Quincy Institute's co-founder and executive vice president of programs Trita Parsi debated Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies today on CSPAN's Washington Journal program.
The two sparred a bit over today's presidential elections in Iran, the nuclear deal and U.S. sanctions on Tehran. They also took call-in questions. Watch below:
The House is poised to expand the use of a secretive mechanism for funneling weapons to Israel.
Hidden deep in a must-pass State Department funding bill is a provision that would allow for unlimited transfers of U.S. weapons to a special Israel-based stockpile in the next fiscal year, strengthening a pathway for giving American weapons to Israel with reduced public scrutiny. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is set to discuss the bill Wednesday morning.
The stockpile — known as War Reserve Stock for Allies-Israel, or WRSA-I — is “the least transparent mechanism of providing arms to Israel,” former State Department official Josh Paul told Responsible Statecraft. Since Oct. 7, Israel has quietly purchased huge numbers of American weapons from WRSA-I, facilitating a wave of airstrikes that many analysts consider the most intense bombing campaign of the 21st century.
The transfer process is simple. When Israel asks for weapons from WRSA-I, the secretary of defense can approve the request without having to go through typical steps like notifying Congress or even the White House in advance. Then “Israel can just drive in, pull whatever it requires, and drive out,” said Paul, who now runs a lobbying firm called A New Policy, adding that payments for the weapons are “worked out or provided in the future.”
The legislation, crafted by committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-Fla.), would build on a 2024 law that temporarily waived restrictions on the value and type of U.S. weapons transferred to WRSA-I each year. (U.S. law previously limited such transfers to $200 million annually.) That law also gave the secretary of defense the authority to assess the value of arms transfers rather than relying on the fair market value of the article.
Even before these changes, the U.S. had already started taking advantage of WRSA-I to quietly fuel Israel’s war in Gaza. In the early days of the conflict, Biden administration officials appeared to dodge transparency rules by cutting up larger transfers from WRSA-I into smaller weapons packages that fell under the $25 million threshold for notifying Congress of the sale. This helps to explain how Israel has managed to prosecute the war in Gaza despite receiving few publicly acknowledged weapons sales from the U.S.
Some worry that these arms transfers could place additional pressure on U.S. weapons stockpiles, which have already been strained by American support for Israel and Ukraine.
According to Paul, the proposed expansion of WRSA-I risks creating “a significant drain on U.S. military readiness.”
The effort to expand arms transfers to Israel comes after a panel of United Nations experts determined that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli government rejected that claim, which it says relies “entirely on Hamas falsehoods.”
Notably, the bill also contains a provision that would eliminate all of the State Department’s reporting requirements, meaning that the department would no longer need to submit reports to Congress on issues like human rights abroad.
“Congressional oversight would take a very big hit if this were to pass as it exists now,” said John Ramming-Chappell, an adviser at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “Congress and the public would have less information about U.S. foreign policy and its impact.”
It appears increasingly likely that the Trump administration will move to "decertify" Colombia as a partner in its fight against global drug trafficking for the first time in 30 years.
The upcoming determination, due September 15, could trigger cuts to hundreds of millions of dollars in bilateral assistance, visa restrictions on Colombian officials, and sanctions on the country's financial system under current U.S. law. Decertification would strike a major blow to what has been Washington’s top security partner in the region as it struggles with surging coca production and expanding criminal and insurgent violence.
A recent U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime report found that coca cultivation in Colombia had increased 53% in 2023, with the country now responsible for 67% of global production. An internal security report shared with Reuters revealed that the number of combatants in the country's armed groups — mostly financed through drug trafficking and illegal mining — increased by 7% in the past year and 45% since President Gustavo Petro took office in mid-2022.
Colombian security forces have been reeling after dissident members of the demobilized FARC guerilla group shot down a police helicopter during a coca eradication operation last month, killing 12 police officers. On the same day, a truck bomb on a major thoroughfare near a military aviation school in Cali exploded, killing six civilians.
While Petro's government has sought to break with the country's militarized counternarcotics strategy through peace talks with armed actors, crop substitution programs, interdictions at more profitable nodes of the supply chain, and global initiatives to decriminalize and reduce the demand for drugs, it has been forced to revive elements of the U.S.-backed war on drugs, including manual eradication, aerial bombardments, and bounties on the heads of crime bosses.
Under the framework of Plan Colombia, Colombia has been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance in the Western Hemisphere, averaging $700 million annually in security aid, development assistance, economic support, counternarcotics funding and foreign military financing through the Departments of Defense and State and the now-defunct USAID — for a total of nearly $15 billion since 2000.
