Biden’s first choices smell of nostalgia: towards an unsustainable return to the past with Iran and China
At the same time that Joe Biden was forming his foreign policy and national security team, the Trump administration was endeavoring to consolidate its achievements in the Middle East and to lock in the new course sealed with the Abrahamic Accords.
According to the Israeli media, in fact, Prime Minister Netanyahu, together with the head of Mossad Yossi Cohen, secretly went to Neom, Saudi Arabia, to meet the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman and the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. No Israeli present, the Saudi authorities denied, while from the Israeli side no official confirmation, but not even denials. Which, given that authoritative media confirm the historic meeting, the first between the Israeli premier and the Saudi prince, would mean that the news was allowed to circulate – and hardly without the consent of Riyadh.
Purpose of the meeting? Almost certainly that of developing a strategy on the Iranian nuclear dossier, which worries both Israel and Saudi Arabia. And it worries even more in light of Joe Biden's likely imminent entry into the White House. In fact, among the first steps of his administration, there would almost certainly be the return of the United States to the JCPOA, the 2015 agreement on the Iranian nuclear program strongly desired by then President Obama, full of flaws that Tehran was able to exploit. Iranian foreign minister Zarif assured days ago that Iran is ready to return to fully respect the agreement (which in reality, as we will see, it has never respected), without the need to reopen negotiations, if the United States will likewise, if the sanctions restored by the Trump administration are removed. A step that the Biden team seems inclined to take (also due to pressure from the party and European allies) presumably immediately after the Iranian presidential elections in June 2021.
It is no coincidence that in these days, immediately following the proclamation – for now only in the media – of Biden president-elect, both the Israelis and the Saudis have received explicit messages of their utmost and common determination to prevent Iran from taking possession of the atomic weapon. The Neom meeting seems to be the ostentation of a united front, of a welding of interests: the new US administration will have to take into account the security of Israel and Saudi Arabia if it does not want to trigger a nuclear race in the region. At stake, just to be clear, is the Saudi bomb.
A second issue at the heart of Neom's meeting, closely related to the first, is the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, with Pompeo's attempt to persuade Riyadh to join the Abrahamic Agreements already concluded between Israel and other Arab countries. (United Arab Emirates and Bahrain) and Muslims (Sudan), before the settlement of Biden, to lock down, or at least make it less reversible, the new course that the Trump administration has given to US Middle Eastern politics, from Iran to the Palestinian question . It is clear that those agreements would never have been concluded without Riyadh's green light, but it is equally clear that the Saudis see their signature at the conclusion and crowning of the process, not "among others". Now, however, time is running out.
If Biden, when he enters the White House, finds himself with a series of historical agreements, almost a system of alliances, which sees Israel together with the Arab countries of the Gulf, it would be much more difficult and expensive for him to return to the pro-Iranian policy of the administrations. Obama.
We recall, in fact, that Obama had focused on Shiite (Iran) and Sunni (Muslim Brotherhood) Islamism as a factor of stability in the Middle East, against the monarchies and authoritarian regimes of the Arab world (from Libya to Syria passing through Egypt) and setting aside historical allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia. A choice that proved unsuccessful and we Italians were particularly burned by it. In Jerusalem and Riyadh they fear a re-edition of that policy and the names of the foreign policy and national security team just made official by Biden reinforce their fears.
The choice of Antony Blinken as secretary of state and Jake Sullivan as national security adviser carry over to that season.
Sullivan succeeded Blinken in 2013 as National Security Advisor to then Vice President Biden, after serving as Deputy Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and was among the key men of the nuclear program deal. Iranian.
Blinken was Deputy Secretary of State from 2015 to 2017, Deputy National Security Advisor from 2013 to 2015, and National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden from 2009 to 2013. And he is a leading advocate for the US return to the JCPA.
