Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 555

Why Does China Fear Taiwan?

When Presidents Ma Ying-jeou and Xi Jinping meet on Saturday in Singapore, it will be the first top-level encounter between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China since the end of the Civil War in 1949. With Taiwan’s economy only about the size of North Carolina’s and barely one-twentieth the size of China’s, the meeting appears a mismatch of enormous proportions.

But remember that elephants really are afraid of mice. Beneath Beijing’s bluster, Taiwan terrifies China because the small island represents a magnificent vision of what the mainland could be and what the Communist Party is not. This should be a reason to reaffirm that defending democracy in Taiwan is important to America and the region—and as an example for the PRC to follow. But like Ma’s unpopular government, the Obama Administration’s first instinct in this context is to bend to mainland sensitivities on this issue, weakening the defense of the Taiwanese democratic way of life in the process.It has become fashionable for many American Asia hands to decry elevating political reform as a top level agenda in the region, especially with respect to China. This makes superficial sense. Asia has the full spectrum of political systems: from North Korea’s perverse totalitarianism to the softer authoritarianism and incomplete democratic systems of countries such as Singapore and Malaysia to genuine liberal democracies such as Japan and South Korea. Why run the risk of inadvertently insulting a friend or partner even if one’s intended target is someone else?Asia has come a long way from the years after the Second World War when indigenous autocrats took over from colonial masters. A number of autocrats still rule. But throughout much of Asia, there is broad consensus that liberal institutions are a prerequisite for the creation of stable and prosperous societies: rule-of-law rather than rule by executive privilege; independent and competent courts and other bodies for adjudication and arbitration; protection of property and intellectual property rights from state appropriation or theft; and limitations on the role of the state in commercial and social affairs.To be sure, many Asian states fail to meet these lofty standards, while some pay only lip service to them. But the appetite for democracy promotion done well is strong in Asia because liberal reform has worked miracles over many decades: think Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and on-again-off-again Thailand. Malaysia and Singapore will eventually follow, as will Indonesia and perhaps Burma. Such is the attraction that even the charter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a grouping which includes Indo-Chinese one-party states such as Vietnam, now upholds democracy as one of the core principles and objectives for ASEAN.The PRC is the outlier in this respect. Its Communist Party insists that Confucian cultures, with their high regard for social hierarchy and top-down authority, are inherently unsuited to liberal democracy. Its neighbors would counter that it is Beijing’s low domestic requirement for negotiation, compromise, and justification of one’s policies that might help explain the country’s increasingly assertive and bullying behavior in East Asia as its power grows. In any event, the self-serving thesis has been contradicted by the emergence of democratic Japan and South Korea, both of which have strong Confucian characteristics.But it is the bustling Han Chinese nation of Taiwan that decisively disproves the thesis, and the whole region, including the PRC, knows it. While this so-called renegade province makes up only 1.5 percent of the population of greater China, it is the most successful and vibrant Chinese model on offer. In contrast, the PRC is fighting the future, and even allocates almost as much to the military-trained People’s Armed Police as it does the People’s Liberation Army just to control domestic unrest and ensure the Party’s hold on power. It is a shame, then, that President Obama has not done more to extol the virtues of Taiwanese democracy and contrast it with the PRC’s political system. A speech on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit in Brisbane was the first and only time the President lauded the emergence of democracy in Taiwan to a global audience. And even then, this occurred almost six years into his administration.Not that Obama stands alone. Some 36 years after passing the Taiwan Relations Act into law, a growing litany of humiliations to please the PRC has been heaped on Taiwan despite that country’s political and economic achievements. This includes prohibitions on Taiwan’s President and ministers from travelling to Washington for meetings and restrictions on high-ranking U.S. military officials from visiting the island. Some way to treat a country the United States is committed to help defend against invasion.By removing the centrality of political values in explaining and justifying U.S. policy in the Taiwan Strait, Washington has inadvertently ceded the moral high ground. Defending Taiwan is no longer about underwriting a liberal order in Asia that leads to democratization. Instead, the cross-strait dispute is becoming little more than two great powers pursuing their strategic interest. Which means Beijing’s riposte to the United States is to simply demand that it stop messing about in China’s backyard.Ma has indicated he sees the meeting with Xi as a bridge-building exercise with the mainland and will seek Beijing’s blessing for more countries to recognize Taiwan as a separate diplomatic entity within the existing “One China, Two Systems” framework, something the PRC is unlikely to acquiesce to.Fast forward only a little to next year. There will be new American and Taiwanese leaders elected, and the regional hunger for democratic governance will only increase. “One Country, Two Systems” will remain the status quo. But giving better support to Taiwan and openly propounding its way of life as the legitimate model for the mainland will help feed that hunger.

