Chris Hedges's Blog, page 53

Emphasis on U.S. Exports, Trade Secrets in China Trade Deal

WASHINGTON — The United States and China reached a trade deal Wednesday that eases tensions between the world’s two biggest economies, offers massive export opportunities for U.S. farms and factories, and promises to do more to protect American trade secrets.

Still, the Phase 1 agreement leaves unresolved Washington’s fundamental differences with Beijing, which is relying on massive government intervention in the economy to turn China into a technological power.

President Donald Trump is wanting to show progress on an issue that he has made a hallmark of his presidency and hopes to use in his reelection campaign this year. Wednesday’s signing ceremony at the White House gave him the chance to do that just hours before the House voted to send articles of impeachment to the Senate for a trial.

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Trump promoted the trade signing as a way of delivering economic justice for American workers he claims have been betrayed by past administrations and their trade policies.

“We mark more than just an agreement. We mark a sea change in international trade,” Trump declared during a rambling ceremony in which he made references to former FBI Director James Comey, the impeachment proceedings and a possible visit to Mount Rushmore on July Fourth for a fireworks display.

The Chinese delegation also praised the pact. Chinese leader Xi Jinping said in a letter to Trump that the first-phase deal was “good for China, for the U.S. and for the whole world.” He said it also showed the two countries had the ability to “act on the basis of equality and mutual respect.” The letter was read by Beijing’s chief negotiator, Vice Premier Liu He.

Some of the president’s Democratic critics were unimpressed.

“True to form, Trump is getting precious little in return for the significant pain and uncertainty he has imposed on our economy, farmers, and workers,” said former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the Democrats hoping to replace Trump.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement that “with the economy losing thousands of manufacturing jobs and Farm Country reeling from the damage caused by President Trump, Americans are left with nothing more than a showy television ceremony to try to hide the complete absence of concrete progress, transparency or accountability in this ‘phase one’ agreement.”

The administration acknowledges the agreement leaves unresolved some U.S. complaints — most notably, the way the Chinese government subsidizes its companies. That was the concern voiced when Trump sparked a trade war by imposing tariffs on Chinese imports in July 2018.

“The Phase 1 deal contains meaningful commitments but by no means lives up to the initial objectives of the administration,” said Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator who is now vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Further Chinese concessions would force Bejing to make major changes in its state-dominated economic model, which means ”the prospects for a timely conclusion are remote,” she said.

The agreement leaves in place tariffs on about $360 billion in Chinese imports, leverage the administration hopes will generate future concessions.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said work on follow-up negotiations will hinge on how China fulfills the commitments it made in the initial phase.

“We have to make sure this is implemented properly,” Lighthizer said. “This is the first agreement like this of its kind and we have to make sure that it works.”

The agreement is intended to ease some U.S. economic sanctions on China while Beijing is to step up purchases of American farm products and other goods. Trump cited beef, pork, poultry, seafood, rice and dairy products as examples.

U.S. trade officials said the agreement would end a long-standing practice of China pressuring foreign companies to transfer technology to Chinese companies as a condition for obtaining market access. Lighthizer said China has also agreed to combat patent theft and counterfeit products, which would include forfeiting machinery used for making counterfeit products.

The 86-page agreement makes it easier to bring criminal cases in China against those accused of stealing trade secrets. It includes provisions designed to stop Chinese government officials from using administrative and regulatory procedures to ferret out foreign companies’ trade secrets and allowing that information to get into the hands of Chinese competitors.

The deal requires China to come up with procedures to “permit effective and expeditious action’’ to take down websites that sell pirated goods. China also must make it possible for e-commerce sites to lose their licenses for “repeated failures to curb the sale of counterfeit or pirated goods.’’

China is required to increase its purchases of U.S. manufactured, energy and farm products and services by a combined $200 billion this year and next. The arrangement means that China is supposed to buy $40 billion in U.S. farm exports. That would be a windfall for Trump supporters in rural America but an ambitious goal considering that China has never bought more than $26 billion in U.S. agricultural products in a year.

“It’s a strong first step,” said Jeremie Waterman, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s vice president for Greater China. “It begins the process of addressing some of the structural concerns, but there’s a lot of work left to do. The meat, the core of (U.S. complaints about China’s aggressive tech policies) has not yet been addressed. Obviously, that’s going to have to wait until Phase 2.’’

Most analysts say any meaningful resolution of the main U.S. allegation — that Beijing uses predatory tactics in its drive to supplant America’s technological supremacy — could require years of contentious talks. Skeptics say a satisfactory resolution may be next to impossible given China’s ambitions to become the global leader in such advanced technologies as driverless cars and artificial intelligence.

The U.S. has dropped plans to impose tariffs on an additional $160 billion in Chinese imports, and it cut in half, to 7.5%, existing tariffs on $110 billion of good from China.

Derek Scissors, China specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, said the trade war has already delivered a benefit for Trump, even if it hasn’t forced Beijing to make major changes to its economic policy: Trump’s tariffs have reduced Chinese exports to the United States and narrowed America’s trade deficit with China.

So far this year, the U.S. deficit with China in the trade of goods has declined by 16%, or $62 billion, to $321 billion compared with a year earlier. The deficit will narrow further if Beijing lives up to its pledges to buy dramatically more American imports.

___

AP Business Writer Joe McDonald in Beijing and Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

Sanders’ Wife on Feud With Warren: ‘This Discussion Is Over’

WASHINGTON — Jane O’Meara Sanders, the wife of Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, has a clear message about the simmering dispute between her husband and Elizabeth Warren: It’s over.

O’Meara Sanders defended her husband’s integrity during a Wednesday interview, but she declined to attack Warren — or inflame the feud in any way — a day after the Massachusetts senator reiterated during a nationally televised debate that Sanders, a Vermont senator, told her privately that a woman couldn’t defeat President Donald Trump.

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“I think that this discussion is over,” O’Meara Sanders told The Associated Press.

The leading liberal presidential contenders have been trying to de-escalate the feud almost since Warren inexplicably made the explosive allegation on the eve of this week’s debate, claiming that Sanders questioned the viability of a female presidential candidate during a private conversation in 2018. The subsequent attempts to tamp down the conflict, from the candidates on the debate stage Tuesday night and from their chief surrogates on Wednesday, reflect the dangerous stakes surrounding a fight that threatens to tear apart the Democratic Party’s progressive base less than three weeks before presidential primary voting begins.

