English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For January 20/2020
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

#elias_bejjani_news
 

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Bible Quotations For today

God will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
First Letter to the Corinthians 01/01-09: “Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind. just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you. so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”

 

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on January 19-20/2021

Lebanon Reports New Record High Virus Death Toll
Coronavirus: Lebanon doctors urge lockdown extension as infections spike
Everything you need to know about the COVID-19 vaccine in Lebanon
Lebanon Doctors Urge Lockdown Extension
Asmar Says Virus Death Rate is ‘Alarming’, Urges Abidance by Rules
Report: Shortage Aggravates in Baby Milk, Medicines, 300 Pharmacies Shutdown
Lebanon bank chief denies sending $400m abroad/Najia Houssari/Arab News/January 20/2021
Aoun Calls Higher Defense Council for Urgent Meeting
Lebanon Receives Swiss Request for Cooperation on Suspected Salameh Fund Transfers
STL Schedules Fifth Status Conference in Ayyash Case in February
'State of Our State': How Lebanon's Situations Got Worse in 2020
Strong Lebanon Bloc Calls on Hariri to 'Communicate' with Aoun
Hariri Stresses Need for Govt., Vows Continued Bid to Get Vaccines
Diab Pushes for Govt. Formation in Talks with Aoun, Berri, Hariri
Lebanon Returns Two Stolen 18th-Century Icons to Greece
Is Lebanon condemned to an endless drift or endless purgatory/Nathalie Goulet/Arab News/January 20/2021
Lebanon’s Maronite patriarch urges Aoun to seek reconciliation
Pro-Hezbollah journalist says party cannot continue with current ties with Iran
Govt formation awaits Aoun’s position on 'reconciliation meet' with Hariri/Hussein Dakroub/The Daily Star/January 19/2021
Lebanon: Impeach the President/Rami Rayess/Al Arabiya/Tuesday 19 January 2021

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on January 19-20/2021

Israel, Syria officials discuss removal of Iran and its militias from Syria: Report
Gulf states, Israel demand seat at Iran nuclear deal negotiations: UAE Diplomat
US not close to rejoining Iran deal, says Biden’s pick for national intelligence
Iran sanctions US President Trump, Secretary Pompeo, other American officials
US denies involvement in alleged attack on Iraq’s Baghdad: Embassy
Explosion and fire reported at oil and gas facilities in Homs, Syria: State TV
Libya's Rivals Meet in Egyptian Resort over Constitution
Trump Decorates Bahrain King on Last Full Day in Office
Qatar Calls for Gulf Talks with Iran
Kremlin Dismisses Calls to Free Navalny, Warns against Protests
UN Calls on Israel to Stop New Settlement Construction in West Bank
Blinken Says U.S. to Seek 'Longer and Stronger' Deal with Iran

 

Titles For The Latest The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on January 19-20/2021

Biden needs clear strategy to end US’ tit-for-tat approach/Nadim ShehadiI/Arab News/January 20/2021
Palestinian elections may not end the stalemate/Osama Al-Sharif /Arab News/January 20/2021
Return to Iran Nuclear Deal Would Be Unwise/Jacob Nagel/Real Clear World/January 19/2021
Memo to President Biden: Please Don’t Mess Up the Abraham Accords/Bret Stephens/Commentary Magazine/January 19/2021
Iran jails U.S. businessman, possibly jeopardizing Biden's plans for diplomacy with Tehran/Dan De Luce/NBC/January 19/2021
Nuclear Extortion: Mullahs Want More Concessions from Biden/Majid Rafizadeh/Gatestone Institute/January 19/2021
The Pernicious Effects of Popular Nuclear Mythology/Stephen Blank and Peter Huessy/Gatestone Institute/January 19/2021

 

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on January 19-20/2021

Lebanon Reports New Record High Virus Death Toll
Naharnet/January 19/2021
Lebanon on Tuesday announced a new record high daily toll of 61 coronavirus deaths, after 53 fatalities were registered on Monday. It also recorded 4,359 fresh virus cases in a 24-period, the Health Ministry said. The new fatalities raise the overall death toll to 2,020. The fresh cases meanwhile take the country’s overall tally since February 21 to 260,315 cases -- among them 3,667 cases detected among arriving travelers and 156,984 recoveries. The country entered a strict 11-day lockdown last Thursday after recording a 70 percent uptick in infections in one of the steepest increases in transmission worldwide. Infections had skyrocketed after authorities loosened restrictions during the holiday season, allowing restaurants and nightclubs to open late, despite warnings from health professionals. Hospitals have struggled to cope with the influx of new patients, with some treating cases in cars, paediatrics units and even dining halls. The World Health Organization said Monday that the occupancy rate for intensive care beds in hospitals across Lebanon stood at 87.4 percent, down from 90.4 percent last week. Sleiman Haroun, head of the Syndicate of Private Hospitals, said Tuesday that a lockdown extension is necessary.
 

Coronavirus: Lebanon doctors urge lockdown extension as infections spike
AFP/ Beirut/Tuesday 19 January 2021
The head of Lebanon’s main coronavirus hospital Tuesday backed the extension of a total lockdown to curb soaring infection figures and save a fragile healthcare system from collapse. “Easing the lockdown cannot occur if the virus is spreading unchecked in the community,” Firas Abiad said on social media. “The infection is not under control.”The country of more than six million has recorded 255,956 coronavirus cases and 1,959 deaths since its outbreak started in February. It entered a strict 11-day lockdown last Thursday after recording a 70 percent uptick in infections in one of the steepest increases in transmission worldwide. The lockdown, which includes a round-the-clock curfew, is expected to last until January 25 but the health ministry on Monday announced a new high of 53 coronavirus deaths in a day. This came after Lebanon hit a new daily record of more than 6,000 new infections on Friday. Petra Khoury of the government’s COVID-19 taskforce told AFP that the duration of the lockdown needed to be doubled. “We need at least three weeks of total lockdown” instead of just 11 days, she said. Infections had skyrocketed after authorities loosened restrictions during the holiday season, allowing restaurants and nightclubs to open late, despite warnings from health professionals. Hospitals have struggled to cope with the influx of new patients, with some treating cases in cars, pediatrics units and even dining halls. The World Health Organization said Monday that the occupancy rate for intensive care beds in hospitals across Lebanon stood at 87.4 per cent, down from 90.4 per cent last week. Sleiman Haroun, head of the Syndicate of Private Hospitals, said a lockdown extension was necessary. “Medical cadres are worn out and I am alarmed over the large number of cases arriving in hospitals every day,” he told AFP.
 

Everything you need to know about the COVID-19 vaccine in Lebanon
Tala Ramadan, Al Arabiya English/Tuesday 19 January 2021
While governments worldwide are negotiating to acquire more vaccines or accelerating the delivery of existing orders, Lebanon only signed its first deal for 2.1 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine on Sunday. According to the Ministry of Health, the vaccine doses are due to start arriving in batches, beginning February. Lebanon finalized the agreement amid an uncontrollable surge in cases, overwhelming the country’s health care system beyond its capacity. Parliament approved a law last week to protect Pfizer-BioNtech and other companies that will provide vaccines to Lebanon from any future liability claims for two years. Given the economic crisis, how will Lebanon buy vaccines? According to caretaker Health Minister Hamad Hassan, the World Bank gave Lebanon credit to buy the doses developed by the US and German companies and, thus, "be distributed in a free and fair manner."
Head Parliament’s Health Committee, MP Assem Araji, said that Lebanon had secured a price of $18 per dose, which means that vaccinations, which require two doses per person, will cost the country $37.8 million in total.
What is the vaccination strategy going to be? Lebanon's national health authority unveiled its plan for vaccinating the public, with a first phase prioritizing healthcare workers and those over the age of 75.
The second phase will target people over the age of 50, health practitioners, and those who have asthma, diabetes, chronic heart diseases, cancer and other critical health issues. The final stage will open for all citizens and residents wanting to take the vaccine.
Will Lebanon rely on one vaccine?
Lebanon's president approved a payment to reserve 2.73 million doses of COVID vaccine under the COVAX program, enough for 1,365,000 people. Along with the 2.1 million doses from Pfizer (enough for 1,050,000 people), this would cover 2,415,000 people out of a population of approximately 6 million, including at least 1 million refugees. The Health Ministry said that another 2 million doses were being discussed with the private sector in Lebanon and other multinational pharmaceutical companies that manufacture vaccines, suggesting Oxford-Astrazeneca and China's Sinopharm. The Ministry has also reserved vaccines from US company Johnson & Johnson, awaiting its global approval. Lebanon is currently considering more vaccines from US-based Moderna and Russia’s Sputnik, with the private sector's aid. Could the decrepit electricity grid pose challenges for storage requirements? The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is highly sensitive and can only be stored at -70 degrees Celsius (-94 degrees Fahrenheit). Once thawed, it must be administered within five days, and each individual must receive two shots. During a recent interview, Hassan said Lebanon had 12 specialized freezers, each with a storage capacity of 35,000 doses. But the country's limited electricity - where even government-run hospitals rely on donations to buy fuel for their generators to back up the unreliable state grid - has raised citizens' concerns about how the government will handle availability, distribution and storage. Lebanese residents took to Twitter to question how citizens could trust the government's plan to store the vaccine. “Possessing the vaccine is one thing, but administering it is the real bottleneck," Fouad Naccache, a citizen who is anxiously waiting to get vaccinated, told Al Arabiya English.
What about herd immunity?
Heiko Wimmen, project director of the Iraq, Syria, Lebanon International Crisis Group, said that Lebanon could become the first country in the world to achieve herd immunity due to the rapid pace at which people were contracting the coronavirus. Wimmen predicted that around 500,000 people would have contracted the virus by February when the first vaccinations begin in the country. “Then the question is how fast they can scale it up, as they may find it challenging to handle the logistics of it. With the cooling requirements and the unreliable electricity supplies, it may not be possible to do it in a decentralized fashion,” Wimmen told Al Arabiya English. According to Wimmen, although no one knows how much a country needs to reach herd immunity, 40 percent could slow down the spread significantly. As the total number of coronavirus cases hit 255,956 cases at the start of the week, Lebanon, one of the hardest-hit countries in the Middle East, may face an even more dire situation in the weeks and months ahead. Deaths in the county have continued to climb as the national death toll passed 2,000 deaths on Tuesday. Hospitals have run out of room in intensive care units, though new cases and hospitalizations appear to have rolled back in recent days. The county records a coronavirus-related death roughly every hour, and last week was its highest recorded ever for coronavirus-related fatalities.
The increasing toll has added a new level of urgency to the rollout of vaccines, which has already been criticized as slow.

 

Lebanon Doctors Urge Lockdown Extension
Agence France Presse/January 19/2021
The head of Lebanon's main coronavirus hospital Tuesday backed the extension of a total lockdown to curb soaring infection figures and save a fragile healthcare system from collapse. "Easing the lockdown cannot occur if the virus is spreading unchecked in the community," Firas Abiad said on social media.
"The infection is not under control." The country of more than six million has recorded 255,956 coronavirus cases and 1,959 deaths since its outbreak started in February. It entered a strict 11-day lockdown last Thursday after recording a 70% uptick in infections in one of the steepest increases in transmission worldwide. The lockdown, which includes a round-the-clock curfew, is expected to last until January 25 but the health ministry on Monday announced a new high of 53 coronavirus deaths in a day. This came after Lebanon hit a new daily record of more than 6,000 new infections on Friday. Petra Khoury of the government's COVID-19 taskforce told AFP that the duration of the lockdown needed to be doubled. "We need at least three weeks of total lockdown" instead of just 11 days, she said. Infections had skyrocketed after authorities loosened restrictions during the holiday season, allowing restaurants and nightclubs to open late, despite warnings from health professionals. Hospitals have struggled to cope with the influx of new patients, with some treating cases in cars, paediatrics units and even dining halls. The World Health Organization said Monday that the occupancy rate for intensive care beds in hospitals across Lebanon stood at 87.4 per cent, down from 90.4 per cent last week. Sleiman Haroun, head of the Syndicate of Private Hospitals, said a lockdown extension was necessary. "Medical cadres are worn out and I am alarmed over the large number of cases arriving in hospitals every day," he told AFP.

Asmar Says Virus Death Rate is ‘Alarming’, Urges Abidance by Rules

Naharnet/January 19/2021
Spokesperson of the Lebanese Higher Defense Council Brig. Gen Mahmoud al-Asmar warned on Tuesday of the latest alarming death rate in Lebanon as the result of coronavirus, noting that a decision to extend or not the lockdown is up to the government. “The huge leap in deaths we saw yesterday as a result of coronavirus is scary, we urge Lebanese to abide by the rules and we urge security forces to be even more strict in rule application,” said Asmar in televised remarks to LBCI. Asmar said “people tend to break the rules,” but he urged full commitment in order to halt the spread of the virus, noting that efforts are ongoing to improve the lockdown procedures. “A decision to extend the lockdown or not is taken by the government,” he said. On Thursday, Lebanese authorities began enforcing an 11-day nationwide shutdown and round-the-clock curfew, hoping to blunt the spread of coronavirus infections spinning out of control after the holiday period. Asmar said: “The health situation is terrible and the hospitals are at full capacity. I urge people to abide by precautionary rules.” Lebanon on Monday reported 53 new coronavirus deaths, a new record high daily death toll for the small country.
It also registered 3,144 new virus cases in a 24-period, the Health Ministry said. The new fatalities raise the overall death toll to 1,959. The fresh cases meanwhile take the country’s overall tally since February 21 to 255,956 cases -- among them 3,657 cases detected among arriving travelers and 154,611 recoveries. “We are working seriously on the idea of creating centers in some areas to try to relieve pressure on hospitals,” added Asmar. Lebanon, a country of more than 6 million, including at least 1 million refugees, has seen a massive climb in infections since Christmas and New Year holidays. The surge has overwhelmed hospitals and the health care system.

Report: Shortage Aggravates in Baby Milk, Medicines, 300 Pharmacies Shutdown
Agence France Presse/January 19/2021
Lebanon is reeling under multiple crises including a deteriorating health sector and a shortage in medicines as a result of the exchange rate crisis, which also reflected on a shortage in infant milk formula strictly sold at pharmacies, Asharq el-Awsat reported on Tuesday. Amid concerns of lifting subsidies from the import of basic goods, Lebanese rush to store medicine and baby milk in anticipation, which, if approved, will lead to a 6-fold increase in prices, said the daily.Panic buying did not ease despite the assurances made by caretaker Health Minister Hamad Hassan and the ministerial health committee, that the government will only rationalize the prices of medicine and milk if it agreed on lifting subsidies. The scarcity of medicines also affected the availability of infant baby milk, which is restricted for sale in pharmacies. "There is a real availability crisis in infant formula which is now missing as a result of people storing it in large numbers, in addition to an approved rationing for its distribution, which is based on the consumption of each pharmacy in 2020,” Richard Khwairi, a pharmacy owner told Asharq el-Awsat. “The missing milk is mainly for babies of one year old or older, because it is not subsidized. It is more likely that the milk is being stored to be sold later at higher prices when the health ministry approves a plan,” a pediatrician who refrained from being named said in remarks to the newspaper. Ghassan al-Amin, head of the Order of Pharmacists of Lebanon, told the daily: “Today, medicine has become like a dollar for the Lebanese. The more they are able to store, the more they feel safe.”He added that “the declaration made by the Governor of the central bank some time ago that he is heading to stop the subsidy was a major cause of the crisis that made citizens stockpile,” their essential goods. Al-Amin said the pharmacies have been “placed in a confrontation with the people,” knowing they are “not to blame for the crisis. They are being subjected to daily harassment and insults, even with weapons.”He said that the obligation by the Central Bank to secure funds in cash, has “added to the crisis and led to the closure of around 300 pharmacies, the number will likely increase in the coming months,” he said. Infant baby milk, drugs for everything from diabetes and blood pressure to anti-depressants and fever pills used in COVID-19 treatment have disappeared from shelves around Lebanon. Officials and pharmacists say the shortage was exacerbated by panic buying and hoarding after the Central Bank governor said in November that with foreign reserves running low, the government won't be able to keep up subsidies, including on drugs.
 

