President Trump’s decision Friday to quickly slap new sanctions on Iran after it conducted a ballistic missile test signals the hard turn the new administration intends to take with Tehran.
It capped a week in which the fiery rhetoric from Team Trump highlighted rising tensions between the two countries.
The new sanctions were cheered by Republicans, who had pushed former President Obama to respond more muscularly to Iran’s provocations.
“If you look at the world and you look at the Iranians and you look at what they’ve done, there has to be a response,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said this week.
The White House announced new sanctions on 13 people and 12 companies, including several entities that support the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and help the Iranian government procure materials for its missile program.
The individuals and companies — based in Iran, China, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates — are banned from doing business with U.S. institutions or American citizens.
The Treasury Department maintained the new sanctions are “fully consistent" with the United States’ obligations under the nuclear agreement and that nobody on whom sanctions were lifted under the deal has been redesignated.
Experts have said sanctions that could truly hurt Iran would likely violate the deal
The new sanctions follow Sunday’s test by Iran of a medium-range ballistic missile that flew about 600 miles before exploding in a failed test of a reentry vehicle.
The launch was widely interpreted as a test from Tehran of Trump’s response.
The sanctions themselves aren’t much of a departure from the Obama administration’s handling of Iran’s missile program. In January 2016, Obama’s Treasury Department sanctioned nearly a dozen Iranian-linked entities for their role in the program.
But Republicans accused Obama of dragging his feet in responding to the ballistic missile tests and not responding more robustly, saying Obama was choosing to placate Tehran so as not to risk the future of the landmark nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers.
By contrast, they said, Trump’s quick response shows that America will not tolerate Iran’s provocative behavior.
“This announcement makes clear that it is a new day in U.S.-Iran relations and that we will no longer tolerate Iran’s destabilizing behavior,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Friday in a statement. “A coordinated, multi-faceted effort to pushback against a range of illicit Iranian behavior is long overdue.”
Democrats, some of whom chafed at times to Obama’s policies toward Tehran, also praised Friday’s sanctions.
“I have long supported new sanctions on those involved in Iran’s ballistic missile program and their support for terrorism,” Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), ranking members of the House Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement Friday. “Iran's recent ballistic missile test—in clear violation of international law—certainly deserves today's response.”
Engel is one of many Democrats who opposed Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump has repeatedly criticized.
Trump and his administration are using notably harsher rhetoric to talk about Iran.
Trump has tweeted about Iran multiple times since Sunday’s test, saying that he won’t be as “kind” to the Iranians as Obama and that Iran was “on notice.”
National Security Advisor Michael Flynn also said Iran was “on notice” after the test.
At the same briefing Wednesday, Flynn also said the ballistic missile launch was in “defiance” of a United Nations Security Council resolution.
U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, which was passed in July 2015 in support of the nuclear deal, says that, “Iran is called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.”
The language has hindered a U.N. response, since supporters of Iran, such as Russia, argue the tests aren’t a violation because the resolution is a “call,” not a “ban.” For the same reason, the Obama administration also consistently avoided saying outright that the tests violated the resolution, saying instead they “violated the intent.”
Iran also contends the launches don’t violate the resolution because the missiles are not designed to carry nuclear weapons.
Trump included Iran among seven Muslim majority countries from which travel to the United States is temporarily banned. The inclusion prompted Iran to pledge a reciprocal ban on travel from the United States.
Iran has also vowed to continue with its missile tests regardless of Trump’s rhetoric.
“We will never use our weapons against anyone, except in self-defense,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zharif tweeted Friday, prior to the announcement of sanctions. “Let us see if any of those who complain can make the same statement.”
Indeed, Matthew McInnis, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said sanctions alone probably won’t be enough to stop Iran’s missile program, though they will hopefully have some positive effect.
“Eventually there will need to be some further pressure, potentially including threats of force,” he said. “The ballistic missile program is so critical to the regime that it will take a very significant amount of pressure on them to seriously consider stopping the program.”
As an example of the type of threat, McInnis said the United States could threaten to shoot down Iranian missiles.
