To negotiate when our strategic objective is within our grasp risks failing to achieve it.
To negotiate when our strategic objective is within our grasp risks failing to achieve it.
T here’s this from David Sanger and Jonathan Swan in the New York Times today (an opinion piece presented as news under the guise of news “analysis,” as the Times often does), regarding increasing signs that President Trump may more openly join Israel in the war against Iran — mainly, an operation to destroy Tehran’s nuclear facility in Fordow, which is deeply buried such that only the U.S. has the military capability to destroy it rapidly:
If [the president] decides to go ahead, the United States will become a direct participant in a new conflict in the Middle East, taking on Iran in exactly the kind of war Mr. Trump has sworn, in two campaigns, he would avoid. Iranian officials have already warned that U.S. participation in an attack on its facilities will imperil any remaining chance of the nuclear disarmament deal that Mr. Trump insists he is still interested in pursuing.
I don’t pretend not to have a political opinion here but, for whatever that’s worth, this analysis seems thoroughly wrong. As far as the Iranians are concerned, we are joined at the hip with Israel and always have been (the big Satan and the little Satan). There have already been reports of American participation in the ongoing war (in which, for example, Trump has directed bombings of Iran’s Houthi proxies, American forces have assisted Israel in thwarting Iranian aerial attacks, and Trump is said to have intervened to prevent an Israeli assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — which implicitly suggests that he could have blocked Israel’s attacks on Iran’s military assets, nuclear facilities, oil fields, and other infrastructure but chose not to.
Moreover, what Trump has “sworn” to oppose is so-called forever wars along the lines of U.S. incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which went on for many years because we indulged the urge to nation-build on the backs of our armed forces rather than quickly accomplish our military objectives and bring our troops home. Trump has never been opposed to rapid, decisive uses of American force, as Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani could explain if he were still around to tell the tale. In his first term, the president directed withering strikes against ISIS. In Syria, he authorized attacks on Russian mercenaries and Iranian proxies in response to operations against American forces. Even if it would be more consequential — more a triumph for American national security — a quick U.S. strike to destroy Fordow, with the rest of the warmaking left to the highly capable Israelis, would be perfectly consistent with Trump’s history: willing to act decisively but resistant to long-term engagements.
As for the bit about how such an attack would “imperil any remaining chance of the nuclear disarmament deal” Trump has been courting Iran to enter, the American interest here is Iranian nuclear disarmament, not a deal. Whether it is achieved by militarily force or by Iran’s surrender on this point is not nearly as important as that the disarmament happen. (From my point of view, military force would be preferable because it would increase the chance that the regime would be overthrown; a deal would invest the U.S. in the continued existence of the regime to enforce the deal. I maintain my longstanding view that the national security threat to the United States is Iran’s jihadist regime — whether it acquires nuclear weapons only affects the degree of the threat.)
To be clear, I think both Sanger and Swan are good reporters and serious thinkers. My counterpoints go to a divide between national security analysts on the left- and right-of-center: their assessments of the value of diplomatic negotiations.
The left takes the position that negotiating is itself a benefit, for the obvious reason that as long as parties are talking, they are less likely to shoot at each other. There is also the more subtle conviction that, regardless of ostensible ideological motivation, all rivals are all perfectible, reasoning humans at bottom, and if we just talk to each other we can reach each other on that universal level and settle our disputes.
To carry the argument effectively, left-leaning analysts cite right-of-center leaders who famously made peace through negotiations with enemies, or at least tried to advance peace while achieving some strategic benefits — e.g., Nixon’s overtures to Mao’s China and the Soviet Union, and Reagan’s negotiations with Gorbachev. Israel’s Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin, under criticism in the late Seventies during peace negotiations with Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat, cited Jewish teaching in countering that “the greatest achievement of a human being is to turn his enemy into a friend.” And he proceeded to make a peace that has endured — at least between governments, if not between peoples — for almost a half century.
(Note: Although he was regarded as a hero of the 1973 war, the peace cost Sadat his life when he was murdered by Egyptian jihadists at a military parade in 1981. The fatwa approving the assassination was issued by Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, whom I prosecuted for anti-American terrorism in the ’90s. While Egypt’s authoritarian regime has kept the peace, uneasily at times but reliably, the Egyptian public — 90 percent Muslim and proud custodians of Al-Azhar University, the center of Sunni Islamic scholarship for over a millennium — remains largely sharia-supremacist. The Muslim Brotherhood and other Egyptian jihadists have materially supported Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. If the fleeting democratically elected, Brotherhood-dominated, Obama administration–backed Egyptian government of the “Arab Spring” had not been overthrown, it would have ended the treaty with Israel.)
On the right, we tend to see negotiations as a means to the end of achieving our strategic objectives, not as an end in and of themselves.
Far from being win-win propositions, negotiations have costs. They legitimize the counterparty. That is a significant detriment because, unlike the left, we take ideology seriously — such that, since communists or jihadists are ideologically pledged to our destruction, we must understand that, when they negotiate, it is because they want a strategic pause before resuming the fight, not because they want a real end to the fighting.
To negotiate when our strategic objective is within our grasp risks failing to achieve it — which would be a national security defeat, not a diplomatic victory. We believe wars must end — someone must win and someone must lose — before there can be lasting peace. Wars that are merely paused, not ended, embolden the enemy into believing he has immunity for his provocations and result ultimately in more death and destruction.
Nixon, a staunch anti-communist, was not talking for talking’s sake; his diplomacy sought to expose and exploit divisions between China and Russia, for America’s benefit. Reagan walked away from Gorbachev at Reykjavik, and his military build-up and support for anti-Soviet proxies, even as he negotiated, eventually resulted in peace through the collapse of the Soviet Union — “We win, they lose.” And Sadat came to the table only after Israel repeatedly defeated Egypt in battle, including in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Israel (with U.S. assistance) ended the war poised to destroy Egypt’s third army (provoking a dangerous confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviets in which the latter stood down, paving the way for Cairo’s break with Moscow).
In the Middle East right now, the immediate, achievable goal is to conclusively end the threat that the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terrorism could acquire the world’s most dangerous weapons. The goal is not to negotiate. It is to achieve that solution, and negotiations that make the achievement less rather than more likely are counterproductive.