Several parties to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) have engaged in actions that threaten to undermine the agreement. The Iranians have now undertaken five calculated breaches of their commitments. In response, the European signatories France, Germany, and the United Kingdom (“E3”) temporarily triggered the deal’s dispute resolution mechanism (DRM) on 14 January 2020. The loss of trust between the three European states and Iran is very clear — the Europeans have attempted to play a mediating role vis-à-vis the United States, which withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, but in Iran’s view have not done enough to preserve the benefits it was promised under the deal.
Moreover, France, Germany and the United Kingdom have lost their face-saving capacity which will be required to get the Iranians to the table. All of this is happening while the U.S. continues to escalate its sanctions pressure against Tehran, with the ostensible goal of getting the Iranians to the table to negotiate a new deal. From Washington's point of view, two other topics should be discussed in addition to Iran’s nuclear program: its missile programs and its destabilizing external behavior.
Credible new actors
A lot is at stake. New actors and an expanded discussion format are needed to reduce tensions, to account for U.S. concerns, and to maintain the substance of the agreement. In terms of new actors, Austria, Finland, and Switzerland could provide important diplomatic support (“good offices”). None are encumbered by previous association with the JCPOA. On the diplomatic stage, they are recognized as experienced, credible, and honest top-class brokers. These “New 3” are also Europeans.
Switzerland is not a member of the European Union, but it does represent U.S. interests in Iran. Their political advantage compared to Germany, France, and the U.K. is in their lower profile, which could make them seem less threatening to U.S. President Donald Trump — though all three would need to resist any attempts at economic blackmail from the United States.
An important first symbolic step would be for Austria and Switzerland to join the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) that France, Germany, and the U.K. established last year to facilitate trade between Europe and Iran by circumventing U.S. sanctions.
Fresh ideas
The “New 3” are neither there to “fill in” the deficits of the three European members of the JCPOA, nor to carry out a parallel foreign policy agenda. The momentum of new EU Foreign Policy High Representative Josep Borrell needs to be coordinated and enriched with fresh ideas. All agree that they are opposed to increased hostility from Washington. Overall, the European position must be visibly strengthened and expanded. The “New 3” will only be heard if they — with all obvious limits — have a recognizable added value to offer.
The “New 3” could bring a renewed push to deescalate tensions. The ”E3” pulled the ripcord on their decision to invoke the DRM in early February by suspending the mechanism that would most likely have led the dispute to the United Nations Security Council and thus to the reimposition of international sanctions against Iran.
Despite their breaches of the JCPOA’s terms regarding uranium enrichment, the Iranians continue to allow the controls and inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency without restrictions, apparently until just recently. The agreement is currently hanging by this thread. Both sides looked into the abyss and are afraid of the measures they have themselves undertaken. But does this look like conflict management? A coolly calculated procedure by the “E3” cannot be granted. The most urgent role of Austria, Finland, and Switzerland would therefore be as a corrective to the course the "E3" has chosen.
Bern, Helsinki, and Vienna could also act as face-saving relay stations between the JCPOA parties for the purposes of confidence-building. For example, they could be the ones to suggest to the Iranians that their expectations of the Europeans cannot be met structurally under the conditions that have been created by the Trump administration — in other words, that it is impossible for the “E3” to find a way to allow Tehran to continue selling oil despite U.S. sanctions.In addition, Bern, Vienna, and Helsinki could be asked to provide a confidential discussion framework in their capitals for official contacts between the main counterparts. The importance of this function, similar to the role Oman played in the preparatory talks between Iran and the U.S. that led to the JCPOA, cannot be overestimated in the current difficult situation.
A broader scope
There are two avenues for expanding the scope of the discussion format beyond Iran’s nuclear program. First, the JCPOA, with all its unprecedented requirements in the nuclear field, serves as a kind of “nuclear-weapon-free zone” agreement for Iran. At the upcoming Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in New York, it would be a leap forward if the JCPOA, with the help of the Iranians, became the model for talks on the Middle East-wide nuclear weapons-free zone that has been sought for decades, without results.
Second, the “New 3” could play a pioneering role for an innovative path on Iran’s missile program that encourages discussion in Tehran, in order to compensate for the failure of the “E3” to protect Iran’s benefits under the JCPOA. Iran will sooner or later have to include its missile programs in diplomatic talks simply because of Washington's demands. However, the proposals from Europe on this issue lack an understanding of the historically determined central role of ballistic missiles in Iran's military strategy. Tehran's missile arsenal cannot be seen in isolation from the region's political constellations and military dynamics. This is where the arsenals of Iran's main opponents, Saudi Arabia and Israel, come into play, in addition to the U.S. military presence.