Shooting down a missile would be an act of war, said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council and author of “Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy.”
Parsi expressed alarm at Trump’s handling of the situation, calling it “blind escalation.” He said he expects Iran to respond in some way to Trump, at which point Trump will either have to make good on his promises or look weak on foreign policy.
“What’s their mechanism to dial this down,” Parsi said. “They don’t really have much options, so why make the threat. If you want to be strong on foreign policy, you don’t make threats you can’t act on.”
The era of U.S. international leadership is over. How do I know? Because President Trump so decreed in his inaugural address. He put the world on notice: Henceforth, America will be looking out exclusively for No. 1.
Do the people, whose instrument Trump claims to be, share his vision of an insular America? We'll see, but it's hard to find a popular mandate for Trump's retro-nationalism in the 2016 election results.
No doubt plenty of Trump voters respond favorably to his "America First" message, but the president seemed oblivious to the reality that he presides over a closely divided country and political system. After all, he was U.S. voters' second choice for president, by a non-trivial margin of nearly 3 millions votes.
Polls on the eve of the inauguration found that he is the least-popular new president in memory (with an approval rating of just 34 percent) and a solid majority of Americans on Election Day said Trump is lacking in presidential temperament.
What's more, plenty of Republicans don't agree with Trump's desire to abandon U.S. commitments overseas and go it alone. Dissenters include not only Reagan acolytes like Republican Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.), but also several of Trump's Cabinet picks, notably Defense Secretary James Mattis and Ambassador to the U.N. nominee Nikki Haley.
Trump, of course, gave no sign of being humbled or constrained by these realities, speaking as though he'd won the White House with the kind of crushing margin authoritarians like Russian President Vladmir Putin roll up.
Unlike most incoming presidents, Trump did not use the occasion to salve raw political wounds and invoke a spirit of national unity.
On the contrary, the speech was vintage Trump-on-the-stump: insulting, accusatory and peremptory in tone. Sounding like a Manhattan version of the late Argentinian President Juan Perón, he broadly indicted the nation's political leaders, many of whom were seated behind him on the Capitol balcony, for betraying working Americans.
"Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation's capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land," he intoned.
The New York billionaire portrayed himself as a modern day Andrew Jackson, defending the common man against the machinations of self-dealing elites. "Jan. 20th, 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again," he declared sententiously.
Trump's tribune-of-the-people routine is integrally linked to his critique of America's global role. In his telling, U.S. leaders of both parties have been played for chumps by faithless allies who won't defend themselves or help us fight terrorism;by trading partners like China and Mexico that have "stolen" our jobs; and, by international institutions that erode our sovereignty and force Americans to fork out money to fight the phantom menace of climate change.
Buried deep in the landfill of Trumpean hyperbole is a reasonable case that America really is overextended and needs to rebalance its global responsibilities and pressing domestic needs, such as rebuilding our run-down transportation systems and other infrastructure.
Instead of making a measured argument along these lines, Trump concocts a populist melodrama in which working Americans are pathetic victims of their own political elites: "We've made other counties rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon. ... The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world."
Not to worry, though. Trump will stop such "carnage" immediately and restore America's lost glory: "We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. ... We will get our people off of welfare and back to work, rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor."
Above all, "America will start winning again," through the sheer force of Trump's implacable will and mystic bond with "the people."
What's missing in all this, of course, is democratic politics. Trump is demanding a fundamental change in national strategy — a rejection of the postwar international order built largely by U.S. power and leadership and a return to the narrow American nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s. And he seems to think he can impose it unilaterally, because "the people" stand behind him.
To get where he wants to go, Trump will have to win the backing of the very political leaders and institutions he maligned in his inaugural speech, plus a significant chunk of the people who didn't vote for him last November.
U.S. presidents don't have unlimited powers and don't rule by decree. Their power lies mainly in the bully pulpit's art of persuasion. And claiming mandates you didn't win is anything but persuasive.
