With the flourish of his pen on Monday, President Trump imposed sweeping sanctions on Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as everyone in Khamenei’s office or appointed by him. It was a point of high drama in the escalating brinksmanship between the United States and the Islamic Republic. It was the closest that Trump has come to formally calling for a regime change. “The Supreme Leader of Iran is one who ultimately is responsible for the hostile conduct of the regime,” the President told reporters. “These measures represent a strong and proportionate response to Iran’s increasingly provocative actions.” Usually, the United States will sanction a head of state—such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro—as a signal that the leader is no longer deemed legitimate. In other words, Washington believes that a leader has to go.
Trump was opaque, even puzzling, about his intentions, however. “America is a peace-loving nation,” he said. “We do not seek conflict with Iran or any other country. I look forward to the day when sanctions can be finally lifted and Iran can become a peaceful, prosperous, and productive nation. That can go very quickly; it can be tomorrow. It can also be in years from now. So, I look forward to discussing whatever I have to discuss with anybody that wants to speak. In the meantime, who knows what’s going to happen.”
The new executive order also targeted the Revolutionary Guard commanders involved in shooting down a sophisticated U.S. drone last week. The Trump Administration intends later this week to impose sanctions on the U.S.-educated Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who was the chief interlocutor during the two years of negotiations that led to the Iran nuclear deal, in 2015. Zarif once quipped that he and the former Secretary of State John Kerry spent more time with each other during that period than they spent with their wives. As Iran’s top diplomat, Zarif regularly travels to New York to attend U.N. sessions. He was here in April and had been expected to return next month.
At a White House press conference, the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, vowed that the new sanctions will “lock up literally billions of dollars more of assets.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was visiting Saudi Arabia on Monday, charged that Khamenei’s office “has enriched itself at the expense of the Iranian people. It sits atop a vast network of tyranny and corruption.” The new sanctions, Pompeo said, will deprive the Iranian leadership of the resources it uses to “spread terror and oppress the Iranian people.”
Ironically, the punitive new measure may not have major economic impact—at least not to the degree that the Administration advertised. “It’s a lot of hype, but it doesn’t mean much economically. It’s unlikely to have a damaging effect” on Iran beyond the sanctions that have already been imposed, Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former Treasury sanctions specialist who is now at the Center for a New American Security, told me. “It’s in the realm of the symbolic.” The sanctions are “a sideshow to a threat of military escalation and all-out conflict,” she said. They fuel a narrative focussed on Iran rather than the United States—and the fact that Trump blinked when he called off a retaliatory military strike last Thursday.
Former Treasury officials also claim that Trump did not need to sign a new executive order—beyond the hype and media attention it produced. The authority to sanction either entities or officials affiliated with the Iranian government has existed since 2012, when the Obama Administration issued an executive order, Kate Bauer, a former Treasury official who is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said. “It’s clear that this Administration wants to send a message,” Bauer said. “This is a response to the recent escalation and the shooting down of the drone.”
The main impact of the new sanctions may be political—diminishing rather than encouraging diplomacy or deëscalation. Pompeo said that Tehran “knows how to reach us,” if it decides to “meet our diplomacy with diplomacy.” But Tehran immediately rejected talks. At the United Nations, the Iranian Ambassador Majid Takht-Ravanchi told reporters that Tehran would not succumb to pressure. “Nobody in a clear mind can accept to have a dialogue with somebody that is threatening you with more sanctions. So, as long as this threat is there, there is no way that Iran and the U.S. can start a dialogue,” he told reporters, before a closed-door session on tensions in the energy-rich Gulf. In a tweet, Zarif said that Trump’s advisers and allies “despise diplomacy and thirst for war.” Other Iranian officials condemned the new sanctions as “economic terrorism.”