It therefore makes sense to refrain from focusing exclusively on Iran's capacities in this area and to pursue a regional approach that also includes the capacities of these two main opponents and thus increases the number of actors (Iran's ally Syria should also be part of this setting). The discussion format is thus not only thematic, but also expanded to include important regional players. In short, no stone should be left unturned to save the nuclear deal with Iran, including the involvement of more parties and a broader scope for negotiations.
Adj. Prof. em. Dr. Bernd W. Kubbig was Project Director at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and Adjunct Professor (Privatdozent) at Goethe University, Frankfurt/M., Germany. He has directed the Program on Missile Defense International; and since 2006 he has been coordinating the international expert group on the Establishment of a Missile Free Zone in the Middle East, culminating in the Routledge study, "Arms Control and Missile Proliferation in the Middle East." In 2011, he founded the Academic Peace Orchestra Middle East (APOME) and was the Editor of the Policy Brief series. He has specialized in U.S. foreign and security policy, with a focus on the Middle East, missile defense, and space.
Marc Finaud is a former French diplomat who has been seconded to the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) between 2004 and 2013 and now works for this international foundation, where he trains diplomats and military officers in international and human security, and conducts research in those fields. During his 36-year career as a diplomat (from 1977 to 2013), he served in several bilateral postings (in the Soviet Union, Poland, Israel, Australia) as well as in multilateral missions (to the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Conference on Disarmament, the United Nations). He holds Master’s degrees in International Law and Political Science. He was also Senior Resident Fellow (WMD Program) at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) between 2013 and 2015. He is now also a Swiss citizen. List of publications: www.gcsp.ch/marc-finauds-publication
Just days after replacing Justin Trudeau and becoming Canada’s 24th prime minister, Mark Carney has advised Governor General Mary Simon to dissolve Parliament. Canadians will now head to the polls on April 28 for a long awaited and highly anticipated federal election.
Trudeau had announced his intention to resign as prime minister and Liberal Party leader on January 6, having served more than nine years as Canada’s head of government. Opinion polling had shown an increasingly sizable lead for the rival Conservative Party over the preceding 18 months, with about 25 percentage points separating the two parties by the time Trudeau announced he was stepping down.
Carney’s arrival on the scene has changed the dynamic decisively. A former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, Carney’s image as a steady pair of hands at the helm during a time of national crisis has allowed the Liberals to establish a roughly five-point polling lead in the early days of the campaign. What was almost certain to be one of the largest Tory landslides in Canadian history has since become a tossup.
Given the mounting popular perception that Trudeau’s government had mismanaged major policy files ranging from the economy to immigration to public order, this election was expected to be a referendum on nearly a decade of Liberal rule. But Trudeau’s departure and — more importantly — Donald Trump’s arrival on the scene have ensured that Canadians are likely to cast their ballots with the future rather than the past in mind.
The ballot box question “Who is best positioned to deal with Trump?” has become increasingly urgent due to the growing perception that the U.S. president is not joking when he repeatedly threatens to annex Canada and make it America’s 51st state. Few Canadians believe that the tariffs the administration has levied have anything to do with fentanyl — indeed, the Intelligence Community’s newly released Annual Threat Assessmentneglects to mention Canada as a source of America’s fentanyl crisis.
With no clear demands or conditions for how to avert (or lift) the imposition of tariffs, there is a sense among Canadians that the purpose of these economic measures is not to compel a negotiation nor to obtain specific policy concessions, but rather, in Trudeau’s words, to bring about “a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex [Canada].” Tariffs are seen not as a tool, but rather as a good in themselves capable — albeit at great cost, given the highly integrated nature of the North American economy — of repatriating jobs to the United States.
Carney has pledged to negotiate with the U.S. on trade only when “Canada is shown respect as a sovereign nation.” But Trump would be wrong to conclude that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would be easier to deal with. Poilievre’s brand of Canadian “prairie populism” is ideologically distinct from the more iconoclastic MAGA populism found south of the border. And unlike Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s call for an “Am-Can Fortress” which focuses on persuading Americans of the extent to which Canada can underwrite American security and prosperity, Poilievre’s brand of “Canada First” is more in line with promoting Canadian resource development for overseas export.