Protests invite generalizations, and I was about to irresponsibly philosophize about what Saturday's historic Women's March means — specifically, what it teaches us about American self-portraiture — when I stumbled on this photograph of the new president and his wife. Surrounded by a truly unreasonable number of roses at the inaugural luncheon on Jan. 20 — a day that ought to have brought them some joy — they look the very picture of unhappiness. This is Adam and Eve sulking outside of Eden. This is every marriage gone wrong, every midlife crisis, every spiritual void that leads a soul to snatch something they'll wake up in the night regretting.
So I stopped short, because that image with its blue dress and red tie crystallized so much of what happened in America this weekend. It provoked the crowds of people in red hats who gathered in Washington, D.C., one day and the crowds of people in pink hats who gathered there — and all over the country and the world — the next. Is there anything true worth saying about a country that produced both those spectacles and this portrait of a man and a woman caught off guard, slathered in wealth, their misery on exhausted display in a rare moment when they forgot about the cameras?
There is. The Trumps may not be "relatable" in the strictest sense — their gold-encrusted habitat was always intended to alienate and impress — but that photograph captures, in its own small way, the country they now represent: divided, afflicted by comfort, addicted to outrage, bitterly convinced they've been wronged. They are, above all, camera-conscious and camera-ready.
Never has an administration been more consumed with its own image, and this weekend turned into a contest between the spectacle-producing power of the president vs. the protesters. President Trump, we now know, is trying to use his reality TV experience to generate particular effects: He padded his first press conference with paid staffers to clap — thereby making it look like he had more support than he did. He reportedly wanted tanks and missile launchers at his inaugural parade to maximize his show of power. (The military said no). When turnout for his inauguration was significantly lower than President Obama's in 2009, he rebuked the National Park Services for calling attention to the comparison, accused the press of dishonesty, and made his press secretary spend his very first press conference lying to the American people: "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period," Sean Spicer said — a statement so easy to disprove it generated a day of Twitter jokes with the hashtag #spicerfacts.
But there may have been a reason for Spicer to lie so brazenly on his first day: First of all, in the contest for who had the bigger and better spectacle, Trump lost. That required a distraction. The crowd of protesters in Washington was three times bigger than Trump's inauguration crowds, and an estimated 3 million people protested in 670 cities worldwide. If Trump slightly underperformed, the Women's March exceeded expectations on every front: Chicago's expected 75,000 protesters grew to roughly 250,000; Boston expected 25,000 and ended up with about 175,000; L.A. drew somewhere around 500,000 people; New York expected about 100,000 and got twice that. Nor were the protests limited to the "coastal elites." There were protests of several thousand in places like Boise, Lincoln, and Charleston, West Virginia — and St. Louis and Albuquerque and Birmingham and Anchorage.
Worse still, Trump lost on multiple fronts. He lost to the Women's March the day after his inauguration, and he lost to Obama in both crowd turnout and television ratings the day of. If you fancy yourself a ratings machine and a populist, it is hard to appear that, well, unpopular.
Lying may have been the administration's effort to deprive the Women's March of media oxygen, but it was also likely an effort to consolidate support among hard-core Trumpists. If Spicer and Kellyanne Conway — the latter attempted to rebrand Spicer's falsehoods as "alternative facts" this weekend — are cultivating an audience that will accept Trump's administration's word over the evidence of their eyes, the squabble over crowd size is a perfect, low-stakes opportunity. When gauging the extent to which your followers will follow, lie obviously about something that doesn't much matter.
It's hard to imagine a better test, because the Women's March was massively photographed by almost everyone in it. A protest movement that flooded with self-portraiture poses a real problem to this administration because it floods every social media venue with images that cannot possibly be attributed to Trump's legendary "dishonest media." These are people's friends and families posting photos of their signs, of the crowds, of marches all over the world. The media simply cannot be blamed for the stunning ubiquity of the Women's March.
But that, for Trump's administration, is all the more reason to blame them anyway. Perhaps they'll convince some folks that the hundreds of thousands of people participating all over the world and uploading their photos are evil reporters or "paid protesters."