Lebanon bank chief denies sending $400m abroad
Najia Houssari/Arab News/January 20/2021
BEIRUT: Lebanon’s central bank has denied allegations that its governor, Riad Salameh, transferred up to $400 million abroad along with his brother and an assistant. The bank’s claim follows an announcement by Swiss authorities of an investigation into money transfers by Salame. The Swiss attorney general’s office said it had requested legal assistance from Lebanon in the context of a probe into “aggravated money laundering” and possible embezzlement tied to the Lebanese central bank. Salameh has denied any wrong-doing, describing the claims as “fabrications” and “false news.”
In a statement on Tuesday, the Banque du Liban said: “Salameh, as always, abides by the Lebanese and international laws in force, and cooperates with all parties concerned.”Lebanon’s pro-Hezbollah Al-Akhbar newspaper said the same day that Lebanon had received an official request from EU and Swiss authorities to provide judicial assistance in an investigation into financial transfers involving Salameh.
According to the newspaper, European investigators are seeking information on bank transfers totaling $400 million made by Salameh, his brother Raja and assistant Marianne Hoayek. Earlier in the day Justice Minister Marie-Claude Najm confirmed that she had received a request from Swiss judicial authorities to cooperate on an inquiry into money transfers by Salameh. The newspaper said: “The investigation into criminal behavior does not concern Salameh alone. Rather, it will have to do with the Banque du Liban and its affiliated institutions, especially the Finance Bank, Middle East Airlines (MEA), Intra Bank and Casino du Liban.”President Michel Aoun and Hassan Diab, the caretaker prime minister, have been informed of the case, the newspaper said.
Al-Akhbar quoted sources, which it did not identify, saying: “The European authorities are studying Salameh’s case as part of a file that includes a long list of Lebanese personalities prepared in cooperation with France, Britain and the US, which requested the participation of the EU and demanded that the sanctions are not solely imposed by the US Treasury Department and are not only related to combating terrorist financing.”Lebanon’s central bank described the newspaper’s claims as “groundless fabrications,” and warned of legal action in response. A financial and banking source told Arab News: “The governor of the central bank has no legal right to transfer any funds abroad from the Banque du Liban. All transfers made through private commercial banks and all the operations of the Banque du Liban are fully monitored by the Central Council and the government commissioner at the Banque du Liban.”
The source said that when any central bank in the world makes any transfers abroad, “these are automatically under US surveillance.”
According to the source, “Lebanon usually receives requests from abroad to provide assistance based on the tax information exchange agreement.”The source said: “I am not attempting to defend anyone. What was mentioned indicates that there is a political conflict, and what was published is part of the political war in Lebanon.”Aoun and his team are calling for a forensic audit that covers the central bank, and parliament has approved a request to extend the audit to cover all state institutions. The Banque du Liban is being blamed for the loss of Lebanese dollar deposits in private banks after it borrowed funds to finance Lebanese government policies. Lebanon’s crippled banking system is at the heart of a financial crisis that erupted in late 2019. Banks have since blocked most transfers abroad and cut access to deposits, resulting in widespread anger as growing numbers of people face economic hardship.

Aoun Calls Higher Defense Council for Urgent Meeting
Naharnet/January 19/2021
President Michel Aoun called the Higher Defense Council for an “urgent” meeting on January 21 at Baabda Presidential Palace. According to reports, the meeting will likely discuss an extension of a ten-day total lockdown that came into effect last week Thursday. Lebanon on Monday reported 53 new coronavirus deaths, a new record high daily death toll for the small country. It also registered 3,144 new virus cases in a 24-period, the Health Ministry said. The new fatalities raise the overall death toll to 1,959.

Lebanon Receives Swiss Request for Cooperation on Suspected Salameh Fund Transfers
Associated Press/January 19/2021
Caretaker Justice Minister Marie-Claude Najm announced on Tuesday that she had received a request from judicial authorities in Switzerland to cooperate on an inquiry into financial transfers made by the Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh, media reports said. Najm added that she “haa submitted the request to the Public Prosecutor to take the necessary measures.”Salameh issued a statement saying that Lebanon abides by international and local laws and is cooperating with all those concerned. According to a government official, Swiss authorities had opened an investigation into transfers by Salameh. Later on Tuesday, the office of Switzerland's attorney general said it requested legal assistance from Lebanese authorities for an investigation into possible money laundering and embezzlement tied to Lebanon's central bank. The Swiss attorney general confirmed in a statement it had opened an investigation following media reports in Lebanon about it but no additional details were released. The office declined to provide further information on its inquiry. The investigation was apparently launched at the request of the Lebanese government, which is looking into reports of what it said were billions of dollars that left Lebanon after banks blocked transfers abroad. Lebanon is facing a crippling financial crisis that was in full throttle last year, when private banks enforced informal capital controls, limiting withdrawals and blocking transfers abroad. The value of Lebanon's currency tumbled against the dollar amid an unprecedented shortage of foreign currencies. The government defaulted on its foreign debts and began talks with the International Monetary Fund for a rescue package. Amid the chaos, reports surfaced of capital transfers, including by government officials. Caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab has held Salameh responsible for the currency crash, accusing him of pursuing "opaque" policies that sent the Lebanese pound on its downward spiral against the dollar. The government also hired a New York-based company to conduct a forensic audit of the central bank, which later pulled out, saying it was unable to acquire needed information and documents. Diab said Salameh was inaccessible. Disagreements between the head of the government and the central bank governor were widely publicized. Salameh, who has held the central bank post since 1993, has defended his role, alleging a systematic campaign meant to hold him responsible for the country's financial crisis. Meanwhile, talks with the IMF faltered amid disagreements between government officials on how to estimate the banking sector losses.

STL Schedules Fifth Status Conference in Ayyash Case in February

Naharnet/January 19/2021
The Special Tribunal for Lebanon’s (“STL”) Pre-Trial Judge, Daniel Fransen, will hold a fifth Status Conference on 3 February 2021, the STL said in a press release on Tuesday. The hearing aims at reviewing the status of the Ayyash case and ensuring the expeditious preparation for trial, through an exchange between the Prosecution, Defence and Legal Representatives of the Victims. In a scheduling order issued today, the Pre-Trial Judge states that the hearing will begin at 10.00 AM (C.E.T.) The Status Conference will be public; however, the Judge might decide to go into private session during the course of the hearing if confidential matters need to be discussed. The Status Conference will take place in the STL courtroom, with remote participation via video-conference. The hearing will be streamed on the STL website with a 30-minute delay in Arabic, English, and French. The first status conference in the Ayyash case took place on 22 July 2020, the second on 16 September, the third status conference on 4 November and the fourth took place on 16 December 2020. In accordance with Rule 94 of the STL Rules of Procedures and Evidence, the Pre-Trial Judge shall convene a status conference within no more than eight weeks after the initial appearance of the Accused -or its equivalent in absentia proceedings, which coincides with the Trial Chamber decision to proceed with a trial in the absence of the Accused. The Pre-Trial Judge shall also convene status conferences within eight weeks from the previous one, during the pre-trial proceedings, and until the case is ready for trial.

'State of Our State': How Lebanon's Situations Got Worse in 2020

Naharnet/January 19/2021
The Lebanon Renaissance Foundation on Tuesday released its 2020 version of the ‘State of Our State’ index, which evaluates the country’s situation in several key fields on yearly basis. The Foundation has released yearly reports since 2010.
“State of our State index compiles, on annual basis, the evaluations of people hailing from diverse backgrounds, all of whom members of the Foundation (activists, former officials and business leaders),” the Foundation said in a statement emailed to Naharnet. “Basic functions of a State are to provide physical security, efficient institutions and a capable administration. The Goal of this index is to evaluate Lebanon’s situation and share results with the Lebanese public in a succinct manner. It also enables us to prioritize initiatives that are to be addressed by our foundation,” it added. “Inspired by similar approaches created by various research & analysis groups, 13 criteria have been specifically adopted to reflect the Lebanese conditions. Those same criteria are also evaluated for a model country (Norway) thus enabling the final Lebanese result to be compared to a benchmark or model,” the Foundation explained.
The biggest drops in 2020 were recorded in the fields of the quality of political leadership, the rule of law, the efficiency of civil society and the government’s control over its territory. Since inception in 2010 with a score of 4.3/10, the index has dropped 7 times and remained unchanged twice with a single improvement recorded in 2016. Each of the following 13 criteria is evaluated on a 0 to 10 scale by the evaluators (worst to best) for both Lebanon and Norway and a simple arithmetic average for all evaluators comes out as the index figure for the year under review (2020).
1. Stability over 3 years (LEB 1.9 - NOR 8.7)
2. Citizens’ personal security (LEB 2.7 – NOR 8.6)
3. Government control over territory (LEB 1.4 – NOR 9.4)
4. Capacity to resist foreign influence (LEB 1.2 – NOR 8.2)
5. Rule of law (LEB 1.5 – NOR 9.0)
6. Quality of political leadership (LEB 0.5 – NOR 8.0)
7. Freedom of speech (LEB 4.2 – NOR 9.0)
8. Cultural and religious tolerance (LEB 4.4 – NOR 8.0)
9. Efficiency of civil society (LEB 4.3 – NOR 8.0)
10. Limiting corruption (LEB 2.0 – NOR 8.0)
11. Confidence in public institutions (LEB 1.7 – NOR 8.0)
12. Economic transparency (LEB 1.4 – NOR 9.0)
13. Sovereign debt settlement record (LEB 1.4 – NOR 8.0)
Score over 10: LEBANON 2.2 – NORWAY 8.4
- Last year (2019) result:
Lebanon 3.2/10
Norway 8.5/10
- 2018 result
Lebanon 3.2/10
Norway 8.4/10

Strong Lebanon Bloc Calls on Hariri to 'Communicate' with Aoun
Naharnet/January 19/2021
The Free Patriotic Movement-led Strong Lebanon bloc on Tuesday reiterated the call for Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri to communicate with President Michel Aoun over the formation of the new government.
In a statement issued after its weekly e-meeting, the bloc hoped that “the time has come and circumstances have become complete for the formation of the long-awaited government.”It also called on Hariri to “end the state of stalemate and communicate with the president so that they together form the promised reformist government according to the principles of the National Pact and the rules of the constitution.”Hariri had earlier in the day stressed “the need to form a government as soon as possible.” “Throughout the previous stage, I showed openness and willingness to go several times (to the Baabda Palace) so that we form the government. My position is clear in this regard,” Hariri added following talks with caretaker PM Hassan Diab, who also met Tuesday with Aoun and Speaker Nabih Berri as part of an initiative to break the deadlock.

Hariri Stresses Need for Govt., Vows Continued Bid to Get Vaccines
Naharnet/January 19/2021
Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri on Tuesday emphasized the need to form the new government as soon as possible and promised further efforts to secure Lebanon quantities of much-needed anti-coronavirus vaccines. “I would like to thank (caretaker) Prime Minister (Hassan) Diab for his visit. We discussed several matters, most importantly the need to form a government as soon as possible,” Hariri said after talks with Diab at the Center House. “Throughout the previous stage, I showed openness and willingness to go several times (to the Baabda Palace) so that we form the government. My position is clear in this regard, and I thank Prime Minister Diab for what he is trying to do in this matter,” Hariri added. Asked about his efforts to secure a quantity of coronavirus vaccines for Lebanon, Hariri said: “Hopefully, we are working on this, and you will see me travel more and I will continue to insist on getting the vaccine as soon as possible.”

Diab Pushes for Govt. Formation in Talks with Aoun, Berri, Hariri
Naharnet/January 19/2021
Caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab held separate meetings Tuesday with President Michel Aoun, Speaker Nabih Berri and PM-designate Saad Hariri in an initiative aimed at facilitating the formation of the new government.
“I discussed the situations with President Aoun, especially the governmental file, and I sensed high readiness to reactivate the cabinet formation process,” Diab said after meeting Aoun in Baabda. “There will be a meeting between President Aoun and PM-designate Hariri at the time they find appropriate,” he added. Diab had earlier held a 90-minute meeting with Berri in Ain el-Tineh. “Speaker Berri expressed readiness to help, as he has always done, in order to resolve the few remaining obstacles that are delaying the government’s formation,” Diab said after the talks. “The meeting was good and special and there will be follow-up,” he added. Asked whether a new government will be formed soon, Diab said: “We are seeking this and white hands are always present.”“We must capitalize on the positivities, which are plenty, to see how we can iron out some of the remaining hurdles,” the caretaker PM added.
And speaking earlier in the day after talks with Hariri, Diab said “the country is in dire need for political accord among all the relevant sides.”“I agreed with PM-designate Hariri that the priority is for forming a government as soon as possible to address the repercussions and impact of these successive crises that have rocked Lebanon and negatively affected Lebanon and the Lebanese,” he added. “The PM-designate expressed high readiness and openness to consult with all sides over this issue,” Diab revealed.

Lebanon Returns Two Stolen 18th-Century Icons to Greece
Agence France Presse/January 19/2021
Lebanon handed back two 18th-century religious icons of Jesus and Mary to Greece on Tuesday after they were seized during an auction, a judicial source said. The paintings were stolen from an exhibition in Athens in 2016, and Greece put out an international notice calling for their return. Icons are Christian religious paintings, often of saints, and are viewed as sacred. Lebanon has launched an investigation, but it is not clear who stole them, or how they were brought to the country. "The person who bought the paintings at the auction in Lebanon was questioned," the source said, adding that the buyer was about to ship them to Germany "to sell them on at an international auction there." The paintings were handed to the Greek ambassador in Beirut. Greece has retrieved several other religious icons worth thousands of dollars in recent years. In 2011, Greek officials blocked the sale of a dozen religious icons by two art galleries in Britain and the Netherlands after finding the items had been stolen years before. The icons, which dated from before the 18th century and could have each fetched from $7,000 to $21,000, were stolen from unguarded monasteries and churches in the sparsely-populated Epirus region of northwestern Greece. In 2008, Britain returned to Greece a 14th-century icon stolen from a Greek Orthodox monastery 30 years earlier, and found in the hands of a London-based collector.

