produced the 2015 nuclear deal. Kuwait, which has a mixed population of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, is determined not to get dragged into regional disputes, especially of the sectarian kind.

Qatar has been aligned with Sunni Islamists like Turkey’s ruling party and the Muslim Brotherhood, and it has actively opposed Iran in Syria and Iraq. However, since Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt imposed an embargo on Qatar in June 2017, Doha has drifted closer to Tehran. In addition to sharing a natural-gas field that provides almost all of Qatar’s income, the emirate is now dependent on Iran for commercial air routes and other critical support.

Unsurprisingly, Qatar was quickest off the blocks after the Soleimani killing: its Foreign Minister and Emir made visits to Tehran to express solidarity and condolences. There is widespread speculation that the Reaper drones used in the strike were launched from the U.S. base at Al-Udeid, near Doha. The Qataris were anxious to tell the world, and especially Iran, that they were not a party to the attack. (Incidentally, if Washington and Tehran weren’t sending messages to each other via the Qataris, it would be tantamount to diplomatic malpractice; Doha is unusually both a key U.S. ally and friendly to Iran.)

Similarly, Oman announced a mediation effort, only to quickly conclude there was “no room” for negotiations at present.

More striking were efforts by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to calm nerves and contribute to de-escalation. While many have assumed that these two countries, along with Israel, have been pressing the U.S. into a war with Iran, that was never true. While they welcomed the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign on Iran, these countries know that they would be among the first targets Iran would strike in the event of an all-out fight. Last year’s attacks on Saudi Aramco facilities and UAE-related international shipping were stark reminders of their vulnerability.

The UAE’s chief diplomat, Anwar Gargash, made early and repeated, public pleas that all parties put “wisdom, balance and political solutions above confrontation and escalation.” Behind the scenes, the message to Washington was that the UAE has no interest in anybody starting a war with Iran. Last summer, for the first time in years, the UAE dispatched several diplomatic delegations to Iran to reopen dialogue on issues such as maritime security and other matters of mutual concern.

Saudi Arabia repeatedly called for restraint and dispatched deputy defense minister—and former ambassador to the U.S.—Khalid bin Salman, to encourage Washington to de-escalate. Riyadh recently established a new diplomatic back channel to Tehran.

So, after years of bitter bickering and confrontation, the Gulf Arab countries suddenly found themselves operating in concert. This is appropriate, since the GCC was founded in 1981, in large part to deal with the challenges posed to the peninsular states by the then fledgling Islamic Republic.

Iran remains an overarching, unifying threat: for some GCC states, the threat of war is more real than the threat of Iranian hegemony. In practical terms, that might amount to the same thing. All of them have had to develop a more robust conversation with Tehran than previously in recent years.

Another challenge is to keep talking among themselves. Tentative steps have already been taken towards reconciling the split with Qatar, especially since the participation of the national soccer teams of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain in the Gulf Cup in Doha late last year. The differences, especially over Doha’s support for Islamists, are some way from being reconciled, but the combined response to the flare-up between Washington and Tehran shows that, on existential questions, the Gulf Arab states can—and must—act in harmony.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/iran-is-a-crucial-test-case-on-us-engagement-in-the-middle-east-and-beyond-1.963179 

Donald Trump, as well as both the country’s major political parties, seem torn between internationalism and isolationism.

Iran might not have decided yet whether to escalate or de-escalate tensions with the US following the targeted killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani, as Raghida Dergham reports in these pages. But question marks also hover over both the Donald Trump administration’s long-term approach to Tehran and even over the broader trajectory of the US international role in coming decades.

Iran will be a crucial test case for American engagement.

Underneath the extraordinary outcry on both the left and the right in response to the killing of Suleimani lies a huge rift between internationalists, whether hawks or doves, who want to sustain the kind of global engagement Washington maintained during the Cold War era versus neo-isolationists, who reject a robust American international profile except, perhaps, regarding trade.

The Republican Party can normally be expected to rally around Mr Trump under any and all circumstances. And one would particularly expect a degree of robust unanimity when it comes to kinetic military actions overseas, particularly in response to the killing of an American military contractor and the besieging of the US embassy in Baghdad by cadres of the pro-Iranian Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah.

