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The Part That Comes After ‘No’
In Vienna, representatives from the parties to the U.S.–Iran nuclear deal — which is either dead or dying — have convened to jaw-jaw. Harold MacMillan once said (and Winston Churchill did not) that jaw, jaw is better than war, war, which it is — until it isn’t.
Under the Barack Obama administration, the United States, Iran, and several other interested parties — Russia, China, Germany, France, the European Union, and the United Kingdom — came to an agreement that bore the simultaneously sterile and pretentious name “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” five words that give the impression of saying something without quite doing so. Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to some limitations on its nuclear-development program, but not to the abandonment of the program; in return, Iran was to receive relief from sanctions imposed variously by the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations. Like many of the big projects of the Obama administration, the JCPOA looked better on paper than it turned out in practice.
Not that critics, especially on the right, were especially impressed with the plan on paper. National Review writers railed against it, and, as a presidential candidate, Donald Trump in his usual maximalist style called it the “worst deal ever negotiated.” But as president, Trump had some trouble getting out of JCPOA. Writing in National Review in 2017, John Bolton, who would later serve as Trump’s national security adviser, asked some uncomfortable questions:
Although candidate Donald Trump repeatedly criticized Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement, his administration has twice decided to remain in the deal. It so certified to Congress, most recently in July, as required by law. Before the second certification, Trump asked repeatedly for alternatives to acquiescing yet again in a policy he clearly abhorred. But no such options were forthcoming, despite “a sharp series of exchanges” between the president and his advisers, as the New York Times and similar press reports characterized it.
Many outside the administration wondered how this was possible: Was Trump in control, or were his advisers?
At Steve Bannon’s request, Bolton drew up a proposal for getting out of the JCPOA. The Trump administration, in response, gave its usual kind of performance: a tantrum and a convulsion with very little follow-up. Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, but left the hard work undone. In his memo, Bolton had prescribed a program of sustained diplomacy (“Early, quiet consultations with key players such as the U.K., France, Germany, Israel, and Saudi Arabia” . . . “Prepare the documented strategic case for withdrawal” . . . “A greatly expanded diplomatic campaign should immediately follow the announcement, especially in Europe and the Middle East” . . . “Develop and execute Congressional and public diplomacy efforts to build domestic and foreign support,” etc.) but very little of that happened at all, and practically none of it was executed with any competence. Trump insisted that he had consulted extensively with U.S. allies and that the United States and its critical partners were “unified in our understanding of the threat,” which was obviously and transparently false. The leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom put out a joint statement of their “regret and concern,” insisting that the JCPOA had been effective and that “the world is a safer place as a result,” which was also obviously and transparently false. In the end, our European allies, along with China and Russia, stuck with the JCPOA, though without the participation of the United States this was effectively an almost purely formal matter.
About the JCPOA, the Europeans were wrong on the substance, with Bolton having the better case:
The JCPOA’s vague and ambiguous wording; its manifest imbalance in Iran’s direction; Iran’s significant violations; and its continued, indeed, increasingly, unacceptable conduct at the strategic level internationally demonstrate convincingly that the JCPOA is not in the national-security interests of the United States. . .
Even the previous Administration knew the JCPOA was so disadvantageous to the United States that it feared to submit the agreement for Senate ratification. Moreover, key American allies in the Middle East directly affected by this agreement, especially Israel and the Gulf states, did not have their legitimate interests adequately taken into account.
But walking away — simply blowing up the deal, denouncing it as a misadventure of the Obama administration, and then reimposing sanctions — was not enough, in Bolton’s view:
U.S. leadership here is critical especially through a diplomatic and public education effort to explain a decision not to certify and to abrogate the JCPOA. Like any global campaign, it must be persuasive, thorough, and accurate. Opponents, particularly those who participated in drafting and implementing the JCPOA, will argue strongly against such a decision, contending that it is reckless, ill-advised, and will have negative economic and security consequences. . . . We will need to assure the international community that the U.S. decision will in fact enhance international peace and security. . . .