Vietnam Tests Relations with Japan

With leaders in both Japan and Vietnam concerned about China’s behavior in the South China Sea, the two countries are looking to improve relations. Just as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Vietnam wrapped up today, Japan announced Hanoi had asked Tokyo to participate in joint military drills. Reuters reports:

Vietnam agreed to build a “truly trustworthy” relationship with China on Friday during a visit to Hanoi by its President Xi Jinping, but at the same time invited Beijing’s old rival Japan for joint military exercises and a visit to a sought-after port.

The diplomatic flurry highlights the fragility of China’s testy ties with its communist neighbor, and Vietnam’s efforts to diversity its relations through new alliances with states locked in bitter disputes with Beijing over its maritime expansionism.Vietnam and China’s competing territorial claims mushroomed into a major dispute last year, which Xi aimed to settle on a timely visit close to a scheduled shakeup of a Vietnamese Communist Party leadership increasingly being courted by the United States.

The effects of last week’s U.S. freedom of navigation exercises are becoming easier and easier to discern. First, we saw the collapse of ASEAN talks because of members’ frustration with China. Yesterday, Malaysia’s Defense Minister smiled for the cameras aboard a U.S. carrier with Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. Now, Vietnam and Japan are looking to strengthen military ties.

Any of these developments could have occurred without the freedom of navigation exercises, of course, but it does look like we are starting to see a more confident attitude from countries concerned about Chinese regional dominance.

Canada to US: We Still Want Keystone

Canada’s new Liberal government has something in common with the Conservative administration it replaced: it wants the United States to save the Keystone XL pipeline from regulatory limbo. Reuters reports:

While Canada’s Liberals back Keystone XL, they have made it clear they will not adopt the same tack as Canada’s outgoing Conservatives, who irritated the U.S. administration with constant pressure over pipeline.

“Our position is that it is up to the Americans to see what they can do but we support this project and we hope that it will work well,” Dion told reporters.Asked about the strain Keystone had imposed on ties with the United States, by far Canada’s most important partner, he replied: “We don’t want it to be an irritant … we understand the Americans have to look at this very closely.”

While the new Liberal administration’s tack may lack the assertive tone of its Conservative predecessors, it doesn’t meaningfully differ in substance. Put simply, Keystone XL is Canada’s best and smartest option for getting the crude from its Albertan oil sands to market—America’s Gulf coast refineries are configured to deal with the heavy grade being produced in those projects.

But while Keystone is the most efficient pipeline option for Canada, it’s important to note that it won’t make or break Canada’s oil sands. If the Obama administration were to reject the pipeline, Canada could explore other options, including a pipeline east to Canada’s Atlantic coast (though that Energy East project, as it’s called, got some bad news this week as the new government announced it was killing plans to build an export terminal in Quebec), or west to its Pacific coast (a controversial plan, as the pipeline would transit green-minded British Columbia). Keystone isn’t the only option, it’s just the best one.And that’s crucial for understanding why report after report has said the project will have a negligible effect on our planet’s greenhouse gas concentrations. True, oil sands projects are particularly energy-intensive, and they certainly emit greenhouse gases. But that oil is coming out of the ground whether the U.S. builds Keystone or not. Greens manufactured a controversy around the pipeline by making it a marquee issue, but—and this is going to sound strange for followers of this long saga—Keystone isn’t a green issue. It’s an infrastructure issue, and it’s one of our largest trading partners clearly values.

There’s a Price War Underway in Europe

It’s a good time to be buying oil, as European consumers will be pleased to discover. In a market where oil executives are now  their hands over peak demand rather than peak supply—where supply outstrips demand by some 2 million barrels of crude per day—the fight for market share is getting downright fierce, and nowhere is that more true than in Europe, which is seeing producers across the Middle East, Africa, and, of course, Russia going out of their way to court the continent. Now, as the FT reports, Saudi Arabia is cutting the price of its supplies to Europe by more than $1 per barrel next month in an attempt to elbow out its competition:

Rising shipments from Iraqi Kurdistan that are delivered into the Mediterranean via the Turkish port of Ceyhan have displaced some Saudi shipments this year, traders and analysts said, while more crude from west Africa is also flowing to Europe. […]

On Thursday Saudi lowered its official prices for its Arab light crude grade in Europe by $1.30 a barrel for December, taking its discount to the weighted average of the North Sea Brent benchmark to $4.75 a barrel.Going after Russia’s customer base has raised heckles in Moscow, with Igor Sechin, the chief executive of Kremlin-backed state oil company Rosneft complaining last month about Saudi “dumping” after he revealed the kingdom was selling oil to refineries in Poland.