O’Meara Sanders said their campaign has no interest in promoting divisions “like Trump does by gender, race or ethnicity.”

“We remain committed to continuing a progressive movement made up of women and men, black and white, gay an straight,” she said. “The message is unity.”

At the same time, she described her husband as “a person that everybody can trust” and pushed back against Warren’s accusation.

“Maybe people sometimes misremember things that happened,” she said. “But I know without a doubt that it is not anything Bernie would ever say. It is inconceivable because it’s not what he believes. And there’s proof of that going back many, many years.”

“I’m not attacking Elizabeth Warren in any way, shape or form on this,” O’Meara Sanders continued. “My message is Bernie is trying to bring people together.”

Indian Students Refuse to Give an Inch to the Far Right

With her head bandaged and her arm in a sling, university student Aishe Ghosh went before the cameras to say that the students of the university she attends in New Delhi would move “not an inch back.” The students would continue to agitate to defend Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and its union, and to fight against the divisive and toxic politics of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Before Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party won the 2014 parliamentary elections, he would brag that he had a 56-inch chest; Modi is a large man, his girth a measure—we were told—of his strength, and his machismo. Twenty-five-year-old Aishe Ghosh, president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU), is much smaller than Modi and has no need to brag in this way. When she says that she will not move “an inch back,” her eyes glint with both amusement and determination. You have already hit me with your iron rods, she seems to be saying, and I am still here; your violence cannot silence me.

On January 5, a group of masked men and women roamed the gated campus of JNU with iron rods and other weapons. They apparently targeted left-wing students, including Aishe Ghosh, who later said, “I was continually hit on the head with iron rods. … They were about to lynch us.” Ghosh is a leader of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI), a mass organization of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). In September 2019, she won the post of the presidency of the student union on a Left Unity platform. She had previously been a councilor for the School of International Studies, where she is working to get her Ph.D. It was clear from the very first that these armed attackers seemed to pick out the communist students for special punishment.

Initially, the Indian government suggested that it was the Left that had been the author of the violence. The Delhi Police even went so far as to charge Ghosh for an attack on the JNU computer server; the police did not seem to want to investigate the attack on the university, nor on the bizarre way in which the private security on the campus seemed cavalier as terror reigned around them. It was obvious to the victims that the masked attackers came from the BJP’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP); the magic of social media meant that students quickly identified one or two of these attackers and put their names online. The Delhi Police sat on its hands, making noises against the Left rather than against these students of the ABVP.

Incitement to Riot

The news channel India Today spoke to the alleged masked attackers, who admitted that they came from the ABVP. They said their aim was to smash the Left, their animosity in full display. It is hard to watch these young people speak with such confidence and with such chilling precision about their desire to hurt those with whom they did not agree. It was not that Aishe Ghosh and Nikhil Mathew and other Left activists merely crossed their assailants’ path; these masked men and women apparently went in search of them, their purpose to beat them into submission.

It’s easy to guess where these young suspected masked attackers—all of them students—took their lessons from. The Indian Home Minister Amit Shah spoke about the ongoing protests in Delhi a week and a half before this attack. Shah and the far-right had coined the term “tukde tukde gang” to speak of the Left—the phrase implying that the Left wants to break India into pieces (tukde tukde); it is the Left, Shah has long said, that is anti-national, and therefore it needs to be eradicated. He told his Delhi audience that “it’s time to teach Delhi’s tukde tukde gang a lesson” and that it is time “to punish the tukde tukde gang. … People in Delhi should punish them.” Taught a lesson, be punished: this is an incitement to riot, an incitement listened to by the ABVP activists suspected to be involved in the attack, Akshat Awasthi, Rohit Shah, Komal Sharma, Vikas Patel, and Shiv Poojan Mondal. No operational connection has been established between the BJP high command—including Amit Shah—and the masked attackers on the campus, but it is clear that there is a straight line that unites them ideologically and politically. Shah’s language about lessons and punishment should not go without investigation.

The Delhi Police is under the direct control of Amit Shah. In the India Today sting, Akshat Awasthi, “who identified himself as an AVBP activist and confessed to his role in the JNU campus attack,” is asked by the reporter, “So, the police helped you, the ABVP?” Awasthi asked in turn, “Whose police is it, sir?” He meant that the police are on the side of the ABVP and said that while the police were inside the campus, Delhi’s deputy commissioner of police asked the activists to “hit” the students. This is incendiary stuff, with the far-right Indian government of the BJP being implicated in the violent attack on the JNU campus.

Not an Inch

I have known Aishe Ghosh for some years now. A brilliant student who did her bachelor’s degree at Daulat Ram College (Delhi University), Aishe came to JNU to study international relations. It is impossible to be a JNU student and not be somehow involved in politics. Debate and discussion saturate the campus, from the day-long discussions at the tea shops to the late-night talks at the dining halls. Posters on all kinds of issues have long been a permanent feature on the campus walls, and marches are a regular occurrence. The university’s students’ union—JNUSU—has kept this campus democratic for its entire history, and the student elections are one of the best examples of the democratic process anywhere in the world.

JNU, like the other central universities, draws the finest students from a variety of class backgrounds; they are able to come and study because the costs are held down by student struggle and social pressure. Over the past several decades, governments committed to neoliberal policy have tried to raise the fees and change the character of JNU, and of the other central universities. Mass student resistance is not what they anticipated; most of this resistance has been given organizational shape by the Left student groups. People like Aishe Ghosh, who run from meeting to meeting organizing the resistance, have been key to the fight to keep their universities democratic; that is precisely why they are the target of the far-right.

