Trump’s love fest with Xi

S P SETH

Was there really a grand strategy behind Trump’s 12 days Asia tour? Doesn’t look like there was one and none seemed to unfold as Trump moved from one country to another that was on his itinerary. North Korea appears to hog much of Trump’s attention since he has come to power. He can’t believe that despite all his threats to annihilate the ‘Little Rocket Man’, his regime and his country, Kim Jung-un still seems unbowed. The US has sent three aircraft carrier groups towards North Korean waters for naval exercises, which Kim would regard as an existential threat. And Trump told Kim in a direct message that, “The weapons you are acquiring are not making you safer, they are putting your regime in grave danger. Every step you take down this dark path increases the peril you face.”  Against this backdrop, he reportedly told Kim come to the table to “make a deal.”

But the question is: what sort of a deal? Short of renouncing nuclear weapons, there is no deal. Trump said, “We will offer a path to a much better future. It begins with an end of the aggression of your regime, a stop to the development of your ballistic missiles and complete, verifiable and total denuclearization.” There is no indication that Pyongyang is inclined to come to the table for such a deal. As President Vladimir Putin has reportedly said that they (North Korea) would rather eat grass than abandon their nuclear weapons.

However, Trump believes that China can deliver the goods here if it were to cut off all economic ties with North Korea, with no money for their nuclear weapons program and for almost anything else. Which will mean two things. First, the Kim Jung-un regime will collapse creating chaos and a flood of refugees streaming into China. Second, a state of non-governance will create, over time, prospects of unification with South Korea, thus creating conditions for US military presence near China’s border by virtue of Seoul’s security alliance with Washington.

Beijing is not prepared to go that far, though it has lately tightened its sanctions against North under the UN Security Council resolutions. Which has encouraged Trump that a combination of flattery and in the larger context of US-China relations, Beijing might be prepared to go the extra mile to tell Kim that he has run out of options and his nuclear threat, though catastrophic if it were to materialize, will also be self destructive.

During his China visit, Trump described his official meeting with Xi as “excellent… discussing North Korea—and I do believe there is a solution to that—as you [Xi] do”, but it was left ambiguous what the solution might be. Trump, though, thanked China for cutting all banking ties with the rogue regime.

In a larger context, Trump is offering China a shared role with the US to manage world affairs. Until Trump became President, this was something the US was not prepared to confer on China. China was at best a regional leader and even there its role was not unfettered. The US was insisting on freedom of navigation through South China Sea. And now Donald Trump says his “great chemistry” with Xi would lead two men to solving “world problems of great danger.”  And for added emphasis, Trump said, “ I believe we can solve almost of them [problems] and probably all of them.”

As for China’ currency manipulation and its burgeoning surpluses with the US, he generously absolved China of any blame, saying that they were doing what any country would do, which is to maximize its advantage, made possible by the incompetence of the past US administrations. Talking of the “shocking” China trade imbalance, he said, “It is too bad that past administrations have allowed it to get so far out of kilter. But we will make it fair and it will be tremendous for both of us.” Apparently, as a start, about $250 billion worth of trade memorandum were signed with Chinese companies, which do not translate into actual contracts.

At the same time, Trump has virtually gone quiet on the issue of South China Sea islands, which China has claimed as its own and built military structures on them to defend its sovereignty, even though this sovereignty is contested by some regional countries. But most are now making accommodation with China with its growing economic, military and political power, as they see the United States’ power waning. China couldn’t have hoped for a better President in Trump from the viewpoint of maximizing their regional and global role.

Even though Trump has talked up his “great chemistry” with Xi Jinping, nothing substantial has moved on any of the issues that have plagued US-China relationship, be it the question of South China Sea and/or massive trade imbalance in China’s favour.

And in the larger global context, as Antony J. Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state during the Obama administration, has written in the New York Times: “ … if the Trump-led retreat into nationalism, protectionism, unilateralism and xenophobia continues, China’s model could carry the day.”

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Trump and Iran nuclear deal?