The Democratic Party can be expected to always critique the president’s performance. Its leaders focused on the lack of customary briefings of senior congressional leaders in advance of the action, or satisfactory ones after.

Others went further. Many Democrats decried the “recklessness” of the killing and claimed that Mr Trump was dragging the US into a new Middle Eastern war for political purposes. Democratic leaders, essentially products of Cold War multilateralism who prize alliances and international institutions, sounded very different from those who reject the legacy of US global leadership as wasteful, corrupt, immoral or imperialistic.

This division is strikingly mirrored among Republicans. Internationalists such as senator Lindsey Graham – who are generally more hawkish and unilateralist than their Democratic counterparts – applauded the strike. But libertarian and isolationist senators, led by Rand Paul who has been one of Mr Trump’s key allies, did not disguise their doubts and dismay.

Numerous American reactions to the drone strike reflected ideological and political orientations, frequently having nothing to do with the event itself, viewed either strategically or tactically. Many seem either cynical or neurotic, or both.

The problem has been exacerbated by typically poor messaging from this White House, which failed to clearly explain that beginning in late October, Kataib Hezbollah and other Iraqi militias operating under the supervision of Suleimani had launched rocket attacks on US-related military targets in Iraq on an almost weekly basis, eventually leading to the death of a contractor. Demanding, as both left and right isolationists did, specific intelligence about an imminent threat therefore seems silly.

To the contrary, the normal burden of proof in this instance is inverted. Given what Suleimani and the other leading Iraqi and Iranian figures killed in the strike have been doing in recent months, any suggestion that they did not pose an “imminent threat” is baffling. That claim must posit a sudden shift in their modus operandi, and that they were going to start behaving very differently all of a sudden than they have been for many weeks. It is possible but hardly likely.

This obvious point should have been easily communicated to Congress and the public but the Trump White House, as it so often does, failed to make a sound policy case, preferring to indulge in undignified chest thumping.

This mistake invited facile neo-isolationist arguments, with their own preposterous buzzwords such as “endless wars” – which Mr Trump himself has unwisely used to criticise his predecessors – to try to insinuate that the US-Iranian confrontation was effectively manufactured, exaggerated or is somehow pointless.

A good case could be made that the nuclear deal Iran signed with the world’s powers had secured the international community a valuable breathing space on the country’s nuclear programme, and withdrawing from it was rash and imprudent. However, there is really no question that if the US wishes to be a major global power it has no choice but to confront Iran’s expanding hegemony in the still strategically vital Middle East.

Yet many Americans on both the right and the left do not wish the country to remain a major global power at all. The isolationist streak runs deep. A majority demanded it between the first and second World Wars, leaving the country dreadfully weakened at a time of growing peril.

It was only the consensus about an existential threat posed by the erstwhile Soviet Union during the Cold War that established internationalism as a hegemonic and mainstream position in US foreign policy.

Those days are obviously over and the current confrontation with Iran is arguably the most vivid demonstration of that yet. The Trump administration may be committed to continuing to challenge Iran’s regional agenda, missile programme and nuclear ambitions. But much of the rest of the country wants nothing to do with anything like that.

At stake, ultimately, is whether the US intends to remain a global power or not. If so, it is not necessary to kill people like Suleimani or go to war with Iran. But it is essential to maintain the kind of engaged leadership that placed Washington at the centre of global affairs for the past 80 years.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties are badly split on this issue, and Mr Trump himself appears to be deeply conflicted between internationalist (or at least mercantilist) and neo-isolationist tendencies. He is constantly tacking between the two positions. Thus divided, Washington is incapable of the foreign policy focus it needs.

The country needs a robust, thoroughgoing national conversation about international relations. Foreign policy professionals and others who favour international engagement have simply failed to make the case to ordinary Americans that global leadership is in their interests. Far too many consider it all a detestable, outrageous burden. As long as that persists, and absent an existential and unifying foreign threat, the US is likely to remain an indecisive international actor that hamstrings itself time and again to the benefit of much weaker adversaries.

https://agsiw.org/u-s-iran-crisis-promotes-sudden-gcc-unanimity-and-common-purpose/

GCC states all oppose any escalation with Iran, but it remains unclear if that will help heal other rifts.