And the competition is only going to get fiercer next year when a newly sanctions-free Iran ramps up its own production. If there’s a winner here, it’s obviously Europe, which, after making so many headlines for its questionable energy security, is now enjoying a period where global hydrocarbon markets are so flush that concerns of scarcity have been all but forgotten.

On the other side, while every petrostate is now feeling the pinch of low oil prices, Russia is clearly the biggest loser in all of this. Oil and gas export revenues make up a huge chunk of Moscow’s budget, and Europe remains its most important customer base. But while Moscow may have once taken it as a given that it had a staple of pliant customers to its west, that’s clearly no longer the case. Just this week a Swedish refiner bought its first supplies of Saudi oil in more than 20 years, and if and when Iran ramps up its exports to Europe, it will predominantly be Russia who will be forced to make way, as both countries export the same variety of heavy sour crude. Europe’s dream is Putin’s nightmare.

China Is Secretly Buying American Radio Stations

Whether it be Rush Limbaugh or NPR, liberals and conservatives both like to complain about various elements of American radio. But there’s a new player in town that has no relationship with any domestic partisan tradition: according to a series of exposés in Reuters, the Chinese government has covertly (and likely illegally) been buying large interests in radio stations across the U.S. and around the world:

A Reuters investigation spanning four continents has identified at least 33 radio stations in 14 countries that are part of a global radio web structured in a way that obscures its majority shareholder: state-run China Radio International, or CRI.

Many of these stations primarily broadcast content created or supplied by CRI or by media companies it controls in the United States, Australia and Europe. Three Chinese expatriate businessmen, who are CRI’s local partners, run the companies and in some cases own a stake in the stations. The network reaches from Finland to Nepal to Australia, and from Philadelphia to San Francisco.

One station Reuters highlights, WCRW, conveniently broadcasts from just outside Washington, D.C. In its coverage of U.S. freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea last week, the station explained that “external forces” were trying “to insert themselves into this part of the world using false claims.”

The whole story is full of troubling revelations, and you can read this smart analysis from Heritage Senior Fellow Mike Gonzalez for more depth. As Gonzalez points out, it’s particularly concerning that the U.S. government had no idea about China’s interests in American radio until Reuters informed them. But it also underscores something we’ve said before about Russia: the West’s enemies are much better at propaganda than officials in Brussels and Washington often realize.Western leaders rightly talk up the value of their own soft power—the power of the democratic ideal. But even if the West’s ideas really are better, it is naive to expect them to win over converts without constant vigilance and promotion.

The Real Reason the Left Opposes the Safe Campus Act

Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill—two of the upper chamber’s most vocal figures on the issue of campus sexual assault—are waging an all-out war against the “Safe Campus Act“, a Republican-sponsored piece of legislation that would, among other things, require alleged campus sexual assaults to be reported to law enforcement before they could be adjudicated in campus tribunals. The National Journal‘s Sarah Mimms gives a good overview of the arguments on both sides of the bill: Its supporters, including Greek associations and civil liberties advocates, say that cops and judges, not campus administrators, should be responsible for addressing serious crimes, while its opponents, including a coalition of rape crisis activist groups, say the prospect of dealing with law enforcement intimidates victims and prevents them from coming forward.

The anti-Safe Campus Act position is puzzling on a number of levels. Campus activists and their supporters have, over the last two years, been successfully arguing that campuses are failing to adequately adjudicate sexual assault cases. They have also claimed that our society is infected with a “rape culture” in which allegations are not taken seriously, and that campus rapists are usually “serial predators,” who will offend again and again. Given these premises, wouldn’t it make sense to ensure that all campus sexual assault allegations are considered by police and prosecutors—the only authorities who have the power to truly incapacitate (rather than simply expel) an offender—in addition to campus administrators? Wouldn’t this be the only way to properly reflect the severity of the crime in question?You won’t hear them admit it, but one of the primary reasons campus rape activists are loath to create a larger role for law enforcement in campus rape cases is that they correctly perceive that the legal system would summarily dismiss many if not most of the cases that lead to disciplinary sanctions in campus courts. (This is also the reason, by the way, that fraternities are so enthusiastic about the Safe Campus Act). Not only do campuses use a far lower standard of proof than the criminal justice system (“more-likely-than-not” instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt”), but—even more critically—they are increasingly interested in applying a new and much broader definition of rape than the one provided for in criminal codes. The clearest representation of this is the increasingly widespread adoption of “affirmative consent“—the requirement that each party must explicitly agree to every sexual act within every sexual encounter—but it also extends more broadly to colleges’ practice of treating boorish male behavior, even when it is clearly not criminal, as a punishable offense.

Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk discussed this phenomenon in a brilliant New Yorker essay on a recent rape case at an elite boarding school:

We are in the midst of a significant cultural shift, in which we are redescribing sex that we vehemently dislike as rape, and sexual attitudes that we strongly disapprove of as examples of rape culture. For centuries, the legal definition of rape was intercourse accomplished by force and without consent. Many states have done away with the force criterion, and no longer require proof that the victim physically resisted the assailant or failed to do so because of reasonable fear of injury. With force absent from rape definitions, there has been increasing pressure on how to define consent. In the past several years, on many college campuses, consent has become affirmative consent, according to which not obtaining agreement before each sexual act is sexual misconduct. California and New York require affirmative-consent policies at schools receiving state funding. Some college campuses have gone even further and defined consent as not only positive but “enthusiastic” agreement to have sex. Anything short of that becomes sexual assault … Far-fetched at the time, Catharine MacKinnon’s 1981 statement, “Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated,” is effectively becoming closer to law, even if it is not on the books.

Campus activists and their supporters oppose the Safe Campus Act because they are sympathetic to MacKinnon’s definition of rape, but they know that (for now, at least) our criminal justice system is unwilling to apply it. College campuses are the crucible of an ongoing revolution in rape law, and in order for the revolution to continue, it must be insulated from reactionary prosecutors and judges, with their old-fashioned ideas about force and consent. Meanwhile, the activists must be able to continue to push the idea of a campus rape crisis where one in five women are victims, without revealing to the public that what they describe as “rape” is actually something very different from what most people still understand the term to mean.

We are at a strange cultural moment where the left that is trying to impose more regulations on (certain kinds) of sexual activity, and the right is opposing these regulations on the grounds of civil liberties and due process. We think that the right has the better of this particular argument—that affirmative consent standards and amateur campus tribunals are likely to fail, and that sexual assault cases are best handled in courts of law. Still, as conservatives resist efforts to redefine rape along the lines Catharine MacKinnon would like, it’s important they don’t ignore the cultural developments that have given these efforts so much momentum. As we’ve argued before, the “liberated” sex scene that exists on college campuses seems to work out much better for frat boys than for everyone else, and measures like affirmative consent, clumsy and clunky as they are, are in part an understandable reaction to a heavily tilted (and often quite ugly) sexual landscape. So conservatives pushing the Safe Campus Act should aim not to be champions of the frat boys, but as champions pragmatism, liberty, and the belief that people can change their culture without heavy-handed intervention from the authorities.

Watch the upcoming battle over the Safe Campus Act closely. It’s about more than reporting technicalities; it’s about an ongoing culture war that will resonate for a generation.

Greens Push UK Power Grid to Brink of Collapse

British grid operator National Grid made history this week when it was forced to ask some of its largest electricity consumers to decrease their usage to help cope with a spate of power outages. The FT reports:

National Grid urged a group of heavy users, including businesses, factories and hospitals, to switch to back-up power or to reduce demand to meet the sudden lack of supply. Consumers responded by taking 40 megawatts of demand off the grid — partly by switching to back-up generators. […]

The measures highlighted the tightness of the margin between supply and demand in the UK, where old power plants have in the past decade been taken off the grid but not replaced quickly with alternatives. Coal-fired plants are being closed at a rapid pace, ahead of a 2023 deadline for compliance with new EU rules on air quality.

This is the sort of problem that will naturally arise in any country that tries to rush through a transition towards cleaner, greener energy sources. In the case of the UK, the shuttering of coal-fired power plants, a dirty but consistent source of baseload power, has decreased the country’s generating capacity enough that unforeseen outages can have wide-reaching, destabilizing effects on the grid.

