The President is mending fences with Cuba, something that he had promised to do when he was campaigning back in 2008. Now, he must do more. He must mend fences with Venezuela, who is not a clear and present danger to the US. He must continue to mend fences with Iran, despite any efforts of certain politicians to undermine the preliminary deal. And he must mend fences with Russia; if we do not, then we risk World War III and a nuclear confrontation that will result in millions of civilian casualties and dwarf the kind of damage that we did in Iraq. In short, he must live up to the standard set when he won the Nobel Peace Prize back in 2009.
One of the reasons that we had trouble building up goodwill in our own backyard throughout Obama's administration was the fact that we were refusing to extend ties to Cuba. Another was our propensity for fomenting coups, noted in the NYT article:
Latin America’s often wary eye on the United States goes back even to what historians consider a precursor to today’s regional summit meetings, a congress the South American independence hero Simón Bolivar called in Panama in 1826 among a handful of newly independent countries.
They were suspicious of the United States then and of whether, after throwing off the influence of Spain, the new nations would have to contend with a new dominant power.
Periodic American intervention, coup orchestrations and outright invasions followed and heightened the region’s sensitivity to sovereignty, which continues to this day and often trumps all other concerns.
Based on this, if we reverse almost 200 years of ill-will, we will develop our economy much more than Obama ever dreamed of doing with his TPP, which is being written by and for large multinational corporations and which would undo 40 years of efforts by both Democratic and Republican administrations to protect our environment. Right now, politicians in Latin America are using American imperialism as an excuse to justify human rights violations. If we reverse 200 years of this, then we will remove the grounds that they have for that.
Case in point -- Venezuela. The US rightly walked back remarks that claimed that country was a threat to our national security and that the recent sanctions we imposed because a national emergency existed. But the US must do more -- if there is no national emergency, then the US should not impose such sanctions in the first place. And no reasonable person is arguing that. And Venezuela's opposition politicians themselves note that the sanctions have caused President Nicholas Maduro to dig in his heels and rally his troops with the threat of American imperialism.
The language escalated tensions between the two countries and provoked an angry response from President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Even Venezuelan opposition leaders said it was excessive and had inadvertently played to Mr. Maduro’s political benefit.
American officials had previously sought to play down the language in the order, saying that the administration was required by law to make the security threat designation to carry out the sanctions.
But Mr. Rhodes went further on Tuesday, explicitly stating that Venezuela did not pose a threat, adding that the language was “completely pro forma.”
So, even if Mr. Maduro's imprisonment of opposition politicians is completely unjustified from a human rights perspective, think of it from his point of view. The US already once attempted to foment a coup against Maduro's predecessor, Chavez, back in 2003. Given our past 200 year history of involvement in Latin America, a reasonable person sitting in Maduro's shoes can conclude that the US is trying again now that Chavez is dead and Maduro does not have the kind of charisma that his predecessor had. Like I noted yesterday in discussing David Brooks' column, the US should renounce regime change as an instrument of diplomacy.
In an editorial today discussing Latin America, the NYT Editorial Board notes:
The Obama administration’s decision to impose sanctions on seven Venezuelan officials last month did more to inflame Mr. Maduro’s rhetoric than to curb his government’s despotic conduct. During his private meetings and public statements in Panama, Mr. Obama can deflate Mr. Maduro’s fearmongering by reiterating that the United States is not about to carry out a coup in Caracas. More significantly, Mr. Obama can be an inspirational voice for citizens ruled by oppressive leaders.
One of the reasons for Obama stopping in Jamaica was to lay the groundwork for more wind and solar. If we can work with Latin American countries and Caribbean countries in developing wind and solar, then why can't we do the same with Iran?
Iran has a hot, dry climate, which means that they could benefit even more from solar than Latin America would.