When I first met her, she told me that she comes from the West Bengal town of Durgapur. After she was attacked, there was a protest march in solidarity with Aishe in Durgapur, which has a long history of strong trade union and communist politics. Her parents—Sharmistha and Debashish—as well as her grandparents defend her fully. In the 1950s, the Indian government developed Durgapur as the epicenter of modern industry, since it was not far from the coalfields of Asansol and Raniganj as well as the iron ore region of Burnpur and Kulti. Strikes were a constant feature at the steel plants and the coking coal plants. These were political strikes, not only for wages. In 1959, Durgapur workers took an active role in the Food Movement, which developed across West Bengal as a consequence of the starvation of the poor. There was a major strike in the city in 1961 that combined basic issues for the workers (wages, conditions) with the food crisis and against the pogroms in Assam. Five years later, Durgapur rose up against retrenchment and the destruction of the industry. Police violence led to the death of a popular union leader, Jabber, and to the shooting death of another worker, Ashish. The unions called for a general strike that ran for nine days, during which the workers marched with the mud from Jabber’s grave across the city. This was the soil from which Aishe Ghosh emerges.

Amit Shah and Aishe Ghosh stand at two ends of the Indian experience. The former—Amit Shah—represents the world of money and iron rods, a world of wealth and intimidation. While he studied biochemistry at CU Shah Science College in Ahmedabad (Gujarat), he joined the ABVP and rose rapidly to become a leader. Akshat Awasthi would be familiar to him; they share a temperament and an ethos. Aishe Ghosh is also familiar to them; she is the student leader who stands against them, who represents decency and democracy. The rods of the right wing are aimed at her head. You will hit me, she says, but we won’t pick up sticks; we will fight you with our words.

This article was produced by  Globetrotter , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

The Secret Behind How Billionaires Make Obscene Amounts of Money

As Ray Charles wailed in a song of true-life blues: “Them that’s got is them that gets/And I ain’t got nothin’ yet.”

While the workaday majority of Americans continue to be mired in our low-wage economy, the precious few at the tippy-top soared out of sight in 2019. They started the year already wallowing in wealth. By year’s end, the 500 richest people saw their total haul increase by an average of $2.4-billion each.

Indeed, some needed bulldozers to bank their increased wealth.

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, for example, piled up an extra $27-billion last year. Bill Gates of Microsoft added $22 billion to his stash. And even though Amazon czar Jeff Bezos dropped $9 billion in a divorce settlement, his fortune multiplied so much that he’s still the world’s richest person.

Bear in mind that none of these moneyed elites did anything extra to earn these extraordinary bonanzas. They didn’t work any harder, didn’t get smarter, didn’t add anything of value to society. They simply reclined in luxury and let their money make money.

That’s a dirty little secret of our rigged economic system — unfettered inequality begets ever-expanding inequality.

Another dirty little secret is that billionaire-ism is hereditary. Right-wing media baron Rupert Murdoch, for example, doled out $10-billion to his six children last year. So — voila! — thus were born six brand-spanking-new baby billionaires, who did nothing to reach the top of the world’s financial heap, except please daddy.

Not only are the rich different from you and me, but the filthy rich are also different from the merely rich. It can take hard work, creativity, perseverance, and luck to become a millionaire, but in today’s skewed wealth system, multibillionaires don’t need any of that — their money does all the work to lift them above everyone else.

The Wrong Question for Democrats to Be Asking About Trump

This article originally appeared on Salon.

So what do you think: Is Donald Trump on drugs? It’s a question that has hovered around this president since well before he took office, and cropped up all over again — at least on the internet — after Trump’s address to the nation following the killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and the subsequent Iranian missile attack on a U.S. base in Iraq.

Many observers perceived Trump as sniffling extensively and having difficulty articulating words during that speech, and suggested that his pupils appeared to be dilated. This was taken as more evidence that this obese, 73-year-old man does lines of Adderall all day to remain conscious, or is heavily tranquilized by his handlers to manage him, or perhaps both. (Those observations would indeed tend to pull in different directions, drug-speculation-wise, although that’s hardly the biggest flaw in this whole zone of online paranoia-slash-overconfidence.)

Much of this collective wisdom derives from archly worded “news” posts explaining why “Trump” and “Adderall” are trending on social media, or tweets within the self-reinforcing edifice of #Resistance Twitter that presume, as a widely accepted fact, that the president is a patient of Dr. Feelgood who is being kept marginally alive and functional with massive infusions of pharmaceuticals. Those in turn derive from gossipy years-old reports that people who worked on “The Apprentice” with Trump either saw him snorting Adderall — an amphetamine in tablet form that can easily be crushed, although that’s not the approved delivery method — or pretending to. All of this is taken to explain something, I guess. But what?

Not everyone agrees that there’s anything to see in the first place, I hasten to add. One veteran of the Washington press corps told me he perceives no there there: Trump gets in front of a sensitive microphone and reads nervously off a Teleprompter, with the whole world watching. People who usually avoid his spoken-word performances — which are always bizarre — realize what a weird and debilitated personality he is, and freak the f**k out. No drugs are required, beyond the known and acknowledged massive infusions of junk food and Diet Coke.

Before we wander too much deeper down the rabbit hole — which is definitely what it’s like when you Google “trump adderall” — let’s jump right to an answer, of sorts: There is no answer, because for all the thinly-sourced rumors about Trump’s alleged addiction to amphetamines or other stimulants, there’s no real evidence either way. I also think there’s no answer because the question isn’t a real question — it’s a pseudo-question, designed to conceal either a fear or a wish, and to provoke a particular response.

Maybe we’re supposed to think, Oh my God, the president is on drugs! Surely the Cabinet will remove him under the 25th Amendment now! Which no one except an imaginary Democrat grandma in Topeka actually thinks, and is even more small-minded liberal self-trolling than the fantasy about Robert Mueller leading Trump and his entire posse out of the White House in chains, which too many MSNBC viewers swallowed for too long.

Or maybe we’re just supposed to perceive Trump’s alleged Adderall-vacuuming as another damning element of his general debauchery and decline, in concert with the popular internet narrative that he suffers from dementia, brain damage, mental illness and a range of undisclosed physical ailments. In that strand of the multiverse, Trump is heading for a catastrophic health crisis or (in the version promulgated by Dr. Bandy Lee) an involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, and we won’t have to worry about defeating him in the November election because he’ll be dead or on a ventilator or shouting at the walls in a padded room.

