It’s All Bad, But…

Murdering dissidents by radiation poison, arresting and torturing anyone who disagrees with the regime, making genuine opposition candidates enjoy long prison sentences. Russia and Vladimir Putin. 

Public beatings sanctioned by their courts (pictured above). Unsanctioned but official beatings of women who led the legalization of women being able to drive. Arresting and bankrupting dissidents. Public decapitations. Suffocating and dismembering a criticizing journalist by luring him in to consular offices in a distant foreign locale. Dropping bombs on Yemeni schools and hospitals. Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

Blowing an unpopular uncle apart with an antiaircraft gun. Interning north of 160,000 dissidents and their families in six isolated concentration camps where rape, torture, starvation and random sport killings are routine. Building a nuclear and ballistic missile capacity and threatening the United States, making promises to a gullible American president but breaching every one. North Koran and Kim Jong-un.

These are “Donald’s Buddies,” not a Saturday morning cartoon show but a nexus of relationships that are dangerous to the United States. Folks he says he trusts, over the clear findings of his highly-trained intelligence agencies, regimes that either tolerate us out of political necessity (Saudi Arabia) or outright seek to attack us or reduce our power and influence in the world (North Korea and Russia). 

It would be one thing if a sophisticated U.S. president, well-briefed by State Department experts who have spent their lives learning about our enemies (my mother and step-father are my first hand examples of such expertise), backed up by detailed and substantiated military analysis and voluminous intelligence reports, were dealing with seeking to diffuse severe military and intelligence threats to our nation. 

Or we can insert a president who does not read expert reports, holds this trained and experienced cadre of experts in deep disregard, casting them as ignorant fools who simply “don’t get it.” A president who, for whatever deeply-embedded insecurity, believes that foreign policy is a personal effort, one-on-one, based on friendship, trust and camaraderie with some of the most mendacious, cruel and untrustworthy people on earth. People whose behavior is so fraught was evidence of their ill intentions that even his Republican Congress people cringe at how gullible our President must be to believe what he is told… or worse… somehow economically corrupted to play their game or even blackmailed for some yet-undisclosed indiscretion. He does not seem to be able to understand that détente, peace and effective arms accords never start with making a buddy. Never. This is serious stuff. Complicated and rising well above an “emotional connection” – real or perceived – between world leaders.

Strangely, where genuine de-escalation of tensions is a necessary goal, if Donald Trump cannot make a buddy with an enemy’s leadership, there is absolutely no attempt to engage that nation and bring them into meaningful peace talks. There are only threats, sanctions and even rejection of functioning treaties – like the UN-sponsored Iran denuclearization accord (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran's Nuclear Program) to which the United States was a party… until on May 8 of last year, Trump pulled the U.S. out of that agreement – believing that somehow, Trump’s Art of the Deal bully tactics will eventually work against religious zealots and hardliners who hate our country. That approach has failed for 40 years.

You actually don’t need peace accords with your allies. Peace treaties are seldom negotiated among and between friendly nations, joint military actions (NATO) maybe, but not peace treaties. Those are reserved for enemy nations and dispute resolution. Which brings me to one of the most malevolent and repressive regimes on earth, Iran, a Shiite trouble-maker with its own international surrogate – Hezbollah – spreading Iran’s toxic message well beyond her borders. 

Not only does Iran foment regional discord and instability, but her threatened and now-paused nuclear program is an existential threat to one of our closest allies, Israel. That Israel’s hardline Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a slightly smarter version of Donald Trump, who likewise does not believe in negotiated engagement and opposes any accord with Iran that does not give Israel everything it demands, cannot be the determinant of our foreign policy. The Joint Comprehensive Plan noted above, the treaty we disowned last year, at least worked to halt Iran’s nuclear program, an assessment by our intelligence community and our own Department of Defense. Like North Korea’s most recent statements, Iran is threatening to resume the development of its nuclear capacity.

Let me clear. I do not trust the theocracy that runs Iran. Their actions and policies disgust me. Their blind support of the Assad regime in Syria, gassing and bombing its own people, and their own practices with their own people are inexcusable, but not honoring a denuclearization pact borders on insanity.

Let me be even clearer, Iran’s leadership tends to crush any semblance of opposition of criticism from within. Very effectively for 40 years. Even with an economy in shambles, Iran’s leaders have successfully suppressed public outrage with clear efforts to impress upon its own people that dissent is simply not acceptable. “‘They are determined to terrify their own population and tell them they are going to maintain control.’ [said Barbara Slavin, director of the Atlantic Council’s Future of Iran Initiative.]… More than 40 lawyers who defend political activists have been arrested in the decade following Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential election.

“But the Iranian judiciary intensified its clampdown in January 2018 after the country was rattled by its biggest anti-government demonstrations in nearly a decade. The protests were set off after a woman was arrested in Tehran for removing her headscarf in public…

“A sentence of lashes and decades in prison handed down to a prominent human rights lawyer is the latest example of Iran’s expanding crackdown on such attorneys in an effort to silence dissent… Nasrin Sotoudeh, who defended women protesting the nation’s mandatory headscarf law, was sentenced to a total of 38 years and 148 lashes, her husband said this week, clarifying that she would probably spend 12 to 17 years in prison based on penal code guidelines.” Los Angeles Times, March 16th. Disgusting, and Iran is clearly our self-declared enemy.

But Iran is a regional force to be reckoned with, and our support of a most corrupt Saudi monarchy as our strongest backstop against Iranian aggression is a failing and unsupportable policy, both practically and morally. Congress agrees and may well send a bill to the President withdrawing American military support for Saudi Arabia’s horrific military campaign in Yemen, a surrogate war. The President has threatened to veto this legislation, but Congress may well have the votes to override that veto. Shutting down the potential for Iran’s re-nuclearization requires a peace treaty, like the joint accord, where negotiating with a Trump-buddy is simply not possible.

In the end, we have a diplomatic destroyer at the helm, creating global perception that the United States can never be trusted again when it makes a treaty commitment. Accords approved by previous administrations, upon which the world has relied, can be abrogated at the whim of a rogue president, who caters to his slogan-hungry base… believing that which is not and never will be. Donald Trump’s foreign policy is littered with failure, alienation and plunging America’s influence overseas to its lowest level since World War II. Are we tired of so much losing? Are we tired of a president who has accomplished less to benefit the American people than any president since Zachary Taylor (1849-1850, when the United States was hardly an international power)?

              I’m Peter Dekom, and the ballot box is a solution for those who still believe!