Never mind why he’s even doing it. Never mind that it’s helping Russia, which is probably a priority client of his (far more so than the American people, as a preponderance of evidence suggests). It’s how and when The Donald has chosen to leave these carefully crafted treaty regimes, years in the making by legions of diplomats, engineers and physicists, that’s so scary. This is the closest we’ve been to Midnight since the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Premier Khrushchev commented ‘a smell of burning’ was in the air. This is no joke, per our leading atomic scientists: thebulletin.org/...
Take the Iran nuclear deal which Trump scotched in May 2018, also known as the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed by the permanent UN Security Council + Germany and the EU). Never mind the deal’s primary goal was working: It was preventing Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, both by increasing its Breakout Time for weapons-grade uranium to 10 years and plutonium to decades (www.brookings.edu/...), and by installing a comprehensive inspection regime on the ground which included 3,000 calendar days of IAEA inspection per year (meaning about 30 days each for 100 nuclear engineers, monitoring a robustly amplified regime of snap inspections). Trump peremptorily yanked the U.S. out of the deal, without even consulting our NATO allies on what might replace it, or on an actual long-term strategy for dealing with Iran besides saber rattling. The timing was suggestive: Mueller was ramping up his indictments of high-profile Trump aides and associates, and Israel’s right-wing PM Netanyahu was (and still is) facing a quartet of corruption charges from Israeli prosecutors involving both him and his family, which he derided as ‘fake news’. Our FBI had just raided Cohen’s quarters; ‘Jarvanka' was under scrutiny; the parallels are striking.
We’re not just crying ‘wag the dog’ here. Ending the JCPOA was another straw man Trump trotted out on campaign, egged on by tea party zombies and Neocons like Ambassador Mustaches (Bolton) of the ‘bomb first and ask questions later’ persuasion. Trump just can’t seem to modify these fake boogeyman ideations even if they hurt the country. The problem is this poses a huge danger of a fresh Mideast conflict. Right after meeting with Kim on Sentosa, Trump hinted the JCPOA should be renegotiated, which was a sop to our allies, but neither he nor Pompeio have done a thing about it. Their ideological partner Netanyahu has taken advantage of the strategic vacuum Trump created by ramping up threats on Iran, and lately Trump has joined in with outright calls for regime change. This is simply insane; Iran has been a Russian client in the past, and Putin could quickly supply it with missiles and other defensive options if it were seriously threatened by the U.S. or Israel. Iran is a mountainous country nearly the size of Brazil, and for anyone to attack it without a Security Council Resolution would be the act of a madman. The only conceivable conclusion is Trump is willfully setting up a scenario where he might call for such a Resolution, as an insurance premium against his own domestic political troubles.
Speaking of straw men:
Trump just had to be reprimanded by Iraq’s President for threatening to use our troops there to ‘monitor’ Iran, which would violate the new SOFA protocol (Status of Forces Agreement) we are negotiating with Iraq — a sovereign state and not a mere US military base like Guantanamo: arabcenterdc.org/... His imbecile comments on our strategic relationship with Iraq have seriously undermined our position there and in the region. And his threats of war against Iran are inexcusably destructive and counterproductive. Practical treaties have carrots as well as sticks, otherwise nobody would ever sign them: Keeping Iran and others off the nuclear trail entails the U.S. doing its utmost to encourage moderate regimes like Rouhani’s, by rewarding their substantial middle class technocracy with economic development. Instead he’s given the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Committee) extremists a gift on a silver platter: Since the U.S. dumped the agreement, they’re improving their missiles as a response to U.S. sanctions. The EU has tried to help keep Iran on board with a reach-around agreement, but this poses the danger it will weaken U.S. international financial clout and increase Russia and China’s: www.nytimes.com/...
