Amid Virus Fears and Racial Discord, the World's Bad Guys Dig In - Gerald Seib
(Seib is the political contributor to the WSJ, non rabid)
Whatever its other merits or flaws, the new book by former national security adviser John Bolton is a reminder of one uncomfortable reality: While the U.S. has been preoccupied for most of 2020 by the coronavirus and racial ferment, the bad guys around the world have simply dug in deeper. The top four leaders on the American list of bad actors—the rulers of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Syria—don’t appear to be going anywhere, notwithstanding new spates of economic sanctions. The pace of Iran’s nuclear activity is picking up, not declining. North Korea is firing off missile tests and blowing up, literally, the process of smoothing relations with South Korea.
Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has been stalled in his efforts to mop up the last pocket of organized armed resistance in his country’s Idlib province, and his regime is being hammered this month with a new set of American sanctions. Yet support from Russia and waning American interest in military engagement seem sufficient to keep him entrenched.
Meantime, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro appears increasingly impervious to the fact that the U.S. and other nations have recognized his main opponent, Juan Guaidó, as Venezuela’s legitimate leader. Indeed, in a little-noticed development on Friday, President Trump told Axios that he would consider holding a meeting with Mr. Maduro—a step that would represent a stunning reversal of American policy, a grant of legitimacy to Venezuela’s leftist strongman and a move away from Mr. Guaidó. (The president tweeted Monday that he “would only meet with Maduro to discuss one thing: a peaceful exit from power.”)
“We’ve gone backwards on virtually every front,” says Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “I keep arguing that the pandemic hasn’t transformed history, but has accelerated it. Every trend you can see is simply farther along.”
(snip)
In dealing with this rogue’s gallery of bad actors, the common thread in Trump policy has been heavy deployment of economic sanctions to force changes of either behavior or regimes. And there’s no doubt the effort has created some real and painful economic pressure... Yet the main goal of American economic pressure is to compel Iran to roll back its nuclear program—and the opposite seems to be happening. Since Mr. Trump pulled the U.S. out of a 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, Tehran’s leaders have stepped up uranium enrichment, and now have nearly tripled their country’s stockpile of enriched uranium, the United Nations’ atomic agency has said.
(snip)
One of the broader dangers is that the U.S. may be entering a period of reduced willingness to address problems around the world. In his own new book, “The World: A Brief Introduction,” Mr. Haass offers his own bleak assessment of a world in which the U.S. is withdrawing: “The United States cannot be an example to others around the world nor can it effectively promote order abroad if it is divided at home, distracted by domestic problems and lacking in resources.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amid-virus-fears-and-racial-discord-the-worlds-bad-guys-dig-in-11592835450 (subscription)