There were many directions that the United States might have gone after leaving the JCPOA. David French and Eli Lake each argued for regime change in Tehran, with the United States assisting and encouraging liberal-democratic opponents of the ayatollahs’ regime. “The most urgent task now for Trump is increasing the odds of success for Iran’s democracy movement,” Lake wrote. “We must beat Iran on the battlefield,” French insisted, “not by invading or declaring war but instead by ensuring the endurance and ultimate victory of our allies in the proxy conflicts raging across the Middle East. We must not abandon our allies in Syria, and we must not cede even an additional inch of territory to the combined Iranian/Russian/Assad forces in that country’s northeast. We should provide prudent and proper aid to Israeli efforts to weaken Iranian-backed forces in Syria and Lebanon. And we must work to curb Iranian influence in Iraq.”
That was excellent advice, which the Trump administration mostly ignored, abandoning our Kurdish allies in Syria. The Biden administration, which is much closer to the Trump administration on key issues such as national security and international relations than either camp would care to admit (this should not surprise us — Trump is very much a man of Biden’s generation and spent much of his adult life as a big-city Democrat), continued the policy of general retreat, abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban. Biden makes the necessary conventional Atlanticist noises about diplomacy and multilateralism and such, but, like Trump, he views U.S. global security leadership mainly as a heavy national burden for which Americans go unrecompensed. (If you think American leadership costs us too much, wait until you see how much Chinese leadership costs us.) We could say with charity that he does not bring quite as much passion or ambition to the issue of Iranian nuclear ambitions as he does to the project of putting money into the pockets of his labor-union cronies.
The Obama-Trump-Biden progression contains many similar sequences. Take the so-called Affordable Care Act, another Obama project that, like the JCPOA, was a sloppily built and poorly conceived program that would have required something close to perfect execution to produce something like a reasonably successful result. Republicans would have liked to have done the same thing with ACA as they did with JCPOA: repeal it and walk away without providing a better way forward. The Trump administration spent four years being two weeks away from announcing its big health-care proposal (Kubla Khan kept 5,000 mastiffs, and he still didn’t have enough dogs to eat all that homework), but Republicans could never really build any consensus behind anything except repealing the ACA, and they lacked the political will even to do that.
There is a lot to be said for Republicans’ being the Party of “No.” (Sometimes, there’s a case for being the Party of “Hell, No!” but there is also a time to be the Party of “No, Thank You.”) “No” is the most important thing for conservatives to say. But it isn’t enough. Consider another Obama administration initiative, the illegal and unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The Trump administration rescinded that one, too, and was right to do so. But, then . . . what? Programs such as DACA create their own constituencies, and these do not simply evaporate when one presidential action is negated by a subsequent one. As with the JCPOA, there were many ways that we might have gone after DACA, but what happened in fact was that we ended the program and then did approximately squat.
The Obama administration cooked up JCPOA. The Trump administration killed it. The Biden administration is working halfheartedly to revive it or something like it. And the result is that Iran is today a much more advanced and capable nuclear power than it was in 2015 when JCPOA was signed. Among other things, Iran has produced a substantial amount of 60-percent-enriched uranium, which has no civilian purpose and serves only as a marker on the road to a nuclear weapon. “In other words,” as Senator Bob Menendez put it, “Iran has already done most of the heavy lifting.”
It is good and necessary to say “No” in both domestic and foreign affairs. It is the part after “No” that is giving us some trouble. Sanctions are not entirely useless, but the examples of Cuba, North Korea, and Iran must force us to conclude that they are not the economic or diplomatic equivalent of bunker-busting weapons. Echoing earlier bombastic rhetoric, Senator Menendez threatens Russia with “the mother of all sanctions” instead of the “mother of all bombs,” and it is not quite the same thing. But there is a great deal of diplomatic territory between sanctions and bombs. Unfortunately, it requires sustained effort and offers very little near-term political reward.
And if you will forgive me for closing with the repetition of two things I keep coming back to, we have trouble with the part after “No” for two main reasons: The first is that our foreign policy is comprehensively dominated by domestic politics; it is healthy and normal that domestic politics should influence foreign policy to some considerable extent, but there must be something left over that is still foreign policy itself unless our foreign affairs are to be completely absorbed by the totemic contests of our ongoing domestic tribal rivalry. The second is that the United States does not seem to know what it wants — from Iran, from Russia, from China, from any other international relationship. We are like the decadent Romans denounced by Coriolanus, citizens “that like nor peace nor war.” But our relationship with Iran is at the moment neither peace nor war, and that not-peace/not-war is going to be even uglier, more complicated, and more dangerous if Tehran acquires nuclear weapons. We do not have very many attractive options right now, and we will have even fewer against a nuclear Iran.