No one can claim those scenarios are flat-out impossible, but they don’t seem super likely either. On the long list of things Trump doesn’t want people to know about him, the actual state of his physical and mental health is somewhere around the middle. That said, we’re not talking about Warren G. Harding or Franklin D. Roosevelt here, both of whom had disabling medical conditions that were concealed from the public. Trump plays golf frequently (and badly), can clearly walk unaided from point to point, and displays a roughly average level of physical vigor — that is, for an overweight senior citizen with an atrocious diet and a sedentary lifestyle.

Furthermore, I’m not sure whether we’re supposed to feel reassured or horrified by the prospect of Trump kicking the bucket while in office, followed by President Mike Pence, somber waves of unctuousness coming off him like the odor of Brylcreem, informing us that our national nightmare is over. Does this fantasy appeal to some tiny slice of middle-ground normies, NeverTrump Republicans and elite journalists? Basically, to David Brooks and Sen. Susan Collins and people who still think they say things worth listening to, gosh darn it? Because the nightmare won’t be over, and it won’t be a good thing.

Essentially, the question of whether Donald J. Trump is an unregenerate speed freak, or is pounding controlled substances of some other kind, is a plaintive protest against the fact that things are not normal in the United States of America. We once lived in a normal country where the president wasn’t a delusional racist or a would-be tyrant who constantly “jokes” about serving more than two terms. Maybe this can be explained away, or mitigated, or made to be less painful, if we conclude that he’s wired to the gills on psychiatric amphetamines 24/7.

Is it OK to express the view, amid this atmosphere of mid-level pearl-clutching, that while I have no idea whether Trump uses Adderall or not, it wouldn’t be an incredibly huge deal if he did? Adderall and other prescription amphetamines are used by millions of adults and children with ADHD to improve their mental focus and energy — and are used off-label, both legally and otherwise, by millions of other people for similar purposes. (Famously, this includes college students. And, um, journalists.) One psychiatrist I spoke to told me he frequently prescribes such stimulants for Wall Street traders and other financial professionals who have to be intensely focused for extended periods, and that he also recommends it informally as a short-term antidepressant.

Amphetamines can unquestionably be habit-forming, and like most drugs are toxic in large doses. The same psychiatrist also told me that addiction is relatively rare, given how widely these drugs are taken, and that the potential for lethal overdose is orders of magnitude lower than with opioids, which have literally killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Snorting stimulants, as Trump has allegedly done, is viewed as abusive by medical professionals — it leads to a rapid spike of the drug in the bloodstream, followed by a rapid crash — but as a practical matter is widely tolerated and not in itself illegal.

My favorite article about Trump and Adderall, by far, is the one published last year in Medium by John Kruse, a San Francisco psychiatrist and the author of “Recognizing Adult ADHD: What Donald Trump Can Tell Us About Adult ADHD.” Kruse argues that what many people perceive as evidence of Trump’s drug abuse — “his non-sequiturs, verbal inconsistencies, sniffing, twitching and restlessness” along with the bouncing from topic to topic, the “impulsivity” and the “self contradictions” — might instead represent “a broad array of ADHD symptoms.” In other words, if Trump is using Adderall, Kruse suspects the drug is helping him hold it together, and he and we and the entire world would all be in even worse shape if he quit.

Don’t imagine for a second that I’m offering excuses for the obviously damaged person in the White House, or suggesting you should feel compassion for him. Kruse makes clear that ADHD is not an adequate explanation for Trump’s “many aberrant behaviors,” which quite likely include co-occurring mental illness. But trying to categorize Trump as a drug abuser, as if that explained something about why he is the way he is, or why our nation got so sick that we elected him — or offered some meaningful remedy — strikes me as unhelpful. Donald Trump’s drug habit, if he has one, isn’t the problem. The rest of us might want to take a long, hard look in the mirror and figure out how our national pattern of abusive behavior got us here.

Trump’s Unprecedented Attack on Iran and the Rule of Law

The assassination of Iranian major general Qassem Soleimani on Jan. 3 in Baghdad is what happens when the steady erosion of congressional war-making powers intersects with the tenancy of a madman in the Oval Office.

I know. Soleimani was, to invoke the parlance of another grossly unqualified commander in chief (and a sitting Democratic senator in Connecticut), “an evildoer,” with decades of blood on his hands. I have no sympathy for him. This column isn’t about Soleimani or the repressive medieval theocrats that govern Iran. It’s about us and our respect for the rule of law.

No matter how vile Soleimani was, his crimes cannot justify his murder, as The Intercept’s James Risen termed the targeted killing in a recent essay. Summary executions, even of the most heinous individuals, remain illegal.

Worse still, the drone strike on Soleimani could be just the first of many such undertakings by the Trump administration, signaling a new phase in American drone warfare aimed not only at nonstate terrorists, but also at hostile foreign state officials. On the same night Soleimani was slain, U.S. forces launched a similar attack in Yemen on another Iranian military commander, Abdul Reza Shahlai. Unlike Soleimani, Shahlai survived.

To date, Trump’s publicly announced justifications for Soleimani’s assassination have shifted wildly, in the fashion of dictators of developing nations, lurching from one bogus rationale to another.

“Soleimani was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel but we caught him in the act and terminated him,” Trump told reporters on the morning of the attack in a statement delivered at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. “We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war.”

During an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Jan. 8, the president went further, claiming that Soleimani had been planning “imminent” attacks on “four U.S. embassies,” which, apart from the installation in Baghdad, he notably didn’t name. He made the same claim the following day at a rally in Toledo, Ohio.

More recently, in a Jan. 13 tweet, Trump insisted again Soleimani was planning imminent strikes, but this time he added a new and very disturbing assertion—that “it doesn’t really matter” if the attacks were “imminent” because of Soleimani’s “horrible past!”

Senior administration officials have struggled clumsily to keep up with their boss’ kaleidoscopic fabrications. At a White House press conference on Jan. 10, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reasserted the imminence justification, remarking, “We had specific information on an imminent threat and those included attacks on U.S. embassies. Period, full stop.” Urged to define “imminent,” however, Pompeo demurred, saying only, “This was gonna happen and American lives were at risk and we would’ve been culpably negligent … had we not recommended [to] the president that he take this action.”

The stumbles continued during the Sunday morning television news shows that aired Jan. 12. Desperately trying to reconcile Trump’s contentions with reality, Defense Secretary Mark Esper told CNN’s Jake Tapper:

The President never said there was specific intelligence to four different embassies. What the President said with regard to the four embassies is what I believe as well. He said that he believed that they probably, that they could have been targeting the embassies in the region.