Is Lebanon condemned to an endless drift or endless purgatory
Nathalie Goulet/Arab News/January 20/2021
Since Aug. 4, 2020 — the day of the tragedy at the port of Beirut — many have looked on at Lebanon’s pain, a slow agony so deeply inscribed in its contemporary history that many are unaware that Lebanon was once the peaceful and prosperous Switzerland of the Middle East.
Much has been written on the causes of this drift: Exacerbated confessionalism, corruption and haphazard governance. The country is also the favourite arena of the internal struggles of its powerful, vampiric neighbours.
Almost six months after the dramatic explosion, Lebanon has made little headway on the path to institutional reconstruction.
It appears totally illusory to think that we can solve the problem of Lebanon from within Lebanon.
The businessman Omar Harfouch, a Lebanese living in Paris, has launched the crazy gamble of forming a government of exile.
His observation is clear: Lebanon is ruled by at least 6 oligarchs, each of them accompanied by at least 60,000 “followers” , or sycophant ,who owe their positions to that individual, securing their futures and that of their families.
In addition to this caste of oligarchs, there are also important people who, be they deputies or ministers or shrewd businessmen, repeat the same pattern of courtiers and maintenance obligations on a smaller scale.
Such people have no interest in changing the system which continues from generation to generation, a sort of inheritance of mediocrity, rather than meritocracy.
Harfouch is proposing a program of immediate actions, with the aim of restoring the confidence of the exhausted Lebanese. He agitates on social media and talks about placing the Lebanese Central Bank under supervision, freezing the assets of oligarchs abroad, and setting up an authority for the transparency of public life, with an obligation to declare assets, based on the model of the French High Authority for Transparency in Public Life. He has even met with its president, Didier Migaud, to discuss how cooperation might work.
Then will follow the measures with the financial institutions, an agreement with the IMF and a supervised donors’ conference to prevent international generosity from financing corruption. This fight against corruption will inevitably finance the fight against poverty, a real issue facing the country.
Then the time will come for demilitarization, and the end of private militias. After the shock of immediate financial measures, Lebanon will also require institutional changes and the advent of a secular “Third Republic,” a new voting system, universal suffrage and a new social covenant.
Governance free from corruption and sectarianism is how Lebanon will find its place back at the table of Nations. What if Harfouch’s ideas are the way forward? His statements have reached millions already, and he’s starting petitions to ferment new measures on change.org.
French President Emmanuel Macron failed to help start reform, because he based his policies on the surviving and corrupt shreds of the country, instead of seeking new people.
In doing so, he was unable to secure the support of a breathless and hopeless people, or the political class.
The president “oxygenated” and restored great families, like the Hariri’s, thus prolonging the country’s agony.
The reality is that no one from within Lebanon will be able to reform it or face the militias that attack all those who want to end their privileges. It must come from elsewhere.
* Nathalie Goulet is a senator for Orne. Twitter: @senateur61


Lebanon’s Maronite patriarch urges Aoun to seek reconciliation
The Arab Weekly/19 January/2021
BEIRUT – Lebanon’s top Christian cleric has urged President Michel Aoun to set up a reconciliation meeting with Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri to form a cabinet and end the country’s political deadlock. “The tragic state of the country and the people does not justify any delay in the forming of (new) government,” Maronite Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rai said at his Sunday sermon at his seat in Bkirki. “The door leading to the road of a solution is the formation of a salvation Cabinet made up of Lebanese elite, personalities who succeeded in Lebanon and the world,” he added. The country’s fractious politicians have been unable to agree on a new administration since the last one quit in the aftermath of the August 4 Beirut port explosion, leaving Lebanon rudderless as it sinks deeper into economic crisis. Tensions between Aoun and Hariri, who publicly traded blame in December after failing to agree to a cabinet, came to a head last week when a leaked video showed Aoun apparently calling Hariri a liar. Rai said at his Sunday sermon that the situation in Lebanon was now “tragic” and there was no excuse to further delay forming a government. “We wish that his Excellency the president takes the initiative and invites the prime minister-designate to a meeting,” he said. Veteran Sunni politician Hariri was named premier for a fourth time in October, promising to form a cabinet of specialists to enact reforms necessary to unlock foreign aid, but political wrangling has delayed the process. The leaked video that circulated on social media last week showed Aoun talking to caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab about Hariri. Lebanese President Michel Aoun (L) speaks with Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri during their meeting at the Baabda Presidential Palace, in “There is no government formation, he (Hariri) is saying he gave me a paper, he is lying,” Aoun is heard saying. Sources in the president’s office said the dialogue had been taken out of context and was not complete. After the video circulated, Hariri tweeted Biblical verses referring to wisdom not residing in bodies that were amenable to sin.
The souring of the relationship between Aoun and Hariri comes as the country continues to struggle with an acute financial crisis that has seen the currency sink by about 80%.Lebanon’s healthcare system is also buckling under the pressure of a severe spike in COVID-
 

Pro-Hezbollah journalist says party cannot continue with current ties with Iran
Rawad Taha, Al Arabiya English/Tuesday 19 January 2021
Pro-Hezbollah Lebanese journalist Kassem Kassir said Hezbollah cannot continue with its current relationship with Iran and that it must become a Lebanese political party. Kassir’s statements have been heavily attacked by supporters of the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia after his interview aired on NBN TV station which is largely funded by Hezbollah’s Shia ally movement Amal. Kassem Kassir is a political writer who specializes in Islamist movements and has written a book about the change in Hezbollah’s discourse between 1982 and 2016. He has been seen as a writer who has generally supported Hezbollah, according to observers. Kassir’s recent comments on Hezbollah come at a time of rising frustration from Iran’s growing influence in Lebanon and an international and regional pressure to suspend Iran’s presence in Syria via Hezbollah and other militia groups.
“There are two issues that Hezbollah must resolve. The first issue is the relation with Iran, Hezbollah cannot continue with the same relationship it has had with Tehran, Hezbollah has to become a Lebanese political party, [it is fine if] there is a religion or sentimental relationship with Iran, but Hezbollah shouldn’t be led with orders from Wali al-Faqih [Supreme leader Ali Khamenei],” Kasser said during the interview. The second issue that Kassir discussed was Hezbollah’s role in “resisting Israeli threats” to Lebanon.
“Hezbollah cannot stay resisting alone, it must fall under a national defense strategy, the idea that the Shiaa have a transnational role to play must seize to exist, they must integrate within their countries’ communities” Kassir added.
“We need Hezbollah, and the Shia in general, to [remain humble],” he added. “In the past 10 years, for geo-political reasons, Hezbollah was pressured into mobilizing outside of Lebanon, however, Hezbollah in its internal organization and manifesto states that is must not interfere in other nation’s issues, Hezbollah learned from the experiments of other resistance movements, like Fatah,” Kassir added. “Hezbollah meddled in Syrian affairs for one reason or another, that has happened, I don’t have to state my position on that matter, but from now on Hezbollah must return to Lebanon”, Kassir added.
Kassir commented on the mass media campaign that was held on Soleimani’s death memorial saying that it has negatively impacted Lebanon internally. “Regardless of the role Soleimani has played in Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel, we must do an internal critic, [everything that is over-done has negative consequences],” he added. Kassir received different reactions on his prior statements which were heavily criticized by some of Hezbollah’s followers. NBN channel removed his statements from its social media networks. Kassir had to clarify his stances in a social media post where he mentioned that he is not partisan and does not have role or responsibility within Hezbollah. “I am just a writer, a journalist, or a humble viewer and a university researcher who works to spread dialog. I was and still am with the resistance in Lebanon and Palestine and against every occupier. I wish for those who want to discuss opinions to do so calmly in the interest of our nation and for the sake of the unity of our country. I have worked and still work within my conviction and freedom,” he added.


Govt formation awaits Aoun’s position on 'reconciliation meet' with Hariri
Hussein Dakroub/The Daily Star/January 19/2021
BEIRUT: Political attention Monday shifted to President Michel Aoun’s position on the Maronite patriarch’s call on him to invite Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri for a “reconciliation meeting” to agree on the formation of a “salvation Cabinet” to deal with the country’s multiple crises and enact reforms demanded by the international community.
Given the rising tensions between the president and the premier-designate caused by a leaked video in which Aoun was shown calling Hariri a liar over the government formation process, many politicians expressed concerns that Aoun’s possible rebuff of Maronite Patriarch Bechara al-Rai’s call threatened to plunge the crises-ridden country into a prolonged Cabinet deadlock with all the dire consequences this entailed for the crumbling economy and fragile stability.
There was no comment Monday from the president’s office, a day after Rai issued the call for a “reconciliation meeting” between Aoun and Hariri to agree on the swift formation of a new government.
Hariri’s return to Beirut Sunday night from a visit to the United Arab Emirates was expected to hasten Aoun’s declaration on Rai’s call.
A source at Baabda Palace said Aoun’s position would be known after Hariri’s return from a foreign trip. “I don’t know what the president’s position [on Rai’s call] will be. We will see when Prime Minister Hariri returns to Lebanon,” the source told The Daily Star Sunday.
Similarly, there was no immediate comment from Hariri after his return to Beirut on Rai’s call, the second to be issued in less than month by the Maronite patriarch who is trying to narrow differences between the president and the premier-designate over the formation of a proposed 18-member Cabinet made up of nonpartisan specialists to deliver reforms in line with the French initiative.
Asked whether Hariri would accept Rai’s call for a reconciliation meeting with Aoun, a source close to the premier-designate told The Daily Star Monday: “The Constitution governs the relationship between the president and the prime minister.”In making the call on Aoun to invite Hariri for a “reconciliation meeting,” Rai expressed his fears of a possible social unrest as a result of the crippling economic crisis that is hitting the Lebanese hard and has put half the country’s 6 million population below the poverty line.
"The tragic state of the country and the people [cannot tolerate] any delay in the government formation. In this situation, we wish that his excellency the president will take the initiative and invite the prime minister-designate to this [reconciliation] meeting,” Rai said in his Sunday sermon at his seat in Bkirki.
Rai’s call came as Lebanon continues to reel from one of the worst economic and financial crisis in its history and mounting health hazards posed by a frightening surge in coronavirus infections. The economic crisis has been aggravated by the grave consequences of the massive Aug. 4 explosion that pulverized Beirut’s port, damaged half of the capital, killed nearly 200 people, injured thousands, left 300,000 people homeless and caused billions of dollars in material damage.
While a French initiative to rescue Lebanon remained deadlocked after rival Lebanese leaders failed to agree on the swift formation of a “mission government” to implement a slew of economic and administrative reforms stipulated in the initiative, it remained to be seen whether Rai’s new call for a reconciliation between Aoun and Hariri would materialize this time.
Meanwhile, while Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri is coming under pressure to intervene to help break the Cabinet deadlock, now in its sixth month, other mediators are gearing up to patch up the rift between Aoun and Hariri over the government formation.
Deputy Parliament Speaker Elie Ferzli, an ally of Aoun and the Free Patriotic Movement headed by MP Gebran Bassil, is mediating with Baabda Palace and the FPM in a bid to bridge the gap with Hariri, a political source said.
General Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, who had previously mediated in disputes between the president and the prime minister, will also be in contact with both Aoun and Hariri to facilitate the Cabinet formation, the source added.
Lebanon has been left without a fully functioning government since then-Prime Minister Hassan Diab’s Cabinet resigned on Aug. 10 in the aftermath of the port blast. Berri was quoted by visitors as saying he was waiting for tensions between Aoun and Hariri to ease before intervening. This was confirmed Sunday by MP Mohammad Khawaja, who belongs to Berri’s parliamentary Development and Liberation bloc.
Long-simmering tensions between the president and the premier-designate, who last month publicly traded accusations of responsibility for obstructing the formation of an 18-member Cabinet of nonpartisan specialists to deliver reforms in line with the French initiative, came to a head on Jan. 11 when Aoun was shown in the leaked video calling Hariri a liar. Aoun’s accusation has exacerbated the impasse in the Cabinet formation process, already stalled by a disagreement between the president and the premier-designate over the distribution of key ministries. The video episode has deepened a crisis of confidence between the two leaders and ramped up political tensions in the country.
Some politicians warned that Lebanon risked descending into an open-ended Cabinet crisis with all the grave repercussions this carried for the country’s ailing economy and stability if Aoun and Hariri refused to budge from their conflicting positions on a new government.
Since his designation on Oct. 22, Hariri has been striving to form a proposed 18-member Cabinet of nonpartisan experts to implement reforms urgently needed to unlock billions of dollars in promised international aid to the cash-strapped country that is teetering on the verge of a total economic collapse.
But his attempts have stumbled over a dispute with Aoun regarding who gets to name the Christian ministers and who controls two key ministries: Interior and Justice, and demands by Aoun’s son-in-law, Bassil, for veto power and representing political parties in the government. In addition to refusing to grant veto power to any party in the next government, Hariri is reportedly also opposed to allotting the Interior and Justice ministries to Aoun and the FPM.
Future officials have said Hariri would not bow to pressure from Aoun and Bassil aimed at pushing him to step down or meet their conditions for the Cabinet formation.

Lebanon: Impeach the President
Rami Rayess/Al Arabiya/Tuesday 19 January 2021
There are little expectations related to resolving the severe multiple crises’ that Lebanon is passing through. With Coronavirus imposing total lockdown in the country, there are barely any political meetings to form a new cabinet, or to draw a road map out of the impasse.
Impeaching the Lebanese President, Michel Aoun seems far-fetched, as long as he earns the support of Hezbollah. The Christian parties' silence is deafening with fear of the precedent being set to remove the incumbent Christian President. They ignore two earlier similar cases that happened in Lebanon’s contemporary history.
The first was in 1952 when a so-called “White Rebellion” removed the first President after the country's independence in 1943. As the Lebanese took to the streets refusing corruption and requesting reform, they took from office, Behara el Khoury. The second removal happened six years later, when in 1958, a popular revolution crippled Camille Chamoun's chances to renew his term as president.
Today, any call for the President to resign is categorically refused by the Maronite Church and several Christian political parties.
The President is not above the law and is accountable for his decisions. It implies a sectarian divide, when Muslims call for the Christian president's resignation. It is not. Calling for the removal of the President cannot be regarded as a sectarian call; rather it is a political demand.
Sectarian divisions have been always been present in Lebanon, and reached their peak during the long civil strife from 1975 to 1990, but they rarely reached that level during times of peace.
Refusal to impeach a President found its roots in 2005 when the late Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir blocked plans to oust the incumbent President at the time, Emile Lahoud.
The mainstream media in Lebanon has placed emphasis on a meeting held between three former Prime Ministers. Fouad Saniora, Tammam Salam and Najib Mikati along with the Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Joumblatt met almost three weeks ago in Salam's house. Many analysts considered that this meeting marked the first step towards forming a wider political alliance aiming at ousting the President.
Joumblatt had denied in several televised interviews his willingness to indulge in any front with other political players before Christian leaders and Christian parties led calls for ousting the President. He wants to avoid the rise of sectarian tension in the country.
The Lebanese Constitution does not stipulate any particular provisions to impeach the President unless for indictment for such as, high treason.
The Taif Accord (1989) that ended the Lebanese fifteen year civil war rearranged political prerogatives and removed important powers from the hands of the President. They were instead allocated to the collective decision of the council of ministers. Introducing impeachment amendments hasn't happened.
With little political change expected in Lebanon due to the current balance of power, largely tilted in favor of Hezbollah, the President and his party, the Free Patriotic Movement do little. Hezbollah controls the political process in the country through its proxy allies.
The Presidency, Parliament, Premiership and other constitutional institutions are not fully impaired, but taking important political decisions are at the behest of Hezbollah.
With the country’s economy crumbling, leaders in charge of forming the new cabinet seem totally disconnected with the upcoming social catastrophe. Hyperinflation is reaching untenable levels, and accompanied by currency devaluation.
The crisis of confidence between President Michel Aoun and the Prime Minister Designate, Saad Hariri has peaked, after leaked TV footage revealed Aoun saying that Hariri lied when he said he handed the President a list of nominees for the ministerial posts for the cabinet, which the President discarded as incorrect. If Lebanon does not embark on a full reform plan launched by a trustworthy cabinet of specialists, the economic situation will deteriorate further with no clear political solutions on the horizon. Impeaching the incumbent President is the first step necessary, but is insufficient to bring change to the country. Is the worst yet to come?

 

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on January 19-20/2021

Israel, Syria officials discuss removal of Iran and its militias from Syria: Report
Rawad Taha, Al Arabiya English/Wednesday 20 January 2021
Israel’s demand to remove Iran and its militias from Syria was discussed by Syrian and Israeli officials last month at the Russian Hmeimim base in Syria’s Latakia, according to the Syrian Bridges Center for Studies.
According to the report, the meeting included the Director of Syria’s National Security Office Major General Ali Mamlouk, Security Advisor at the Syrian Palace Bassam Hassan, Israel’s former chief of staff of the Israeli army Gadi Eisenkot and former Mossad general Ari bin Menashe. Alexander Tchaikov, the commander of the Russian forces in Syria, was also present at the meeting. Observers and international affairs experts have been monitoring Russia’s work as a mediator between Syria and Israel in recent weeks. Sources have confirmed that Israeli army has been informing the Russians of airstrikes on Syria beforehand. After the recent “Abraham Accords” peace deals between Israel and Arab states, some have speculated that Syria may be next, despite Iranian presence on its soil, after multiple Syrian officials openly discussed the possibility of peace after negotiations. The center said that the Syrian delegation requested facilitating the return to the Arab League and obtaining financial aid to pay off Iranian debts along with stopping western sanctions to open the way for Syria to expel Iran. The center added that Israeli demands included “completely removing Iran, Hezbollah and Tehran's militias and forming a government that includes the opposition, restructuring the security and military establishment.” The center added that the meeting did not conclude with specific agreements, but that it constituted the beginning of a path that Russia is pushing toward and is expected to witness a major expansion in 2021. The report added that Moscow believes that building a direct relationship between the regime and Israel could constitute a lifeline for the regime and obtain international support for its political project in Syria. Last Tuesday, Israel, with US support, launched the heaviest raids on Iranian and Syrian sites in northeastern Syria. The Israeli army announced in its annual report for 2020 that it carried out 50 air strikes on targets in Syria and launched more than 500 missiles and smart missiles during the past year, with the aim of preventing Iran's positioning in Syria.