Trump’s decision, a year ago, to unilaterally reimpose other sanctions—splitting with the five major powers who also brokered the nuclear deal—has battered Iran’s economy. In April, Washington vowed to sanction five nations that remain major importers of Iranian oil if they didn’t cease all purchases; the move cut off Tehran’s main source of revenue. Iran’s oil sales today are about a sixth of what they were in 2016. Inflation has exceeded fifty per cent in some months, with the price of basic necessities skyrocketing. The I.M.F. projects a six-per-cent economic contraction for Iran in 2019. Yet the Iranian economy is still far from crippled. The Islamic Republic has not witnessed the kind of economic protests that erupted nationwide in late 2017 and early 2018, Western diplomats in Tehran have told me
Sanctioning Iran’s supreme leader and his entourage could even backfire, some experts suggest. The Trump Administration’s goal is to get Tehran to make concessions on its missile development, regional interventions, and human-rights record, as well as its nuclear program. But “these sanctions will make discussions toward a new treaty very, very difficult,” Adnan Mazarei, a former deputy director of the I.M.F.’s Middle East program who is now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told me. “They send a bad political signal. The recent events—especially shooting down a U.S. drone—make Iran feel more comfortable and self-confident from a domestic perspective. It could say, ‘We won the last round and maybe we can talk now.’ ” No longer, Mazarei said. Tehran has boasted that it shot down the Global Hawk drone, one of the most sophisticated surveillance aircraft in the U.S. arsenal, with a homemade rocket. On Monday, the chief of Iran’s navy, Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi, warned that his forces could shoot down more U.S. aircraft flying in the Gulf, “and the enemy knows it.”
Over all, sanctions are an imperfect tool, former Treasury specialists told me. They can work—but they may take years, even decades. North Korea has been sanctioned to the hilt, but Trump’s negotiations with Kim Jong Un have yet to reduce his nuclear program, which is far more sophisticated than Iran’s. Iran is still more than a year from the ability to produce a bomb, whereas Pyongyang is estimated to have between twenty and sixty bombs. Sanctions to get Rhodesia’s white minority government to the negotiating table to end the country’s civil war took almost fifteen years. Sanctions are also most effective when the world unites behind punitive economic measures, as the U.N. did in invoking sanctions on Iran four times between 2006 and 2010. Today, the deepest split in U.S. relations with its transatlantic allies is over Iran policy.
As prospects of diplomacy dimmed on Monday, Trump signaled his willingness to deploy military force. “I think a lot of restraint has been shown by us,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “A lot of restraint. And that doesn’t mean we’re going to show it in the future.”
Trump’s reliance on pressure tactics is showing diminishing returns
President Trump’s brinkmanship with Mexico over immigration has opened a new and risky front in his global campaign to pressure other nations to capitulate to his demands, a strategy that has paid few dividends over 2½ years and left his major foreign policy initiatives in doubt.
From his “fire and fury” rhetoric against a nuclear-armed North Korea to an escalating trade war with China to new ultimatums aimed at Mexico, Trump has wielded threats, insults and punishments against his foreign counterparts with diminishing returns.
Though he lured Kim Jong Un to the negotiating table through a “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions, Trump’s historic summits with the young dictator ended in failure after talks collapsed in February.
President Trump’s brinkmanship with Mexico over immigration has opened a new and risky front in his global campaign to pressure other nations to capitulate to his demands, a strategy that has paid few dividends over 2½ years and left his major foreign policy initiatives in doubt.
From his “fire and fury” rhetoric against a nuclear-armed North Korea to an escalating trade war with China to new ultimatums aimed at Mexico, Trump has wielded threats, insults and punishments against his foreign counterparts with diminishing returns.
Though he lured Kim Jong Un to the negotiating table through a “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions, Trump’s historic summits with the young dictator ended in failure after talks collapsed in February.
And although Mexico took steps to comply with Trump’s hard-line immigration policies — allowing Central American asylum seekers to the United States a temporary haven — Trump’s vow this week to impose sweeping tariffs unless that nation curbs unauthorized immigration into the United States stirred a public backlash.
For Trump, who campaigned on achieving “peace through strength,” the consistent application of a tool kit of toughness has limited his options and left him in a precarious position as he accelerates his campaign for a second term.
Despite his pressure tactics, unauthorized immigration at the U.S.-Mexican border is at a 12-year peak, the tariff wars have sent jitters through Wall Street, and Pyongyang has resumed testing of short-range missiles, a sign that Kim is growing impatient.
“It strikes me that we are in the middle of an unprecedented and multifaceted experiment in the application of brute force,” said Daniel Russel, who served as an assistant secretary of state on Asian affairs in the Obama administration. “President Trump has been extraordinarily effective at generating leverage . . . but it has yet to be shown that he has the ability to translate that leverage into results that are advantageous to the United States or are durable.”
