Stunning news today as European Union foreign affairs chief Josep Borell announced a “pause” in the Iran nuclear talks in Vienna, citing “external factors.” Diplomats say this refers to the eleventh-hour demand by the Russians, one of the original JCPOA signatories, to relieve some of its sanctions over the Ukraine invasion in exchange for its support on a renewed deal.
Though the JCPOA has not been killed by these Russian demands, Moscow does have the ability to harm the United States by delaying the agreement at a crucial point of Washington’s vulnerability to high oil prices. It may also have the ability to pull the plug on the agreement as a whole by triggering snap-back sanctions in the UN Security Council or preventing the Joint Commission from adopting the decision to bring the US back into the deal. The snap-back option would of course create a very significant crisis between Tehran and Moscow.
In retrospect, the parties were clearly mistaken in thinking that Russia would continue to compartmentalize the JCPOA talks from its tensions with the West. The Ukraine crisis of 2014 did not undermine the JCPOA negotiations, but it is of course incomparable to the Ukraine crisis of 2022. It remains unclear, however, if the Russian objective is to delay the deal to undermine the West’s efforts to pressure Russia over Ukraine or to completely scuttle the deal.
Though Tehran has been tempered in its statements so far, it must clearly be angered by the Russian maneuvers. But Iran is stuck between two bad choices: Accepting the potential collapse of the deal and continued U.S. sanctions, or seeking a potential agreement with the U.S. outside of the JCPOA. The latter could dangerously increase tensions between Tehran and Moscow while making Iran dependent on the U.S. at a time when GOP officials have made it clear they will kill the JCPOA if they take the White House in 2024.
Hopefully, the deal can still be salvaged. But if it collapses on the goal line because of Russian sabotage, it further underscores the folly of Biden not going back to the deal via Executive Order on the first day of his presidency. No one could have predicted Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine as a factor, but many predicted that it would be unpredictably messy to negotiate a return.
Trita Parsi is the co-founder and Executive Vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
A police officer stands outside the hotel where a meeting of the JCPOA Joint Commission, or Iran nuclear deal, is held in Vienna, Austria, April 27, 2021. REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger|A police officer stands outside the hotel where a meeting of the JCPOA Joint Commission, or Iran nuclear deal, is held in Vienna, Austria, April 27, 2021. REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger
Top photo credit: Donald Trump (Anna Moneymaker/Shutterstock) Volodymyr Zelensky (miss.cabul/Shutterstock) and Vladimir Putin (paparazzza/Shuttterstock)
Trump on right course with terms for Russia-Ukraine peace
As President Trump prepares to meet with Ukrainian President Zelensky on Friday, much public discourse has focused on whether the United States should provide Ukraine with Tomahawk cruise missiles to increase pressure on Russia. But a much more important question has been all but ignored: What is this increased pressure on Russia intended to achieve?
The short answer — to force Russia to the negotiating table — obscures the fact that Russia has already been negotiating with the United States over what it regards as the root causes of the war.
The Russians claim that at the Alaska summit, Trump and President Putin reached significant understandings on a framework for ending the conflict. Putin showed flexibility by dropping Russia’s insistence on Ukrainian withdrawal from Kherson and Zaporizhia, and he indicated at the concluding press conference that Russia was ready to address ways to ensure Ukraine’s security.
As Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with stalled progress toward a settlement, Putin and other senior Russian officials have emphasized in recent public statements that they hope to continue the process of negotiations in accordance with the Anchorage understandings. What then has gone wrong?
Two possibilities come to mind, each rooted in crossed signals between the White House and the Kremlin. Judging from Putin’s public remarks after the summit, it is likely that Trump and Putin agreed on a fundamental geopolitical compromise over Ukraine, whereby the United States would close the door on Ukraine’s membership in NATO and Russia would accept Ukrainian accession to the European Union.
In the wake of the summit, however, controversy almost immediately erupted over the question of a post-settlement peacekeeping operation. Putin probably indicated a readiness to accept such an operation, but this question quickly became entangled in Europe’s insistence that it include a European “reassurance force” of combat capable troops.