Nothing has united the Gulf Cooperation Council member states in many years like the flare-up of tensions and exchange of attacks between the United States and Iran. All six countries oppose any further escalation of the crisis. And all of them took action of some kind, including constructive diplomatic or public messaging, to try to ensure this didn’t happen. It is the most unanimous, and in some ways most united, the GCC has been on any major issue since at least the boycott of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt began in June 2017. And it comes on the back of additional moves to try to heal the GCC rift and repair the Gulf Arab states’ ability to operate with a degree of common purpose.

Before the recent crisis began, all the Gulf countries had expressed some degree of alarm about rising tensions between Tehran and Washington. Tehran’s political and strategic crises – with anti-Iran sentiments rising in Lebanon and Iraq, as well as anti-regime protests domestically – helped prompt moves to restore travel and cooperation between Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE and Qatar. But the buildup to the crisis did not produce the strong sense of unanimity and implicit common purpose that emerged following the January 3 U.S. precision guided drone strike that killed Major General Qassim Suleimani, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, leader of the pro-Iranian Kataib Hezbollah Iraqi militia, and several other senior Iranian and pro-Iranian militia figures.

That attack, and concern about Iran’s potential response to the targeted killing, produced a flurry of Gulf Arab diplomatic and public diplomacy activity that left little doubt that, for all their differences, the GCC countries shared the urgent common goal of reducing temperatures and curbing the risk of a wider set of military clashes and even a U.S.-Iranian war. Given their differences regarding relations with Iran and varying positions in the regional strategic landscape, Gulf Arab countries were both able and required to play significantly different roles in pursuit of that mutual goal. This allowed for a range of Gulf Arab interventions from varied vantage points that provided different forms of leverage or influence.

Qatar has always been compelled to maintain reasonable relations with Iran because of the shared natural gas field between the two countries that provides most of Doha’s income. Since the boycott began, Qatar has also increasingly relied on Iran for access to critical commercial air routes and other, more subtle, forms of support. So it is no surprise that Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani traveled to Tehran the weekend after the attack to express condolences to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Because Doha’s position was very strongly in favor of restraint and de-escalation, presumably there was at least some form of indirect messaging to Tehran from one of the few countries that considers itself a very close ally to the United States and a warm friend of Iran.

The GCC squabble did slightly reassert itself in the middle of the efforts to avert a larger crisis between Washington and Tehran when some Saudi media outlets made much of the claims that the drone strike that killed the Iranian commander and his allies was launched by U.S. forces from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The implication is that there was a form of duplicity in Qatar’s supposed complicity in the attack followed by statements of sympathy and calls for restraint. But, in fact, even if the strike was launched from Al-Udeid, it is extremely unlikely that Qatari officials played any role in the decision making at any stage.

Oman and Kuwait also maintain better relations with Iran than the other three GCC members and seemed to be implying that they were ready to proactively help moderate tensions. Oman said it was actively seeking to mediate between the parties to restore calm. It ultimately appeared to conclude room for such a direct mediation did not actually exist, but was clearly willing to play that role when possible. Kuwait was apparently initially directly critical of the targeted killing, although those statements were deleted after being posted, and the country has repeatedly called for restraint and calm. Kuwait also quickly asserted that the drone strike was not launched from its territory.

More instructive were the responses by Iran’s primary regional antagonist, Saudi Arabia, as well as the UAE and Bahrain. UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash tweeted that it was imperative to put “wisdom, balance, and political solutions above confrontation and escalation.” Almost all major UAE newspapers also called for de-escalation and the restoration of calm. Saudi Arabia, too, called for restraint, said it was not consulted in advance about the attack, and said Deputy Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman would travel to Washington in the coming days to urge restraint. Bahrain essentially echoed the sentiments, although in a more muted fashion.