The larger point is this: From the images of Pence and Trump waving at empty bleachers to the hordes of protesters spilling over into side streets in cities all over the country, the weekend became a battle of camera angles, of the stories that spectacle sells. For all that Trump fancies himself a master of spectacle, he lost this round. And he seemed to know it even in the photograph with which I began this piece. Many emotions are legible in his face, and frustration and defeat are among them.
The Women's March was an inspiring, tendentious, flawed, necessary, and successful event. That will not be enough. Critics have been quick to point out that, for all the good feeling it generates, a march accomplishes little in itself. That's true. But it might be less true in this case than it would be in others. This happens to be a president for whom spectacle matters more than almost anything else; that means he's uniquely susceptible to this kind of protest. Crowds matter so much to him, in fact, that — per The New York Times — he sulked through much of his first weekend as president: "He spent his Friday night in a whirlwind of celebration and affirmation. When he awoke on Saturday morning, after his first night in the executive mansion, the glow was gone, several people close to him said, and the new president was filled anew with a sense of injury."
That man is in power now. He is slowly reshaping his press coverage to his specifications, floating the idea of "putting in his own security and intelligence community," whatever that might mean, and praising authoritarian leaders who crack down on dissident populations. The Women's March will be remembered as a global rebuke to this administration and the manifestation of a massive political will to resist. But if it does what protests should — if it provokes a response — much more will have to come from it.
The wave of fires on November 22-26, 2016 throughout Israel – 1,773 in number – resulting from extreme weather conditions (heat, aridness, and winds), should direct the attention of the public and the decision makers to the risks of natural disasters in general, and those caused by large scale fires in open areas in particular (in contrast to house fires). This is a growing phenomenon caused by accelerated global climate change. Figures from the Israel Fire and Rescue Commission show that there were over 28,000 fires in open areas in 2014 and in 2015. Nine people were killed in fires in 2015; 17 in 2014; 18 in 2013; and 23 in 2012. The average annual number of deaths from fire in Israel is low on an international scale: 0.11 fatalities per 100,000 residents (compared with 1.4 in Greece, 1.2 in the United States, and 0.5 in the Netherlands).
The question of arson aside, and despite the low number of injuries, the subject of multiple fires should arouse public discussion, renew professional deliberations, and lead to system-wide decisions about Israel’s abilities to respond successfully to natural and other mass disasters. Several conclusions emerge in this context, based in part on lessons from other countries.
Natural disasters are liable to exact very high prices. Israel has been fortunate not to experience severe and costly natural disasters in recent decades. The last high magnitude disaster occurred on July 11, 1927, when an earthquake killed over 300 people and caused severe damage. Up-to-date official estimates predict thousands of fatalities when an earthquake on a similar scale occurs. Although the potential for a major earthquake in Israel is high, the country’s systemic preparedness for an event of this type, and those liable to follow it, such as a tsunami, is poor. The level of preparedness is particularly low in comparison with the awareness and preparedness for high risk security disruptions, which are much more frequent, but which cause relatively less damage. Note that some of the preparations for emergency security scenarios in Israel are part of the response to natural hazards, although the latter also require specialized professional skills and preparation that are lacking in Israel
Adequate preparations should be made for unexpected extreme events. The recent wave of fires highlights the need for advance preparation for diverse scenarios differing from those previously experienced. This generalization is valid for both man-made hazards, such as security conflicts threatening the home front, which rightfully attract serious attention, and natural disasters, due to their potentially damaging consequences. Preparing for novel scenarios represents a serious challenge, both in conceptual and budgetary terms. It is not easy for decision makers to divert their attention from the familiar scenarios, especially those that are security related. Still, sophisticated analysis of extreme – albeit rare – scenarios, and balanced consideration of appropriate responses for more common events, are essential for devising the necessary scale of preparedness.