But by leaving the INF, the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, Trump is really playing with nuclear fires: www.nytimes.com/… To borrow a Southern analogy, this is like a monkey with a flamethrower in a roomful of scarecrows. Why? Because the INF was specifically designed to prevent ‘limited nuclear war.’ Intermediate-range nuclear missiles were once deployed thickly across Europe’s Iron Curtain; this was considered so strategically dangerous it was potentially more of a threat than the larger long-range ICBMs on both sides. The issue was that these smaller weapons (our Pershings and their SS-20s) made nuclear war more ‘thinkable’, because strategic planners might be tempted to start a limited theatre conflict in Europe, or threaten a small-scale launch as a form of nuclear blackmail if a Soviet Bloc state defected (as Hungary and Czechoslovakia had attempted to). On their side, the Russians found NATO’s nuclear umbrella so threatening, they devised a ‘Deadman’s Hand’ switch where an automatic long-range ICBM counterstrike would be launched if their European command centers or capital cities were attacked. It became imperative to control this Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) scenario, and that’s why the INF was put together long before the Cold War was over. Discussion had actually begun between Paul Nitze and Yuli Kvitsinsky under Carter and Brezhnev in the 70s, but Reagan and Gorbachev concluded it successfully in 1987, ably seconded by Schultz and Shevardnadze, after over a decade of tortuous negotiations between the two alliance blocs. The breakthrough came at the Reykjavik Summit of 1986 where they not only agreed on a framework for INF, but also for the START 1 long-range ICBM reduction treaty in 1991 and the end of the Cold War. The INF is a vital, nay indispensable leg of our strategic defense which Trump and his cronies are going to dump after less than a year’s consideration. As the American commander said at Bastogne, this is just plain nuts.
Consider the timing: Last Friday 2/1/19 Pompeio announced we are leaving the Treaty. And guess what, the very next day, Saturday 2/2/19 was the deadline for Russia to fully comply with the current INF requirements by dismantling its medium-range 9M729s, launchers and equipment: www.bloomberg.com/… Treaty regimes are enforced by sticking to deadlines and applying maximum pressure on your partners, with the help of allies. They are not upheld by abandoning your commitment before your partners’ deadline has expired. This gave the Russians a Get-Out-Of-Jail Free Card to go ahead with their new intermediate and hypersonic missiles with no questions asked, at least by the Security Council. If Trump hadn’t been degrading NATO and our other allies for over a year, we could have presented a united front at the UNSC and possibly forced a vote by the full 15-member Council, of which Russia is of course a permanent member as are we. Yes, they have veto power but they might have been swayed to at least respond with a positive commitment to some reductions, in return for acceptable concessions on our side. We’ve done it before; that’s how diplomacy works in the world of Realpolitik. As TR taught us, speak softly and carry a big stick. We can worry later about getting China, India and some of the smaller nuclear powers involved. By backing out of these things no lo contendere we raise the very reasonable question of why any nuclear power should sign a long-term strategic agreement with the U.S., when some crazy President can just decide to ditch it?
Bolton and the Neocons claim to be worried about getting these other actors on board. You manifestly do NOT do that by killing the treaty all by yourself, the day before the other side actually violates it. We could have renewed the treaty after pressure on Russia from our entire alliance bloc, NATO + the Far East democracies + Australia/NZ + Mexico and the MNNA, and then invited the Chinese, Israel etc. to jump in the water’s fine. Instead we threw a hair dryer in the pool. What Trump did is really skirting the edge of treason: By ditching the INF the Trump Team gave Russia an immediate tactical advantage, because they’re farther along in their intermediate-range deployment and hypersonic development than we are, in terms of weapons in theatre. Putin just debuted a new medium-range hypersonic missile which actively evades interception: www.washingtonpost.com/… This is precisely what the INF was designed to prevent "...the rise of maneuverable missiles that can strike their targets within seconds will destabilize parts of Europe and Asia, where a leader would have only a few seconds to decide how to respond to an attack.” We also have a pipeline of advanced designs but it will take us some time to build and deploy them to Europe. Again, the only rational conclusion is we have a head of state who is actually working for Russia, not our people or our allies: www.dailykos.com/...
It is now ours to reason why, because nobody's minding the store. It’s singular how virtually all Trump’s campaign tags were pitiful fictions in search of a policy, yet his agitprop shock media hosts and their Dittoheads have obsessively fixated on them, even as they hamstring the nation, the world, and his voters’ livelihoods. His own employees and biographers had long suspected he had executive function OCD when he clung to his surreal visions to the detriment of investors, but now the stakes are much higher. Our National Security specialists are seriously perturbed over Trump’s inveterate inability to understand our global strategic posture: time.com/... And our current atmosphere of shambling crises is entirely due to Trump’s propensity for deliberately manufactured, zero-sum gambles, which now include the entire planet. When the Mueller Report is complete it should be declassified by the House and Senate Intel. Committees, even if some must be redacted. The safety and security of this country and the world are at stake. With General Mattis gone, there are no responsible adults supervising our Cabinet, and the removal of Trump’s dangerous regime (and its incompetent Fascist goons like Bolton and Miller) is more than justified by the fact he’s demonstrably and willfully violating his duty to protect these United States. It’s 2 minutes to Midnight, and long past time to say ‘Adios, Mustachios.’