It’s not surprising that Qatar, Oman, and Kuwait were keen on avoiding the U.S.-Iranian escalation. But it is more noteworthy that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain – which regarded Suleimani and his Iraqi clients as deadly enemies – would be similarly committed to de-escalation and the avoidance of further conflict. Yet the prospect of a broader regional conflict has been alarming to these states for many months, if not years.

In the summer of 2019, Iran’s “maximum resistance” campaign of deniable attacks on pro-U.S. targets accelerated. The UAE, which had long been quietly calling for a “political path” forward with Iran along with the sanctions campaign, then reached out to Tehran with diplomatic exchanges designed to create a bilateral dialogue. After the Iranian attack on its oil facilities on September 14, 2019, Saudi Arabia, too, began its own low-key exploration of the potential for direct back-channel communication with Tehran.

Whatever their specific views about and bilateral relations with Iran might be, all the Gulf Arab states are nervous about the impact any broader conflict between the United States and Iran might have on their interests. The UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia could find themselves caught in the crossfire and subjected to direct Iranian attack as indeed happened in September. Qatar, Oman, and Kuwait have their own concerns about political and even economic destabilization arising from increased violence. And even those states that most strongly oppose Iran’s regional role and see a strategic opportunity arising from Tehran’s ongoing crises realize that they have little to gain and much to lose from a further intensification of armed conflict with Tehran.

The GCC was founded in May 1981 in direct response to the formation of the Islamic Republic following the revolution in Iran. From its outset, then, the Islamic Republic has been perceived by the Gulf Arab countries as a unifying threat. Over time, the perceptions of that threat and the best ways of dealing with it have significantly diverged and have been joined to other differences in interests and perspectives between Gulf Arab countries. However, given that the emergence of the Islamic Republic was the proximate cause for the Gulf Arab countries to unite in the first place, it is logical that a major crisis involving Iran has been the cause of a sudden eruption of unity of purpose and common interest between countries that have often found themselves on opposite sides of major regional developments in recent years. How far this will go to help heal GCC divisions, if at all, remains to be seen. But it is at the very least a salutary reminder of how much the Gulf Arab countries still have in common and how strongly their interests can converge in times of crisis.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-04/war-with-iran-is-not-inevitable?srnd=opinion

Tehran knows direct conflict would impose huge costs on the Islamic Republic.

Now that the U.S. has taken out Qassem Soleimani, arguably the most important military figure in the 40-year history of the Islamic Republic, conventional wisdom holds that Tehran must respond with extreme prejudice. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has promised “severe retaliation,” and his regime is putting out videos of thousands of Iranian mourners demanding vengeance.

What might that mean? Many commentators—and not only in Iran or the U.S—are suggesting that a new war in the Middle East is inevitable. Some liken Soleimani’s killing to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and on Twitter the hashtag #WWIII has been trending.

Not so fast. Iran may have many options for unleashing mayhem against American interests and allies in the Middle East, and plenty of allies and proxies through which to do so. But it also has a powerful reason to stop and reconsider. Beyond the expressions of outrage in Tehran—and alarm elsewhere—lies the cold reality that Iran cannot afford a war with a far more powerful opponent.

Any retaliation that leads to war will wreak enormous damage on the Islamic Republic. Even if costs more American blood and treasure than President Trump imagines, the toll on the Iranian nation will be many magnitudes greater. That is an outcome the regime in Tehran has consciously been trying to avoid.

The leaders of the Islamic Republic like to think of themselves as strategic thinkers, with a keen understanding of their opponents and a knack for anticipating their next moves. But they clearly misjudged Donald Trump. Convinced the American president would do anything to avoid a war, they have for months been provoking the U.S. with progressively more intense provocations.

Their goal all along has been to force the U.S. to ease the economic sanctions Trump imposed after he withdrew from the nuclear deal in May 2018. The regime Tehran initially tried to wait out the sanctions, but discovered they were more painful than expected.

A year later, by May 2019, they began a campaign of intimidation by attacking commercial shipping in international waters, but were careful not to actually sink ships or kill anybody.

Tehran was counting on provoking disproportionate U.S. response, short of actual war but enough to create a crisis and prompt international diplomatic intervention to get both sides to back down. In this scenario, Iran would be “persuaded” to stop its attacks, and the U.S. to ease the sanctions.