The threat of decertification, which puts much of that aid at risk, comes amid a rapid deterioration in relations with the historic U.S. ally since President Trump took office. A Petro-Trump social media spat in January over conditions of deportation flights led to threats of 50% tariffs, visa revocations, and economic sanctions.
Insinuations by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Petro was responsible for the political violence that culminated in the assassination of Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay in June, followed by a diplomatic crisis over unfounded allegations that Rubio was involved in a coup plot against Petro, have eroded once-solid ties. A proposed 50% reduction in non-military assistance to Colombia in the 2026 U.S. federal budget and the administration’s unhappiness with the conviction for witness tampering and bribery of the former rightwing president, Álvaro Uribe, have further strained bilateral ties.
Tariffs on Colombia's U.S.-bound exports and demands to extradite guerrilla leaders involved in peace negotiations have led Colombia to seek new trade and security agreements with China and the European Union, a trend that decertification could accelerate.
To mitigate some of these concerns, Colombia in August hosted a bipartisan delegation of two freshman Colombian-American senators, Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who told the AP before arriving that “the purpose of the trip is to understand all the dynamics before any decision is made.” After meetings with top Colombian officials, Gallego said in a statement: "Colombia will suffer more if we take away its certification because there will be more unemployed people, and then drug traffickers and criminals will have more people who want to work for them."
In July, the Colombian government tapped a former Trump aide to "[advocate] for Colombia’s position in anticipation of the forthcoming determination by the U.S. administration," documents filed with the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent Registration Unit reveal.
The one-year, $720,000 contract with DGA Government Relations is being overseen by Nicole Frazier, who served as a special assistant to the president in the last two years of Trump’s first term. She has been tasked with giving "special emphasis" to ensuring Colombia is not decertified.
For the past six months, Colombia has waged a diplomatic offensive against the pending blacklisting, with numerous high-level visits by top police and counternarcotics officials, meetings with key GOP lawmakers and Trump administration officials, and repeated warnings from Colombia’s defense minister that decertification would run counter to making the U.S. “safer, stronger and more prosperous,” echoing Rubio’s words from January.
“It’s a political decision,” Colombia’s foreign minister Rosa Villavicencio said this week, but “if you look at certification objectively, in terms of the social costs we’ve paid, lives lost and servicemembers killed, the just thing to do would be to maintain our certification, and we hope that it’s looked at objectively.”
After the State Department sends its recommendation to the president based on Colombia’s interdiction results, hectare reduction figures, and anti-drug policies over the past year, Rubio will send his own recommendation to Trump, who makes the final decision, which is then submitted to Congress for feedback, though typically the presidential determination stands.
Security analysts and former U.S. officials have urged the U.S. to issue national security waivers allowing certain bilateral cooperation to continue even if Colombia is formally decertified. The last time Colombia was decertified, insurgent and paramilitary violence surged.
Without these waivers, transnational criminal groups could seize the opportunity to ramp up operations across the region and narcotics flows to the U.S. may increase, according to these experts. U.S.-bound migration from Colombia could also resume and foreign investment in the country continue to wane.
Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli, a Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, says that waivers could include foreign military financing and international narcotics and law enforcement programs, as well as funds approved in the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act.
“Cooperation with the U.S. is so embedded that decertification would seriously affect all operations, including in air, maritime, intelligence and other capacities,” a Colombian defense official told the International Crisis Group. “The main beneficiaries of decertification would be criminal groups, [who] are regional, not just local, so [this] would endanger security across the hemisphere.”
Decertification could also inadvertently boost Petro’s party in the lead-up to next year's elections — contrary to the Trump administration's preference — and prove difficult to reverse if the Trump-aligned opposition wins the presidency in August.
This could be why business leaders, opposition mayors and former President Uribe’s party are, like the Petro government, warning U.S. lawmakers and the administration about the risks of decertifying the country. This week, the mayors of Colombia’s second and third largest cities visited Washington to advocate against decertification.
“It would be the U.S. shooting itself in the foot,” Sanchez-Garzoli said, because “by isolating Colombia, the U.S. would not get the intelligence it needs, which is vital for counternarcotics efforts and strategies in the region. This would have a boomerang effect and would be bad for drug policy in the region, which is why in the past Colombia has always ended up being certified.”
The U.S. military recently launched a plainly illegal strike on a small civilian Venezuelan boat that President Trump claims was a successful hit on “narcoterrorists.” Vice President JD Vance responded to allegations that the strike was a war crime by saying, “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” insisting this was the “highest and best use of the military.”