Given the perception among many Canadians that their country has become engulfed not in a mere trade dispute but rather a struggle to preserve their national sovereignty, Ottawa will likely be more willing than Washington to endure the pain that the ongoing tariff war will bring, even if Canada is more economically dependent on the United States than the U.S. is on its northern neighbor. And whatever the potential benefits of pursuing a deeper economic relationship with Moscow, many struggle to understand the logic behind talking up economic ties with Russia while placing Canada so firmly within America’s crosshairs.
Having secured re-election, Canadians can no longer afford to dismiss Trump as an aberration in American politics. Unlike during his first term when it was assumed that “adults in the room” would limit Trump’s room for maneuver, this time he has built a loyal administration willing to cheer him on. But the economic fallout of a sustained trade war with Canada may risk Trump’s most significant accomplishment — a generational political realignment in which a multiethnic working-class electoral coalition underwrites support for the Republican Party.
Given these circumstances, Trump would be wise to declare victory and move on. For example, he could claim that Trudeau was the problem and that his administration’s policies successfully drove him from power. Building on the positive tone of his first call with Carney, he could also publicly acknowledge that, while he continues to believe that Canada would be better served by joining the United States, such a venture is not practical nor economical so long as Canadians overwhelmingly oppose it. These entirely cost-free moves from the administration would help to avert potentially permanent damage to Canada-U.S. relations.
Canada remains the largest market for American exports, larger thanChina, Japan, Britain and France combined. It also remains a friendly and reliable source of (subsidized) energy — the largest provider of oil, gas and electricity to the United States by a wide margin. American leaders should take note when the Canadian prime minister, a member of the country’s centrist establishment, openly concludes that the longstanding era of Canada-U.S. cooperation “based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over.”
Whatever discord exists between Ottawa and Washington on issues ranging from trade to continental defense, maintaining a cooperative — and respectful — relationship with Canada remains manifestly in the national interest of the United States.
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Top photo credit: Alexander Vindman (Philip Yabut/Shutterstock) and the cover of his new book (publisher, PublicAffairs)
Alexander Vindman’s recent book, “The Folly of Realism,”throws down the gauntlet, as the name suggests, at the “realists” he thinks were responsible for failing to deter Russia and seize opportunities for defense cooperation with Ukraine.
According to Vindman, the former National Security Council official who testified against President Trump during his impeachment trial in 2019, this “realist” behavior incentivized Moscow’s continued imperialist predations, culminating in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Vindman’s proposed antidote to what he considers the lapses of the past three decades is Benjamin Tallis’ framework of "neo-idealism," a lightly repackaged menagerie of post-Cold War transatlanticism’s greatest hits that is bizarrely presented as a novel outlook on the international system.
Fully squaring all the historical misjudgments presented in these 240 pages demands an exegesis of at least as many pages, and not just because there are so many — though one certainly doesn’t find themselves pressed for material — but because Vindman’s central arguments flow from larger, decades-long narratives about Russia and post-Cold War U.S. policy that simply do not stand up to scrutiny.
Nuclear policy emerges as one of the main causal drivers of Vindman’s story. No one can quarrel with the proposition that successive administrations took seriously the cause of nonproliferation in the post-Soviet sphere — they had every reason to — and that nuclear concerns shaped U.S. engagement with the Russian Federation to a significant even if not decisive degree.
But to suggest, as Vindman does, that the thrust of early U.S./NATO policy toward Russia boils down to nuclear concerns is to lapse into a narrowly tendentious reading of events that history doesn’t lend itself to.
Vindman, who interviewed the officials involved in negotiating the 1994 Budapest Memorandum from the U.S. side, was careful not to retread the solecisms so heartily indulged by many of his allies and fellow travelers. He concedes, and not insignificantly so considering how deeply this narrative has entrenched itself in recent years, that the signed memorandum did not contain U.S. security guarantees to Ukraine in exchange for relinquishing its supposed nuclear arsenal.
“There's no question in my memory and in my mind that the Ukrainians understood completely the difference between security assurances and Article 5 security guarantees. And they understood they were getting security assurances,” Vindman quoted Nicholas Burns, Senior Director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia Affairs at the National Security Council, as saying.
These assurances, as I explained with my colleague Zach Paikin, did not commit the U.S. to undertake any specific commitments beyond what it agreed to in previous treaties. Indeed, it’s precisely because the memorandum was not legally binding and contained no concrete defense commitments that it did not have to be ratified by the Senate, as all treaties must be.
But this whole “denuclearization” business calls for a greater degree of technical scrutiny than Vindman affords it. Three of the 15 states that emerged from the Soviet collapse — Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus — did not in fact “inherit” thousands of nuclear weapons. These were Soviet nuclear weapons, stationed across the Soviet Union but controlled from Moscow. After the Soviet collapse, these became Soviet nuclear weapons left over on the territories of former Soviet soviet states.