Gulf states, Israel demand seat at Iran nuclear deal negotiations: UAE Diplomat
Rawad Taha, Al Arabiya English/Wednesday 20 January 2021
The UAE does not have a problem with rapprochement with Iran but that any talks of a nuclear deal need to be conditional and participatory, a UAE diplomat told CNBC during an interview. “We need to be able to engage also with the Biden administration, with the Iranians, with the region. I think that was the problem with the JCPOA [nuclear deal], is that it didn’t take our concerns into account. It treated us as bystanders and spectators when we felt that it was directly concerned with our security,” said UAE’s Assistant Minister of Culture and Public Diplomacy at the Foreign Ministry Omar Ghobash. US President-elect Joe Biden has stated his intention to return to the Iran nuclear deal, if Tehran fully complies with the agreement. The original nuclear deal signed under the Obama administration between Iran and international actors did not include the Gulf states and Israel and did not tackle Iran’s ballistic missile program and proxies in the region. “We do business with Iran and we have sort of a significant Iranian population here. We don’t have an issue with that. We do have an issue with ballistic missiles, nuclear technology, looking at a nuclear weapon and the corrosive influence that they have on many Arab economies. So, if we can put an end to all of that, fantastic, everybody would be very happy to deal with Iran and on an equal basis when we think about how this is all going to play out in the future,” he added. Ghobash added that it’s kind of “low hanging fruit” to use the UAE’s relationship with Israel to present a more unified position across the region in terms of what happens with Iran. “We do have common interests [with Israel], it’s clear, because we stand on the side of stopping nuclear proliferation in the region and we stand on the side of sort of developing local economies and developing our human resources. In that sense, we stand on the same side, how the Biden administration will take that into account, it’s something that we all need to work on,” “We in the Emirates are a positive influence. The Gulf states are a positive influence. And it’s our belief that the Biden administration and the group of nations that have been negotiating with Iran take us on board and see the positive influence that we can bring to discussions on Iran,” Ghobash added.

 

US not close to rejoining Iran deal, says Biden’s pick for national intelligence
Joseph Haboush, Al Arabiya English/Tuesday 19 January 2021
The United States is not close to rejoining the Iran nuclear deal, incoming Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said during her confirmation hearing Tuesday. “I think, frankly, we are a long ways” from Iran coming back into compliance with the nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Haines said. President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee suggested that Iran’s ballistic missile program and other destabilizing activities in the region needed to be studied as well. Separately, Haines said China would be a priority and a challenge. “It’s something I will have to focus on,” she said.

 

Iran sanctions US President Trump, Secretary Pompeo, other American officials
Yaghoub Fazeli and Emily Judd, Al Arabiya English/Tuesday 19 January 2021
Iran’s foreign ministry imposed sanctions on outgoing US President Donald Trump, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and several current and former members of the Trump administration, on Tuesday. Current American officials sanctioned include Trump, Pompeo, acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, CIA Director Gina Haspel, US Special Representative to Iran and Venezuela Elliot Abrams, and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) chief Andrea Gacki. Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, former US envoy for Iran Brian Hook, and former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper were also sanctioned. The US State Department told Al Arabiya English it was aware of the reports of the Iranian sanctions and called the move a “transparently political stunt.” “This is a transparently political stunt by the Iranian government that does not deserve the seriousness of a substantive response,” a State Department spokesman told Al Arabiya English. Iran sanctioned the officials for their alleged involvement in the killings of top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani and nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, as well as “supporting acts of terror against Iran” and imposing sanctions against the Islamic republic, the semi-official ISNA news agency cited foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh as saying. The sanctions are based on a law that was approved by Iran’s parliament in 2017, meant to “confront America’s human rights violations and adventurist and terrorist acts in the region.”According to the law, sanctioned individuals are not allowed entry to Iran, any assets they own within the Islamic republic are confiscated, and their bank accounts in the country are frozen. Last month, Iran also blacklisted the US ambassador in Yemen, one day after Washington imposed terrorism-related sanctions on Tehran’s envoy to the Yemeni Houthis. Tensions between Iran and the US have escalated since Trump pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal and reimposed crippling sanctions on Tehran in 2018 as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign. Experts argue the maximum pressure campaign has created leverage for US President-elect Joe Biden to negotiate a better nuclear deal. Biden has pledged to rejoin the accord if Iran returns to complying with it. However, his incoming Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said the US is not close to rejoining the deal during her confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

 

US denies involvement in alleged attack on Iraq’s Baghdad: Embassy
Tamara Abueish, Al Arabiya English/Tuesday 19 January 2021
The United States was not involved in the alleged attacks on the south of Baghdad in Iraq, a spokesperson for the US Embassy in Baghdad confirmed on Tuesday. “We are seeing reports of potential explosions near Jurf as-Sakhr, south of Baghdad. We can confirm that no US personnel or assets were in the vicinity of Jurf as-Sakhr and that there was no US involvement in this alleged incident,” the spokesperson said. The US Central Command also denied allegations that Washington had any involvement in the attack. “Explosions reported earlier today about 40 miles outside of Baghdad, Iraq, in the town of Jurf Sakhar were not the result of US military action,” the US Central Command quoted Captain Bill Urban as saying. Earlier on Tuesday, the official account of the security media cell of the Iraqi Prime Minister’s Office denied reports of airstrikes hitting Iraq’s Baghdad on Monday night, calling them “incorrect”. The sound of explosions that were reportedly heard at the scene were the result of electrical towers that were hit by ISIS militants, the media cell said on Twitter on Tuesday. Security officials began a search operation to arrest those responsible for the attack, according to the statement. Several reports on Monday had suggested the explosions may have been US or Israeli airstrikes on Iran-backed militias.
 

Explosion and fire reported at oil and gas facilities in Homs, Syria: State TV
ReutersTuesday 19 January 2021
Syrian state media said three loud explosions were heard in the city of Homs on Tuesday and initial reports said they were near oil storage tankers near the country’s main Homs refinery. The news flash from state media gave no details on casualties but said civil defense units had rushed to the site with conflicting reports on where the blasts were located in the city. A correspondent at the state-owned al Ikhbariyah television station said a fire had erupted in oil storage tankers in an area near the country’s main Homs refinery. It was not clear if the explosions were an accident or the result of sabotage in a war-torn country where violence has subsided but insurgents and rebels still wage attacks in government-held areas. The central province of Homs has, in recent months, seen hit-and-run attacks on government forces by remnants of Islamic State militants who take shelter in outlying sparsely populated areas. The Russian air force has also been active in helping the Syrian army bomb suspected hideouts of militants in the Homs area.

 

Libya's Rivals Meet in Egyptian Resort over Constitution
Agence France Presse/January 19/2021
Libyan officials from rival administrations on Tuesday began talks in an Egyptian Red Sea resort about constitutional arrangements for presidential and parliamentary elections later this year, the United Nations said.
According to the U.N. acting envoy for Libya, Stephanie Williams, failure to find an arrangement will have "negative repercussions on the other tracks, including the security and economic situation."She urged the gathering via videocall to wrap up their discussions within a two-month deadline agreed to in November in Tunisia. That agreement also called for presidential and parliamentary elections to be held on Dec. 24, 2021. Oil-rich Libya sunk into chaos following a NATO-backed uprising that overthrew and later killed dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. The North African country is today divided into two rival administrations, each backed by an array of militias and foreign powers. An administration backed by military commander Khalifa Hifter rules the east and south while a U.N.-supported government based in the capital, Tripoli, controls the west. The so-called Libyan Political Dialogue Forum, has been negotiating a mechanism for choosing a transitional government that would lead the country to elections. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed former Slovak Foreign Minister Jan Kubis on Monday to lead the U.N. political mission. Kubis, the current U.N. envoy in Lebanon, replaces Ghassan Salame who resigned last March amid fierce fighting between Libya's rival sides over Tripoli. In October, Libya's rivals agreed to a U.N.-brokered cease-fire in Geneva, a deal included the departure of foreign forces and mercenaries from Libya within three months. But so far, no progress has been made on that.

Trump Decorates Bahrain King on Last Full Day in Office
Agence France Presse/January 19/2021
US President Donald Trump bestowed a rare award on King Hamad of Bahrain on Tuesday, acknowledging the Gulf state's normalisation of ties with Israel on his last full day in office. Trump, who sees Arab recognition of Israel as a key overseas achievement of his presidency, already conferred the same award on King Mohammed VI of Morocco last week for his move to restore ties. Announcing his bestowal of the Legion of Merit, Degree Chief Commander, on King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, Trump also paid tribute to Bahrain's hosting of a June 2019 conference on the economic dimensions of his controversial Middle East peace plan, which broke with decades of international consensus and was boycotted by the Palestinians. "King Hamad has shown extraordinary courage and leadership through his support of the Vision for Peace and his decision to establish full diplomatic relations with the State of Israel," the official Bahrain News Agency quoted Trump as saying. "King Hamad has challenged old assumptions about the possibility for peace in the region, and in doing so, positively reshaped the landscape of the Middle East for generations," Trump added. Just across the Gulf from Iran, Bahrain is a longstanding Western ally which is home to the US Fifth Fleet. In 2011, with support from neighbouring Saudi Arabia, the Sunni ruling family crushed month-long Shiite-led protests for an elected prime minister. It has since banned the two main opposition parties and thrown dozens of dissidents in jail. The Legion of Merit is a military award that was created to honour allied leaders in World War II and had gone into obscurity until it was revived by Trump, who last month also presented it to the prime ministers of Australia, India and Japan. On Wednesday at noon, President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn in and the Trump presidency will be over.

Qatar Calls for Gulf Talks with Iran

Agence France Presse/January 19/2021
Qatar has called for Gulf Arab countries to hold talks with Iran, the foreign minister said in an interview aired Tuesday, after Doha reconciled with its neighbours following a rift. Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, who has previously called for dialogue with Iran, told Bloomberg TV he was "hopeful that this would happen and we still believe this should happen". "This is also a desire that's shared by other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries," he said. It comes weeks after GCC hawks Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE re-established ties with Qatar after breaking them off in June 2017 partly over allegations that Qatar was too close to Iran. Doha denied the accusations. Qatar and Iran share one of the world's largest gas fields and Doha maintains cordial relations with Tehran. Doha is a close ally of Washington and has previously mediated between the US and Iran suggesting that Sheikh Mohammed's intervention could be timed as a signal to the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden. Biden is due to take office on Wednesday. The current occupant of the White House, President Donald Trump, has pursued a policy of "maximum pressure" on Iran and pulled the United States out of a multilateral nuclear deal with it in 2018. Tehran's arch-rival Riyadh, the dominant Gulf Arab power, has not publicly indicated any willingness to engage with Iran. Instead Saudi Arabia insisted that this month's rapprochement with Qatar meant the Gulf family would be better able to combat "the threats posed by the Iranian regime's nuclear and ballistic missile programme"."Qatar will facilitate negotiations, if asked by stakeholders, and will support whoever is chosen to do so," added Sheikh Mohammed.

Kremlin Dismisses Calls to Free Navalny, Warns against Protests
Agence France Presse/January 19/2021
The Kremlin on Tuesday dismissed Western demands to free top opposition politician Alexei Navalny and said his calls to stage mass protests were troubling. "We hear these statements. We cannot and are not going to take these statements into account," President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists, in the Kremlin's first reaction to Navalny's arrest on Sunday when he flew back to Russia from Germany. Peskov said the Kremlin was also "troubled" by Navalny's calls to stage "illegal" protests after he was ordered jailed for 30 days on Monday.

UN Calls on Israel to Stop New Settlement Construction in West Bank
Agence France Presse/January 19/2021
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday urged Israel to "halt and reverse" its decision last week to build 800 new homes for Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. The decision is "a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution, and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace" in the Middle East, Guterres said in a statement. "The establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.
"Settlement expansion... further erodes the possibility of ending the occupation and establishing a contiguous and viable sovereign Palestinian State, based on the pre-1967 lines," Guterres said. Israel on Sunday approved the construction of 780 homes in the occupied West Bank, ordered last Monday by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. All Jewish settlements in the West Bank are regarded as illegal by much of the international community. There are currently some 450,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, living amid an estimated 2.8 million Palestinians.

Blinken Says U.S. to Seek 'Longer and Stronger' Deal with Iran
Agence France Presse/January 19/2021
The U.S. will come back into a nuclear accord with Iran if it returns to compliance, and Washington will eventually seek a stronger deal of greater duration, secretary of state-designate Antony Blinken said Tuesday. President-elect Joe Biden "believes that if Iran comes back into compliance, we would too," Blinken told his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "But we would use that as a platform with our allies and partners, who would once again be on the same side with us, to seek a longer and stronger agreement," he said.

The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on January 19-20/2021

Biden needs clear strategy to end US’ tit-for-tat approach
Nadim ShehadiI/Arab News/January 20/2021
A multipolar world is one of competing visions, strategies and actions. During inauguration week in the US, there is much speculation about the new administration’s worldview and the position of the Middle East in that context.
How seriously one can take US election campaign promises? In the heat of the moment, candidates trash their opponent’s policies and promise to dismantle or reverse them. But is there a vision behind all this? The US’ allies in the region have existential stakes in the matter and are on the edge of their seats in anticipation. Since 9/11, the Arab region has been at the center of these debates. The war on terror, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Turkey, the Arab Spring, and Libya have all raised questions about the role of the US and its limits.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice summed up the Bush era’s vision in her Cairo speech of 2005: “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East — and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”
The “neocons” blamed the 9/11 attacks on the “dual containment” policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which brought us the Iran-Iraq War and sanctions, with dictators like Saddam Hussein consolidating their power as a result and becoming more tyrannical. Saddam even invaded Kuwait and massacred his own people. The consequences were catastrophic and regime change was the answer. This was the rationale behind the Iraq invasion of 2003, which took inspiration, as George W. Bush himself said, from the Second World War’s transformation of the Axis Powers into democracies. “Every nation has learned, or should have learned, an important lesson: Freedom is worth fighting for, dying for, and standing for — and the advance of freedom leads to peace,” he said soon after Saddam’s regime fell.
However, the Iraq invasion resulted in a tragedy. Apart from whatever mistakes were made in its aftermath, it was correctly seen as a threat by other regimes in the region, which feared they would be next. Syria and Iran contributed to its failure through the creation of chaos aimed at driving the Americans out of the region. They succeeded, as the US ultimately chose withdrawal and capitulation.
President Barack Obama reversed Bush’s approach. Instead of confrontation, he chose engagement; and instead of regime change, he made deals with both Iran and Syria. Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry both visited Bashar Assad in Damascus while he was sending extremists across the border to defeat the US in Iraq. Obama, in his 2009 Cairo speech, reassured all the dictators of the region that the US would not pursue regime change and that he understood that they have special circumstances. “So let me be clear: No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other,” he said. “Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.”
The result was the US abandoning Iraq, negotiations with Iran over the nuclear deal, and half-hearted support to the revolts in Syria, leading to Obama’s retraction from his “red lines” — all with catastrophic consequences. Obama also had tense relations with Israel and with traditional Arab allies, who perceived the nuclear deal as giving Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) a free hand to create havoc in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Donald Trump was more of a disruptor, but he also followed that pattern of reversing most of his predecessor’s policies, including in the Middle East. He challenged the Iran deal and asked for it to be renegotiated, confronted Tehran in Syria and Iraq, and declared the IRGC a terrorist organization and targeted its leadership, culminating in the January 2020 assassination of Qassem Soleimani. He also pursued a policy of extreme pressure by imposing crippling economic sanctions on Iran, the Syrian regime, and the IRGC and its allies. While Obama and Kerry tried to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Trump addressed it as an Arab-Israeli problem. US-led rapprochement between some Gulf states and Israel led to successful “normalization deals” with four Arab countries.
All the indications are that Biden will continue the pendulum swing pattern and reverse Trump’s policies.
All the indications are that Joe Biden will continue the pendulum swing pattern and reverse Trump’s policies. During his election campaign, he promised to restore the Iran deal and was critical of Trump’s engagement with the Gulf states. He will refocus on the Palestinian-Israeli dimension of that conflict but his policy toward the Assad regime in Syria is, at best, ambiguous.
Is that all there is to it? There is a common thread in the lack of appetite for war and the need to pivot out of the region. A pattern of consecutive administrations undoing the work of their predecessor without a clear goal is worrying.
This is a legitimate concern. Domestic politics are certainly important, but the pattern of tit for tat without any rationale or strategy is indeed worrying. This is not the case for other powers competing in the region: China has a worldview based on its Belt and Road Initiative, Russia and Turkey aim to restore past influence, and Iran has a clear strategy of perpetual war against the US and, through its IRGC proxies, collapsing states, building alternative institutions and gaining control. Whether they will succeed or not is beside the point; in the US, partisan politics will never amount to a national strategy.
*Nadim Shehadi is the executive director of the LAU Headquarters and Academic Center in New York and an Associate Fellow of Chatham House in London.