It is essential to prepare for simultaneous and multiple threat scenarios. As with the recent wave of fires, and as was the case during the past decade, in the three rounds of major security events, the theaters of acute disruptions were spread over several and relatively remote locations. Many of the recent fires occurred in a row, making it possible to move forces and efforts from one site to another. With simultaneous fires, certainly if they persist of an extended period of time, a greater allocation of trained forces and special equipment will be necessary in order to respond to the challenge. To meet this need, a reserve corps of firefighters should be established that will facilitate flexible and prolonged operation of the force. This need will be more acute when the severity, extent, and duration of the scenarios is more extreme. In the most recent fires, the necessary additional forces were recruited from 14 countries. This option is hardly available in security scenarios, which Israel has traditionally faced alone.
High professional skills and horizontal cooperation constitute a key to successful management of mass disasters. Weakness in these areas characterized the principal barriers in the great fire event in the Carmel Forest in 2010 in which 44 people died. This time there appeared to be a significant improvement in three important fields: (a) The firefighting system is undergoing a revolution, not yet completed, in organization, operations, and equipment; (2) Coordination and cooperation between the responding agencies in general, especially between the police and the firefighting agencies, have improved; (3) The mechanism for receiving assistance from foreign firefighting agencies made it possible to greatly increase the domestic capacities for providing a flexible response. The important progress in these areas requires maintenance and further enhancement, in order to cope with more dangerous and prolonged future challenges.
Evacuating civilians from their homes is a complex process requiring meticulous advance preparation. At the peak of the fires, tens of thousands of residents were evacuated from their homes. Few of them made use of the evacuation sites opened for them, and most found temporary non-institutional solutions. From this perspective, the evacuation in the recent event should not serve as an example for drawing applicable systematic lessons for future scenarios, which are liable to require far more extensive evacuation and the provision of complex solutions for the evacuated population, possibly for a prolonged duration. This matter has indeed recently appeared on the agenda of the relevant agencies. At the same time, it does not appear that there is an adequate holistic nationwide and local response for more extreme situations, in particular for people with special needs.
The rehabilitation system is still being tested. It is estimated that several hundred buildings were completely ruined or extensively damaged in the fires. Meeting the challenge of rapid financial compensation and complete reconstruction of the buildings, so that the residents can return to their homes, will be a criterion for the government’s readiness and ability to cope with this sensitive issue. Past experience, including in the world at large, indicates that this is a challenge with a string of severe failures, amounting to long delays in the processes of compensation and reconstruction. The authorities are expected to make the necessary effort, including beyond what is formally required, to conclude this matter as fast and as effectively possible, taking into account the discomfort of the affected civilians. The fact that the number of people involved is not very large will make it easier to achieve this goal.
Arson is an integral part of fires. In Israel, a third of the fires in open areas over the past two years were, upon investigation, classified as cases of arson. This is also the prevailing situation in other countries. In Australia, which has been afflicted with fires in open spaces, one third to one half of the fires in an average year resulted from arson. Arson was the definite cause in thirteen percent of the cases, and the suspected cause in 37 percent. Arson can stem from a long list of factors, one of which is malicious political and nationalistic background – a phenomenon called “pyro-terrorism.” The professional literature suggests that on the map of global terrorism, over 5 percent of the attacks were caused by deliberate arson. It is still premature to assess how many of the hundreds of fires in the most recent wave had a hostile background, and what were the motives and characteristics of the perpetrators. In the past, malicious arsonists were found on both sides – Jews and Arabs. Clearly, steps should be taken to reduce this phenomenon by both preventive and punitive measures. These measures, however, should reflect the realization that arson is not the main operational tactic of anti-Israeli terrorism, and that arson, including in the most recent case, is not the main reason for the fires.
In conclusion, the recent wave of fires should be regarded as an example – albeit limited in severity – that enables a process of systemic learning. Fires in open spaces, including in Israel, are expected to become increasingly common. Israel has shown that it is able to learn and implement the right lessons. If the relevant responsible agencies focus their attention on drawing operative conclusions as a basis for better preparedness for more severe cases, including novel extreme hazards, Israel might be ready to deal more effectively with mass disasters, both natural and man-made. ____