If greens had their way, countries would follow the example of Germany’s energiewende and relentlessly pursue the deployment of renewables, regardless of the (considerable) cost. But leaving aside the higher power bills such a policy inevitably brings about, it can also undermine the stability of the grid delivering that power. Wind and solar producers can only contribute intermittently, which is a tough quality to square with the most important demand of any power grid: consistency.There’s a real, tangible danger in being snookered by the policy advice of shallow-thinking greens. Britain can’t shutter its fleet of coal-fired power plants without bringing on baseload replacements capable of making a similar sort of round-the-clock supply contributions, and installing more wind turbines and solar panels isn’t the answer.

We’re Just Months Away From Iran’s Flood of Oil

New supplies of Iranian oil are set to come online next year at a time when the market is already fairly flooded with crude. When sanctions are lifted as part of the recent nuclear deal with the West, Tehran expects to ramp up production as quickly as possible, but it will be doing so at a time when supply is already far ahead of demand. Bloomberg profiles Iran’s post-deal oil prospects, as well as the effects the new oil will have globally:

[Iranian oil minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh] has repeatedly said Tehran would increase its production by 1 million barrels a day within weeks of the end of the sanctions, expected to be lifted sometime during the first half of 2016. The IEA estimates that within six months of sanctions ending, Tehran could bring daily production to 3.6 million barrels—or about 800,000 barrels a day above current production. That would mark Iran’s highest level of crude output since 2011. […]

Whatever Iran is able to produce next year, much of its crude could end up in Southern Europe, as Iran aims to regain customers it lost in France, Italy, and Greece. After sanctions forced European countries to stop buying from Iran, Southern Europe turned to Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Iraq as its main suppliers. Analysts say that to take back market share, Iran will have to offer customers cheaper crude than the Saudis and Russians. […]Zanganeh, Iran’s oil minister, has a message to the rest of the energy world: “Our only responsibility here is attaining our lost share of the market, not protecting prices.”

Whether it’s 500,000 barrels per day (bpd), 800,000, or even 1 million as Iran has predicted, those barrels will contribute to a global supply that already exceeds demand by nearly 2 million bpd. Some of that is already built in to the current price of oil, but depending on how much more oil Tehran is able to sell—and how quickly it manages to do so—we could see oil prices drop further than their already low sub-$50 per barrel levels.

This is excellent news if you’re buying oil—but if you’re a producer, it’s the sort of thing that will keep you awake at night. American shale producers, who are working relatively high-cost fields, are finding ways to streamline processes and innovate new techniques to keep output up even at today’s bargain prices, but those companies won’t relish the further shrinking of already extraordinarily narrow margins. For petrostates, the problem is even more pronounced, as their state budgets and national solvency depend by and large on revenues generated by selling oil. Many of these regimes increased state spending in the wake of the Arab spring as a way of placating a restive populace, and any budget cuts could have a destabilizing effect.One option would be to cut production and correct the oversupply—historically the strategy of OPEC—but this time around the Saudis don’t seem willing to make that sacrifice for the good of the world’s petrostates—and none of the cartel’s other members can realistically afford to restrict production enough to induce a significant price rebound. Iran, an OPEC member, seems unconcerned by the depressive effect its new supplies will have on prices, and is instead projecting a “make room for us” sort of attitude. If 2015 was a bad year for the global oil market, 2016 promises to be even worse.

Unfinished Business from the Iran Nuclear Debate

Remember the Iran nuclear agreement? Two months ago, it was the talk of the town. Then, like the national obsession with the Chandra Levy murder that faded away the moment al-Qaeda crashed airplanes into the Twin Towers, it vanished virtually overnight—no more headlines, no more op-eds, no more talk shows. The big difference is that the open questions surrounding the Iran deal remain matters of strategic importance.