It was never established that Ukraine exercised legal, political, or operational control over these weapons, nor that the nascent Ukrainian state disposed of the considerable resources required to maintain them. Ukraine did not, in this sense, possess a nuclear inheritance that could be bartered away for Western security guarantees or anything else.
What we have before us, then, is not a geostrategic question but a largely operational challenge of removing these weapons, to which Ukraine had no recognized claim, from Ukrainian territory in an orderly way. This rather unremarkable process, though unquestionably a major part of the story of 1990s U.S.-Russia relations, is lent a degree of long-term political significance by Vindman that it simply doesn’t deserve.
So, what, then, is the larger picture and how does it fit into Vindman’s argument that the West’s woes stem from a decades-long policy of, if not appeasing, then at least turning a blind eye to “Russian ambition and exceptionalism?”
One cannot help but escape the sense that Vindman’s story suffers from the plight of Alexander the Great, who wept that he had only one world to conquer. His analysis is strongly tinted by the endless, yet strategically vacuous, expressions of goodwill, optimism about Russia’s Western path, and other such millenarian effusions that characterized U.S.-Russia relations up to the mid-2000’s.
But in the most important ways, U.S. policy has been guided all along by something quite similar to Vindman’s neo-idealism. The Soviet collapse gave Western leaders a generational opportunity to go about the difficult but necessary task of building a new security architecture that includes mechanisms not just to deter Russia, but also to engage it in ways that do not lead to security spirals in Eastern Europe. U.S. policymakers, less driven by balance of power concerns than they were enchanted by the seductive vision of a Europe “whole and free,” brushed aside the concerns of George Kennan, Robert McNamara, and a great many others to greenlight the limitless expansion of NATO, an alliance explicitly arrayed against the Russian Federation’s Soviet predecessor.
It seems to be a source of consternation for Vindman that Ukraine was not invited into NATO in those early days. Vindman’s implication that Ukraine was thus abandoned to Russia’s sphere of influence incorrectly frames the problem at hand. Washington’s fervid devotion to NATO’s “open door” membership policy and dogged refusal to countenance any framework for delimiting NATO’s boundaries shows that the lack of progress in this area was purely tactical in nature and certainly not grounded in systemic realist thinking.
There is also the peccadillo of democratic values, defense of which is supposed to be NATO’s entire raison d’être. In point of fact, polling shows most Ukrainians had no desire to join the alliance until as late as the mid 2010s, when it became impossible due to outstanding territorial conflicts with Russia.
Vindman’s indictment of what he wants the reader to believe passes for “realism” — more on that shortly — hinges on viewing Russia as an innate aggrandizer emboldened by the failure of successive U.S. administrations to deter it.
It all falls apart upon the most basic attempt at a more sophisticated structural analysis — one which would find that Russia’s behavior is consistent not with a grand strategy of conquest for its own sake but with what most realists would identify as balancing behavior in response to the eastward expansion of Western military and security institutions into the post-Soviet sphere, and Russian actions intended to preemptively deny such expansion.
Trudging through this book, with its unique blend of endless encyclopedic tedium heaped on top of the analytical equivalent of a children's pop-up story, can be best likened to navigating a swamp that’s shallow yet impossibly vast. But this rather unpleasant journey at least gives the reader ample time to meditate on the book’s central conceit.
Vindman unfortunately displays a woefully inadequate grasp of that which he tries to impugn: at no point does he demonstrate anything more than a cursory understanding of realist approaches to the issues he tries to elucidate.
One is left grasping in vain for any evidence that Vindman can pass the simple theoretical Turing Test of explaining any school of realism — let alone to distinguish between them — to the satisfaction of a realist. But Vindman’s underlying thrust is not to meaningfully engage with realist arguments on Ukraine’s post-Soviet transition, 1990’s U.S.-Russia relations, or nuclear proliferation in the former Soviet sphere.
Instead he wants to launder what has largely been an idealist, atlanticist handling of these issues since 1991 by pinning the neoconservatives’ manifold sins and lapses on a haphazard cluster of ideas and approaches clumsily christened by him as “realism.” There was no realism in the strategically shortsighted decision — condemned by many realists at the time — to enable successive waves of NATO expansion and encourage, against genuine U.S. and European security interests, the integration of post-Soviet states into the West’s collective defense umbrella.