When the first round of provocations didn’t get a response, the Iranians shot down an American military drone. Trump called off a retaliatory strike at the last minute, but he announced a “red line”: the death of any American at Iranian hands would mandate a military response.

So, Iran raised the stakes by unleashing a major attack on Saudi oil installations. The U.S. moved troops to Saudi Arabia, but again did not respond kinetically.

At that point, Iran’s proxy militias in Iraq, especially Kata’ib Hezbollah, launched a series of rocket attacks against U.S.-related facilities in Iraq. This campaign culminated last week with an attack that killed an American contractor, several Iraqi police and soldiers, and wounded four American troops.

Throughout this calibrated testing of the limits of American patience, the regime in Tehran was certain that Trump didn’t want a war. When his red line was crossed, however, they discovered he wasn’t quite as conflict-adverse as they assumed.

First, U.S. strikes on Kata’ib Hezbollah bases killed at least 24 militia cadres. Then, after the group’s members violently besieged and damaged the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad, the Trump administration claims it picked up credible intelligence that Soleimani was plotting further attacks on American interests and personnel in Iraq.

Evidence for this has not been provided, but such behavior is consistent with Iran’s escalating provocations. Soleimani’s presence in Iraq, where he was traveling with Kata’ib Hezbollah leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis will have hardened suspicions. Both were killed in the U.S. drone attack, and several more pro-Iranian Iraqi militia leaders may have been killed in a subsequent strike last night.

What now? The Iranians can no longer be under any illusions about Trump’s appetite to answer provocations with disproportionate force. The killing of Soleimani was the most severe attack on the Iranian political apparatus the U.S. could have inflicted outside of Iran. Khamenei must know now “severe retaliation” by Iran could be met with an even more devastating American response. He might still calculate that Trump doesn’t want all-out war, but that gamble is much riskier than it was last week, last month, or last year.

The smarter option for Iran would be to take Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seriously when he says the U.S. is now looking for de-escalation, and restrict their retaliations to thundering threats. The regime might, instead, harvest some international sympathy, however undeserving, for Soleimani’s killing. And the outpouring of national grief could distract Iranians from the recent slaughter of hundreds of their countrymen, ordered by Khamenei and executed by Soleimani and other commanders.

If the regime is driven by ideology and emotions, it will live up to Khamenei’s word and retaliate harshly—at great cost to Iran and the whole region. But if it is rational, as it tends to be in a crisis, it will take the opportunity for a long pause in the pattern of escalation with the U.S., and find a new strategy that does not drag everyone towards a devastating conflict.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/the-us-is-to-blame-for-its-foreign-policy-paralysis-over-the-past-decade-1.957399

A lost consensus about national goals has left successive governments in Washington rudderless, increasingly distracted and lacking clear purpose on the global stage.

Conventional wisdom increasingly holds that the US is struggling through a long goodbye from a traditional role of Middle East leadership. But if so, why?

American officials invariably insist Washington remains the driving force. Almost 10 years ago, then secretary of state Hillary Clinton declared a “new American moment” of global leadership. A year earlier, then president Barack Obama told a Cairo audience that he sought “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world”. For all its “America first” rhetoric, the Donald Trump administration has similarly trumpeted US engagement in the region and the world.

On paper and in all spheres, the US remains by far the biggest international player in the Middle East. Yet a combination of policy failures and misjudgements has weakened its credibility and soured the American public on deep engagement in the region.

After the end of the Cold War, underscored by the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991, many in Washington imagined a unipolar world with the US acting as unchallenged superpower into the foreseeable future. If that was ever real at all, it was certainly temporary.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the Middle East.

The failure of the Bill Clinton administration to secure a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement at Camp David in the summer of 2000 and prevent the Second Intifada – from which the peace process has never recovered – now seems the start of a long decline.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was undoubtedly a major turning point, particularly for the American public’s striking Middle East fatigue. The George W Bush administration charged into Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts, with no clear sense of what it wanted or how any of those things could be accomplished. The result was a predictable debacle.