Indeed, as the clock ticks toward implementation of the nuclear agreement, the task of clarifying issues of enforcement, deterrence, and U.S. regional policy is more urgent than ever. This is not least because Iran’s actions since the deal’s approval suggest Tehran views the accord not as the pathway to responsible regional behavior but as a license to expand influence, fuel instability, and make trouble for America and its local allies.While next week’s visit to Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be an opportunity to bring to a close an especially bitter chapter in U.S.-Israel relations, it might also herald—if only briefly—a return to center stage of policy debate on aspects of the Iran nuclear agreement (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA). One way to organize these issues is to take a closer look at the President’s little-examined correspondence with key legislators on the Iran deal.Saying No, PolitelyDuring the course of the Iran debate, President Obama met with dozens of Senators and Representatives, often in one-on-one meetings. Few details of these or other White House meetings with concerned legislators have emerged, though stories circulate about the hardball politics that kept all but four Democrats in the Senate and 25 in the House from flouting party discipline and voting to disapprove the Iran agreement. (Technically, no actual Senate vote was taken on the deal itself; the closest was a cloture vote that failed.) Along the way, the President deemed it necessary (or at least politically expedient) to respond to at least three Democratic legislators—New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler (August 20); Delaware Senator Chris Coons (September 1); and Oregon Senator Ron Wyden (September 7)—with detailed written responses to questions and concerns.The most noteworthy aspect of these three letters is what they do not include—namely, any specific commitments beyond the letter of the Iran deal text. While virtually every substantive critique of, or proposed improvement to, the Iran deal is addressed in these letters, each one was summarily dismissed or sidestepped through language that has the whiff of resolve without actually making any specific commitments beyond the narrow wording of the JCPOA text.This, by itself, is not surprising; the goal of the correspondence was to secure legislators’ support without paying for it in the coin of policy concession. But the arguments the President chose to make—or, in some cases, not to make—and the differences among the letters offer some revealing insight into the Administration’s approach on key issues.On Deterrence and the “Sunset” ProvisionsThroughout the Iran debate, numerous legislators cited the “sunset” problem: what happens when various limitations on Iran’s nuclear activities expire. They called on President Obama to bolster U.S. deterrence by declaring as U.S. policy the intent to use military force in response to clear and verifiable effort by Iran to break out toward a nuclear weapon. In his various letters, the President addressed the issue but only in descriptive terms; he specifically did not adopt the definitive declaratory language legislators sought.To Nadler and Wyden, he used exactly the same formulation: “Should Iran seek to dash toward a nuclear weapon, all of the options available to the United States—including the military option—will remain available through the life of the deal and beyond.” This sentence may be analytically accurate but it falls far short of making any commitment to act even in event of an Iranian “dash” toward a bomb, begging the question “if not then, when?”If the President’s minimalist formulation—no stronger after the deal than in the years before—was designed to bolster U.S. deterrence, it is difficult to see how it achieved its goal. In that sense, the formulation is of a piece with certain U.S. actions taken since the deal’s approval, such as the removal of the lone U.S. aircraft carrier from the Gulf and the deployment of fewer than fifty U.S. Special Forces troops to the anti-ISIS fight in Syria, which—in regional eyes—doesn’t begin to match up against the arrival in that country of thousands of Russian and Iranian personnel. While actions speak louder than words, the combination of words and actions speaks loudest of all.On Pushing Back Against Iran Throughout the Middle EastAn issue that dominated legislative debate on the JCPOA was the fear that the strategic environment fostered by the deal—and sanctions relief, in particular—would fuel Iran’s nefarious regional behavior and that the United States needed to adopt a more aggressive and robust regional policy to push back against Iranian advances. Here, too, the President’s letters reflect a pattern of acknowledging the congressional concern but deflecting it with general promises to “do more.” As he wrote Coons: “We must always strive to be more effective in countering Iran’s asymmetric threat to the region, particularly as Iran does gain access to more resources over time.” That is an echo of what he wrote Nadler: “It is imperative that … we take steps to ensure we and our allies and partners are more capable than ever to deal with Iran’s destabilizing activities and support for terrorism.”Interestingly, in the Nadler letter, the President went on to emphasize the continued enforcement of non-nuclear sanctions as a way to counter Iran’s regional activities. However, the formulation the President employed was particularly weak and offered no commitment to act: “I made sure the United States reserved its right to maintain and enforce existing sanctions….” By the Coons letter 11 days later, the President had a much more robust response, citing efforts to interdict Iranian weapons transfers, countering cyberattacks, and training the special forces of local partners. And instead of just reserving the right to enforce sanctions, the President stated to Coons, “I have made clear we will maintain and enforce existing sanctions.” But it is important to place this rhetorical shift in a broader perspective; moving