Nonetheless, “imminence” was the formal justification Pompeo, Esper, CIA director Gina Haspel and Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly offered in a classified briefing with members of Congress on Jan. 8.

The briefing, according to several accounts, was an unmitigated disaster. “We did not get information inside that briefing that there was a specific, imminent threat,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said afterward.

Even some Republicans were outraged. The briefing was “probably the worst I’ve seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I’ve served in the U.S. Senate,” said Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.

It’s easy to understand Lee’s consternation. Neither U.S. nor international law support the killing of Soleimani or the attempt to take out Shahlai.

First and foremost, under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war. No declaration of war with Iran has been issued. As Trump himself has conceded, the U.S. does not want an all-out war.

Sadly, the absence of a declaration of war isn’t likely to deter the Trump administration any more than other administrations have been deterred from waging undeclared armed conflicts. Congress last passed formal declarations of war on June 4, 1942, against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. (War was declared against Japan on Dec. 8, 1941 and on Dec. 11, 1941 against Germany and Italy.)

Since then, one administration after another has invoked the president’s inherent powers under Article II of the Constitution as commander in chief of the military in conflicts large and small, ranging from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. Such conflicts have been justified on the basis of “national self-defense,” sometimes pursuant to U.N. resolutions, as in Korea, or under the aegis of congressional decrees authorizing the use of force, as in Vietnam with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

But there is no U.N. or congressional resolution that authorizes the killing of Soleimani. Both the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in 2001 and the AUMF passed in 2002 are inapplicable.

The 2001 AUMF endorsed the use of force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, specifically al-Qaida. The Obama administration subsequently stretched the reach of the authorization to include other nonstate terror groups, such as the Islamic State group. Iran, by contrast, is a sovereign nation, and despite recent claims by Vice President Mike Pence, there is no evidence that Iran aided the 9/11 hijackers.

The 2002 AUMF is also irrelevant, as it authorized the use of force against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government. It provides no authorization for striking Iran or its leaders.

Neither can the Trump administration rely on general principles of self-defense for the killing of Soleimani. In its justification of drone strikes against U.S. citizens who had joined al-Qaida, even the Obama administration recognized that targeted individuals must pose “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” The term “imminent” has a well-established meaning in American law on self-defense, connoting an immediate or present threat rather than a future possibility.

Absent proof of an imminent threat, the killing of Soleimani should be considered an assassination, which is illegal under a series of executive orders dating back to the administration of President Gerald Ford.

International law, although complex, also weighs against the strike on Soleimani. While Article 51 of the U.N. Charter recognizes the right of nations to engage in acts of self-defense, neither it nor other international agreements, such as the 1907 Hague and 1949 Geneva Conventions, permit the premeditated killing of specific individual commanders for past acts.

In compliance with its responsibilities as a U.N. member, the U.S. reported to the world body on Jan. 8 that it had “undertaken certain actions [including the Soleimani killing] in the exercise of its inherent right of self-defense” under Article 51. But as Rutgers University Law professor Adil Ahmad Haque noted in a Jan. 10 article published by the Just Security website, international law prohibits the use of armed force except upon “clear evidence of an ongoing or imminent attack.”

It is also unconvincing to justify Soleimani’s killing as an act of deterrence against future aggression, as both Attorney General William Barr and Secretary Pompeo claimed on Monday. Deterrence, as Professor Haque explains, “is not a legal defense. [It] is a confession.”

Perhaps nothing underscores the hypocrisy, illegality, danger and downright madness of the Trump administration’s everchanging positions than news reports earlier this week indicating that the president actually approved the hit on Soleimani last summer or fall.

On Jan. 10, the House took a tentative first step to rein in the president, passing a “concurrent resolution” to restrict Trump’s power to strike Iran again without congressional approval. However, even if the measure clears the Senate, it will lack the force of law, as concurrent resolutions are not binding on the executive branch. They are symbolic only.

A “joint resolution” designed to restrict further hostilities with Iran is pending in the Senate that would have the force of law if it is passed, but it will need a two-thirds vote from both houses of Congress to override an expected veto by Trump.

It’s up to the American people to stand up and demand that Congress—Democrats and Republicans—do just that, returning our war-making powers to the first branch of government, where they belong. It’s time to demand an end to the madness once and for all.

Border Patrol Dodges Questions About Migrant Children’s Deaths

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The Trump administration sought to “conceal information” about the death of a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy in Border Patrol custody, a House subcommittee chairwoman said at a hearing Tuesday.

Rep. Kathleen Rice, D-N.Y., said the Department of Homeland Security has “consistently failed to maintain transparency by stymying congressional inquiries. This raises concerns that they are hiding serious issues with management, in addition to the leadership vacancies at the top of the department. One example of this is the department’s decision to conceal information on the death of Carlos Hernandez Vasquez.”

Rice chairs the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security, Facilitation and Operations, which had a Tuesday hearing to examine DHS efforts to prevent child deaths in custody. Six migrant children died in government custody between September 2018 and May 2019, the first such deaths in a decade.

Much of the hearing focused on Carlos, who died on May 20 in a Border Patrol cell in Weslaco, Texas. A ProPublica investigation in December, which included video of Carlos’ last hours and death, raised questions about his treatment by Border Patrol agents and contracted medical workers as his condition deteriorated.

“Despite information requests by this committee, it was not until a ProPublica report was released seven months later that Congress and the public learned more about what happened to Carlos, that his death may have been caused by the failure to provide urgently needed medical care and the failure to follow the most basic procedures to simply check on a sick child,” Rice said in her opening statement.

Two high-ranking Homeland Security officials testified at the hearing, but neither responded to Rice’s criticism. The two officials — Border Patrol Chief of Law Enforcement Operations Brian Hastings and DHS Senior Medical Officer Dr. Alex Eastman — used their opening statements to stress the unprecedented nature of the surge of families and unaccompanied children at the border last year.

They said DHS quickly scaled up medical care for migrants at the border following the deaths of two children in December 2018, using medical professionals from the Coast Guard, Public Health Service and private contractors. Eastman said the surge of migrant families and children was “an unconventional problem that required an unconventional solution.”

