War Fears As U.S. Pressures Iran

On Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed steep tariff hikes, more than doubling the penalties on some $200 billion worth of Chinese goods and promising harsher measures to come. China pledged to respond in kind. It seems that an agreement remains more elusive than ever as tensions continue to escalate.

So far, the U.S.-China talks have raised more questions than they have answered. Can Trump force China to abandon its bad economic and trade practices? Will the final outcome be worth the pain inflicted on American farmers? Will the United States wind up in a strong position to compete with China or on weaker footing than ever?

The deal currently in the works, according to the details that have emerged thus far, primarily seeks to pair a few big purchase agreements to reduce the trade deficit with promises on China’s part, some of which the United States has heard before, to curtail its most egregious abuses, including intellectual property theft and forced tech transfer. It does not appear to address China’s broad industrial policy program—particularly subsidies, joint venture requirements, and other policies designed to privilege Chinese firms over their U.S. counterparts in global supply chains—in a meaningful way. These, not the trade deficit, are the larger long-term threats to the United States and its allies. Americans should not allow Trump’s last-minute tariff bluster to cover up the fact that his administration may well give China free pass on issues that should be at the top of the priority list for any deal.

As Trump’s deal takes shapes, the idea of competition with Beijing has seized Washington. This strategic shift has been a long time coming, driven mostly by China’s own actions, particularly its predatory economic practices, aggressive military posturing in the South China Sea, and increasing willingness to use its growing economic clout to bully smaller nations on issues ranging from human rights to 5G infrastructure. And unlike almost everything else in Washington these days, the growing concern over the scale of the China challenge is bipartisan. That said, there are real differences over what to do about it.

Instead of Trump’s chest-thumping, short-term approach, the United States should pursue a smarter strategy that better positions the American people to compete and succeed in this century—one that also leverages China’s growing capabilities to address global problems such as climate change and that limits its ability to exploit the United States’ open system, without losing sight of America’s democratic values.

The United States needs to focus as much on what it does in Michigan and Ohio to compete with China as it does on the South China Sea.The United States needs to focus as much on what it does in Michigan and Ohio to compete with China as it does on the South China Sea. Over the last 20 years, the United States has been consumed by costly wars in the Middle East and South Asia. The country has allowed its infrastructure to decay, stood by while its education system deteriorated, and allowed its political discourse to descend into a dysfunctional abyss. China, on the other hand, has made massive investments in education, research and development, military modernization, and artificial intelligence. It is now poised to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy and is steadily closing the military gap.

The sheer scale of the challenge posed by China is going to require a far more purposeful connection between U.S. domestic policy choices and foreign-policy aims—a task that will require a new approach to national security and economic policymaking that reaches well beyond the walls of the White House Situation Room. A U.S.-China relationship that works for the United States will ultimately be driven by how educated and healthy Americans are, whether their children and grandchildren have viable futures, whether the United States continues to dominate scientific research and higher education, whether the country has functioning infrastructure, whether it can maintain a thriving immigration system to sustain its economic growth, and whether its democratic institutions remain functional and resilient. In sum, the United States needs to get its own house in order instead of launching a bilateral trade war that imposes real costs on the American people for very little gain. In 2018, the Trump tariffs collectively raised American consumer and producer costs by $68.8 billion and reduced U.S. real income by $7.8 billion. Instead of imposing costs on Americans, the government should instead be investing in them. The United States should launch a national competitiveness initiative that includes moonshot investments in research and development, once-in-a-generation public infrastructure investments, and significant tuition assistance for graduate education in science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. That would get Beijing’s attention.

As would a return to working collectively with allies and partners. Trump’s unilateral approach to taking on China has alienated those whose help is necessary to compete more effectively—whether on the future of digital trade or setting the rules of the road on artificial intelligence. The Trump administration’s failure to recognize the power of the country’s democratic values in an increasingly contested global war of ideas has ceded the ideological field to Beijing and other authoritarian governments. And Trump’s inexplicable allergy to multilateral problem-solving, including the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord, is allowing China to paint itself as the responsible global actor.

Competing effectively with China does not require the United States to launch a cold war or end all cooperation with Beijing. That would be unrealistic and counterproductive to long-term U.S. interests. The United States can walk and chew gum at the same time. In addition to getting its own house in order, the United States, with a more effective strategy, could also leverage China’s growing capacity take on the greatest problems the world faces. China should be carrying more of its own growing weight on pandemic disease, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, climate change, environmental cooperation, and other collective hurdles. By leaning back on areas of international cooperation, the Trump administration is currently ceding the field to China and letting it set the standards on issues ranging from human rights to global sustainability efforts.