Trump campaigned on the theme that the rest of the world was taking advantage of the United States because of weak political leaders who valued multilateral partnerships over the unapologetic pursuit of national self-interest. He pledged that, as president, he would not hesitate to pressure rivals and allies alike to win a better deal for Americans.
“Mexico must take back their country from the drug lords and cartels,” Trump tweeted Friday. “The Tariff is about stopping drugs as well as illegals!”
Foreign leaders initially sought to placate him by offering modest concessions, hopeful that it would satisfy Trump’s domestic political imperatives by allowing him to trumpet small victories.
The Trump administration renegotiated a bilateral trade deal with South Korea and, after ripping up the 25-year old North American Free Trade Agreement, crafted a new accord with Mexico and Canada that experts said included valuable modernizations of some trade rules.
In Europe, some NATO members moved to accelerate previous pledges to increase their own national defense budgets amid Trump’s complaints that they were freeloading off the United States’ security umbrella — and his vague threats, first issued during his 2016 campaign, that he would pull out the United States of the alliance.
But on his signature initiatives, Trump’s go-to tactics have faltered and the president has grown increasingly frustrated, prompting him in recent weeks to escalate his threats and punitive actions.
In early May, for example, after U.S. negotiators accused Beijing of attempting to backtrack on agreements after months of trade talks, Trump responded by raising tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods that he enacted last year from 10 percent to 25 percent.
That prompted Beijing to announce it would “fight to the end” and raise duties on $60 billion of American goods on June 1.
Trump administration officials have said the president feels emboldened by the strength of the U.S. economy and believes he can outlast his rivals in a showdown that could harm both economies. But some analysts said that the president could be dangerously miscalculating his position given the uncertainty of his own political prospects.
“I know that Trump considers the 2020 campaign as a triumphant march to the inevitable [reelection], but that’s not the way the rest of the world is looking at it,” said Christopher R. Hill, who served as a U.S. ambassador under the four presidents who preceded Trump. “You’re already seeing the Chinese holding back and saying, ‘We’ll see what will happen over the next 18 months to see if he’s still around and then maybe we’ll do something.’ To some extent, Trump does not have the self-awareness to understand that people are looking at the window closing on him.”
For Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a liberal who took office in December, Trump’s threats are a serious concern, given that 80 percent of Mexico’s exports enter the U.S. market. But López Obrador, who dispatched diplomats to visit Washington on Friday, is facing increasing calls from the public and political columnists to take a tougher line with the White House.
Trump, frustrated by Mexico’s refusal to pay for a border wall, flirted with a plan to seal the southern border to trade and tourism in April before backing off over concerns from advisers about the effect on the American economy. This week, however, amid reports that U.S. authorities apprehended nearly 120,000 unauthorized immigrants at the border last month, Trump overrode similar warnings from aides.
“What’s so striking with him is his willingness to pick multiple fights without thinking through the consequences,” said Eliot Cohen, a former State Department adviser in the George W. Bush administration who organized a “Never Trump” coalition of foreign policy experts during the 2016 campaign. “The Mexico thing is a great example. It could really hurt him domestically.”
Other analysts noted that Trump’s trade war with China could harm his efforts to negotiate a nuclear weapons disarmament pact with North Korea, given that the president has counted on Beijing maintaining tough economic sanctions on Pyongyang.
But Trump has shown few signs of second-guessing himself. He has threatened new auto tariffs on Japan to win leverage in ongoing trade talks, although he announced during a state visit to Tokyo last week that he would delay any action for six months.
And Trump’s reputation for hostility has preceded him. In London, where Trump will arrive next week on a state visit to meet Queen Elizabeth, Sky News broadcast a promotional video featuring a Trump baby balloon, flown by protesters during Trump’s visit last summer, darkening the skies with the ominous tagline, “He’s back.”
“One of Trump’s major failings is that he only has a hammer,” said Andrea Schneider, a professor of law at Marquette University who focuses on negotiations and has studied Trump’s tactics. “He has no capacity of looking at the long term and recognizing that the vast majority of our interactions in life are repeat interactions. I joke with my students that if you treat negotiations as a one-shot deal, it will be. No one will ever want to deal with you again.”
In Diplomacy, Trump Is the Anti-Reagan
another take is that it’s the Plaza Redux, meaning the 1988 real estate debacle in which Trump hastily purchased New York’s Plaza Hotel because it looked like an irresistible trophy, only to be forced to sell it at a loss a few years later as part of a brutal debt restructuring.