Under questioning from Rice, Hastings said the video of Carlos’ death revealed by ProPublica was “troubling” but sidestepped questions about his death because of an ongoing investigation by the DHS Office of Inspector General.

Hastings described one change in “welfare checks” made in the wake of Carlos’ death. Records obtained by ProPublica showed that a Border Patrol agent logged three welfare checks on Carlos in the four hours he was lying on the floor of his cell, dying or dead. The medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Carlos told ProPublica that the agent looked through a window but didn’t enter the cell.

In July, then-Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner John Sanders ordered that “any subject in our custody” receive welfare checks every 15 minutes and be documented in the system, Hastings said.

Hastings’ word choice drew a sharp rebuke from Rice.

“You mean person, not subject, in your custody. Because that’s what they are. They’re people, not subjects,” Rice said.

“Person, yes ma’am,” Hastings said.

Video obtained by ProPublica shows the Border Patrol held a sick teen in a concrete cell without proper medical attention and did not discover his body until his cellmate alerted guards.

Rice and other Democrats criticized reports released last month by the DHS inspector general into the deaths of two Guatemalan children in Border Patrol custody in December 2018. The reports found no wrongdoing by agents in the deaths of Jakelin Caal Maquin, 7, and Felipe Gomez Alonzo, 8.

“Publicly available summaries of these investigations are extraordinarily narrow in scope. They focus only on whether DHS personnel committed malfeasance and not whether the department’s policies and resources could properly protect the children in its care,” Rice said. She criticized the inspector general for declining an invitation to testify before the subcommittee.

Rep. Xochitl Torres Small, D-N.M., also criticized the inspector general for taking a year to complete investigations of the two deaths. Jakelin and Felipe were both held by Border Patrol agents in her district.

“Even more concerning, the OIG limited its investigation scope to only determine whether there was malfeasance by personnel and did not consider whether CBP’s policies and procedures are adequate to prevent migrant child deaths,” Torres Small said. “As I’ve said from the beginning, the reason for these investigations is not to punish people, it’s to keep this from happening again. It’s to make sure that we have the protocols in place in case we’re faced with this challenge again.”

The DHS Office of Inspector General did not immediately respond to requests from ProPublica a hearing about the scope of the investigation or the reason for not testifying at Tuesday’s hearing.

Putin Engineers Shakeup That Could Keep Him in Power Longer

MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin engineered a surprise shakeup of Russia’s leadership Wednesday, proposing changes to the constitution that could keep him in power well past the end of his term in 2024.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev resigned his post after Putin announced the proposed constitutional amendments. Putin kept his longtime ally in the Kremlin’s leadership structure, appointing him to the newly created post of deputy head of the presidential Security Council.

The shakeup sent shock waves through Russia’s political elites who were left pondering what Putin’s intentions were and speculating about future Cabinet appointments.

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Putin’s proposed constitutional reforms, announced in a state of the nation address, indicated he was working to carve out a new governing position for himself after his term ends, although the suggested changes don’t immediately indicate what specific path he will take to stay in charge.

The 67-year-old former KGB operative, who has led Russia for more than 20 years, often keeps his intentions secret until the very last moment.

Alexei Navalny, the most prominent Russian opposition leader, tweeted that Putin’s speech clearly signaled his desire to continue calling the shots even after his term ends.

“The only goal of Putin and his regime is to stay in charge for life, having the entire country as his personal asset and seizing its riches for himself and his friends,” Navalny said.

The Kremlin later announced that Tax Service chief Mikhail Mishustin was nominated to replace Medvedev, who has been prime minister for nearly eight years. Approval by the Duma is virtually certain.

After Putin’s first two terms ended in 2008, Medvedev served as a placeholder president for just one term, from 2008 to 2012 and appointed his mentor as prime minister, although Putin continued to wield power. Under Medvedev, the constitution was amended to lengthen the president’s term from four years to six, although it limits the leader to two consecutive terms.

In televised comments Wednesday, Medvedev said he needed to resign in light of Putin’s proposed changes in government.

Putin suggested amending the constitution again to allow lawmakers to name prime ministers and Cabinet members. The president currently holds the authority to make those appointments.

“It will increase the role of parliament and parliamentary parties, powers and independence of the prime minister and all Cabinet members,” Putin told an audience of top officials and lawmakers.

At the same time, Putin argued that Russia would not remain stable if it were governed under a parliamentary system. The president should retain the right to dismiss the prime minister and Cabinet ministers, to name top defense and security officials, and to be in charge of the Russian military and law enforcement agencies, he said.

Putin emphasized that constitutional changes must be put to a nationwide vote.

Putin has been in power longer than any other Russian or Soviet leader since Josef Stalin, who led from 1924 until his death in 1953. Under the current law, Putin must step down in 2024 after his term ends.

Observers speculated that Putin may stay in charge by shifting into the prime minister’s seat after increasing the powers of parliament and the Cabinet and trimming presidential authority.

Political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin said Putin’s speech made it clear he was pondering the move to premiership.

“Putin is advancing the idea of keeping his authority as a more powerful and influential prime minister while the presidency will become more decorative,” Oreshkin said.

In his address, Putin said the constitution must also specify the authority of the State Council consisting of regional governors and top federal officials.

Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Moscow Center said it appears as if Putin might try to continue pulling the strings as head of the council and could even shift into a new position before his term ends.

“It looks very much like Putin is preparing to leave the presidency, whether that will take place in 2024 or even earlier, and is currently trying to create a safety mechanism for his successor in case of conflict,” she wrote on Facebook. “Putin looks like he is counting on becoming the head of the State Council, which will get increased powers and become a key decision-making platform with input from the Presidential Administration, the government and the governors.”

Other possible options include a merger with neighboring Belarus that would create a new position of the head of a new unified state — a prospect that has been rejected by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Political analyst Kirill Rogov said that Putin intends to stay in charge while re-distributing powers between various branches of government.

“Such a model resembling the Chinese one would allow Putin to stay at the helm indefinitely while encouraging rivalry between potential successors,” Rogov observed.