S P SETH

As if the crisis around North Korea’s nuclear program weren’t enough to keep people worried about the state of the world, Trump has raised the stakes even further by refusing to certify the 2015 deal between Iran and six world powers that include five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany. Broadly speaking, under the deal, Iran undertook to wind back its nuclear program for 10 to 15 years and, in return, it was given a reprieve from wide-ranging international sanctions. Has the deal worked?  The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is charged with overseeing it, has certified eight times that Iran is scrupulously adhering to it.

In a book review on the subject in The New York Review of Books, Jessica T. Mathews, a Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, gives a detailed and comprehensive account of Iran’s compliance. According to her: “Since the deal was concluded in 2015, Iran has gotten rid of all of its highly enriched uranium. It has also eliminated 98 per cent of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium, leaving only three hundred kilograms, less than the amount needed to fuel one weapon if taken to high enrichment.”

She goes on: “The number of centrifuges maintained for uranium enrichment is down from 19,000 to 6,000… Continuing enrichment is limited to 3.67 per cent, the accepted level for reactor fuel… Iran has disabled and poured concrete into the core of its plutonium reactor--- thus shutting down the plutonium as well as the uranium route to nuclear weapons…” And is complying with all the provisions regarding supervision by IAEA inspections.

What then is the problem? Trump believes, Tehran is not complying with the spirit of the agreement. In any case, Iran will cheat on it. But the fact is it hasn’t happened and is most unlikely under the strict supervision from IAEA. The deal with Iran is also said to be really bad because it doesn’t cover its other alleged sins like support for terrorism, involvement in the Syrian conflict on behalf of the Bashar regime, aiding and abetting the Hezbollah movement and so on. In other words, Iran is said to be destabilizing the Middle East.

There are two main real reasons why Trump wants to repudiate the Iran deal, even though it is a multilateral agreement. First and the foremost is that he is doing it because he had, more or less, promised the Netanyahu government in Israel that it would be his priority.

There were reports in September 2010 that Israel was on the verge of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, as it feared that Tehran was on the point of reaching a technical “point of no return” in pursuit of a nuclear weapon within a few months.

Which led the Obama administration over time to explore a way out lest the US, as Israeli’s ally, is dragged into an inferno in a region that was already over-heated. As the US and Iran had no contacts for some decades, it was not surprising that it took time for the whole process of establishing initial contacts that led to the 2015 nuclear deal. Besides, it was done in the midst of strong opposition from the Netanyahu government and its political allies in the US. And in this, the US’ most loyal Arab ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, was as opposed to a nuclear deal with Iran as was Israel, pursuing their independent political and strategic interests.

There was a growing belief in Israel and Saudi Arabia that the strong international sanctions’ regime against Iran was biting badly and might bring down the regime sooner rather than later. And that explained serious political tensions at the time between the Obama administration and its respective allies in Israel and Saudi Arabia over the issue. The turnaround in the relationship under Trump is indicative of a sigh of relief in both Tel Aviv and Riyadh, hoping that it would once again turn Iran into a pariah state seriously damaging it economically and politically. But if the intention is to renegotiate the Iranian nuclear deal to dictate its politics and foreign policy, which seems to be the case, Tehran has already rejected that.

The second reason is that Trump is playing internal politics on the issue by leaving the onus on the Congress to fix it or reject it in 60 days. If not, it will be terminated.

There is one problem, though. The 2015 deal is a multilateral agreement in which the US is only one party and its other signatories, that include Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany, are for upholding it as Iran is observing its provisions, as certified by the IAEA. It is still not clear how other parties to the agreement will act if the US were to nullify it and impose sanctions on Iran. Will they ignore potential American threat of sanctioning their own banks and institutions, if they continued their economic relationship with Iran? Or will Iran go back to its nuclear program once the US decertifies the deal?  Which will lead to the situation as it existed before the 2015 nuclear deal, and that will simply mean further disaster in an already explosive region.

As Wendy Sherman, the lead US negotiator for the Iranian deal under the Obama administration, has reportedly said, “How could it possibly be in our national interest to risk Iran resuming its ambitions for nuclear weapons? How does that improve our security?” But like many other things in Trump’s kingdom, this too is inexplicable.

Note: This article first appeared in the Daily Times.