The Obama administration, building on that legacy of failure, added an aura of unreliability.

Traditional allies, including the Gulf countries, Israel and others, watched with dismay as Washington abandoned then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to his fate in 2011 when he was forced to step down, suggesting that in this case at least loyalty proved a one-way street. The signing of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran appeared to confirm many of these fears. Mr Obama also highlighted a “pivot to Asia”, chided Gulf countries as “free riders” and emphasised “burden sharing”. He allowed the Syrian regime to cross an announced “red line” on the use of chemical weapons without any negative consequences.

Mr Trump has continued all these trends and added wild unpredictability to the mix. Obviously, there is no guarantee he will not suddenly reverse his foreign policies if he feels that will play well to his domestic political base.

But behind this sorry tale of largely avoidable strategic deterioration in what remains an evidently vital region lie a number of voluntary and involuntary reactions.

The US is generally overextended and a multipolar world was the inevitable successor to the Cold War bipolar reality, rather than an “end of history” unipolar fantasy. So, the US has been in relative decline but from heights that were artificially exalted, historically peculiar and obviously unsustainable.

The most salient feature of this decline, however, is volitional – or at least hardwired into American democracy. It is also characteristic of American fumbling in other crucial international arenas such as the Korean Peninsula.

In Middle Eastern terms, the question can be easily framed thus: how is it that the relatively feeble Russian Federation is the emerging powerbroker and friend to all in the region while the relatively mighty US routinely sidelines itself? The answer is that Russia knows what it wants, defines its goals narrowly and acts resolutely to secure its specific interests. The US does none of those things, making itself an impossibly clumsy, bumbling whale, bested by relative minnows.

It is not just that, as a democracy, the US is trapped in inevitable conflicts between Democratic and Republican parties, or liberals and conservatives, or even internationalists and isolationists. All of that is true and the rise of the neo-isolationists of the Trump-era is a major challenge to US global engagement. But the greater problem is far deeper: even within a given administration or faction, there is rarely a clear, coherent and broadly-shared understanding of the political goal of many given diplomatic or military interventions. In the absence of a broadly-accepted and bipartisan framing narrative such as the Cold War and a clearly dangerous defining foe like the Soviet Union, the American system has a hard time achieving unity of purpose.

This harkens back to the disastrous period of incoherence between the two world wars, which the “America first” slogan also invokes.

Even within specific administrations in Washington, this is a perennial problem. After a long internal struggle, the Bush administration determined to invade Iraq. At the time, I counted 13 distinctly-different stated reasons for doing that yet almost none of its main proponents agreed on what the priorities should be. So, of course the US failed in Iraq. It never agreed on what it was doing. There was no broadly-accepted metric for measuring success or failure because there was no agreed-upon benchmark for such a judgment. Therefore, failure was guaranteed.

This problem has continued to the present day. Mr Trump seeks one set of policies in Syria, Iraq, Iran and, of course, Ukraine while many of his senior officials, and the military, view things very differently – as the impeachment inquiry has demonstrated. And, in Mr Trump’s case at least, it is not possible for him to stamp his mark on the administration because even he is not sure what he is going to want tomorrow and how he could defend it. And even when he thinks he does, what about everyone else?

Contrast this to Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China. The cliche is, you can’t get what you want until you know what you want. For US foreign policy, this is becoming a crippling conundrum. The US cannot achieve or recognise foreign policy success because it does not have anything close to a shared definition of it.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/impeachment-trial-more-americans-are-starting-to-believe-trump-puts-his-own-interests-before-the-country-1.954959

Even parts of his Evangelical support base are beginning to fall out of love with the ‘morally lost and confused’ US president.

On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives adopted two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump. So, the president has been impeached and there will now be a trial in the Senate, right? Well, not so fast. In the Trump era, nothing is ever quite what it seems.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi has suggested that she might not formally forward the articles to the Senate or name the House’s “managers” – or prosecutors – until she is satisfied that the Senate will hold a serious proceeding.

By simply adopting the articles, the Democratic-led House of Representatives did not automatically empower the Senate to take over the process. Constitutional lawyers are even abstrusely debating whether Mr Trump has been impeached technically yet.

