All of these scenarios demand that policy makers, strategists, and military planners be on guard for indicators of North Korean instability. They must prepare for the very real possibility that contingency plans may have to be executed by the alliance. The ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command in particular must now review contingency plans for the full range of threats.
The Iranian state owns many petrochemical firms, so their exports generate hard currency for the regime or facilitate key imports. The United States should demand detailed trade data from Abu Dhabi to ensure that Emirati imports of Iranian petrochemical products stop immediately. If there is no change, the United States should escalate its designations of Emirati targets.
Brig.-Gen. (res.) Jacob Nagel is a visiting professor at the Technion aerospace faculty and a senior visiting fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). He previously served as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s acting national security adviser and head of the National Security Council. Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the US Department of the Treasury, is a senior vice president for research at FDD.
The worldwide effort to contain coronavirus is far from over. America’s campaign to rebut Chinese disinformation concerning the virus’s origins and the CCP’s responsibility for unleashing it isn’t over either.
If Pompeo believes that Europe, for its own internal politics, must see a vote to extend the arms embargo fail before agreeing to snapback, then he should schedule that vote and proceed to snapback without delay. The United Kingdom, having just lost a British soldier to an Iranian proxy attack in Iraq, may be willing to act sooner than later. We must not waste another moment to save the United States—and the world—from what Trump rightly calls the worst deal ever made.