The well-established idealist framing of American engagement with competitors as a manichean confrontation between democracy and autocracy is anathema to realism and, indeed, to a healthy understanding of U.S. national security priorities.
But it is true that actual realist ideas are rapidly making their way back into the foreign policy discourse after decades in the wilderness. As is always the case after an exiled intellectual movement rediscovers the levers of power, there will and should be a vigorous debate on what form these ideas will take when filtered through the vicissitudes of American politics and applied to the pressing challenges of our time, including the Russia-Ukraine war and the broader task of building a sustainable architecture of European security.
And whatever missteps are made along the way pale in comparison to a disastrous status quo that can be described by many names. Realism, it is not.
At the Munich Security Conference in mid-February, U.S. Vice President JD Vance warned Europe not to back away from one of the West’s most basic democratic values: free speech.
“In Washington there is a new sheriff in town," he said, "and under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.”
Vance continued, “Dismissing people, dismissing their concerns… shutting down media, shutting down elections… protects nothing. It is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.”
He added, “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people.”
Vance had just joined Donald Trump in running a successful 2024 presidential campaign that championed free speech and condemned the Biden administration for its censorship efforts.
On March 8, barely three weeks after Vance’s Munich speech, Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and sent to a detention center in Louisiana to be deported. He is a legal resident married to an American woman who is pregnant.
Khalil was not charged with a crime. President Trump praised the arrest, saying that Khalil had engaged in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity” that his administration would not tolerate.
“We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country,” Trump added.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said his department has revoked more than 300 student visas. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas," he said.
When Turkish Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested this week, a video showed “masked, plain-clothes officers handcuffing and leading her to an unmarked car.”
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin posted on X that Ozturk "engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”
"A visa is a privilege not a right," she added.
Yet, like the case of Khalil, no one knows what, if any charges she is facing. A judge ruled that she could not be removed from Massachusetts but the feds took her to the same Louisiana detention center anyway. Reports presume that it was an op-ed that Oztruk wrote last year with two other students criticizing the Israel war in Gaza that brought on the heat.
When asked about Oztruk, however, Rubio said no one should get a visa if they come to the United States to join protest movements that result in vandalism and “raising a ruckus” on campus. He would not say if Ozturk was being singled out for those activities.
The administration argues that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 gives the government the right to revoke the green card of “[a]n alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Without issuing evidence that Khalil and Ozturk’s presence here in the U.S. would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” (the statute says the administration has to notify Congress with their justifications, have they?) we can assume that they are being used as examples in order to chill speech more broadly.
The administration appears to be hiding behind this rarely used statute, but what the rest of us are taking away from all this is that the administration believes our First Amendment protections end at criticizing Israel’s government.
“One reason the actions against Khalil should give MAGA pause is that the administration seems to be acting on behalf of Israel, not the American people,” wrote Andrew Day for the American Conservative, who warned Trump supporters that “the precedent could enable a future Democratic president to target conservatives.”
Categorizing pro-Palestinian protesters as “pro-terrorist,” “pro-Hamas,” or “anti-Semitic” could feasibly be true in some of these cases, and yet, if these people are not actually committing crimes, their speech should be Constitutionally protected.
The Nazi marchers that the Americans Civil Liberties Union so famously defended in Skokie, Illinois, in 1978 were definitely anti-Semitic.
And the courts determined they had a right to speak.
It might be cliché to say that the entire point of free speech is to protect the speech we hate, but apparently it's a trope the Trump administration hasn’t heard enough.
Those cheering Trump’s rounding up of pro-Palestinian protesters might argue that supporting Israel and opposing Hamas has greater value than free speech, or even that those targeted are actual terrorists, putting them in a separate category.
But we can rationalize similar free speech exceptions about all sorts of positions.
In his Munich speech, Vance cited the prosecution of Briton Adam Smith-Connor, a physiotherapist and army veteran who Vance said had been charged with the “heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.”
Heidi Stewart, chief executive of Bpas, the UK’s leading abortion provider, said of Vance’s comments, “Bpas ... will always remain proud to stand against misogynistic and anti-democratic interference with British women’s reproductive rights by foreign extremists, whether they are the vice-president of the US or not.”
Someday, “foreign extremist” JD Vance could be considered a “threat” to U.S. foreign policy by another administration. Then what happens?
Vance’s broader point was that people of different views should be able to express them in Western democracies.
And he was right. The first time.
He told European countries last month that their greatest threats weren’t from Russia or China, but their retreat from some of their “most fundamental values,” that the United States has historically shared with them, with freedom of expression seeming to top his list.
“What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance warned.
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