In 2017, Chinese leader Xi Jinping had term limits abolished, which would effectively keep him in power for life, although Putin appears to favor more intricate ways of staying in charge than abolishing term limits.

Although Putin continued calling the shots during Medvedev’s presidency, he wasn’t totally happy with all his actions. He was particularly critical of Medvedev’s decision to give the green light to the Western air campaign in Libya in 2011 that led to the ouster and killing of long-time dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

Medvedev’s decision to step down and let Putin return to the presidency also sparked massive protests in Moscow in 2011-2012 in a major challenge to the Kremlin. Some of Putin’s associates suspected Medvedev’s aides of encouraging the protests.

In his speech, Putin emphasized the need to amend the constitution to give it a clear priority over international law.

“The requirements of international law and treaties and decisions of international organs can only be valid on the territory of Russia as long as they don’t restrict human rights and freedoms and don’t contradict the constitution,” he said.

He also said that the constitution must be tweaked to say that top government officials aren’t allowed to have foreign citizenship or residence permits.

Putin also vowed to encourage population growth by offering additional subsidies to families that have children.

He said that Russia would remain open for cooperation with all countries while maintaining a strong defense capability to fend off potential threats.

“For the first time in history, we aren’t trying to catch up with anyone,” Putin said. “On the contrary, other leading nations are yet to develop the weapons that Russia already has.”

CNN Debate Moderators Pilloried for Blatant Anti-Sanders Bias

Critics of the corporate media as well as supporters and staffers of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign blasted the moderators of the CNN/Des Moines Register Democratic presidential debate Tuesday night for employing centrist talking points and demonstrating a bias against Sanders in how they framed questions.

The debate, which ran over two hours, was moderated by the Register‘s Brianne Pfannenstiel and CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer and Abby Phillip. It featured six of the 12 remaining Democratic candidates: Sanders (I-Vt.), former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

As Common Dreams reported, the financial burden of deploying American forces was notably absent during first part of the debate—a lengthy discussion on foreign policy and war—but the moderators did ask candidates about the costs of implementing Medicare for All healthcare, as Sanders has proposed. That contrast, and the presentation of the healthcare questions, sparked swift condemnation from progressives.

Overall, a team of Rolling Stone writers called the debate moderators’ questions “mystifyingly inane.” In a piece titled “CNN Completely Botched the Democratic Presidential Debate,” HuffPost‘s Zach Carter called them “awful.” According to him, the debate on the whole was “tedious, interminable, frivolous… a fiasco of irrelevance held three weeks before the Iowa caucuses.”

“Again and again, CNN anchors substituted centrist talking points for questions―and then followed up predictable responses with further centrist talking points, rarely illuminating any substantive disagreements between the candidates or problems with their policy positions,” he wrote.

Carter pointed to examples such as when Phillip noted that Des Moines is an “insurance town” and asked Sanders what will happen to employees of private insurance companies if the country implements Medicare for All. She also asked Sanders, “How would you keep your plans from bankrupting the country?”

Those critiques and examples, along with others, circulated on social media:

Jesus Christ I hate these biased questions from the moderators. “How would you keep your plan from bankrupting the country?” JUST ASK THE KOCH BROTHERS TO MODERATE NEXT TIME! #DemocraticDebate

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 15, 2020

These @cnn commentators are appalling. They’re making it sound like sanders created a false controversy over the foreign policy differences between him and Biden as if it’s not actually an existential distinction between the two of them.

— Katie Halper (@kthalps) January 15, 2020

Oh @CNN, this question framing is interesting.#DemocraticDebate pic.twitter.com/xzg1qNhnx3

— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) January 15, 2020

More inane rightwing framing wow

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) January 15, 2020

The debate led some critics on Twitter to conclude that #CNNisFox or #CNNisTrash:

#CNNisFox

— Joe Quinlan / No War With Iran! (@JosephQuinlan8) January 15, 2020

#CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash #CNNisTrash

— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) January 15, 2020

The debate came just a day after CNN published what critics called a hit piece involving a private conversation between Sanders and Warren in 2018. Citing four unnamed sources—none of whom were in the room for the conversation—CNN reported that Sanders told Warren “he did not believe a woman could win” the presidential race. While Warren issued a statement after the story ran endorsing the findings of the report, Sanders has repeatedly denied it, including during the debate.

A team of writers at The Intercept detailed how CNN handled the topic Tuesday night:

Phillip opened a line of questioning on the recent feud between Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren: “CNN reported yesterday, and, Sen. Sanders, Sen. Warren confirmed in a statement that in 2018 you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?”

The moderator’s use of Warren to confirm a version of the story that originally came from Warren’s account of the meeting at the time signaled which side CNN was taking in the he-said/she-said, but it was confirmed by the framing of the question—”Why did you say that?”—rather than asking whether he said it.

Sanders denied the accusation, noting that he had been ready to stand aside for Warren to run in 2016, though she declined to. Phillip pressed to be clear he was denying the charge, then pivoted to Warren, and waved away his denial with such force—”Sen. Warren, what did you think when Sen. Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?”—that Sanders and the audience laughed.

The New Republic‘s Libby Watson declared that “CNN is truly a terrible influence on this country.”

CNN is truly a terrible influence on this country https://t.co/UopNiGrbCP

— guy fieri 2020 campaign manager (@libbycwatson) January 15, 2020

Jeet Heer, a national affairs correspondent at The Nation, wrote in a piece titled “CNN Has It in for Bernie” early Wednesday that “the big loser of the night was the network that hosted the event. CNN was so consistently aligned against Bernie Sanders that it compromised its claim to journalistic neutrality.”

“CNN’s treatment of Sanders raises a major problem that he’s going to have to confront going forward: Some major players in the mainstream media are clearly unafraid to cover him in a biased and one-sided manner,” Heer concluded. “But this problem also has an upside: Sanders thrives under adversity, and he can use these examples of bias to fundraise and to mobilize his base. The Sanders campaign is a gamble, and one major uncertainty is whether his base is strong enough to overcome consistently negative media coverage.”

Sanders, a longtime critic of the corporate media whose backers have repeatedly called out the U.S. media for the ignoring his campaign during this election cycle as part of a #BernieBlackout, had his “single best fundraising hour of any debate so far” during the first hour of Tuesday night’s debate, according to Robin Curran, his campaign’s digital fundraising director.