For the Russians, there is an important distinction between a neutral peacekeeping operation, which they believe should be under United Nations auspices and focus on monitoring the implementation of a ceasefire, and a deterrence force aimed at countering the Russian military. Russia has for decades opposed the possibility of Western combat forces in Ukraine, and in fact one of the chief objectives of its invasion has been to preclude such an outcome. If one of the purposes of increased US pressure on Russia is to force Moscow’s acceptance of a post-settlement European military presence in Ukraine, that pressure will fail.
The other crossed signal very likely involved the question of direct Russian-Ukrainian negotiations over territory, reparations, cease-fire provisions, and other largely bilateral matters. At Alaska, Putin may well have indicated a willingness to negotiate with Ukraine on these issues and even to meet with Zelensky, but it is likely that the important question of sequencing was not addressed.
At the post-Alaska meeting in the White House between Trump and European leaders, it became clear that Trump expected Putin to meet quickly with Zelensky to negotiate the parameters of a ceasefire agreement. But Putin has long insisted that any summit meeting with Ukraine must follow — not precede — working-level negotiations that would hammer out most of the key elements of a deal. This would allow the presidents (as is the norm in international diplomacy) to focus only on the remaining disagreements and minimize the likelihood that a summit would fail.
These miscommunications over peacekeeping and sequencing have allowed Europeans and other opponents of a compromise settlement with Russia to paint Putin as both disingenuous and opposed to negotiations. The only viable path toward peace, they argue, is toughened economic and military pressure on Russia.
There is profound irony in the fact that Trump seems to be contemplating an approach that doubles down on former president Biden’s policy of maximizing pressure on Russia to force Moscow’s capitulation, an approach he had heretofore consistently criticized.
That approach failed because it was based on a fundamentally flawed assumption: that Putin views the war as an elective, a bid for land and empire that he will abandon if the costs of conquest prove too high. But Putin has always viewed this war as a security imperative, designed to prevent the NATO alliance from ensconcing its forces in Ukraine and threatening Russia’s heartland. He will not end the invasion until he at a minimum achieves Russia’s key security objectives.
At this point in the war, there is little that already overstretched Western military factories can do to address Ukraine’s shortage of air defense systems at a time when Russia has amassed a formidable arsenal of missiles, glide bombs, and drones, and is intensifying its strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure. Deep strikes into Russia with Tomahawk missiles, which cannot be provided in large numbers even if Ukraine were to devise some means of launching them, will not change this picture.
Moreover, Ukraine is losing the manpower war, as Russia is consistently exceeding its monthly recruitment targets while Ukraine falls short of the numbers needed to replenish its growing losses, including to many of its most effective forces.The only way Trump can remedy this shortfall would be to commit Western troops to combat operations alongside the Ukrainians.
Trump therefore faces a fundamental choice. If he backs his way into the Biden strategy, Russia will almost certainly accelerate its military operations. Sooner or later the increasingly exhausted Ukrainian military will approach a collapse, in much the same way that the attritional warfare in World War I ended. Trump will be forced either to stomach an unstable and dysfunctional Ukrainian rump state or bring the United States into war with Russia.
But the path toward a compromise that addresses core Russian concerns while still ensuring Ukraine has an effective, Western-aided self-defense capability is still open, at least for now. That will require putting an end to European insistence on a combat-ready “reassurance force” in Ukraine, pressing Zelensky to re-open working level negotiations with the Russians, and codifying the understandings Trump and Putin reached in Alaska.
The result could be a framework agreement that — not unlike the Gaza deal — still requires further negotiation but puts the war in Ukraine on a clear path toward a stable settlement.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.
The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.
Congress is MIA when it comes to war
In serious matters of war and peace, Congress has decided, yet again, to take a pass. By a vote of 51-48, the Senate on October 8 voted down a bipartisan proposal that would have required congressional approval before the Trump administration carries out additional strikes against suspected drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea bound for the U.S. It represents yet another lawmaker leap into irrelevance regarding one of the fundamental duties of the legislative branch of the U.S. government.
It also telegraphs something new: In the past, Congress has often passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (technical legal name: fig leaf, from the Latin meaning “don’t blame us”) before a president ordered military attacks. But this time around, lawmakers are so weak-kneed they’re refusing even to backdate a blank check for combat.
