Trump takes on Iran, China simultaneously — why worry?
The president has engaged America in a grand struggle to reshape the behavior of two of the world’s oldest civilizations — Persia and China — simultaneously.
Pressing both to change is not crazy. What’s crazy is doing so without tightly defined goals, allies in those goals, a strong national security team and a plan to sync up the competing foreign policy objectives.
Trump is unilaterally breaking the 2015 denuclearization deal with Iran’s dictator while wooing North Korea’s dictator into a denuclearization deal he must trust Trump will honor. Trump is sanctioning China on trade while hoping for its help to denuclearize North Korea. Trump is imposing steel and aluminum tariffs on America’s European allies while needing their help to confront China on trade and Iran on nukes.
And last week Trump pulled back minutes before bombing Iran over a downed U.S. drone when we need Iran’s cooperation to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan.
But here we are, and Trump deserves credit for one thing: imposing real pain on Iran and on China, creating real leverage for transactional or transformational deals with both.
A president who acts just a little crazy can be good at times. Who else would have squeezed Beijing and Tehran this hard and at once? But a president who acts a lot crazy — who creates pain without clear goals, who always insists on being seen to win and the other guy being seen to lose, with no compromise escape route — is not good.
Can Trump translate the pain he’s imposed into tangible long-term gains for America?
Because China and Iran are two very different problems.
China wants to dominate artificial intelligence and electric cars to become the superpower of the 21st century.
Iran, by contrast, is focused on acquiring the most important technology of the 20th century, nuclear weaponry, to help it dominate its region.
We can settle for a transactional deal with Iran, but need a transformational deal with China.
If Trump is smart, he’ll quickly strike a limited deal with Iran. Trump should invite our partners in the 2015 Obama-Iran nuclear deal to join us in improving that deal with a simple offer: The U.S. will lift oil sanctions if Tehran agrees to extend the restrictions on its ability to make a nuclear bomb from the original 15 years to 30 years, and agrees to a ban on testing Iranian missiles that can reach beyond the Middle East.
Given its economic pain, Iran would have difficulty saying no. Then we could sit back and let transformation emerge from within Iran, the only place it can emerge from.
Once Iran’s nuclear program is curtailed for 30 years, our interest isn’t to get any more deeply embroiled in this region’s pathologies. As Karim Sadjadpour, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment, said: “America has bad enemies in the Middle East. It also has bad allies.”
China poses a more profound challenge. We can’t allow China to use the same abusive practices it employed to dominate the manufacturing and assembly of low-margin, high-volume goods to now compete directly with us for the high-value-added, high-margin technologies of the 21st century — like 5G telecom, new materials, AI, aerospace, microchips.
But China’s current growth model is central to keeping the Communist Party in power and won’t be abandoned easily. A small transactional deal won’t cut it.
What’s at stake with Trump and China is our future global economy. With Iran, it’s our future global nuclear nonproliferation regime.
The stakes simply couldn’t be bigger. I believe 2019 will be a pivotal year — like 1945 and 1989. I hope it ends as well.