It’s a chaotic world

S P SETH

The western democracies are in a bit of a muddle, bordering sometimes on panic.   The 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US seemed to come out of nowhere, and any intelligence about it was ignored/lost as nothing like this had happened before. Not surprisingly, the US response was both instant and chaotic. At one level, with all the power at its disposal, it mounted an attack on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, where its mastermind, Osama bin-Laden, was their houseguest. And not surprisingly, the US prevailed, with Taliban and the al-Qaeda on the run.

Even as Afghanistan crumbled, the US looked elsewhere for a deeper conspiracy. And they came to see it in a Saddam Hussein-ruled Iraq imagining a spurious al-Qaeda connection and possession of weapons of mass destruction. Which led to the US invasion of Iraq. As we now know that there was no al-Qaeda connection and no weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration wanted to dominate and control the Middle East, starting with Iraq. Iraq was to be made an example that whoever stood in the US way would face the same fate. But it didn’t work, as is evident from the continuing chaos and disaster in the Middle East.

The continuance of chaos is one aspect of the terrorist threat. Another aspect is the political impact within western societies, where one country after the other has sought to pass legislation to curtail aspects of its citizens’ freedom to deal with the terrorist threat. The question here is not whether these measures are necessary to create a right balance between security and freedom. Which is for each affected country to decide. But its cumulative effect has been a growing sense of fear and insecurity, sometime creating an impression that there might be a terrorist lurking around every street corner. The specter of a ‘lone wolf’ terrorist is an example of this, making many Muslims as suspect.

While terrorism appears, at times, to have become an all-consuming concern, it has also overlapped with and/or accentuated by a seemingly uncontrolled political eruption in some Middle Eastern countries. First, christened hopefully as the Arab Spring, it later degenerated into chaos and disaster that appears to have no solution or end, as in Syria and Yemen. And the interaction between it and an even messier version of terrorism represented by IS is there for us all to see. The US-led coalition to contain/destroy al-Qaeda terrorism and its more sinister version, IS, is consuming the resources of these countries with apparently no end in sight. The military successes against the IS in itself-declared caliphate is not making the situation significantly better.

This continuing war against terrorism over the last 15 or so years has had a damaging effect on the economies of western countries, and is continuing to do so. Even as they were grappling with the political, security and economic dimensions of a prolonged war-like situation in terms of terrorism and chaos in the Middle East, the world was hit by a global financial crisis (2007-8), considered the second worse since the 1930s Great Depression, caused largely by unregulated and rampant capitalism.

Until recently, this version of capitalism was considered a model for international economic development. Its eruption tended to upend the economic security of many people in western societies, with increased unemployment, falling/stagnant incomes and a growing sense of frustration and disillusionment with their institutions and generally with things around them.

This is reflected particularly in the loss of trust with the governing elites who are seen by many people as self-seeking, untrustworthy and incapable of working for the general good. Many people feel that they have lost control of their destiny and their country, with no one now to turn to rectify the situation. Among other reasons for this situation, many people in the west blame globalization as a critical factor. Globalization is no longer seen as working for the common man in western societies. It is blamed for destroying jobs in the manufacturing sector, with western companies setting up shop in China, particularly, to take advantage of cheap labour, unconstrained by restrictive labour laws and trade unions.

The global financial crisis led many people to turn to populism as the solution to their problems. Brexit is an example of it, with the Brits voting to wrest control of their affairs by voting to quit European Union. In all this, there is this fear of the “other” like, among other things, the immigrants. And when these immigrants/refugees are from Muslim countries, it is also overlaid with the fear of terrorism.

While Britain is wrestling with Brexit, with Theresa May’s grip on power shaky, the US threw up the phenomena of Trumpism, with Donald Trump elected as the US president. And he is all the time trying to stir up popular passions of his countrymen against all and sundry considered hostile to the US, both within and outside the country. We find this against Muslims, Mexicans, crisis around North Korea, threat of a trade war with China and stirring up racism within the country, the latest example being targeting of football players who have been kneeling during the playing of national anthem to protest against attacks on Afro Americans, their exclusion and denial of justice.

Not surprisingly that with so much and so many in Europe and the US wanting to turn inward, the world is looking even a more dangerous place than ever. This is because most of the fears and problems that plague the world have global dimensions requiring global solutions.  