In recent weeks, the administration has acknowledged five such attacks. They have killed, by the administration’s own count, 27 people it labeled as Venezuelan “narco-terrorists.” The White House maintains the U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with “unlawful combatants.” So it has chosen to respond by launching its own armed conflict through unlawful attacks.
Trump administration justifications for the attacks have been both meager and dubious. “Can you imagine a doctrine in which we just blow up ships off of Miami and say ‘whoops’ if they didn’t have any drugs on board?” Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said(PDF) on the Senate floor. “We allow searches. But we don’t kill every suspected boat off of Miami suspected of having drugs because 25 percent of them don’t have any drugs.”
It is illegal for the U.S. military to target civilians who — even if they may be peddling narcotics — are not engaged in “hostilities” against the United States, the Army’s former top law-of-war officer told the New York Times. “This is not stretching the envelope,” Geoffrey Corn added. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”
The Bunker is not in favor of drug smugglers. It just would like to see those in charge stay within the well-established boundaries of the laws of war. And that has to start with Congress, charged in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution to debate, and then to declare or not declare, war on enemies of the United States. At a minimum, U.S. citizens deserve to see the Congress they pay take a stand. But lily-livered lawmakers haven’t seen fit to step up to the plate and declare war against any state or organization since 1942. Their abdication comes despite dozens of combat deployments since then, some of which — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq 2.0 — surely warranted such a debate.
Each week seems to bring an ever-tighter ratcheting of autocracy to the U.S. government. First it was over ballots. Now it is over bullets.
Aimed at them.
For now.
The F-35 still spends too much time on the tarmac
When The Bunker was but a boy, he grew up in a Chevrolet neighborhood. Dad would get upset whenever someone parked a new Cadillac in their driveway. “More money than brains,” he’d grouse. “Living beyond their means.” Dad may have died 35 years ago, but if he were still with us, he’d be saying the same thing about the Pentagon’s $2 trillion F-35 program.
“The F-35 remains the most advanced fighter in the world, but too many of them are sitting idle on ramps,” Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, groused at the soon-to-be top Air Force general at his October 9 confirmation hearing. “The Air Force cannot project power if its most advanced fighter cannot get off the ground.”
This is a perennial problem for a military more concerned with presents (gold-plated weapons favored by generals and defense contractors) than presence — the ability to get to the fight and prevail. It too often leads to a bevy of hangar queens. “Our pilots are flying about two to two-and-a-half times a week in a fighter aircraft,” General Kenneth Wilsbach, tapped to be the service’s next chief of staff, conceded to the Senate panel. “That is not enough.”
Building an air force (the Marines and Navy also fly F-35s) is a tough balancing act that would challenge the Flying Wallendas:
Long-standing Pentagon logic says more costly warplanes are better warplanes.
But more expensive warplanes require more money to buy, and, more critically, to keep them flying. The Air Force’s F-35 broke down nearly twice as often as planned in 2023. Its readiness rate fell from a poor 69% of the time in 2021 to a pitiful 52% in 2024.
Inevitably, the more money the U.S. military spends on keeping its aircraft flying, the fewer hours those planes can fly. “That means that you can’t fly your full fleet,” Wilsbach said. “What that means is the pilots and the crews aren’t training.”
Highly-trained pilots — it costs more than $13 million (PDF), in 2025 dollars, to train an F-35 pilot — love to fly. They don’t take well to hours sitting in simulators or hanging around ready rooms waiting for their planes to be repaired. Flight hours for Air Force combat pilots have dived from 16 per month in the 1990s, to 10 in the mid-2010s, to about five hours monthly today.
So they’re more inclined to bail out of the service, forcing the military to spend $13 million training replacements.
That, in turn, takes $13 million per new pilot that can’t be spent on maintenance, leading to fewer flying hours, air infinitum.
Wilsbach, predictably, said the Pentagon should spend more money to keep F-35s airborne. But a former top Air Force officer says service leaders “can use our imaginations” to solve the flying-hour crunch. Merrill McPeak, a fighter pilot who served as Air Force chief of staff from 1990 to 1994, suggests his service equip its F-35 units with gliders to keep their pilots flying. “Time spent in the air flying anything builds airmanship and confidence,” he says. “Better still, it’s fun.”