Palestinian elections may not end the stalemate

Osama Al-Sharif /Arab News/January 20/2021
More than 15 years after the Palestinians held their last presidential and legislative elections, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas on Friday issued a decree calling for fresh votes to be held this year. His four-year-term as president ended in 2009, but the rift between the PA and Hamas — when the latter took over the Gaza Strip in 2007 — prevented the holding of new elections.
In the 2006 legislative elections, Hamas won a majority and Abbas was forced to name Ismail Haniyeh as prime minister. That government was short-lived and its collapse led to Hamas’ bloody coup in Gaza. Since then, multiple initiatives aimed at ending the intra-Palestinian rift have been unsuccessful. With a crippled legislature, Abbas emerged as an authoritarian ruler and was able to sidestep Palestinian democratic institutions.
A majority of Palestinians are skeptical of the upcoming elections. A survey conducted in December found that 52 percent of those polled believed that the elections would be neither free nor fair, while 76 percent said Fatah, the largest of the Palestinian factions, would not accept the outcome if Hamas emerged as the winner. A number of Palestinian factions said that elections should not be held until reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas has been concluded.
Hamas has welcomed Abbas’ decree, but with reservations. The legislative elections will be held in May, while the presidential poll will take place at the end of July, followed by elections for the Palestinian National Council in August.
Meanwhile, inter-factional dialogue continues with little progress under Egyptian and Turkish auspices. Hamas and Fatah have reached multiple understandings in the past but failed to implement them. The rift has weakened the Palestinian position both regionally and internationally. Hamas also runs the beleaguered Gaza Strip uncontested and has refused to allow the PA to return. Abbas, 85, remains the only candidate for president despite calls to allow younger faces to take over. Analysts believe the upcoming elections, if they are held on time, are meant to renew Abbas’ legitimacy while there is a new US administration in office. Hamas is also under pressure, especially as Israel’s blockade of Gaza is taking its toll on the Strip’s population. The coronavirus epidemic has added to Gaza’s woes.
While the UN and EU have welcomed Abbas’ announcement and called on Israel to facilitate the holding of the elections, it is doubtful that the occupying authority will allow polls to take place in East Jerusalem. In 2006, Palestinians in East Jerusalem were allowed to vote. Another challenge lies in dealing with a government or legislature that includes Hamas members. The US, Israel and most EU members have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. Regardless of the outcome of the elections, Hamas is unlikely to give up its control of Gaza.
Still, the elections come at a crucial moment for the region. Under President Donald Trump, the Palestinians suffered major political and economic losses, beginning with the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and ending with the normalization agreements struck between Israel and a number of Arab countries. The expansion of illegal settlement activities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the last four years has also been astronomical.
For the Palestinians to restore a semblance of regional and international support, they must achieve genuine reconciliation and unity.
While President-elect Joe Biden has committed himself to reviving the two-state solution, he is unlikely to launch a new initiative in the first few months of his term. But his administration will at least restore political and economic ties with the Palestinians and call on Israel to resume peace negotiations. Realistically, the implementation of the classical two-state solution will prove improbable and there may be a return to Trump’s proposed peace plan as a starting point.
Abbas has to understand that the geopolitical stage has changed dramatically since 2016 and that, for the Palestinians to restore a semblance of regional and international support, they must achieve genuine reconciliation and unity. The elections provide a challenge that could deliver both, but they could also deepen existing divisions. Two countries that have a vested interest in uniting the Palestinians are Jordan and Egypt. On Sunday, Abbas was visited by the heads of both countries’ intelligence agencies, apparently to urge him to make serious moves toward Palestinian reconciliation ahead of the elections. But Abbas must also commit to initiating the wholesale reforms that are needed to restore confidence in the PA, especially among the Palestinians themselves.
If the elections are held, they must be free, with international observers overseeing the process. The fact that Abbas will run uncontested may prove problematic, while a failure to achieve reconciliation before the elections could deliver a situation where the current stalemate drags on for years to come.
*Osama Al-Sharif is a journalist and political commentator based in Amman. Twitter: @plato010

 

Return to Iran Nuclear Deal Would Be Unwise
Jacob Nagel/Real Clear World/January 19/2021
Israel and its new Gulf allies are growing increasingly concerned that the incoming Biden administration intends to re-enter negotiations with Iran with the aim of returning to the deeply flawed 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The deal yielded wide sanctions relief and other concessions to Iran but never blocked the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terrorism from a direct path to a nuclear arsenal in short time.
Should the Biden team re-enter the deal, the fallout could be far greater. The Iranians have made progress in the nuclear realm since 2015. Thus, the United States, Israel, and their regional allies have great challenges ahead. But there are four concrete steps they should take to avert a full-blown crisis.
First, Israel should demonstrate internal political unity. This is no simple task given the political tumult in Israel, which is heading for its fourth round of elections in a span of just two years. Still, political figures in the current government should maintain discipline in speaking with the press.
Even if some politicians in Israel’s current government think they have a better policy dealing with Iran, they should demonstrate restraint and not present their policy as Israel’s, particularly if it differs from the official directive issued by the prime minister. When it comes to apolitical civil servants in Israel’s military, intelligence community, and foreign ministry, it should be discouraged. This was the way the Israeli team of experts worked with the six world powers involved in the prior negotiations. The team spoke in one voice, explained to the negotiators Israel’s grave concerns, and worked to mitigate the JCPOA’s fatal flaws. Unfortunately, the current situation in Israel is more chaotic. Some officials, politicians, and even civil servants are granting interviews, mostly off the record, breaking rank, and offering their personal views. This is not wise and only sends confusing messages.
Second, Israel must build a broad international coalition to include its new peace partners in the Middle East. Those countries harbor similar and often stronger concerns about Iranian nuclear threats. The United States ignored the concerns of these regional partners during last round. It will be harder to ignore them now, especially if they speak with one voice alongside Israel.
Third, Israel and its Gulf allies must join hands with both Democrats and Republicans that oppose up-front concessions to Iran. For Israel and its new regional allies, it is important to avoid making this a partisan issue. Still, it is important to convince banks and businesses worldwide that re-entering Iran would be risky. Iran is still engaged in a wide range of illicit conduct, and no political agreement can erase that. It is also worth noting that future U.S. Congresses, not to mention future presidents, may still seek to exit a faulty deal with Iran, much the way President Donald Trump did in 2018.
Fourth, Israel and its regional allies must work with the United States to retain a credible military threat against Iran’s nuclear program. This should not be a means to encourage war. Iran simply will not negotiate a new reasonable deal unless Tehran is certain its nuclear facilities are under threat of destruction. Similarly, the regime itself should know that its survival is far from certain if it does not relinquish its entire nuclear program this time.
Convincing the new administration to adopt this doctrine will not be easy. Israel and its partners must stress that Iran’s malign nuclear activities have not ceased. The regime has engaged in nuclear blackmail, enriching uranium up to 20 percent at its Fordo facility, continuing research and development (R&D), installing new advanced centrifuges in underground facilities, and taking other dangerous steps in the nuclear arena.
The International Atomic Energy Agency director general recently declared that a new agreement is required to revive the deal. At the same time, the agency published reports demonstrating that Iran has violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the nuclear safeguards agreement, and the nuclear deal itself. These reports are backed by site visits in Iran and by documents Israel captured from a secret Iranian atomic archive.
So far, the international community has failed to take decisive action. Multilateral decisions are not easy in the most ideal circumstances. Under pandemic conditions and amidst political changes, it has been ever more difficult. The Iranians, playing their cards very wisely, waited for the U.S. election, hoping Trump would lose – and he did. Israel and its partners must now work together with the incoming administration to ensure Iran does not avoid accountability for its nuclear violations.
Israel and its regional allies are not opposed to a new agreement. However, the next deal must permanently block Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons. The last one failed to do that. The next deal must fully prevent Iran from maintaining a “civilian nuclear program” in underground facilities. It should also address all three elements of Iran’s illicit nuclear program: fissile materials, weaponization, and means of delivery.
The United States and its allies must also adjust to some new realities. Iran’s strategy has changed. The regime no longer seeks to “break out,” but rather to “sneak out” with the help of advanced centrifuges, advanced R&D, and underground or clandestine facilities. A future agreement cannot allow underground facilities, open Possible Military Dimensions questions, or regime-backed organizations dedicated to weaponization, such as Iran’s Organization for Defensive Innovation and Research, or SPND.
Some have advised the incoming Biden administration that Washington should focus on finding a compromise, like requiring Iran to reduce low-enriched uranium stocks (to a number larger than that allowed under the JCOPA) or dismantle some advanced cascades, and now they can add to the list to stop or reduce the 20 percent enrichment, in exchange for sanction relief. This would be a huge mistake. It was exactly this logic that allowed Iran, under the previous deal, to enrich uranium with more than 5,000 centrifuges. Remarkably, the Iranians were rewarded for cutting their centrifuge numbers down from 10,000, even though unanimous UN Security Council resolutions called for that number to be zero.
Those that seek a rapid new deal with Iran posit that such tough demands will only lead to conflict with the Islamic Republic. This is the wrong mindset for starting a negotiation with Iran. The new administration should not rush to the negotiating table, and it should reject any assertion by Iran’s leaders that the United States should atone for Trump’s policy. Iran leaders should pay for their violations, both past and present.
There are, of course, other Iranian activities that will require the attention of the incoming Biden administration and its allies in the Middle East. They include supporting terrorism, precision guided munitions, and more. But the United States, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states must differentiate between dealing with the nuclear program and other concerns. It would be an error to include Iran’s terror support or malign actions in Syria and Lebanon in the nuclear negotiations. These concerns can be tackled in parallel tracks or after the nuclear problem is resolved. Merging these files could lead to dangerous nuclear concessions. (Some reporters have wrongly asserted that Israel and the Gulf countries rejected the JCPOA because it did not include Iran’s malign behavior and ballistic missiles.)
The new administration is understandably eager to address looming challenges in the Middle East. But it would be wise to move deliberately and carefully, learning from past mistakes. Israel can help, but it must speak with one voice and coordinate carefully with its partners, working assiduously to avoid a return to the disastrous agreement of 2015.
**Brigadier General (Res.) Jacob Nagel is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a visiting professor at the Technion Aerospace Engineering Faculty. He previously served as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s acting national security advisor and head of Israel’s National Security Council. The views expressed are the author’s own. FDD is a nonpartisan think tank focused on foreign policy and national security issues.