from tepid support for maintaining the status quo to enthusiastic support of the status quo, welcome as it is, adds nothing new to the effort to push back against Iran’s negative behavior.On Penalties and ConsequencesThroughout the Iran debate, the JCPOA’s lack of specific discussion of penalties for Iranian violations—other than “snapback”—was frequently cited by legislators as a source of concern. In none of his letters does President Obama state that the United States has already worked out detailed arrangements with our European allies to impose calibrated punishments for small- and medium-sized violations. Instead, as he wrote to Wyden and Coons, the Europeans have “conveyed to us that they stand ready to re-impose European Union sanctions in a calibrated manner as appropriate.” Standing ready, of course, is not the same of committing to take specific action. The fact that President Obama had to add his own assurance that “I have no doubt that our European allies will stand with us if Iran fails to meet its JCPOA commitments” only had the effect of confirming such doubts.In the Nadler and Wyden letters, the President added a tactical rationale for why it doesn’t even make sense to work out a matrix of specific penalties for specific violations: “Ultimately it is essential that we retain the flexibility to decide what responsive measures we and our allies deem appropriate for any non-compliance.” (In the Nadler letter, the President even suggested that such detailed advance planning may be “counterproductive” in that it may “lessen the deterrent effect” of penalties by “telegraphing” them in advance. That line of argument—which makes an asset out of what may be a lack of consensus among the Euro-allies on the issue—was not repeated in the later Coons or Wyden letters.)To be sure, should the Administration want to pursue a solution to the “telegraphing” problem, there are numerous ways to address the President’s concern for “tactical flexibility” while still correcting the JCPOA’s silence on the issue of calibrated penalties for less-than-massive violations. For example, Washington and its Euro-allies could issue a public statement outlining the broad categories of potential violations and the broad categories of potential penalties, so that there is greater clarity but a more manageable risk of Iran’s “gaming the system.” At the same time, the Administration could provide the chairmen/ranking members of the relevant congressional committees with the details of the U.S.-European agreement on incremental penalties for purposes of oversight. Of course, such a solution requires the existence of a detailed, written U.S.-European agreement on the issue, evidence of which is not apparent.On Israel’s Deterrence and the MOPA related issue concerned Israel—specifically, the importance of ensuring that Israel has at its disposal the most effective independent conventional deterrent capability to forestall Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions. To some legislators, that translated into the idea that the United States should offer to transfer to Israel the massive ordnance penetrator (MOP) and appropriate delivery aircraft (or the use of such aircraft). The point here is that offering Israel the MOP is not compensation to Israel for having to swallow the JCPOA but that it is important to America’s overall deterrence posture that Israel has its own independent deterrent capability.Here, too, President Obama addressed the issue, if obliquely, in each of his letters. In the Nadler letter, the President began a recitation of “state-of-the-art” munitions to be delivered to Israel with the “BLU-113 super penetrator,” which—along with other items—he said would give Israel “access to the most sophisticated arsenal for years to come.” This was a bit of legerdemain, given that the bunker-busting “super penetrator” is, by a factor of ten, less “super” than the mountain-busting “massive penetrator.” By its absence of from the list of items being provided to Israel, Obama was implicitly responding “no” to the MOP proposal. In the subsequent Coons letter, the President makes passing reference to “penetrating munitions,” but there is no special emphasis on the variety or the quality. Perhaps this reflected recognition that focusing too heavily on what was being provided only invited scrutiny of what was not being provided.While there are admittedly technical issues concerning the MOP proposal, to a certain extent the issue reflects a larger concern—whether it is possible to rebuild strategic confidence between the United States and Israel (or, to put it more narrowly and probably more accurately, between the Obama Administration and the Netanyahu-led government) after the bruising experience of the Iran deal debate. This goes beyond the dollars and cents issue of negotiating a new Memorandum of Understanding on long-term U.S. military assistance to Israel, which the President noted in his letters he was prepared to do. Obama hinted at the truly important business he and Netanyahu have to address together when, in the Coons letter, he noted that he hoped “the Israeli government will soon be ready to … engag[e] in discussions to bolster the effectiveness of Israel’s conventional deterrent.” If the two leaders can launch a post-Iran deal discussion on regional deterrence against common threats—a very big “if,” given the scars of the past year and the lack of confidence the two sides still have in the other’s bona fides—that would be a major step in the right direction.Reading Between the LinesTaken together, the Obama letters were essentially feel-good exercises that gave the relevant legislator the benefit of saying he elicited a serious response from the President on critical issues without actually getting much in the way of substance. But there may be more to these letters than just this. A close look is revealing in other respects.Unilateral action in response to Iranian violation? In the Wyden letter, President Obama raised an intriguing, if somewhat convoluted, proposition: that the United States could respond to “non-compliance issues by Iran” with “a range of more incremental options,” such as re-imposing certain U.S. sanctions or withholding approval of sensitive nuclear-related transfers under JCPOA’s procurement channel.While this formulation sounds muscular, it begs the question: If the United States invested so much effort to create a Joint Commission of JCPOA endorsers that would ensure collective enforcement of the Iran deal, to develop what the President claims to be deep U.S.