Then again, thinking of good ol’ Dad, we could just fly Buicks.
Pentagon press to be branded with scarlet letters
Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense has launched a war against the press. Like the war in Afghanistan, it is not going to end well for the Pentagon. Sure, the flag-pocket-squared SECDEF can bombard those in uniform with a barrage of memos and require them to salute. But the Pentagon press corps — like all reporters, bolstered by the nation’s founders — prizes its independence.
The Bunker spent 37 years reporting from inside the Pentagon, seeking to inform readers about what the U.S. military was doing in their name. He was proud to tell their stories, but didn’t pull punches, either. He was more concerned with being fair than being friendly. He believes he earned a career’s worth of respect from most of those in uniform.
This October 6 memo(PDF) from Sean Parnell, Hegseth’s spokesman, reads like an OPLAN for an attack on the First Amendment and those who embrace it. It reads as if this Pentagon hierarchy views the press as the enemy. Hegseth & Co. seem oblivious to the need for independent and robust reporting on the U.S. military. They are trying to squelch the press from doing its job with a crude one-two punch: First, dramatically cut down on officially released information, and second, bar reporters from “soliciting” (also known as “reporting”) anything else.
News organizations are making it clear they will not agree to its terms. That could lead to their “chaotic withdrawal” from the building beginning October 15, much like the U.S. left Afghanistan in 2021, one veteran Pentagon scribe told The Bunker. “This whole episode stems from Hegseth’s hatred of the media because of the coverage he received leading up to his nomination and after,” he believes.
And here’s the bright red maraschino cherry on top: The Defense Department also will soon begin issuing “Additional Press Identifier Badges” (PDF) that, according to Parnell’s memo, “will have ‘PRESS’ clearly imprinted on them in red letters both vertically and horizontally to assist in identifying members of the press within the Pentagon.”
Here’s hoping they print up one labeled “FOOL” for themselves, as well.
Hundreds of small defense companies are sprouting in Rust Belt cities thanks to local talent, cheap labor and state cash incentives, Sheera Frenkel reported October 13 in the New York Times.
President Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield would rely heavily on space-based missile interceptors, an unparalleled technical challenge, Josh Luckenbaugh reported October 7 in National Defense.
The VA’s rapidly expanding disability benefits program has become a rich target for fraudsters, the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock, Lisa Rein, and Nate Jones reported October 8.
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Top photo credit: U.S. Marines infiltrate the beach head as part of an amphibious demonstration at Hat Yao Beach, Kingdom of Thailand, during Cobra Gold 2014, Feb. 14 (US Marine Corps photo)
Maximum pressure has long been President Donald Trump’s stance towards the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela — he slapped crippling sanctions on the country during his first term — but in recent days the administration has pushed the stakes even higher.
The Caribbean is currently hosting an astonishing quantity of American naval and air assets, including four Arleigh Burke–class destroyers, a guided missile cruiser, an attack submarine, a Marine Amphibious Ready Group, and a flight of F-35 multirole fighters.
These are ostensibly deployed as part of an antinarcotic and drug interdiction operation, but the volume of firepower employed for what is normally a relatively sedate task has created broad suspicion at home and in Venezuela that a military intervention against the Bolivarian Republic is on tap. Maduro recently sent a letter to the United Nations stating that he expected an “armed attack” against his country in “a very short time.”
His concerns have probably not been assuaged by the formation of a new Joint Task Force last week (again ostensibly for anti-narcotics operations) in SOUTHCOM under the II Marine Expeditionary Force, precisely the kind of unit that would be deployed in a Venezuelan military intervention, still less by the recent New York Times report that Trump has authorized lethal covert operations by American intelligence agents within his borders.
The administration has made its interest in removing Maduro quite clear: it views him as the head of a narcoterrorist organization that is responsible for exporting crime, drugs, and illegal immigrants to the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared that Maduro is not the legitimate president of the country, due to his government’s obvious falsification of results in the 2024 election, and the Justice Department doubled the bounty for his capture to $50 million.