The United States also needs a better defensive game. It must take steps to limit China’s ability to exploit the openness of its democratic market system. That means more dynamic screening requirements for Chinese foreign investments to minimize security risks; mandatory disclaimers on Chinese government propaganda so that people know what they are reading in their local papers; and mandatory transparency measures for Chinese funding to U.S. educational and civil society institutions so that China cannot obscure the scale of its investments. We also need an overhaul of the U.S. legal framework on foreign interference to keep pace with the growing challenge posed not just by China but by others as well. By focusing on transparency, the United States can more adequately defend itself while still adhering to its values on free speech and open markets.

The United States and China will inevitably compete to shape the 21st century. The United States must leverage its advantages in that competition—the American people, allies and partners, and values. This will require the country to think differently about the direct connections between its strength at home and its strength abroad.

One year after President Donald Trump bolted from the Iran nuclear deal, the United States is ratcheting up pressure on Tehran nearly by the day, from expanding sanctions to deploying B-52 bombers.

But even if the US campaign has succeeded in causing economic suffering in Iran, the broader objectives remain vague, with no clear end-game on how to wind down tensions that have raised fears of war.

Iran -- which for the past year has made a point of steadfastly complying with the multinational nuclear accord negotiated under then president Barack Obama -- on Wednesday's anniversary said it would stop observing some limits set by the deal.

Voicing frustration, President Hassan Rouhani appealed to European powers -- which still back the agreement -- to do more to allow trade so Iran feels the benefits of the agreement.

The Trump administration has relentlessly pursued a campaign of "maximum pressure," on Wednesday vowing to stop all of Iran's steel and mineral exports -- after already threatening to punish any country that buys its top product, oil.

In recent days the United States has also announced the deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group and the nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to the region, warning of a response to what it charges is an "imminent" threat from Iran.

Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, called Trump's policy an "unmitigated disaster" that has goaded Iran into resuming a nuclear program that it had stopped.

"Trump's Iran strategy is blind escalation. There is no end-game. No overriding strategy. No way out," Murphy tweeted.

"It's just escalation for the sake of escalation. That's wildly dangerous and inexcusably dumb, in that order," he said.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the pressure campaign has achieved "significant successes" and has repeatedly pointed to financial woes of Hezbollah, the militantly anti-Israel Lebanese movement backed by Iran.

Pompeo in May 2018 laid out 12 demands that virtually no Iran watchers believe the clerical regime will meet, including a complete scaling back of its regional role and support of Shiite militias, who often clash with US allies Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Suzanne Maloney, deputy director for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, played down the risks of war, saying that the Trump administration understood the dangers of a full-fledged conflict with Iran.

"What the administration does want is for Iran to be under maximum pressure for a sustained period of time in order to minimize or even reverse its advantages across the region," Maloney said.

She said that US officials believed from past experience that Iran "doesn't bend under a small amount of pressure" but could change if faced with severe threats.

"I think there is a method to the madness," she said.

But she doubted Iran would bow to demands to withdraw itself from the region.

"I don't think they will pull back because if they did, the administration would read that as a signal that its approach is working and it would only double-down," she said.

- Nuclear deal withers -

Some experts believe that the United States may in fact welcome an unraveling of the nuclear accord, which would no longer give Iran the moral high ground of complying with it.

"If the administration is willing to take the risk of the nuclear deal completely collapsing, then their policies to date are moving us in that direction," said Dalia Dassa Kaye, director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the Rand Corporation.

An Iranian withdrawal would help the administration build support for a more confrontational approach, she said.

"The question is still, to what end?" she said.

"Some may hope for a regime collapse, but the Europeans -- and certainly not the Russians or Chinese -- will not support that objective," she said, adding that there remained "a lot of confusion" over US objectives.

Trump, who threatened to destroy North Korea before meeting its leader Kim Jong Un in two landmark summits, on Wednesday said that he hoped "someday" to negotiate face-to-face with Iran's leaders.

But few see a willingness to meet the hawkish president from Iran's leaders, for whom hostility toward the United States is a bedrock principle of the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the pro-Western shah.

Instead, Iranian officials may be waiting for next year to see if Trump is re-elected, with the Democrats seeking to unseat him broadly supporting the nuclear accord.

But Quentin Lopinot, a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said an expected showdown could come much sooner.

"The question is the breaking point. When will the Iranians stop sticking to a point-by-point response?" he said.

In Iran's announcement, it gave European powers 60 days to fulfill commitments on sanctions relief -- a hard sell for European businesses that fear punishment in the United States.

"Until now the Iranians seemed to want to buy time, but this ultimatum risks bringing forward an escalation," Lopinot said. AFP