        

Trump versus Kim

S P SETH

The situation on the Korean peninsula is becoming scarier by the day. If it were not that serious, it might make one chuckle at times. Trump, for instance, calling the North Korean leader “Little Rocket Man” for his testing of ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs, the last one said to have been a hydrogen bomb. Trump has also dubbed the North Korean leader a “mad man”, while Kim Jung-un has called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.”  And to further reinforce the insult, Kim reportedly also called Trump “a mentally deranged person full of megalomania and complacency” who is trying to turn the United Nations into a “gangsters’ nest”, apparently for imposing all sorts of sanctions against North Korea.

This kind of schoolyard bullying might be ignored but for the fact that both the leaders are threatening to destroy the other side. North Korea has said that targeting the US with its rockets was “inevitable”, as the US Air Force bombers flew over waters close to the North Korean coast in a show of force, which further rattled Pyongyang threatening to shoot US planes even in international space near their coast. Pyongyang has also threatened to test a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific. On the US side, Trump has tweeted that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “won’t be around much longer”, thus threatening the regime and the country with oblivion.

North Korea’s foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, has commented that Trump himself was on a “suicide mission”, after the US President said the North Korean leader was on such a mission. And Trump tweeting that, “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely.” There is always this caveat that either party will be reacting to the madness of the other side.

But the big question is how to interpret when rhetoric has ceased to be rhetoric and is about to enter the realm of reality? One thing is clear, though, that both the United States and North Korea are in a state of readiness for some sort of a military conflict, if and when it eventuates. And South Korea seems on a war footing too to face any attack from its neighbour.  Speaking on South Korea’s Armed Forces Day, President Moon Jae-in reportedly said that his government was accelerating work on three fronts: a pre-emptive strike system known as Kill Chain that would target North Korean missile sites; an air and missile defence system; and a program devised to launch devastating strikes against North Korea’s military and political leadership. And then there is of course the massive US military presence in the country.

However, even without a nuclear breakout, South Korea’s capital, Seoul, with its population of about 10 million is within the easy artillery range of North Korea. The escalatory rhetoric and military preparations on both sides have the potential of creating a momentum of its own, even when it is all clear that a war over the Korean peninsula will have devastating consequences that might not remain confined simply to that country and the region.

There have been contradictory messages from the US side, with Trump going for the kill rhetoric while some of his cabinet trying, at times, to be reassuring to Pyongyang. For instance, while Trump was sending the “locked and loaded” for action message if Pyongyang continued its provocations, his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and Secretary of Defence, Mattis, penned a joint op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, which sought to calm things down a bit. They wrote, “The US has no interest in regime change or accelerated reunification of Korea”.

In his recent China trip, Secretary Tillerson reportedly said that the US was in direct contact—without specifying its precise nature—to explore a diplomatic route, even though his boss, President Trump, immediately countermanded his peace initiative. Trump told his Secretary of State via twitter: “…that he is wasting his time in trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.” And he added ominously, “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done.”

Despite such warlike rhetoric, the US is still relying on China to produce the desired results. Beijing lately has ratcheted up the pressure by the intensity and scope of its sanctions to dry up North Korea’s economic capacity to pursue its nuclear ambitions. But going by the past experience of sanctions and whatever else, Pyongyang, though, seems determined not to give up its nuclear course and; if Russian President, Vladimir Putin is right, as he reportedly said recently, North Korea would rather eat grass rather than accept denuclearization.

And that is also the considered view of James Clapper, the former director of the US National Intelligence. In a long article titled, On the Brink, the New Yorker’s reporter Evan Osnos, quotes James Clapper, who visited Pyongyang in 2014, as telling him that, “The North Koreans are not going to give up their nuclear weapons. It’s a non-starter.” Clapper added, “Whether it’s pressuring, threatening, negotiating, or trying to leverage China, everybody’s tried all of that--- and it’s not working.”

Apparently, short of a preventive strike on North Korea to destroy its nuclear sites and weapons and kill its leadership with all its horrible consequences, there is now a dangerous eye-for-an-eye stalemate of sorts on the Korean peninsula.

Note: This article first appeared in the Daily Times

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au