Memo to President Biden: Please Don’t Mess Up the Abraham Accords
Bret Stephens/Commentary Magazine/January 19/2021
In November 2013, I participated in an interview at the Wall Street Journal with Alwaleed bin Talal, a Saudi prince of legendary riches and blunt, if sometimes unsavory, views.
To New Yorkers with long memories, Alwaleed was the man who, after September 11, 2001, had sought to donate $10 million to the city, along with the suggestion that the U.S. government “adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause.” (Then-mayor Rudy Giuliani returned the check.) To the Journal, he was a major shareholder in News Corporation, the paper’s parent company. Getting a meeting with the editorial board, of which I was then a member, was not a problem.
It turned out to be an exceptionally interesting interview. Three months earlier, Barack Obama had surrendered his red line in Syria, refusing to make good on his prior threats of military action in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Instead, Obama seized on a Russian proposal to have Assad voluntarily relinquish his declared arsenal—a proposal that proved remarkably easy to violate while heralding a new era of American fecklessness in the Middle East.
“The U.S. has to have a foreign policy,” Alwaleed said that day. “Well-defined, well-structured. You don’t have it right now, unfortunately. It’s just complete chaos. Confusion. No policy. I mean, we feel it. We sense it.”
As dismayed as Alwaleed was by Obama’s climbdown in Syria, he was even more alarmed by Obama’s turn toward Iran, in the form of an interim nuclear deal that would later become the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. The prince warned that Iran’s supposedly moderate leaders were not to be trusted, and that the only policy that could work was to “put maximum pressure now on the United States not to succumb to the president of Iran’s soft talk.” He also hinted that Saudi Arabia had a nuclear option thanks to an “arrangement with Pakistan.”
And then Alwaleed dropped a little bomb of his own. “For the first time,” he said, “Saudi Arabian interests and Israel’s are almost parallel. It’s incredible.”
That a prominent Saudi prince was willing to say it on the record, in the pages of a leading U.S. daily and in impolitic defiance of an American president, proved how right he was.
In many ways, the meeting with Alwaleed was the first hint of what, seven years later, would bear fruit in the peace deals known as the Abraham Accords. Israel signed the first of them in September with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. It is in the process of finalizing (with the help of some U.S. diplomatic bribery) ententes with Morocco and Sudan, will probably soon make a deal with Oman, and seems ultimately destined to strike one with Saudi Arabia itself. The prospect that the Arab–Israeli conflict, long thought to be the world’s most intractable, might be brought to an end much sooner than anyone dreamed possible offers powerful lessons to the incoming Biden administration for how to conduct a successful Mideast peace policy—provided it has the humility and good sense to learn them.
This is a story in three parts. The first is about the Arab world and its belated reckoning with the consequences of decades of domestic misrule. The second is about Israel, and the policies it pursued in defiance of relentless international condemnation. The third is about the United States, and what it can achieve when it abandons decades of conventional wisdom regarding the nature of the Middle East’s problems and the solutions to them.
ONE THE ARAB RECKONING
IT IS NOT much of an exaggeration to say that Arab civilization at the beginning of this millennium resembled nothing so much as a gigantic prison of desperate inmates, dangerous gang leaders, cruel wardens, and crumbling walls. It was also a civilization that had long been in denial about the causes of its failures. As the historian Bernard Lewis pointed out at the time, for centuries much of the Arab world had developed an almost reflexive habit of accounting for its misfortunes by asking: “Who did this to us?” There was never a shortage of scapegoats: Mongol invasions in the 13th century, Ottoman overlords in the 17th and 18th, British and French imperialists in the 19th and 20th, and then, after 1948, the Zionists and their friends in America.
The endless search for outside culprits, Lewis noted, served to deflect a more difficult, if also more productive, question: “What did we do wrong?” That began to change in 2002, when the United Nations Development Program published the first of five landmark studies, written by prominent Arab scholars. The Arab Human Development Reports collectively served as a kind of 360-degree mirror for a civilization that had spent decades trying either to deny its own problems or otherwise locate their source in anyone and anything except itself.
Among their findings: Spain translated more foreign books into Spanish in a single year than the Arab world had translated foreign books into Arabic in a millennium. Spain also had a larger gross domestic product than all 22 states of the Arab League combined. Half of all Arab women were illiterate. Per capita income growth in Arab countries was the second-lowest in the world, after sub-Saharan Africa’s, with 20 percent of people living on less than $2 a day. Unemployment was high and getting higher, especially among the youth. In terms of demography, nearly 40 percent of all Arabs were under the age of 14, the largest youth cohort in the world.
What kind of future could such a world have in store for them?
Though the report contained the obligatory throat-clearing about the alleged evils of Israeli occupation, it was refreshingly candid about where the real problems lay. The Arab world, it argued, suffered from critical deficits in political and personal freedoms, educational resources and scientific know-how, and women’s empowerment. These were not the result of perfidious outsiders, but of repressive leaders, corrupt elites, and a broader inability to master the challenges of modernity. Barring urgent domestic reforms, the inevitable endpoint for such failures was social collapse of the sort that would soon come to places like Libya, Yemen, and Syria.
If the conclusions of the Development Report seemed academic, its point would quickly be driven home by a more direct set of challenges. From about 2003 onward, Islamist terrorism—hitherto directed mainly against non-Muslims—turned the weight of its savagery inward. The same Arab leaders and secular intellectuals who privately saw the attacks of 9/11 as an overdue comeuppance for the United States, or had celebrated suicide attacks against Israelis during the second intifada, quickly learned how easily such methods could be turned against them. That was true not least in Saudi Arabia, once the leading financier and practitioner of Islamic extremism and then, suddenly, among its leading targets.
The hard consequences of Arab economic mismanagement came home to roost as well. In 2007–08, global food prices rose sharply. Arab countries, which import most of their food, were especially vulnerable. In Egypt, consumer prices for bread rose as much as fivefold in the months before the 2011 collapse of Hosni Mubarak’s regime. In 2014, oil prices collapsed, brought about in part by a fracking revolution that lessened U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern energy.
The hardest shock of all was the Obama administration’s abrupt abandonment of decades of U.S. policy in support of our allies. This came in the form of serial decisions to call for Mubarak’s departure, withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq, steer clear of involvement in Syria, accept a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, negotiate a nuclear deal with Tehran guaranteed to strengthen its regional hand, and treat Russia’s military reentry in the Middle East with near-indifference. If much of the Arab world’s street had been infuriated by the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, its leaders were no less appalled by the policy of American disengagement carried out deliberately under Obama.
Taken together, these developments underscored to Arab leaders—at least those still standing—the tenuousness of their position. Could they survive major internal upheaval? Would the U.S. continue to guarantee their security? Was it possible to return the genie of Islamist fanaticism to its bottle? How could they reform their economies and societies in ways that provided opportunity and hope? Above all, what could be done to halt Iran’s seemingly unstoppable rise?
TWO: ISRAEL’S RISE
AS ARAB LEADERS struggled to come to grips with their vulnerabilities, Israel was gaining a keener sense of its own strengths.
The Jewish state had also been in a bad state at the turn of the millennium. The misbegotten 1993 Oslo Accords collapsed seven years later in a diplomatic humiliation at Camp David for then-prime minister Ehud Barak. This was followed by an eruption of Palestinian terrorism, in which more than 1,000 Israelis—the proportional equivalent of 43,000 Americans—were murdered. The economy went into a deep recession. The Israeli left, along with its fellow travelers abroad, could not understand the flaw in their almost messianic belief that the creation of a Palestinian state had to be realized at great speed and almost any cost. Media solons insisted that Israel could not possibly defeat terrorism through military means. In many places, Israel was treated as a pariah state.
Yet within a few years, and despite stumbles such as the 2006 Lebanon War, Israel had turned itself around. The IDF crushed the second intifada. The economy recovered and thrived, with GDP rising from $132 billion in 2000 to almost $400 billion in 2019. Israel’s demographic picture did not, contrary to the usual anxious predictions, darken: On the contrary, as the Herzl Institute’s Ofir Haivry has shown, Israel’s fertility rate is by far the most robust in the developed world, while fertility rates in the Arab world (including among Palestinians) have gone into a steep decline. On the diplomatic front, Jerusalem significantly strengthened its ties with India, Japan, Greece, Oman, Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, and Chad—all countries of strategic significance to Israel. And while Israel fought three wars against Hamas following the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, the Palestinian question has, for the time being at least, become less of an existential threat and more of a chronic condition, manageable rather than fatal.
Memo to President Biden: Please Don't Mess Up the Abraham Accords
What makes Israel’s progress all the more remarkable is that it achieved it by consistently defying the reigning international consensus as to what it should do.
In 2011, then-secretary of defense Leon Panetta said that Israel was becoming increasingly isolated in the region and that it was time for it to get to “the damn table.” Said Panetta: “I understand the view that this is not the time to pursue peace, and that the Arab awakening further imperils the dream of a safe and secure, Jewish and democratic Israel. But I disagree with that view.”
In 2014, Obama warned in a Bloomberg interview that time was running out for Israel to come to terms with the Palestinians. “If Palestinians come to believe that the possibility of a contiguous sovereign Palestinian state is no longer within reach,” the president said, “then our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited.”
Secretary of State John Kerry added his own confident prediction in 2016. “There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world,” he said. “I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, ‘Well, the Arab world’s in a different place now, and we just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world, and we’ll deal with the Palestinians.’ No. No, no, and no.”
What was it that Israel’s leaders understood about the region that the Obama administration didn’t? The answer could fill a book. But four main points stand out.
For starters, Israelis distrusted the so-called Arab street and hence were not enthusiastic about the so-called Arab Spring. Where many Westerners saw images of Cairo’s Tahrir Square filled with anti-Mubarak demonstrators and thought of the pro-democracy protests in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, many Israelis were put in mind of the mass demonstrations that brought down the Shah of Iran in the late 1970s. In other words, Israelis understood, in a way that relatively few Westerners did, that the two most plausible alternatives to a secular dictatorship like Mubarak’s were, on the one hand, a radical theocratic regime led by the Muslim Brotherhood, or, on the other, chaos. (It was a lucky break for Israel that Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s 2013 military coup averted that outcome in Egypt—at least for now.)
Israelis had also tired of the standard Western analysis that it was “two minutes to midnight” before the last hopes for peace with Palestinians expired. A solution for the Palestinians would have to wait until Palestinian leaders stopped rejecting every Israeli peace offer and brushing aside every Israeli olive branch. In the meantime, Israel would continue to thrive.
Israelis understood, too, how vulnerable Arab leaders were in the face of Tehran’s tightening grip over a crescent of Arab capitals that stretched from Baghdad to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza to Sana’a. That vulnerability was all the more acute as it became clear that the Obama administration was not interested in standing up to Tehran’s imperialism and was in fact happy to abet it in the form of sanctions relief. If Arabs wanted a determined and capable ally, they would have to look elsewhere.
Finally, Israelis knew that, in the Middle East, the coin of the realm isn’t love. It’s respect.
In bidding for the world’s love during the Oslo years, Israel had lost much of that respect. But in the last 20 years, the Jewish state won it back by: crushing the Palestinian terror apparatus; locating and eliminating a North Korean nuclear reactor in eastern Syria; assassinating powerful Hezbollah commanders such as Imad Mugniyeh in Damascus; challenging Iran across a wide domain; standing up to Barack Obama in Washington; and responding forcefully to attacks and provocations from Hamas. In doing all this, Israel demonstrated to its neighbors that, far from being their enemy, it could well be their most valuable asset against their enemy.
In 2014, senior Israeli and Saudi figures, led by Israeli diplomat Dore Gold and retired Saudi general Anwar Majed Eshki, began holding a series of secret talks. In March 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered his speech to Congress to warn against the Iran deal over the administration’s furious objections. Much of the commentariat, both in the U.S. and Israel, fretted that Netanyahu was needlessly driving a wedge between Washington and Jerusalem while risking Israel’s bipartisan support in Congress.
But Netanyahu had a broader audience in mind when, in the middle of his address, he went out of his way to note that Iran had tried to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States in a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Though Arab ambassadors had declined invitations to attend the speech, it was no secret that the Israeli prime minister was speaking for them.
In November 2015, Israel opened a full-time diplomatic office in Abu Dhabi, officially as part of the International Renewable Energy Agency, making it the first permanent Israeli foreign-ministry station in a Gulf country. Such contacts would only become more frequent in the years leading up to the Abraham Accords. There were handshakes between senior Saudi and Israeli figures at the Munich Security Conference; there was intensified intelligence cooperation; and Benjamin Netanyahu made a public visit to Oman. To anyone paying attention, the Abraham Accords could not have come as any sort of surprise.
THREE: AMERICAN FECKLESSNESS
NEAR the end of the Obama administration, a friend of mine half-joked that Obama had belatedly earned his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize—by uniting Arabs and Israelis in horrified opposition to him. There was more than a grain of truth to it. In the space of a few years, Obama, whose election was supposed to herald a new era of global respect for America, had succeeded in infuriating or betraying nearly all of America’s traditional allies in the region while winning no new friends.
This was no way to conduct U.S. foreign policy. Much as many Americans may wish it otherwise, the U.S. continues to have vital interests in the Middle East. The U.S. cannot allow a hostile power to dominate a region that accounts for close to 40 percent of global oil production (and oil that is much cheaper to produce than what is extracted by fracking from shale). We cannot allow the world’s most fanatical regimes to acquire nuclear capabilities, setting off an arms race in the world’s most combustible region. We cannot accept the permanent establishment of jihad incubators similar to what the Taliban established in Afghanistan, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Hezbollah in much of southern Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza. We cannot allow chaos in the region once again to spill into Europe, setting off the chain of events that produced not only a massive humanitarian crisis but also a populist backlash in the West.
Finally, we have a long-term interest in encouraging reformers in the region wherever we might find them—whether it’s in government ministries in Riyadh, a protest movement in Tehran, or a TV station in Dubai. But such encouragement is a far cry from the sort of democracy promotion that was embraced by the Bush and later Obama administrations, which wound up legitimizing political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the Sadrists in Iraq that view democracy merely as a vehicle to establish their own authoritarianism.
Where does the creation of a Palestinian state rank on this list of American priorities? Not high, in the final analysis. There’s a shopworn argument that the failure to “solve” the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a major reason for ideological extremism and jihadist terrorism. Yet to the extent that extremists and jihadis care about, and act upon, their Palestinian grievance, it’s to destroy Israel in its entirety, not to create a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one. There is also an argument that a Palestinian state of some kind will be necessary to preserve Israel’s Jewish and democratic character. But even if one concedes the point, it’s an argument about Israeli interests, not American ones.
The upshot is that the infatuation so many U.S. policymakers have with Palestinian statehood has disserved American interests in myriad ways.
It confuses a vital national interest with a political wish—in this case, the wish of American presidents like Bill Clinton and secretaries of state like John Kerry to be lauded as peacemakers.
It wastes the White House’s political capital and diplomatic time.
It perpetuates the damaging myth that the plight of the Palestinians is the gravest in the region—to the detriment of other Middle Eastern people, such as the Kurds, who have fared far worse at the hands of Turks, Iraqis, and Syrians alike.
It perpetuates the false notion that a solution to the Palestinian issue would somehow solve everything else.
It allows the Arab world to go on asking “Who did this to us?” rather than “What did we do wrong?”—thereby fostering a mindset of blame-avoidance, conspiracy thinking, and political prevarication.
It plays into the propaganda of America’s radical enemies, led by Iran, that Israel’s behavior, rather than their own, is the chief source of turmoil and injustice in the region.
It asks that this same ally, Israel, weaken its defenses and take the proverbial “risks for peace,” when what America most needs from Israel is a strong country that can defend itself, come to the aid of its neighbors, provide the U.S. with critical intelligence and tactical know-how, and serve as a bulwark against the region’s radicals.
It puffs the vanity of Palestinian leaders and encourages them to pursue maximalist demands and reject every compromise, since it is only through the perpetuation of conflict that they remain relevant actors on the world stage. The paradox of the Palestinian issue is that the greater the public and diplomatic attention paid it, the harder it is to solve.
It stands in the way of full normalization of ties between Israel and Arab states by tying normalization to demands that Israel cannot safely meet, such as relinquishing the Jordan River Valley or allowing the descendants of Arab refugees from 1948 to return to Israel.
It feeds anti-Semitic stereotypes. As one French ambassador put it not long after 9/11, “All the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country, Israel. Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?”
In sum, not only did the Obama administration harm U.S. interests and values by overworking the Israeli-Palestinian issue, it harmed Israeli, Arab, and even Palestinian interests as well. Could the Trump administration do better?
To its credit—and to the pleasant surprise of some of its critics, including me—it did, in spades.
FOUR: TRUMPIAN DISCONTINUITY
IN FEBRUARY 2017, toward the end of my tenure at the Wall Street Journal, I wrote a column titled “Mideast Rules for Jared Kushner.” Donald Trump’s son-in-law had been handed the Israel–Palestine brief by the new president, and so I addressed him directly. “For Mr. Kushner,” I wrote,
the goal of diplomacy isn’t to “solve” the Palestinian problem. It’s to anesthetize it through a studied combination of economic help and diplomatic neglect. The real prize lies in further cultivating Jerusalem’s ties to Cairo, Riyadh, Amman and Abu Dhabi, as part of an Alliance of Moderates and Modernizers that can defeat Sunni and Shiite radicals from Raqqa to Tehran. The goal should be to make Palestinian leaders realize over time that they are the region’s atavism, not its future.
I don’t know whether Kushner read the piece, but the ideas I was expressing offered an intellectual foundation for what would become the Abraham Accords.
To the extent that the Accords are about the Palestinian issue at all, it is that they turn conventional thinking about it on its head. Instead of the usual view that a Palestinian state is the precondition to full Arab-Israeli normalization, the Accords suggest that a Palestinian state will happen only as a result of that normalization. There is an intuitive and compelling logic to this. If Israel does not have to fear a hostile or chaotic neighborhood, either now or in the future, it has less to fear from a Palestinian state. And if Palestinians observe that good relations between Israel and other Arab states are the norm, there’s less of a reason for them to stand out as the violent exception.
Yet the Abraham Accords are not, at bottom, about the Palestinians at all. On the contrary, they are about decoupling the Israeli–Palestinian conflict from the Arab–Israeli conflict. Doing so has obvious benefits for all sides. Israeli airliners no longer have to take a circuitous flight path to avoid overflying the Arabian peninsula. Abu Dhabi can acquire state-of-the-art F-35 jets from the U.S. without risking a de facto veto from Israel’s friends in Congress. American military strategists and intelligence operatives can leverage this burgeoning alliance both as an added deterrent and a force multiplier against regional enemies.
The significance of the Accords goes deeper. Had raison d’état governed the calculations of Arab statesmen, their quarrels with the Jewish state would have ended long ago. But the longstanding Arab refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy is the expression not of national interests. It’s a civilizational impulse. It stems from centuries of faltering confidence and wounded pride, which even the most clear-eyed Arab statesmen—including Anwar Sadat and Jordan’s late King Hussein—found hard to challenge. Overcoming it requires a change not just of policy but also mentality, a willingness to rethink assumptions that are as much cultural and psychological as they are political and strategic. It means looking at Israel as a regional role model and strategic partner, and at Palestinians as just another nation. That at least two Arab leaders were prepared to do all this in exchange for no territorial concessions by Israel is a considerable tribute to their farsightedness. In this sense, the Accords are about finally coming to grips with the fundamental causes of the decline of the Arab world, not just the immediate threats to its existence.
As for the Trump administration, whatever else might be said about its conduct of foreign policy, it was refreshingly indifferent to State Department formulas and shibboleths that had governed 50 years of U.S. policy and condemned it to futility. Land-for-peace? One state or two? The status of Jerusalem? The genius of the Accords is that they bypass these questions to achieve realizable policy objectives with major strategic benefits.
They also show how little the U.S. gains through a policy of Mideast evenhandedness. To his considerable credit, Trump shut down the Palestinian mission in Washington. He moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He offered a peace plan for an eventual Palestinian state that clearly tilted toward Israel. The plan later provided the pretext for the Abraham Accords, after the U.A.E. offered Israel a peace deal in exchange for Benjamin Netanyahu backing off from his pledge to annex parts of the West Bank.
Simply put, U.S. policy of being maximally pro-Israel did nothing to diminish America’s standing with its Arab allies. If anything, it did the opposite. Why? In part because Arab solidarity with Palestinians has always been opportunistic. But it’s also because what Arab states want from the U.S. isn’t balance. It’s reliability as an ally. An America that supports Israel to the hilt is one that understands the value of loyalty—an attractive feature to any country that looks to the U.S. for support.
I write all this as someone who has never disguised or disavowed my disdain for Trump: I supported both of his impeachments and have never regretted my opposition to him. But I believe in giving credit where credit is due. Nor am I optimistic about the direction of Mideast policy under Biden, whose sole idea for the region seems to be his eagerness to bring the U.S. back to the JCPOA. But I believe in giving new presidents the benefit of the doubt.
In the short term, Biden’s effort to return to the JCPOA will probably strengthen Israel’s strategic ties with its new partners—at America’s expense. U.S. outreach to Iran will also likely stiffen Israeli resistance to U.S. pressure to resume negotiations with Palestinians. Jerusalem would be rash to cede an inch if sanctions on Tehran are eased, to the benefit of Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad, and other Iranian terrorist proxies on Israel’s doorsteps.
Still, there is no need for Biden to replicate Obama’s Mideast mistakes. And it behooves the incoming administration to at least consider how the Abraham Accords can advance traditional Democratic foreign-policy objectives.
Peace: American presidents have sought, with mixed success, to normalize Israeli–Arab relations since Harry Truman was in the White House. This is not just a matter of altruism. The U.S. benefits when its allies are not at daggers drawn and Washington doesn’t have to worry about placating one side at the expense of the other. The history of Israeli–Arab wars has also been a story of U.S. foreign-policy crises, whether it was the Eisenhower administration’s rupture with Britain and France in 1956 over Suez, the nuclear alert during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the U.S. intervention in Lebanon in the early 1980s, or Iraq’s Scud-missile attacks on Israel during the 1991 Gulf War. The Abraham Accords are a major step toward ensuring that these sorts of crises never happen again.
Global strategy: If the Biden administration believes that the U.S. needs gradually to reduce the scale of its Mideast commitments—perhaps for the sake of pursuing the Obama-era pivot to Asia—then it had better do so in a way that neither leaves chaos in its wake nor creates openings for American adversaries. Broad normalization between Israel and Arab states can never fully compensate for a diminished U.S. footprint in the region; no Israeli aircraft carriers exist to patrol the waters of the Persian Gulf. But it can help. A united Israeli–Arab front could stymie Iran’s bid to become a regional hegemon, prevent Assad from regaining full control of Syria, and undermine transnational threats like Hezbollah or the remnants of ISIS—all of them threats to the U.S. as well.
Regional integration: Israel’s relationship with Azerbaijan, to which it sells arms (some of them used to appalling effect against ethnic Armenians in the recent conflict over Nagorno–Karabakh) and which it uses for intelligence purposes against neighboring Iran, is one model for how Israel could cooperate with, say, Bahrain. A better goal for Israeli–Arab relations would be the old Turkish–Israeli alliance, which involved close commercial ties, extensive tourism, and mutually productive diplomatic cooperation. That relationship held for more than 50 years until the Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power. Arab–Israeli economic integration cannot by itself address the Arab world’s social and economic challenges. But it points the Arab world in the right direction: cultivating human capital, and not letting past grievances stand in the way of future opportunities.
A (somewhat) more reputable United Nations: Imagine a UN whose business was less lopsidedly anti-Israel. (To adapt a line from Lennon, it isn’t easy even if you try.) But normalization might dampen the organization’s infamous biases against the Jewish state, restoring some of its long-lost credibility while making the job of U.S. diplomats at Turtle Bay easier.
Anti-fundamentalism: The biggest prize for Israel, as for the United States, would be for Saudi Arabia to join the Accords, which seemed to come tantalizingly close to fruition after Netanyahu paid a not-so-secret visit to the kingdom late last year. For the Saudi royal family, now deeply riven over the question, it would also mark the ultimate reversal of policy: from being the principal Sunni underwriter of anti-Western, anti-Christian, and anti-Semitic Islamism (a point abundantly documented in Dore Gold’s 2003 book, Hatred’s Kingdom) to being a friend and partner of the Jewish state. That, in turn, would require a profound shift in how the kingdom approaches the practice of Islam, what it teaches its schoolchildren, the mosques and madrassas it supports overseas. If what the U.S. ultimately needs most in the Middle East is a region that doesn’t export misery and fanaticism, then a prime objective of the Biden administration’s policy should be to push the kingdom toward Israel.
Yes, the Palestinians: A Palestinian state will never come into being on account of U.S. or international pressure. It could, however, come into existence when two conditions are met. The first would come about when Israeli leaders have complete confidence that territorial withdrawals in the West Bank will not lead to Gaza-style results. And the second could happen when Palestinian leaders and people alike abandon their long-held goal of destroying Israel as a Jewish state, both by renouncing the so-called right of return and forswearing the use of terror. Both those conditions would be significantly advanced in a world where Israel had normal relations with most of its neighbors. The road from Jerusalem to Ramallah may lead, however circuitously, through Riyadh.
FIVE: CAN BIDEN ACCEPT IT?
WILL THE BIDEN administration pay heed to any of this? Given the usual tendency of incoming administrations from the opposing party to view everything done by their immediate predecessor as dangerous, stupid, or both, my hopes aren’t high. It hasn’t helped that the Abraham Accords were treated by much of mainstream media with characteristic churlishness, as if acknowledging that the Trump administration had accomplished something of value was tantamount to an endorsement of fascism.
But the new administration ought to pay heed because the alternative will be failure. Iran has made it clear that it has no interest in returning to the JCPOA on anything but the deal’s original terms, which would have lifted the arms embargo on Iran last year, and then lift restrictions on centrifuges and enrichment within the decade. Whatever the Biden team thinks of that, it’s unacceptable to Israel and its new allies. For the U.S. to return to the deal would bring the region closer to war. Nor will a resumption of talks between Israelis and Palestinians yield better results than the last time they were tried, during Barack Obama’s second term. The leaders are the same; the differences are the same; the stakes are the same. In diplomacy as in chess, playing the same moves with the same pieces will always yield the same result.
But what if Biden simply accepted that a new dynamic is at last afoot in the Middle East, and that there can be immense upsides—and more than enough credit to share—by harnessing it to American purposes? What if the new president adopted the old maxim that there is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he does not mind who gets the credit? Even Jimmy Carter had the good sense to build on diplomatic openings created by the Nixon and Ford administrations to get to the Camp David Accords, the one lasting achievement of his presidency.
No matter what one thinks of Joe Biden, America desperately needs a successful presidency. The logic contained in the Abraham Accords offers him one shot at success in a place that matters, and where so many others have failed.
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*Bret Stephens is a Pulitzer-prize-winning columnist for the New York Times. With this article, he also joins Commentary ’s masthead as a contributing editor.

Iran jails U.S. businessman, possibly jeopardizing Biden's plans for diplomacy with Tehran
Dan De Luce/NBC/January 19/2021
The imprisonment of a fourth American could derail a bid by the Biden administration to revive a nuclear agreement with Iran.
WASHINGTON — Only weeks after the U.S. election and three days after an Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated, Iranian authorities convicted a U.S. businessman on spying charges, a family friend said.
The case threatens to complicate plans by the next administration to pursue diplomacy with Iran, as President-elect Joe Biden has said he would be open to easing sanctions on Tehran if the regime returned to compliance with a 2015 nuclear agreement.
The man, Emad Shargi, 56, who is Iranian American, was summoned to a Tehran court Nov. 30 and told that he had been convicted of espionage without a trial and sentenced to 10 years, a family friend said.
Shargi's family has not heard from him for more than six weeks, the family said in a statement.
Only a year earlier, in December 2019, an Iranian court had cleared Shargi, but the regime withheld his Iranian and U.S. passports.
The about-face by the Iranian authorities took place only weeks after Biden won the U.S. presidential election and three days after the killing of a leading nuclear scientist and senior defense official, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, east of Tehran. Iran blamed Israel for the assassination; Israel has declined to comment.
Despite Release Dual National Couple Prisoner Bahareh Amidi & Emad Sharghi's Passport Confiscated Prevented From Traveling [fa] https://t.co/ikxbgd9W69 #Iran #IranElection
Iranian media and Farsi-language outlets had reported Shargi's conviction but did not mention his U.S. citizenship. Shargi was not taken into custody immediately after he was sentenced; Iranian media reported that he was arrested Dec. 6 in the West Azerbaijan province of Iran, near the northern border with Iraq.
Shargi has been held incommunicado since then, his family said.
"Emad is the heart and soul of our family," Shargi's family said in a statement obtained by NBC News.
"We just pray for his health and safety," the statement said. "It's been more than six weeks since he was taken and we have no idea where he is or who has him. Out of caution for his well-being, we've never spoken publicly about his case and don't wish to now. Please pray for Emad and for his safe return home."
Iran tries to increase its leverage in future negotiations with President-elect Biden
The case “is going to be dealt with in accordance with the domestic laws of the country,” said Alireza Miryusefi, spokesperson for Iran’s U.N. mission.
Trump's DHS downplayed domestic extremism while pushing anti-immigration agenda, ex-officials say
Domestic issues in either country were irrelevant to the future of the 2015 nuclear agreement, he said.
“We fully expect the Biden administration to live up to its side of the nuclear deal and lift the sanctions altogether, as Mr. Biden himself has promised it will," Miryusefi told NBC News.
The White House National Security Council and the Biden transition team did not respond to requests for comment.
Apart from Shargi, three other Iranian-Americans are under detention in Iran: Siamak Namazi, who has been behind bars since 2015; his elderly father, Baquer, who is on medical furlough; and Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian American environmental activist, who also holds British citizenship.
The timing of Shargi's conviction and imprisonment could put at risk the Biden administration's plans to pursue diplomacy with Iran to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement and reduce tensions.
President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the multinational nuclear deal, known as JCPOA, two years ago and reimposed punishing economic sanctions on Iran. Tehran in turn has gradually violated the terms of the accord, which had placed limits on its nuclear work. Biden has said he would be ready to ease the sanctions if Iran returned to compliance with the agreement, which was backed by European powers, Russia and China.
Hard-line elements in Iran, which have remained skeptical of diplomatic overtures to Washington, have backed provocative actions in the past, including the imprisonment of foreign nationals, to undermine any rapprochement with the West, according to regional analysts, human rights groups and former senior U.S. officials.
Shargi was born in Iran and educated in the U.S., earning an undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland and a master's degree from George Washington University. He and his wife moved back to Iran in 2016 to reacquaint themselves with the country, the family friend said.
He had worked in the plastics materials industry while in the U.S. and for an aviation brokerage firm in Abu Dhabi, and at the time of his arrest, he was working for an investment company called Sarava Holding focused on the tech industry. The family friend said that an Iranian media report that suggested he was the No. 2-ranking executive at the company was inaccurate and that he was not a major shareholder. He had been working for the company for only a number of months when he was imprisoned in 2018.
The family friend described Shargi as a gentle, caring man who is devoted to his family and has no history or interest in political activity.
Shargi was first arrested in April 2018 and held at Evin Prison in Tehran until December 2018, when he was released on bail. While he was behind bars, he was subjected to repeated interrogations, and he was blindfolded and placed in the corner of the room facing the wall, the family friend said.
During the first 44 days of his detention, Shargi had no contact with or access to the outside world, including his family, the family friend said.
Biden faces a race against the clock for U.S. to rejoin Iran nuclear deal
Shargi's conviction and sentencing in November were handled by Judge Abolqasem Salavati of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Court, the family friend said. Salavati, who is known for dispensing harsh punishments, has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department. He has "sentenced more than 100 political prisoners, human rights activists, media workers and others seeking to exercise freedom of assembly," according to the Treasury Department.
Human rights groups have accused Iran of arbitrarily imprisoning foreign nationals, violating their rights to due process and using the cases as potential bargaining chips with other governments.
Iran denies the allegations and has rejected accounts that inmates are subject to inhumane treatment or abuse.
*Dan De Luce is a reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit.
 

Nuclear Extortion: Mullahs Want More Concessions from Biden
Majid Rafizadeh/Gatestone Institute/January 19/2021

http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/95121/majid-rafizadeh-gatestone-institute-nuclear-extortion-mullahs-want-more-concessions-from-biden-%d8%af-%d9%85%d8%a7%d8%ac%d8%af-%d8%b1%d8%a7%d9%81%d9%8a%d8%b2%d8%a7%d8%af%d8%a7-%d9%83%d8%a7%d9%8a/

Iran... rejoined the global financial system with full legitimacy -- plus billions of dollars flowing into the treasury of the IRGC and its expanding militias across the Middle East. You would think, then, that the regime would be delighted to return to the same nuclear deal, right? Wrong. The mullahs want an even sweeter deal.
Biden already showed his cards by stating that he wants the deal. The regime now knows that Biden seems desperate for a deal, and doubtless sees this as a delectable weakness.
The ruling mullahs also most likely assume that they can extort even more concessions from a Democrat administration, particularly Biden's, because they successfully did so in the past....
Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif... told a forum... that he wants a new deal. "A sign of good faith is not to try to renegotiate what has already been negotiated," he said, adding in the same speech that the US must "Compensate us for our losses." Iran's top judicial body had already demanded that the US pay $130 billion in "damages."
The regime, in addition, is playing another dangerous game, as it did with the Obama administration, to program to extort greater concessions from the Biden administration: It is ratcheting up nuclear threats.
Iran's ruling mullahs most likely assume that they can extort even more concessions from a Biden administration, because they successfully did so with the Obama administration. Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif recently said at a forum that he wants a new deal. "A sign of good faith is not to try to renegotiate what has already been negotiated," he said, later adding that the US must "Compensate us for our losses." Pictured: Then US Secretary of State John Kerry shakes hands with Zarif during negotiations in Vienna, Austria, on July 14, 2014. (Image source: US State Department)
The Iranian regime received a dangerous and unprecedented level of concessions from the Obama administration for Iran's 2015 "nuclear deal," known as the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) -- which, by the way, Tehran never signed. The major concession was that the deal paved the way for Iran legally to become a full-blown nuclear state.
The sunset clauses, which enshrined that commitment, had set a firm expiration date for restricting Iran's nuclear program. The Obama administration also helped swiftly lift all four rounds of UN sanctions against Iran -- sanctions it had taken decades to put in place. Furthermore, Iran's military sites were exempt from inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and other inspections were only to be at the times and places of Iran's choosing -- if ever. Iran then rejoined the global financial system with full legitimacy -- plus billions of dollars flowing into the treasury of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its expanding militias across the Middle East.
You would think, then, that the regime would be delighted to return to the same nuclear deal, right? Wrong. The mullahs want an even sweeter deal. Why? Partially because Joe Biden already showed his cards by stating that he wants the deal. "I will offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy," Biden stated in a CNN op-ed.
"If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal, the United States would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations. With our allies, we will work to strengthen and extend the nuclear deal's provisions, while also addressing other issues of concern."
The regime now knows that Biden seems desperate for a deal, and doubtless sees this as a delectable weakness.
Just as enticing to the mullahs, Biden has appointed Wendy Sherman -- a key negotiator in the talks which led to the nuclear deal in 2015 during the Obama administration -- to be Deputy Secretary of State. Biden actually pointed to this professed accomplishment:
"She [Sherman] has successfully rallied the world to strengthen democracy and confront some of the biggest national security challenges of our time, including leading the U.S. negotiating team for the Iran Deal".
That sent a further strong message to Iran that the Biden administration was desperate to return to the nuclear deal.
Meanwhile, the Iranian regime can only feel emboldened by the position of the European Union. The EU is lobbying for returning to the JCPOA and lifting sanctions on Iran -- in spite of the fact, as France's Foreign Minister Jean Yves Le Drian recently acknowledged, that Tehran is rapidly acquiring nuclear weapons capacity. The EU announced last week its "strong commitment" to the Iranian nuclear deal and urged Biden swiftly to rejoin it:
"The EU reiterates its strong commitment to and continued support for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The JCPoA is a key element of the global nuclear non-proliferation architecture and an achievement of multilateral diplomacy, endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council through resolution 2231."
Iran's ruling mullahs also most likely assume that they can extort even more concessions from a Democrat administration, particularly Biden's, because they successfully did so in the past, with the Obama administration, when Biden served as Vice President.
Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, nevertheless, told a forum organized by New York's Council on Foreign Relations that he wants a new deal. "A sign of good faith is not to try to renegotiate what has already been negotiated," he said, adding in the same speech that the US must "Compensate us for our losses." Iran's top judicial body had already demanded that the US pay $130 billion in "damages."
Iran's regime, in addition, is playing another dangerous game, as it did with the Obama administration, to program to extort greater concessions from the Biden administration: It is ratcheting up nuclear threats.
Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the civilian Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, stated on January 1, 2021 that Tehran will enrich uranium at a higher level, a short technical step away from weapons-grade level. The IAEA confirmed the plan:
"Iran has informed the agency that in order to comply with a legal act recently passed by the country's parliament, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran intends to produce low-enriched uranium (LEU) up to 20 percent at the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant. Iran's letter to the agency, dated [Dec. 31, 2020] did not say when this enrichment activity would take place."
Now, at an underground facility, Iran's theocratic establishment is enriching uranium at 20 percent.
Furthermore, on January 4, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), seized in the Gulf a South Korean-flagged ship carrying thousands of tons of ethanol, according to Fars News. The move alarmed the US State Department. A spokesperson noted:
"The (Iranian) regime continues to threaten navigational rights and freedoms in the Persian Gulf as part of a clear attempt to extort the international community into relieving the pressure of sanctions. We join the Republic of Korea's call for Iran to immediately release the tanker,"
Meanwhile, General Hossein Salami, commander-in-chief of the IRGC, recently threatened the U.S. and the United Kingdom. "If you cross our red line," he announced, "we will destroy you. We will not leave any move unanswered. The enemy will not have security anywhere." He added that the regime's "patience has a limit."
The Iranian parliament also recently passed another law, requiring the government to expel the nuclear inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
All these measures -- using threats and nuclear violations -- are just aimed at getting a still sweeter deal from the Biden administration.
*Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu
© 2021 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