Biden has made no secret of his readiness to return to the agreement if Iran returns to respect it, which Zarif has already pledged to do. The intention, then, would be to reopen the negotiations to proceed with a sort of JCPOA II, as Sullivan explained, to extend and strengthen the terms of the JCPOA of 2015. But Tehran has already made it known that it has no intention of reopening the negotiations, so much so that the commitment made by Zarif is to return to respect the agreement automatically after the return of the United States and period.
But in these four years, many things have changed. The agreement has now shown indisputable flaws. For years, JCPOA proponents denied that Iran was violating and circumventing limits and prohibitions. But this stance has now become unsustainable after Israeli intelligence obtained thousands of official documents from the Tehran regime on its military nuclear program in 2018. Documents that prove how the program was far more advanced than Iran admitted, how it lied to the IAEA and the international community about its program, and how the regime took action to deceive IAEA inspectors even during the implementation of the agreement. And they also indicate that some activities related to the secret nuclear weapons program were still ongoing and some secret nuclear sites were destroyed before they could be inspected by the IAEA.
If the Biden administration were to re-enter the agreement, then lift the sanctions reintroduced by Trump and his "maximum pressure" strategy, this would be interpreted as a victory in Tehran, and by other countries in the region as a reward despite its activities. aggressive and destabilizing, which Iranians would probably feel encouraged to intensify and expand.
Even with regard to China, the names chosen by Biden suggest a return to the past. A multilateral approach, reconnecting relations with European and Asian partners, to induce Beijing to abandon incorrect trade policies, but no trade war or new "Cold War".
At a Chamber of Commerce event, Blinken said he believed a "total decoupling " from the Chinese economy "unrealistic and ultimately counter-productive", "would be a mistake".
In 2015, he said he appreciated “China's ambitious plans to promote Asian connectivity across land and sea routes. It has committed tens of billions of dollars to road and rail construction to better connect its factories and markets in Asia and Europe. And we support these efforts to connect the region, but we also urge that they promote trade in all directions and respect international standards. But we don't see China's involvement in Central Asia as a zero-sum game. " Too bad that, today it is more evident than ever, Xi Jinping does not want a complementary, cooperative role for China in the liberal order led by the US, he wants to challenge that order and its leadership.
But what should suggest that the approach that did not work during Obama's eight years, which caused disasters in the Middle East and pushed America's enemies and rivals everywhere, from Russia to China, via Iran, can it work today? Unless, the same interpreters are not ready for a profound self-criticism of those years, but we would not bet on it.
In short, the prevailing mood in Biden's first choices is nostalgia: from Blinken to Sullivan, from John Kerry special envoy for the climate to Janet Yellen to the Treasury, these are figures in clear continuity with the Obama presidencies, which indicate the will to Biden to pick up "where we left off".
The Democrats – the moderate wing of the party no less than the radical one – seem obsessed with restoring Obama's legacy entirely and wiping out the Trump presidency as if it never existed, like forgetting a bad nightmare. Starting with the return to the Paris agreement on the climate and the World Health Organization, to continue with the Middle East and China, the will seems to be that of a total reset of US foreign policy, overturning all the policies of the Trump administration. in all areas and on all dossiers.
However, they risk underestimating the fact that precisely that past and those policies to which they want to quickly return contained all the elements that led to Trump's victory in 2016.
What we see arriving with Biden is the traditional Democrats' approach to international politics, made up of blind faith in multilateralism and liberal interventionism, often naive, inconclusive and irresponsible, which could crash into a profoundly transformed world, which no longer seems like a ideal environment for multilateralism and cooperation.
The risk is that Biden and the Democrats will spend the next four years trying to turn back the clock to an international system that no longer exists.
The post Biden's first choices smell of nostalgia: towards an unsustainable return to the past with Iran and China appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/le-prime-scelte-di-biden-sanno-di-nostalgia-verso-un-insostenibile-ritorno-al-passato-con-iran-e-cina/ on Tue, 24 Nov 2020 04:18:40 +0000.