Editor’s note: This commentary by retired ABC News diplomatic correspondent Barrie Dunsmore first appeared in the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and Rutland Herald Sunday edition. All his columns can be found on his website.
[H]ere we are, less than a week into 2018 and we already have the makings of new crises in two of the world’s hotspots — North Korea and Iran.
In Iran, a new wave of anti-government protests which began apparently spontaneously at year’s end over bread and butter economic issues, has expanded to calls for better living conditions, more political freedom and even an end to Islamic rule.
These protests are not yet of the magnitude of the demonstrations of 2009 over a fixed presidential election, which involved tens of thousands of people. But a Washington Post report this past week, described the latest events as “stunning in their ferocity and geographic reach, spreading to far flung towns and cities that are strongholds of the middle and working classes.” This is significant because these areas normally would be more likely to be supporters of the regime than the cosmopolitan residents of Tehran who led what became known as the Green Movement of 2009.
Meantime the New York Times reports, “Beyond a New Year’s declaration by North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, that he would move to the mass production of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles in 2018, lies a canny new strategy to initiate direct talks with South Korea in the hope of driving a wedge into the seven-decade alliance with the United States.”
Kim may be “little rocket man” to Trump, but in this case he is using the clever ploy of offering to send a North Korean delegation to the South Korean Winter Olympics next month — along with proposing new, high level North- South Korean talks in the near future. South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in jumped at the opportunity.
Analysts see this as Kim’s way of exploiting what are known to be significant differences between President Moon and President Trump. Moon has called for economic and diplomatic openings with the North, while Trump has favored the use of ever-stiffening sanctions to get Kim to rein in his nuclear program.
Trump last year called the South Korean president an appeaser and was angered when Moon said he held a veto over any pre-emptive attacks against the North’s nuclear program. One has to assume Kim is more interested in further dividing the U.S. and its South Korean ally than in having a skater or two in the South Korean Olympics, and saw the latter as a way to achieve the former.
The New York Times’ David Sanger sums it up: “The diplomatic tug-of-war comes amid a backdrop of increasing fears over North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Over the past year the North has made such fast technological advances that it says it can now strike the East Coast of the United States with a missile … there is little dispute that it is getting much closer to such a capability.”
Trump predictably and provocatively tweeted this response to Kim’s latest moves: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works.!”
There has also been no shortage of Trump tweets on the Iranian protests. From USA Today: “Amid widespread anti-government protests in Iran over economic grievances, President Trump on Tuesday slammed former President Barack Obama for ‘foolishly’ giving money to the nation. ‘The people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime,’ Trump wrote on Twitter. ‘All of the money that President Obama so foolishly gave them went into terrorism and into their pockets. The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The U.S. is watching!’”
It’s typical that Trump would blame former President Obama for creating the economic and political conditions which prompted the protests. In fact, all that money which Obama “gave” to Iran was part of the six-nation agreement which placed major restrictions on Iran’s nuclear capabilities in 2016, It was Iran’s money, confiscated mainly by the U.S. as a result of the 1979 hostage crisis. It was always contemplated that it would be returned, with interest, at the appropriate moment. Obama and the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China all agreed that preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power, was such a time.
But Trump doesn’t really care about the money, any more than he cares about the Iranian protesters. He sees both as vehicles for undermining and if possible abrogating the Iran nuclear agreement. Somehow, one might surmise with the avid encouragement of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu – along with the Saudis — Trump has concluded that the world will be better off if this agreement is trashed, ignoring the reality that if so, within two or three years Iran will have an aggressive nuclear program and will be every bit as great a threat to the world as North Korea has become. By any means of rational logic this makes absolutely no sense — except we know that rational logic is not part of Donald Trump’s thought process.
It is again worth noting the George W. Bush administration had a similar flight from rational thinking in 2002 when it discovered North Korea had begun cheating on the deal it had reached eight years earlier with President Bill Clinton, by secretly buying a small nuclear plant from Pakistan. The Clinton agreement had led to North Korea’s known nuclear facilities being frozen in 1994 and placed under U.N. inspections. Instead of playing hardball at the negotiating table, the Bush people walked away in a huff from the Clinton deal. North Korea responded by reopening its frozen nuclear facilities. It kicked out the U.N. inspectors and a few years later produced its first atomic bomb from that very facility — as well as all its subsequent nukes.
I fear that Trump is about to make that same colossal strategic blunder with Iran — with the same unnecessary yet catastrophic consequences.