.. “Like Reagan, he seems to sense that the nuclear technicalities matter less than the political relationship.”
.. First, Trump isn’t Reagan.
- Reagan generally acted in concert with allies. Trump brazenly acts against them.
- Reagan’s negotiation method: “Trust but verify.” Trump’s self-declared method: “My touch, my feel.”
- Reagan refused to give in to Soviet demands that he abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative. Trump surrendered immediately to Pyongyang’s long-held insistence that the U.S. suspend military exercises with South Korea while getting nothing in return.
- Reagan’s aim was to topple Communist Party rule in Moscow. Trump’s is to preserve it in Pyongyang.
Second, Kim isn’t Gorbachev.
- Gorbachev was born into a family that suffered acutely the horrors of Stalinism. Kim was born into a family that starved its own people.
- Gorbachev rose through the ranks as a technocrat with no background in the regime’s security apparatus. Kim consolidated his rule by murdering his uncle, half brother and various ministers, among other unfortunates.
- Gorbachev came to office intent on easing political repression at home and defusing tensions with the West. Kim spent his first six years doing precisely the opposite.
The Peril of Trump’s Populist Foreign Policy
His style of deal-making prizes uncertainty and brinkmanship, without a plan for what comes next.
Mr. Trump’s foreign policy reflects his instinct for political realignment at home, based on celebrity populism.
Populist movements feed off grievances and impatience with traditional politics. Frustrations—whether generated by economic distress, social displacement, or cultural challenges—fuel skepticism about institutions and elites. Challengers (who want to become the new elite) attack traditional leaders as out of touch, incompetent and corrupt.
.. First, it professes to reflect the will of a scorned people.
.. Second, populism finds and blames enemies, domestic or foreign, who thwart the people’s will. Mr. Trump has mastered insulting such scapegoats.
.. Third, populism needs “the leader,” who can identify with and embody the will of the people. Like other populist leaders, Mr. Trump attacks the allegedly illegitimate institutions that come between him and the people. His solutions, like those of other populists, are simple. He contends that the establishment uses complexity to obfuscate and cover up misdeeds and mistakes. He claims he will use his deal-making know-how to get results without asking the public to bear costs.
.. Mr. Trump’s foreign policies serve his political purposes, not the nation’s interests
- .. He says the U.S. needs to build a wall to keep Mexicans at bay—and Mexico will pay for it. He asserted he would
- block Muslims from coming to America to harm us.
- His protectionist trade policies are supposed to stop foreigners from creating deficits, stealing jobs, and enriching the corporate elite.
- Mr. Trump also asserts that U.S. allies have been sponging off America. T
- he U.S. military is supposed to hammer enemies and not bother with the cleanup—even if the result, for example in Syria, is an empowered axis of Iran, Shiite militias, Hezbollah and Bashar Assad’s regime.
.. The president’s emphasis on discontinuity—breaking things—demonstrates action while disparaging his predecessors.
.. His style of deal-making prizes uncertainty and brinkmanship, which risks escalation, without a plan for what comes next.
.. Other presidents led an alliance system that recognizes U.S. security is connected to mutual interests in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East. Past presidents believed that the U.S. economy would prosper in a world of expanding capitalism
.. Mr. Trump dismisses this U.S.-led international system as outdated, too costly and too restrictive of his case-by-case deal-making.
Institutions:
- .. Trump disdains America’s intelligence agencies and is
- dismantling the State Department. His foils at home are
- the courts,
- the press, a clumsy
- Congress beholden to antiquated procedures, and even
- his own Justice Department.
.. Mr. Trump’s recent trip to Asia reveals that foreigners have taken his measure. They play to his narcissism. He in turn basks in their attention, diminishes his own country by blaming past presidents, and preens with promises of great but unspecified things to come.
.. The president’s need to project an image of personal power—for his domestic audience and his ego—makes him more comfortable with authoritarian leaders. Presidents Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte have noticed, as has part of the Saudi royal family.
.. Sixty percent say alliances with Europe and East Asia either are mutually beneficial or mostly benefit the U.S. Record numbers say international trade is good for consumers (78%), the economy (72%) and job creation (57%). Some 65% support providing illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, and only 37% characterize immigration as a critical threat. All these numbers have shifted against Mr. Trump’s positions since the election.