President Donald Trump has
just fulfilled a campaign pledge to tear up the Obama administration’s
signature foreign policy achievement, a multilateral agreement constraining
Iran’s nuclear enrichment (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). In
doing so, the president went against the
advice of, among many others, his secretary of defense, House Foreign
Affairs Committee Chairman Ed
Royce (R-CA), Washington’s three most important European allies, and
almost-two thirds of Americans who believe that the U.S. should not withdraw
from the deal, according to a
CNN poll released on Tuesday morning.
Trump appears absolutely
determined to undo as much of what Barack Obama accomplished as possible. In
addition, the sheer perversity of his personality may well explain today’s
action. But it may also be useful to follow the apochryphal advice that
Watergate’s famous “Deep Throat” offered to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
in All the President’s Men, particularly in the unbelievably corrupt swamp
of the Trump era.
Indeed, today’s unpopular
announcement may have been exactly what two of Trump’s biggest donors, Sheldon
Adelson and Bernard Marcus,
and what one of his biggest inaugural supporters, Paul Singer,
paid for when they threw their financial weight behind Trump. Marcus and
Adelson, who are also board members of the Likudist Republican
Jewish Coalition, have already received substantial returns on their
investment: total alignment by the U.S. behind Israel, next week’s move of the
U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and the official dropping of “occupied
territories” to describe the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Adelson, for his part, was
Trump and the GOP’s biggest campaign supporter. He and his wife Miriam
contributed $35 million in outside spending to elect Trump, $20 million to the
Congressional Leadership Fund (a super PAC exclusively dedicated to securing a
GOP majority in the House of Representatives), and $35 million to the Senate Leadership
Fund (the Senate counterpart) in the 2016 election cycle.
Trump, who had previously
complained that Adelson was seeking to “mold [Marco Rubio] into the perfect
little puppet,” quickly snapped
around and echoed Adelson’s hawkish positions on the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem
after Trump won the Republican nomination and secured Adelson’s backing.
Politico reported that
the most threatening line in Trump’s October UN speech—that he would cancel
Washington’s participation in the JCPOA if Congress and U.S. allies did not
bend to his efforts to renegotiate it—came directly from John Bolton,
now Trump’s national security advisor, and with the full weight of Trump’s
biggest donor. The hawkish language was not in the original remarks prepared by
Trump’s staff.
The line was added to Trump’s
speech after Bolton, despite Kelly’s recent edict [restricting Bolton’s access
to Trump], reached the president by phone on Thursday afternoon from Las Vegas,
where Bolton was visiting with Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson. Bolton
urged Trump to include a line in his remarks noting that he reserved the right
to scrap the agreement entirely, according to two sources familiar with the
conversation.
Adelson, for his part,
has advocated
launching a nuclear weapon against Iran as a negotiating tactic and
threatening to nuke Tehran, a city with a population of 8.8 million, if Iran
does not completely abandon its nuclear program.
Newt Gingrich,
a huge recipient of Adelson’s financial largesse during his failed 2012
presidential campaign, said
that Adelson’s “central value” is Israel.
And Adelson isn’t alone in
holding radical views about Iran and having the ear of the president, or at
least significant financial leverage.
Home Depot cofounder Bernard
Marcus, Trump’s second largest campaign contributor, contributed
$7 million to pro-Trump Super PACs, $500,000 to the Congressional
Leadership Fund (CLF), and $2 million the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF).
In a 2015 Fox Business
interview, Marcus compared the JCPOA to “do[ing] business with the devil.” He
went on to clarify, “I think Iran is the devil.”
Adelson and Marcus also share a
common affinity for the hawkish Foundation
for Defense of Democracies (FDD’s Reuel Marc
Gerecht may have set a record by publishing no less than three
anti-JCPOA columns for The Atlantic in the past week.) Adelson
contributed at least $1.5 million to the group by the end of 2011 (a year that
saw a sharp rise in tensions and rumors of war by Israel against Iran)
according to FDD’s 2011 Schedule
A tax disclosure, and Marcus, the group’s biggest donor, contributed at
least $10.7 million.
FDD says Adelson is no longer
a contributor, but Marcus continues to give generously, contributing $3.25
million in 2015, the last year for which his foundation’s grants are known.
Hedge Fund billionaire Paul
Singer contributed at least $3.6 million to FDD by the end of 2011, making him
the group’s second biggest donor after Marcus at the time.
Employees of Singer’s firm,
Elliott Management, were the second largest source of funds supporting the 2014
candidacy of the Senate’s most outspoken Iran hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton
(R-AR) and Singer contributed $1.9 million to the CLF and $6 million
to the SLF. He was a holdout in supporting Trump’s candidacy and financed the
initial research by Fusion GPS that turned into the Steele Dossier detailing
alleged ties between Trump’s campaign and businesses with Moscow. But he came
around before Trump’s inauguration and contributed $1 million to the
festivities.
Between
them, the three billionaires account for over $40 million in pro-Trump
political money. In the 2016 cycle, the three were also the source of 44% of
individual contributions to the CLF and 47% of those received by the SLF, the
biggest spending campaign finance vehicles for House and Senate Republicans.
Trump and the GOP are deeply
indebted to anti-Iran deal billionaires who aren’t afraid to advocate for
policies that push the country closer to another war in the Middle East.
Trump’s decision to back out
of the JCPOA might come across as a renegade president bucking conventional
wisdom and following through on a poorly thought-out campaign promise to undo
the work of his predecessor.
But another explanation is
that Trump and the Republican Party are effectively captive to a small cohort
of hawkish billionaires dead set on steering the country away from any sort of
detente with Iran, even a multilateral agreement that ensures limits on
enrichment and subjects the Islamic Republic to invasive inspections of its
nuclear facilities.
Both explanations may be true.
And, as if on cue, The
Washington Post‘s Ashley Parker reports that
Adelson will visit with Trump on Wednesday. It’s “described as a
‘friendly,” long-planned meeting, not related to today’s Iran news.”
No comments:
Post a Comment