As President Obama himself noted during his current trip to Panama, it is civil society which should be the catalyst for positive change. I submit that there is another. When we emerged from World Wars I and II, we were able to create a healthy middle class because we were insulated (for the most part) from the war and violence that took place in the rest of the world. I submit that a similar dynamic is at work in Iran -- despite all the bloodshed and violence taking part in the Middle East, Iran has been insulated in a similar manner. I submit that we should facilitate this rise of their middle class, given that they are enemies of both Al-Qaeda and ISIS and given that their civil society is strengthening to the point where someone like Rouhani can win an election. If we help facilitate the creation of a solar industry in their country, then Iran would become an effective partner against the likes of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Yesterday, David Brooks listed all the reasons why a permanent deal with Iran would fail. But Robert Gallucci and Joel Wit, two men who worked on the 1994 deal with North Korea argue today that even if a deal with Iran falls through down the road, it would still be in our national interest to do so. They note that North Korea was well on its way to producing 30 Nakasaki-type nuclear weapons a year by 2000 before President Clinton signed the 1994 deal. They say that even though the 1994 deal with North Korea ultimately fell through, it was still the right thing to do:
Although our policy ultimately failed, the agreement did not. Without the 1994 deal, North Korea would have built the bomb sooner, stockpiled weapons more quickly and amassed a much larger arsenal by now. Intelligence estimates in the early 1990s concluded that the North’s nuclear program was so advanced that it could produce 30 Nagasaki-size nuclear weapons a year by the end of the decade. More than 20 years later, that still hasn’t happened.
The collapse of the North Korea deal has been used to argue that it is impossible to conduct diplomacy with rogue states. But the only litmus test that matters is whether an agreement serves our national interest, is better than having no deal at all, and is preferable to military force. The arrangement with Iran appears to be well on its way to meeting that standard.
Gallucci and Wit note that we did not do our part after 1994 and did not keep our part of the deal -- we did not make any effort to improve relations with North Korea, and we did not lift any economic sanctions. That is why the talks about the timing of the removal of sanctions are important. If the present Iran deal does not have such a framework, then a reasonable Iranian leader might conclude that we are simply imposing our will on Iran and laying the groundwork for war like we did in Iraq, just like North Korea did after 1994. The reason that North Korea restarted their nuclear program was that they believed that we were simply trying to weaken their defenses so that we could move in and finish what we didn't complete in the Korean War.
But even North Korea is not the biggest threat to our national security. That would be the threat of a nuclear confrontation with Russia. There have been numerous accusations of a "Russian Invasion" of Ukraine since the Euromaidan protests that toppled the Ukrainian government. However, French sources are not so sure. On March 25th, General Christophe Gomart, who is the head of France's military intelligence, contradicted the Official Story (TM) when he said to the French National Assembly:
The real difficulty with NATO is that US intelligence is dominant, while the French intelligence is more or less considered - hence the importance for us to supply sufficiently commanders of the NATO French origin information. NATO announced that the Russians would invade Ukraine while according to the information of the DRM, nothing came to support this hypothesis - we had indeed found that the Russians had not deployed command or logistics, including field hospitals, to consider a military invasion and the units of second level had made no movement. Subsequently showed that we were right, because if Russian soldiers were actually seen in Ukraine, it was more of a ploy to put pressure on Ukrainian President Poroshenko as an attempted invasion.
We translated this from Google Translate, so this is garbled; however, the meaning is clear -- if the Russians have sent actual troops into Ukraine, it was done to increase leverage, not engage in a full-fledged invasion. While it is clear that Russia is fomenting aggression in East Ukraine, their involvement has been blown out of proportion. Given the fact that this has been blown out of proportion, the US should rethink its approach towards Russia. While the recent Minsk deal holds some hope of stopping the violence, France and Germany cannot become disengaged from the process like the US was following their 1994 deal with North Korea.
We cannot afford to let the crisis in Ukraine escalate into a third world war. Like the US and Iran, the US and Russia have a common enemy in the Islamic State, which the FSB (Russia's intelligence service) noted yesterday:
A senior security official has said that the threat coming from the so called Islamic State [also known as ISIS, or ISIL] was absolutely real for Russia and its neighbors.
“The threat from ISIS is real because quite a lot of citizens from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization(SCO) are taking part in its activities,” deputy director of Russia’s Federal Security Service told reporters Friday after a session of the SCO’s regional anti-terror body.
General Sergey Smirnov added that law enforcement agencies possessed information on about 1,700 Russian citizens fighting in Iraq on the side of Sunni extremists. “The danger of ISIS is also in their ability to infiltrate other terrorist groups,” he added. In particular, the terrorists have demonstrated interest in the Imarat Caucasus group and some of its leaders have already pledged loyalty to ISIS, Smirnov said.
If ISIS can infiltrate Russian extremist organizations, then what would stop them down the road from infiltrating such groups here in this country? There are risks from Staying the Course and from doing nothing. If we Stay the Course with Russia like George Bush tried to do with Iraq, then the risk we take is that tensions will escalate into a third world war and nuclear annihilation. And if we disengage with Russia, then it is only a matter of time before ISIS infiltrates into our country as well. Given the French intelligence, Obama should reevaluate the status of sanctions on Russia and focus on what the US and Russia have in common, not what divides us.