During the first hour of tonight’s debate:

1. @BernieSanders donors made more than 15,000 donations, a rate of 250 donations per minute.

2. It was the single best fundraising hour of any debate so far.

3. During that hour we accounted for 43% of all money raised on ActBlue.

— Robin Curran (@robingrace5) January 15, 2020

“When we fight, we win,” Workers for Bernie SATX tweeted in response to Curran’s announcement. “And Bernie’s gonna win.”

Recent polling suggests that may be true—at least, in Iowa. The latest polling from the debate hosts, published Friday, had Sanders in the lead at 20% ahead of the Feb. 3 caucuses. J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which conducted the poll, told the Register, “For real, he could win the caucuses.”

EU Nations Push Iran in Last-Ditch Bid to Save Nuclear Deal

BRUSSELS—Britain, France and Germany on Tuesday ratcheted up pressure on Iran to stop violating its landmark nuclear deal in a last-ditch effort to resolve their differences through talks while also starting a process that could bring back punishing U.N. sanctions on Tehran.

The three European Union countries are being pressed on one side by U.S. President Donald Trump to abandon the agreement like he did unilaterally in 2018, and on the other side from Iran to provide enough economic incentives for them to roll back their violations.

Now, the Europeans have reluctantly triggered the accord’s dispute mechanism to force Iran into discussions, starting the clock on a process that could result in the “snapback” of U.N. and EU sanctions on Iran.

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The three nations specifically avoided threatening the sanctions while emphasizing hopes for a negotiated resolution. They held off their announcement until tensions between the U.S. and Iran had calmed down after the Jan. 3 killing of an Iranian general in an American drone strike so their intent would not be misinterpreted.

“Our goal is clear: We want to preserve the accord and come to a diplomatic solution within the agreement,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement. “We will tackle this together with all partners in the agreement. We call on Iran to participate constructively in the negotiation process that is now beginning.”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry warned of a “serious and strong response” to the European move. But at the same time, ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi held out an olive branch, saying his country was “fully ready to answer any good will and constructive effort” that preserves the nuclear deal, Iran’s official IRNA news agency reported.

The U.S. State Department said it fully supports the decision to initiate the dispute resolution mechanism. “We believe further diplomatic and economic pressure is warranted by nations,” it said in a statement.

“The civilized world must send a clear and unified message to the Iranian regime: Your campaign of terror, murder, mayhem will not be tolerated any longer,” Trump said, according to the statement.

The accord, which Iran signed with the U.S., Britain, Germany, France, China and Russia in 2015, has been unraveling since Trump pulled Washington out in 2018 and reinstated sanctions designed to cripple the Islamic Republic under what the U.S. called a “maximum pressure” campaign.

The Europeans felt compelled to act, despite objections from Russia and China, because every violation of the deal reduces the so-called “breakout time” Iran needs to produce a nuclear bomb, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told Parliament.

“Each of these actions were individually serious,” Raab said. “Together, they now raise acute concerns about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.” Iran insists it is not seeking an atomic weapon.

At the time of the signing of the deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, Iran’s “breakout” time was estimated to be as little as two months. With the safeguards in place, limiting Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium and heavy water, the number and types of centrifuges it can use to enrich uranium, and the purity that is allowed, that estimate grew to more than a year.

Trump said the deal should be renegotiated because it didn’t address Iran’s ballistic missile program or its involvement in regional conflicts, and reimposed U.S. sanctions that have left Iran’s economy reeling. To pressure the remaining signatories to provide enough economic incentives to offset the U.S. sanctions, Iran last year began violating its limitations in stages.

Throughout, it has announced the violations publicly and continued to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency in to its facilities.

Following the U.S. drone strike that killed Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran announced what it said was its fifth and final step in violating the deal, saying it would no longer abide by any limitation to its enrichment activities.

That left the Europeans “with no choice” but to invoke the dispute mechanism, Raab told Parliament.

“We do so with a view to bringing Iran back into full compliance,” he said, adding that they hope the move will “reinforce the diplomatic track, not to abandon it.”

In their letter to the EU’s foreign policy chief announcing their move, the three countries distanced themselves from the new U.S. sanctions.

“Our three countries are not joining a campaign to implement maximum pressure against Iran,” they said. “Our hope is to bring Iran back into full compliance with its commitments.”

At the same time, they rejected Tehran’s argument that it was justified in violating the deal because Washington broke the agreement first when it pulled out.

Invoking the dispute mechanism starts a 30-day period in which to resolve the problem, which can be extended and probably will be. If the problem persists, the matter could be brought before the U.N. Security Council and might result in the “snapback” of sanctions that had been lifted under the deal.

After receiving the letter, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who coordinates the agreement on behalf of the world powers, stressed that the pressure on Iran from Europe does not mean international sanctions will automatically be imposed.

Despite Iran’s recent violations, all remaining parties to the JCPOA have said it is worth preserving, saying it is the best way to curb Iran’s nuclear program. Diplomats note that even with its violations, Iran is still enriching uranium to a lower purity than it did before the deal, and IAEA inspectors continue to have access to its facilities.

“We see no reason for such a step,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement about the EU countries’ decision. It called the move an “ill-considered decision” that could lead to a new escalation and make a return to the original framework “unachievable.”

With the growing skepticism that the deal will be able to saved without U.S. involvement, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested the possibility the agreement could be reworked somehow to address some of Trump’s concerns.

“Let’s work together to replace the JCPOA with the Trump deal,” he told the BBC.

Borrell refused to comment on that but again emphasized that the remaining signatories feel it is the best solution to limiting Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“We have to preserve the nuclear deal and work to go back to full and effective implementation,” Borrell said in Strasbourg, France. He described the pact as a “significant achievement” and underlined that “there is no alternative to this agreement.”

Raab told Britain’s Parliament that “the government in Iran has a choice.”

“The regime can take the steps to de-escalate tensions and adhere to the basic rules of international law. Or sink deeper and deeper into political and economic isolation,” he said. “We urge Iran to work with us to save the deal.”

___

Rising reported from Beirut. Danica Kirka in London, Frank Jordans and Geir Moulson in Berlin and Daria Litvinova and Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed.