The World At The Roulette Table

The Iran Nuclear deal bears the official acronym JCPOA -- short for Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Donald  Trump torpedoed JCPOA two days ago. The rationale for his decision, Jonathan Manthorpe writes, seems embarrassingly clear:

The only rational explanation of Trump’s actions – if that is not an oxymoron – is that the JCPOA was a major foreign policy achievement of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Trump gives every indication of despising Obama, and of believing that his supporters want him to erase all evidence that a black man ever inhabited the Oval Office.

His petty, weak minded decision has isolated the United States:

Foremost is Trump’s rejection of the clear and persistent advice from JCPOA partners Britain, France and Germany not to junk the agreement. All three said there are flaws in the agreement, but the sensible approach is to stick with it and try to improve the deal in talks with Iran.

Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Emmanuel Macron, all invested considerable diplomatic credibility in trying to deter Trump from abandoning the JCPOA.

But Trump chose to display contempt for three of the closest and most loyal allies the U.S. has had since the Second World War. Having been spurned, they will have little enthusiasm in the future to either consider Trump’s interests or come to his aid in the future.

Future U.S. isolation may well be measured from May 8, 2018.

Apparently, Trump believes that his actions will have a salutary effect on North Korea. But, despite Trump's braggadocio, Kim Jung Un will read the writing on the wall:

The message Kim is getting is that Trump cannot be trusted to keep a deal, so better not to make one. His logical reaction will be to keep his nuclear deterrent stock pile well primed, pursue economic relations with South Korea, and, most importantly, ensure China’s Xi Jinping has got his back.

So Kim flew to Beijing on Monday for two-days of discussions with Chinese President Xi. Over the past few weeks Kim has gone to great lengths to restore the amicable relationship with Beijing, apparently with success.

Trump's life has been a series of miscalculations -- which Trump insists were actually triumphs. He claims that pulling out of the JCPOA is a triumph. But now more than his financial health is at stake. The man who knew nothing about the casino business is now gambling with the world's future.

Image: Real Iran

Code Red

Back in  February, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman issued a code red warning to his readers, writing that Donald Trump was "either compromised by the Russians, or a towering fool." We have yet to discover what the Russians have on Trump. But when the Great Orange Id backed out of the Iran Deal yesterday, he confirmed that he was, indeed, a towering fool. Roger Cohen writes in The Times:

The nuclear accord, reached in 2015, was a watershed. It was not intended to end Iranian-American enmity, virulent since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but it did dent dangerous confrontation through dialogue.

It was a gamble on drawing Iran, a hopeful and highly educated society, closer to the world and so weakening the Islamic Republic’s hard-liners. It was not about Iranian interference in neighboring Arab states or about its ballistic missile program. It concerned centrifuges and Iran’s clear but never avowed quest for a nuclear bomb.

The agreement put a ring fence around Iran’s nuclear program into the second quarter of this century. It slashed centrifuges by two-thirds; virtually eliminated its uranium stockpile; capped enrichment levels at 3.7 percent, a long way from bomb grade; cut off a plutonium route to a bomb; and redoubled international inspection.

On all this, Iran was in compliance, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Its nuclear ambitions had been checked, a reason several Israeli military and intelligence officials, including former heads of Mossad and Shin Bet, backed the accord, along with former Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Diplomacy doesn't result in perfect solutions. But, at its best, it arrives at win-win solutions. Trump doesn't know how to do diplomacy. The only rule he lives by is "I win, you lose." That is why his speech yesterday was couched in Orwellian terms:

It was not “a horrible, one-sided deal,” as Trump grotesquely claimed on Tuesday. It was not about delivering “peace,” as he absurdly suggested. It was not a “rotten structure,” as he emptily claimed.

Nothing in Trump’s speech was more scurrilous than this very Orwellian inversion of the truth: “If I allowed this deal to stand, there would soon be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Everyone would want their weapons ready by the time Iran had theirs.” In fact, Trump has single-handedly fast-forwarded that race by removing the constraints the deal imposed on Iran.

In the background stood John Bolton, who argued for regime change in Iraq. Obviously, Bolton has learned nothing for the Iraq War. Perhaps that's because Bolton spent the Vietnam War the way George W. Bush did -- in the Army Reserves -- knowing that if he was in the reserves he wouldn't get anywhere near Vietnam. Trump, of course,  got multiple deferments -- like Dick Cheney, whose main claim to fame seems to be shooting his friend in the face.

With such limited experience and monumental stupidity, Trump and his advisors have placed the entire world on Code Red.

Image: You Tube