The Pernicious Effects of Popular Nuclear Mythology
Stephen Blank and Peter Huessy/Gatestone Institute/January 19/2021
While one looks with alarm at the massive Russian nuclear modernization effort now nearing completion, the disarmament lobby -- such as Ploughshares and Global Zero -- views such modernization as simply a reflection of how the American threat is perceived by the Russians.
There is also little doubt that the Russian Federation's priority investment in nuclear weapons was -- and remains -- aimed primarily to checkmate the United States' conventional weapons superiority, and give Russia a free hand to use its own military power for hegemonic purposes. The same could be said of North Korea and Iran's decisions to go along their respective paths to nuclear breakout.
What brings the issue to the forefront today is that many luminaries of previous administrations who may now be staffing the incoming administration still hold these historically inaccurate views.
A commitment to a "sole-purpose" posture -- or to its equivalent, a "no-first-use" stance -- not only undermines the US nuclear umbrella upon which America's allies have relied for 70 years, it also invites a Russian first strike. Moscow's conventional and nuclear forces are configured for just that kind of operation and are ultimately restrained only by the American nuclear deterrent.
If the United States wrongly assumes that Russia's deterrent serves no offensive purpose, we would be ignoring recent and authoritative evidence to the contrary.... Russia's military posture is fundamentally offensive.... "active defense."
Russia's ability to initiate conventional strikes against its rivals and adversaries is closely backed up by nuclear weapons.
Iran would undoubtedly see even partial unilateral US disarmament as a green light for its nuclear quest. One can imagine what that would lead to in the Middle East.
Moreover, US unilateral acts of altruism, designed to lead by example, will not be reciprocated: states in general, and certainly Russia and China, are, to quote Charles De Gaulle, "cold monsters."
While one looks with alarm at the massive Russian nuclear modernization effort now nearing completion, the disarmament lobby views such modernization as simply a reflection of how the American threat is perceived by the Russians.
There is a widespread belief, especially among advocates of nuclear disarmament, that a country with nuclear weapons is primarily interested in self-protection. The narrative continues with another belief -- really more of a wish -- that nuclear weapons should never be used to deter anything other than a nuclear attack from an adversary and, if that can be agreed upon, nations would then be willing to get rid of nuclear weapons altogether.
Those beliefs then requires a further assumption that nuclear weapons cannot practically be used as instruments of aggression, coercion or blackmail and -- because nuclear weapons are so deadly -- that they also would not be used to deter non-nuclear attacks, such as those involving cyber, an electromagnetic pulse, or biological weapons.
A further assumption, held by many leaders in the disarmament community, is that even if nuclear deterrence breaks down, no retaliatory use of nuclear weapons is warranted -- because, again, the risks of escalation toward an all-out nuclear Armageddon are too great. As it is also assumed that no nuclear-armed country would risk such an Armageddon, nuclear-armed adversaries of the US must therefore only be seeking to deter US attacks and therefore have no nuclear ambitions beyond that.
Disarmament supporters go even further. They argue that even should nuclear deterrence break down, the United States should still use only conventional weapons. The late founder of Global Zero at Princeton University, for example, Bruce Blair, testified before Congress in 2019 that for the United States, any response to being attacked with nuclear weapons should be limited just to conventional weapons.
As a consequence, while one looks with alarm at the massive Russian nuclear modernization effort now nearing completion, the disarmament lobby -- such as Ploughshares and Global Zero -- views such modernization as simply a reflection of how the American threat is perceived by the Russians. According to this logic, if the US simply diminished its threat by, say, pledging never to use nuclear weapons first and to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in America's deterrent strategy, nuclear dangers would markedly diminish and Russia, too, would diminish its nuclear modernization efforts.
Insofar as nuclear and arms control issues are involved, it is important to devise sound policies that advance the interests and values of the US and its allies. Especially as President-elect Biden has now indicated his interest in cutting both the budget for low-yield nuclear weapons and adopting abrupt changes such as "no-first-use" in nuclear policy, it is necessary to rely on evidence and facts, not mythology.
Particularly worrisome are the comments from defense experts associated with the incoming administration who are calling for policies never adopted by previous administrations or Congress in all of the 75 years of the nuclear age. These ideas include eliminating the ICBM leg of the land-sea-air Triad, stopping the acquisition of both low-yield warheads and the new bomber cruise missile, and adopting such policies as "no-first-use" of nuclear weapons, all under the assumptions that nuclear weapons -- even those held by adversaries -- exist to deter the possible use of nuclear weapons and serve no other deterrent or political goal.
Although discussions about United States nuclear policy should not cease, it remains a fact that since 1945, the United States has held a bipartisan consensus on the need over time to update and modernize the entire nuclear establishment to ensure the safety, reliability, and effectiveness of a US nuclear deterrent. This consensus is a remarkable achievement through 13 Presidential administrations, 7 Republican and 6 Democratic. It illustrates how, over 75 years, a bipartisan policy can be thoughtfully and successfully pursued. Such a consensus should not be jettisoned cavalierly.
It now appears, however, that this consensus is at risk. That possibility is not just consequential for the United States. It is also critical for America's allies: their safety has long been acknowledged as a vital US interest.
It is therefore most urgent to fully examine a popular argument: that it should be US policy to assert that nuclear weapons' sole purpose can only be to deter other nuclear weapons from being used first. This argument, unfortunately, not only happens to be factually false, it is also dishonest -- both morally and politically -- no small achievement.
In many instances, such as Russia's and China's attainment of nuclear weapons, nuclear proliferation took place, at least in part, precisely to overcome and deter the superiority of conventional weapons possessed by the Free World's adversaries. This was true for NATO strategy during the Cold War and apparently today as well.
Whether we are discussing India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, North Korea, Russia or China, it seems clear that the rulers of these states were frightened by the specter of their rivals' conventional superiority and sought nuclear weapons expressly to deter the possible use of those superior conventional forces. There is also little doubt that the Russian Federation's priority investment in nuclear weapons was -- and remains -- aimed primarily to checkmate the United States' conventional weapons superiority, and give Russia a free hand to use its own military power for hegemonic purposes. The same could be said of North Korea and Iran's decisions to go along their paths toward nuclear breakout.
Anyone who postulates that the purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons should be solely to deter nuclear threats would therefore seem to have a false grasp of reality. Historical studies of the evolution of the American nuclear deterrent reveal that it too was driven to a considerable degree by the need to provide extended deterrence against the clearly understood threat of a superior Soviet conventional (and, as we now know nuclear, as well) thrust into Europe, or another Chinese conventional attack on U.S. allies in Asia. The claim that the sole purpose of having nuclear weapons is to deter other states' nuclear weapons is simply historically not accurate.
What brings the issue to the forefront today is that many luminaries of previous administrations who may now be staffing the incoming administration still hold these historically inaccurate views. Further, the argument concerning the sole purpose of nuclear weapons also serves as a Trojan horse aimed to get the United States and its allies to rely on a declared "no-first-use" of nuclear weapons as a stated policy and then rebrand it so it can be sold without explicitly naming it to American audiences. If nuclear weapons are solely for the purpose of stopping the first use of nuclear weapons, the argument goes, well then the adoption of a "no-first-use" policy obviates the need for nuclear weapons in the first place and might even gradually lead to their abolition.
The argument for "no-first-use" is therefore not only disingenuous, but also dangerous. A "no-first-use" policy would unilaterally undermine not only US interests but those of its allies in both Asia and Europe. Indeed, former Defense Secretary William Perry, who has since his retirement from office become an exponent of "no-first-use," has candidly admitted that the "sole purpose" argument is a stalking horse for significant nuclear disarmament. How that is meant to improve our allies' confidence in US leadership, and support multilateral efforts to solve security problems, is beyond understanding.
These arguments also ignore Russian and Chinese military developments. Russia's present nuclear force structure is actually designed, as the Russian government admitted in 2020, for a first strike in order to deter conventional as well as nuclear attacks by its main enemy, the West. News reports reveal that Russia has just produced a 6,200-kilometer range missile, with a speed of 15,000 kilometers an hour, each missile carrying 16-20 nuclear warheads. Just 100 such missiles would be able to put into Russia's force 233% of the total warheads allowed by the US and Russia's 2010 New Start Treaty -- hardly reflective of a nuclear armed power interested in nuclear disarmament.
A commitment to a "sole-purpose" posture -- or to its equivalent, a "no-first-use" stance -- not only undermines the US nuclear umbrella upon which America's allies have relied for 70 years, it also invites a Russian first strike. Moscow's conventional and nuclear forces are configured for just that kind of operation and are ultimately restrained only by the American nuclear deterrent. If the United States wrongly assumes that Russia's deterrent serves no offensive purpose, we would be ignoring recent evidence to the contrary.
Experts on the Russian military fully understand that Russia's military posture is fundamentally offensive. As Michael Kofman wrote in 2019, because Russia appears to shun deterrence by denial, its doctrine has evolved into what Chief of the General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov calls "active defense":
This is a set of preemptive nonmilitary and military measures, deterrence and escalation management based on cost imposition. The Russian armed forces are geared towards being able to preemptively neutralize an emerging threat or deter by showing the ability and willingness to inflict unacceptable consequences on the potential adversary. In practice this includes a range of calibrated damage, from single and grouped conventional strikes against economic or military infrastructure, to massed employment of precision guided weapons, followed by non-strategic nuclear weapons, and at the outer edges, theater-strategic nuclear warfare.
Similarly, the Norwegian expert, Katarzyna Zysk shows that from 2000, if not before, Russia engaged in what Zysk calls "stake-raising strategies." These involve using the threat of nuclear weapons to deter US conventional superiority on the same principle: raising the costs of any attack on Russia to prohibitive levels. Since 2000, Russian military doctrines, including the updated 2014 version, "maintained clauses permitting Russia the first use of nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict." While Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu promises that non-nuclear deterrence will be completely ready by 2021, it is unlikely that this promise can or will be realized. That omission leaves Russian nuclear weapons configured in an offensive first-strike mode, including new hypersonic weapons that threaten strategic stability, as Russia's primary and most reliable military force.
The historical and current evidence of Russia's policy shows not only that the "sole purpose" argument is bankrupt both factually and politically; it also clearly reveals what the consequences of a "no-first-use" policy would be. Since 2008, Russia has repeatedly used its nuclear deterrent to shield conventional invasions against its neighbors while undertaking literally hundreds of probes against NATO and US defenses. In short, Russia's ability to initiate conventional strikes against its rivals and adversaries is closely backed up by nuclear weapons. Russia is not alone in so doing. North Korea's and Pakistan's unremitting support for terrorism against India and the Republic of Korea, respectively, operates on a similar principle of using nuclear weapons to backstop aggressive conventional or terrorist operations.
Further underlying the push for adopting policies such as "no-first-use" or dismantling elements of America's nuclear deterrent, is a belief that the United States can reduce international tensions by a partial unilateral disarmament -- by the power of setting an example. Just as the "sole purpose" and "no-first-use" arguments on nuclear weapons fall to pieces when examined in the light of history and the actual policies of nuclear states, so too does this moralistic and implicitly self-righteous fantasy. It neglects that both China and Russia, not to mention North Korea and Iran, have feared the United States' conventional superiority, and that such fear has driven -- and still drives – the nuclear and non-nuclear weapons programs of America's adversaries.
Unless the US disarms conventionally, the thinking goes -- a notion hardly to be expected -- the nuclear ambitions of those four adversaries of the US will not change.
It is important to call out the perfervid moralism that afflicts many commentators who think it is evil for the US to have, and threaten to use, nuclear weapons but who omit or overlook that other states have no compunction about threatening to use their nuclear weapons. Worse, the record of observance of disarmament treaties leaves much to be desired.
These critics also fail to consider that US steps toward unilateral disarmament designed to showcase a superior moral posture might immediately trigger a wave of panic-stricken nuclear proliferation in Europe and Asia among America's allies. As one Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) study concluded, these allies of the United States would then lose faith in America's reliability and scramble to enhance their own nuclear capabilities. The same arms-race would occur in the Middle East if US allies there feared facing a potential nuclear-armed Iran by themselves.
It also is worth asking whether North Korea or China, for instance, if the US withdrew its protective nuclear umbrella, would actually wait for South Korea or Japan to attain their own nuclear weapons first, or whether they would act preemptively to prevent such an eventuality. Iran would undoubtedly see even partial unilateral US disarmament as a green light for its nuclear quest. One can imagine what that would lead to in the Middle East. A partial US disarmament there might very well mean an upsurge of terrorism and potential major conventional or nuclear wars throughout that region.
To be sure, there are those who now advocate giving countries such as South Korea and Japan a green light to go nuclear on their own. It is clear, however, that this argument merely cloaks a US unilateral withdrawal from its alliances: a betrayal. The move amounts to unilateral disarmament and does not seem a realistic assessment of how the threat of unleashing nuclear weapons is actually used.
The sentiment to disparage or even abolish nuclear weapons and the politics of nuclear weapons is constantly being revived. While such sentiments are understandable, that does not make them more noble, practical or correct. Nuclear war would be an unspeakable horror for the world but this genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Moreover, nuclear deterrence, whatever its faults, has kept the peace between superpowers for three quarters of a century, despite the moralism of the anti-nuclear forces who would like to ignore that major nuclear powers do not always follow international treaties decreeing an end to nuclear weapons or to war in general.
All these are hard, if dismaying, facts. Both Moscow and Beijing are building hundreds of new nuclear weapons. China is on track to double them during this decade. Moreover, US unilateral acts of altruism, designed to lead by example, sadly will not be reciprocated: states in general, and certainly Russia and China, are, to quote Charles De Gaulle, "cold monsters".
The appropriate US response to nuclear moves by Russia and China will, of course, be debated by Congress and others. But the unbudgeable facts presented here suggest that nuclear modernization, supported by the long-held bilateral consensus of maintaining a safe, reliable and effective nuclear deterrent to advance the interests of the US and its allies, merits continuation for the foreseeable future. We should not deceive ourselves into believing that Moscow or Beijing will suddenly become more accommodating if the US jettisons major elements of its nuclear deterrent. They would probably just regard the US as foolish and naïve. Indeed, the British Parliament concluded in a summer 2020 report that Putin and his gang of oligarchs will not relent in their struggle against the West even if London made major concessions to it.
Policymakers in the "world as it is" rather than in the "world as we wish it were" -- if not academics and intellectuals -- understand this. Hard analytical observation of military history and nuclear threats -- rather than outraged moralism -- is required. While the quest for arms control, security and peace deserves to be pursued, such a quest requires a morality based on the evidence of history and recognizing that one can only peacefully reduce nuclear threats by appearing uninviting to attack. So far, that seems the only way throughout centuries that has kept the cold monsters from launching hot wars.
*Peter Huessy, Senior Consulting Analyst at Ravenna Associates, is President of GeoStrategic Analysis. Stephen Blank is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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