This is only the latest troubling development in the Trump administration’s attempt to repurpose “War on Terror” mechanisms to use the military against cartels and to expedite his much vaunted mass deportation campaign, which he says is necessary because of an "invasion" at the border.
Unfortunately, more than two decades of widely-accepted, bipartisan laws and norms first laid the groundwork for this to occur.
After 9/11, the Bush administration created the Specially Designated Global Terrorists list, and Congress expanded the pre-existing Foreign Terrorist Organization list. These lists allow the executive branch, at its sole discretion, to add and remove individuals and groups to standing lists of “terrorists,” a term that is defined broadly.
The Trump administration has exercised this authority to formally designate transnational cartels as “terrorists” due in part to their role in the flow of people and drugs across the southern border into the United States. They have leveraged this designation to justify a range of actions, including deploying troops to Los Angeles and deporting immigrants to a brutal Salvadorean prison without due process.
Another post-9/11 legal invention that paved the way to what the Trump administration is doing today was the USA PATRIOT Act’s updates to immigration law that allowed deportation of not just those involved in actual violent acts of terrorism, but also those loosely associated with designated “terrorist groups,” even if those associations were peaceful and law-abiding or involuntary and a result of duress. People who have previously been excluded from the United States by these provisions include Iraqi interpreters for U.S. troops, victims of forced labor by violent armed groups in El Salvador, and even Nelson Mandela. These provisions mean that not just alleged members of cartels, but also cartel victims could be denied entry into the United States or deported if already here.
These same post-9/11 immigration law amendments also allow for revoking or denying immigration benefits to foreign nationals who “endorse or espouse” “terrorist activity,” defined broadly. The Trump administration has already revoked the visas of several immigrant students and scholars solely for their nonviolent activities criticizing the U.S.-Israel genocide in Gaza, as part of what they call a “zero-tolerance” policy for terrorism. The administration has primarily leaned on an older and more obscure provision of immigration law to carry out these attacks on immigrants’ free speech rights. But if current efforts are blocked by courts, or they wish to go further, post-9/11 immigration law may give them the tools to justify doing so.
The original decision to treat the 9/11 attacks not as crime but as warfare, and to launch a literal “war on terror” in response, remains the primary post-9/11 legal innovation on which so many abuses are made possible. Under this global war paradigm, the Obama administration carried out ruthless drone killings, including one that targeted a U.S. citizen, and justified the strikes with a mish-mash of legal standards that applied rules of war outside of actual war zones, and expansively interpreted what constitutes an “imminent threat” and resulting “self-defense” powers.
Every post-9/11 president has claimed wide authority to use military force so long as it serves a vague “national interest.” We can see echoes of this in the Trump administration’s insistence that the small Venezuelan boat blown up by the U.S. military posed an “immediate threat to the United States,” that the strike complied with the laws of war, and was “in defense of vital U.S. national interests.”
Commentators are entirely correct to denounce these assertions of legal authority. But policymakers have spent more than two decades accepting a war paradigm against whomever presidents determine to be “terrorist,” making it politically and legally all the more difficult to push back against what the Trump administration is doing now.
It is also worth recalling that dragnet detentions and deportations of immigrants under the auspices of the “War on Terror” are not entirely unique to the Trump era. In the Bush administration, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller leaned on civil immigration enforcement authorities to round up more than 1,000 Arab, Muslim and South Asian immigrants without due process for secret detention until they were “cleared” of terrorism.
A year later, the National Security Entry and Exit Registration System, which some have called the original “Muslim registry,” was launched, imposing onerous registration and surveillance requirements on lawful noncitizen immigrants suspected of no wrongdoing, almost entirely from Muslim-majority countries, with a stated justification of countering terrorism. This program wasn’t fully dismantled until well into the Obama administration, and produced no convictions for acts of terrorism. It did result in the deportation of more than 13,000 people, mostly over minor immigration process violations.
There are more powers that post-9/11 legal infrastructure affords that this administration has not pursued. It is not impossible to imagine terrorism prosecutions against low-level drug purchasers at home, new hot wars across Latin America, and more dragnet deportations of immigrants, justified by a melding of the laws of war, counterterrorism law, and immigration enforcement. This is because, on a bipartisan basis, our lawmakers have built and strengthened a post-9/11 package of powers that gets handed to each successive president, ripe for potential new weaponization and abuse. The targeting of immigrants and cartels as “terrorists,” including with the tools of warfare, is not a sharp deviation from our recent history — it is its logical conclusion.
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.