-European partnership toward that end and to secure a UN Security Council resolution endowing the agreement with international legality, then under what circumstances would the United States act unilaterally? It is unclear whether the President raised the specter of unilateral re-imposition of certain sanctions as an alternative to collective action or in the event the Joint Commission fails to decide in support of a U.S. accusation of Iranian violation. Both of these scenarios are deeply problematic.The possibility of new sanctions? As noted above, the general thrust of the Obama correspondence with legislators was to avoid any commitments to specific action that might bind this or any future administration. At the most, the President promised doing more of the same; sometimes even the President’s promise to maintain existing policy was grudging and hesitant.But there is an exception. Given the discipline with which the President maintained this restrained approach, one sentence in the Coons letter stands out: After promising continued enforcement of existing sanctions for terrorism, human rights, and Iran’s destabilizing activities, the President added: “We are also prepared to deploy new sanctions to address these continuing concerns if and when circumstances warrant.” (Emphasis added)That is the only sentence in any of the letters that specifically notes the possibility of new sanctions. This too begs a question: Precisely what circumstances would warrant new sanctions? What “bad behavior” would Iran have to commit to trigger new sanctions?In just the past few weeks, Iran has committed at least two brazen acts in direct violation of UN Security Council resolutions that should merit consideration for new sanctions: the test-firing of a ballistic missile and the deployment of its armed troops to Syria fight alongside Bashar al-Assad’s forces. Neither, however, has sparked much debate in Washington on potential countering measures. (However destabilizing and problematic Russia’s military deployment in Syria may be, it does not appear to violate a UNSC prohibition, while Iran’s actions in Syria are a direct violation of UNSCR 2231.)While it is difficult to imagine the Obama Administration adding new sanctions to Iran at a time when it is inviting Iran to Syrian peace talks and encouraging its implementation of the JCPOA obligations, the President’s statement provides an opening for a useful debate: If these blatant acts don’t merit additional sanctions, what would? Given how advantageous the Iran agreement is to Tehran—including the early and total relief from nuclear-related sanctions—the commonly accepted argument that Iran would use the imposition of new targeted sanctions to void the accord is, to say the least, open to debate.The Need for Clarity, NowIn sum, all these issues—from those the President directly discussed to those he mentioned obliquely or only in passing—have potentially huge implication for the implementation of the JCPOA and, more broadly, for how the Administration addresses Middle East security, both in the balance of the President’s term and beyond. Getting clarity on these issues now—in the months before Iran completes its “core requirements” and the JCPOA endorsers terminate or waive nuclear-related sanctions—is essential.So far, Senators and Representatives who expressed skepticism about the deal—both those who opposed it and, especially, those who ultimately supported it—have by and large chosen not to press these issues. Instead, they are focusing on long-term oversight and Administration reporting requirements. While important, those “process” issues don’t touch on the big picture: Key policies and precedents about JCPOA implementation and its impact on U.S. strategic posture in the broader Middle East are being set now. Addressing the unfinished business of the Iran deal—correcting the flaws, filling the holes, and solving the problems it raised—is urgent if the United States is to avoid shackling itself to problematic policies and troubling precedents for years to come.

Malaysian DM Joins SecDef Carter in China Rebuke

Last week’s freedom of navigation exercises seem to be bearing fruit: Secretary of Defense Ash Carter today was joined Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier stationed in the South China Sea. Reuters:

China claims most of the South China Sea, through which more than $5 trillion in global trade passes every year. Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan have rival claims.

“Being here on the Theodore Roosevelt in the South China Sea is a symbol and signifies the stabilizing presence that the United States has had in this part of the world for decades,” Carter told reporters as the carrier sailed about 150 to 200 nautical miles from the southern tip of the Spratlys and about 70 nautical miles north of Malaysia.Asked about the significance of his visit at such a time, he said: “If it’s being noted today in a special way, it’s because of the tension in this part of the world, mostly arising from disputes over land features in the South China Sea, and most of the activity over the last year being perpetrated by China.”

Malaysia has been pretty strongly opposed to China’s behavior in the South China Sea, but such a high-level photo op (particularly following the collapse of the ASEAN talks) is an important gesture from a country that typically walks a fine line between China (its largest trading partner) and the United States. Despite some fears that the U.S. could no longer project power as it used to, standing up to China seems to be playing well in the region so far.