But while Maduro is, without a doubt, a usurper of the presidential office and a tyrannical dictator, he is no less the president and head of state of Venezuela. Ideological harangues about the sanctity of democracy will no more remove him from power or render his government moot than American disapproval of the Chinese Communist Party could affect the democratization of Red China, something both sides are well aware of. Removing Maduro will require more than sanctions, threats, or pressure: it will require war, and that possibility looks increasingly likely with each passing day.
While ending Maduro’s dictatorship would certainly be a boon to the Venezuelan people, the intervention comes with a number of costs and risks American policymakers should bear in mind and carefully weigh against the potential benefits of intervention. There is no free lunch in geopolitics.
The most obvious costs are those of the initial invasion. The American invasion of Panama in 1989, to overthrow the government of General Manuel Noriega, was carried out by a force of some 27,000 U.S. troops, 23 of which were killed and hundreds more wounded. Venezuela is vastly larger than Panama, and while its military is very poorly equipped, it likewise dwarfs the forces that were available to Noriega. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates an invasion of Venezuela would require nearly 50,000 troops, some of which will not return home. Any American government should be extremely conscientious about the causes on which it spends the lives of American soldiers.
The real risks of such an operation, however, come after the invasion. Toppling Maduro’s government is one thing; there is no real chance that the impoverished and corrupt Venezuelan armed forces can put up a serious fight against the American military. But occupying and rebuilding the country is another, as the U.S. learned to its chagrin in the Middle East.
While Venezuela is no Afghanistan — it has a relatively unified population, an organized opposition, and a prominent leader in María Corina Machado capable of stepping in and assuming the reins of government — there are still very serious challenges an incoming government will face.
The largest risk are the cartels operating in the region. While Maduro does strategically permit cartels to operate within Venezuela at times, Venezuela does not have the entrenched cartel problems of neighboring Colombia. Cartels operate networks that transport drugs through Venezuela to the U.S. and elsewhere, but control little territory and do not produce a significant amount of drugs in the country. The Venezuelan government continues to crack down on cartels that appear to be making themselves overly comfortable; Maduro has no interest in permitting the growth of significant challenges to his authority, including cartel quasi-states like those in Colombia and Mexico.
Once a U.S. invasion takes place, however, the enforcement power that limits cartel activity in Venezuela will vanish in an instant. One of the foundations of Maduro’s political power is his iron grip of the country’s military, law enforcement, and intelligence services. All are regularly and thoroughly purged of disloyal and seditious elements, and their leadership bought off with positions of power and lucre in government and industry. An American invasion would shatter them as institutions, and an incoming government would need to reconstruct them basically from scratch. Occupying U.S. troops could help fill the gap, but they are unlikely to be able to project power and enforce the laws far beyond major urban areas, a situation that could allow cartels to massively expand their power in the rural areas of the country, especially in the Amazon and the regions bordering Colombia.
Worse still, an American invasion offers the cartels the opportunity to posture themselves as anti-imperialist resistance movements and absorb elements of Maduro’s support in the country — support they are often already tapped into through networks of patronage and corruption. Units from the ostensibly Marxist National Liberation Army, a major drug cartel in Colombia, already frequently travel through Venezuelan territory in between fights with other cartels and the Colombian military; a regime change risks plunging Venezuela into the same permanent drug war Colombia has been embroiled in for decades — one American forces are likely to be personally engaged in during the occupation and reconstruction of the Venezuelan government.
Given that the stated objective of the Trump administration’s military expansion in the Caribbean is to crack down on the drug trade into the U.S. from Venezuela, few things would be more counterproductive than feeding cartel expansion in northern South America.
An intensified Venezuelan drug war could also contribute to the flow of Venezuelan illegal immigration, another major complaint the U.S. has had against the Maduro government. Cartel brutality and conflict has been a major driver of illegal immigration all over central and south America, and it would be a cruel irony if narcos in Amazonas replaced narcos in Caracas as major contributors to the American illegal immigrant population.
The Trump administration is approaching a decisive moment in its Western Hemisphere policy. Eventually it will have to settle American relations with Venezuela. Policymakers must weigh carefully the costs and benefits of military intervention and take into account the serious risks inherent to occupation and nation-building — because if we muck it up this time, we can’t just pull out and leave the Taliban to their own devices. This one’s in our own backyard, and we’ll be paying the cost of any missteps for years to come.
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