The move to withhold the articles is risky but also politically masterful by Ms Pelosi, who has time and again proven to be Mr Trump’s most formidable opponent.

She never wanted to impeach the president, preferring to focus on defeating him in the election. She understood that the Republican Senate majority has never been prepared to remove Mr Trump from office, no matter what facts emerge about him.

However, her hand was forced by Mr Trump himself when the White House released a summary of a July 25 telephone conversation with the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, that appears to show him leveraging US military aid to secure the announcement of an investigation into the son of leading Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

That seemed such an apparently glaring abuse of power, especially as investigations are still ongoing into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, that Ms Pelosi ran out of arguments and options. Almost every witness in the House inquiry made matters worse by emphasising that Mr Trump sought a quid pro quo with Mr Zelenskiy.

As I have noted several times in these pages, impeachment is fraught with peril for Democrats because Senate Republicans can hold any kind of trial they want. Mr Trump passionately wants them to put the Bidens and other Democrats on trial instead of him, but Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has planned a short process without any testimony by witnesses or new documents.

During Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999, such fact-finding was dispensed with because an extensive record was already established and both sides agreed it would have been a pointless waste of time. Today no such consensus exists because the White House refused to co-operate in any way, most key witnesses refused to testify and no requested documents were provided. Many key facts clearly remain undiscovered.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer requested testimony from acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, former national security adviser John Bolton, White House aide Rob Blair and budget official Michael Duffey.

Mr McConnell flatly refused. Republicans want nothing to do with fact-finding because what has already been established is damning enough and they do not know what might be next. Additional evidence could easily put them in an impossible position.

Ms Pelosi has hit on an artful way of satisfying Democrats without falling into a Republican trap. Mr Trump has been impeached but the House won’t let the Senate dismiss the entire matter through a perfunctory procedure with a preordained outcome.

This certainly intensifies the appearance that Democrats are manoeuvring politically rather than ethically or patriotically. But that is undoubtedly a price worth paying under the circumstances.

If the Senate will not agree to a serious trial, Democrats can continue to investigate the president as he languishes under the shadow of impeachment. It ensures that Mr Trump cannot have his day in court –unless Democrats have theirs too.

Mr Trump often chides and mocks Democrats for pursuing his impeachment and claims all this will be helpful to him in the 2020 election.

More often, though, he fulminates about how terribly unfair this impeachment is, comparing it to a coup and worse.  His December 17 letter to Ms Pelosi is easily the most bizarre ever penned by a US president, and may in future be studied in academic disciplines other than history and political science.

At the House impeachment debate, his Republican allies tried to outdo each other in following his lead.

One claimed Mr Trump had fewer rights than the victims of the Salem witch trials of 1692. Another compared impeachment to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. One Trump acolyte even said Pontius Pilate had granted more due process to Jesus before his crucifixion.

Clearly this is not actually helpful to Mr Trump. A growing body of polling data from the likes of Politico, Quinnipiac and even Fox News suggests that more Americans now support impeachment, and even conviction and removal, than oppose it. Before the impeachment inquiry began, the opposite was the case. This is especially dangerous for Mr Trump because his governing coalition, which has never been a majority, is so thin that he can scarcely afford to lose any of it.

Plainly feeling vulnerable, Mr Trump appears more sensitive than ever to any potential deviation from absolute loyalty.

In a serious blow, the leading American evangelical magazine Christianity Today wrote in a scathing editorial that the president should be removed from office, calling him “a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused”.

To offset the impact that could have on his most loyal constituency, Mr Trump will inaugurate a new “evangelicals for Trump” organisation on January 3 next year.

Democrats will take significant political hits for withholding impeachment articles. Mr McConnell will probably breathe a sigh of relief. But Mr Trump will not.

The facts unearthed by the impeachment inquiry and the president’s reactions have taken their toll. It would be a political blunder for Democrats not to try to build on that foundation.

The president is a master of commanding the loyalty of his base. But the growing indication from those polls suggests that the patience of many Americans is wearing thin, as more come to believe that Mr Trump consistently puts his own interests, and not America, first.