The Redemption of Mike Pence
Writing under the headline “Good for Mike Pence,” my colleague Phil Klein observes: “It has become all too common for Republicans, confronted with obviously false and reckless statements by Donald Trump, to either defend him or look the other way. So it’s good to see that Mike Pence has criticized Trump — forcefully and by name — for claiming that as vice president, he had the authority to overturn the election.” A subsequent National Review editorial bearing the headline “RNC Should Take a Lesson from Mike Pence” adds: “We commend the example of Mike Pence.”
I do not disagree with my colleagues in their general assessment, but I am not ready to hold up Mike Pence as a commendable example. It is not as though January 6 came out of nowhere. Mike Pence was an enthusiastic and exceptionally sycophantic servant of one of the worst administrations this country has ever suffered under, and he spent four years making excuses for the dishonesty, immorality, and incompetence of the administration — and the man — he served. That kind of stink does not wash away easily.
The state of Mike Pence’s soul is between him and his God. The state of his judgment is between him and us. And Pence has shown himself to have extraordinarily poor judgment. As Donald Trump comes unraveled in his enforced retirement, a great many of his oxpeckers and apologists are rat-paddling away from that sinking ship as fast as their little rat feet will take them, and I find it impossible to admire Pence, at this late hour, for the grace and urgency of his rat-stroke.
So, yeah, good for Mike Pence for clearing the lowest possible bar in Republican politics. Hooray.
Words About Words
Marc Short, formerly chief of staff to Mike Pence, laments that President Trump was surrounded by “snake-oil salesmen.” Which is true in the sense that Bozo was surrounded by clowns. But, that notwithstanding, how is it that “snake oil” came to take on its current meaning?
Snake oil was, in fact, an actual folk remedy in the United States dating back for many years. It may have been brought to the United States by railroad workers from China, where snake oil still is used as an arthritis remedy. Snake oil was offered as a cure for everything from hearing loss to toothaches. Professional physicians came to be vocal critics of the snake-oil salesmen — not because snake oil is snake oil, but because products advertised as snake oil often contained no snake oil at all. In fact, the makers of Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment were fined — $20! — under the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 for mislabeling their product, which was made from beef fat. Publicity surrounding that case probably was the origin of snake oil’s gradual transformation into a term of abuse.
I get the feeling that this will be a history that continues to be worth knowing.
Rampant Prescriptivism
Today, I will turn this feature over entirely to a reader, who observes:
I’m listening to you and Charlie discuss the lack of political diversity within the parties, and you keep referring to them as homogenous. I believe the word you want is homogeneous. Homogenous is a technical term the biologists came up with to talk about tissues that had common origin (or purpose or some such), which goes beyond merely being similar like the prior term homogeneous. Apparently, they confused even themselves so they invented yet another word — homologous — to replace it, and now we’re almost never correct to use homogenous. I first discovered this once upon a time when writing about homogeneous transforms and coordinate systems to characterize robotic control systems. I realized I didn’t know why they were called that. I investigated to make sure I used the right version of the term. Interestingly, homogeneous comes from the Greek suffix genos so I’m not sure where the extra “e” comes from, anyway. My Latin is not good enough to know whether to blame the early scientists’ Latin for it. I’ve noticed a trend toward dropping the last “e” in recent years that I assume is because we all grew up with homogenized milk in our school lunches, and that sounds like such a better syllabic pairing with homogenous than with homogeneous. But what kind of prescriptivists would we be if we went with what sounds better instead of with how some 17th-century scientist butchered a Greek neologism in a Latin text?
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In Closing
Apparently, we live in a time in which Americans need it explained to them that the way you treat a peer-reviewed scientific journal is not the way you treat a podcast from the guy who used to eat bugs on Fear Factor. It is almost as if this is not about what everybody is saying it’s about!
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