Trump Ignores Advisers on Iran Deal, Follows Pro-Israel Billionaire Adelson's Money
Although much of the Washington commentariat has depicted Trump’s extraordinarily bellicose speech Friday against Iran and the nuclear deal as the latest example of his determination to undo the legacy of his predecessor, meeting the demands of his most important campaign donors may well have served as a major motivation as well. Indeed, his biggest campaign donor, casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, may have influenced the specific language Trump used in his remarks.
Trump rejected the reported views of his own national security adviser and secretaries of defense and state by refusing to certify Iran’s compliance with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But he also echoed talking points developed by organizations, notably the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), that are generously supported by a number of those same donors.
With Watergate back in the public consciousness, in part due to Hollywood’s depiction of Mark “Deep Throat” Felt, it seems fitting to test the relevance of his advice to Woodward and Bernstein to “follow the money” in this case, as in many others.
A hint that this approach may indeed shed some light on Trump’s motivation was offered in a profile of UN ambassador Nikki Haley – the least experienced but most neoconservative of Trump’s foreign-policy team and the beneficiary of $250,000 of Adelson’s political contributions last year – that appeared in PoliticoFriday. It reported that the most threatening line in Trump’s address – that he would cancel Washington’s participation in the JCPOA if Congress and U.S. allies did not bend to his efforts to effectively renegotiate it – was suggested by none other than John Bolton.
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.[Emphasis added.]
Bolton’s access to Trump may indeed be restricted, but, if he’s speaking on Adelson’s behalf, that probably makes a difference. Even before his visit to Las Vegas after the mass shooting there last week, Trump took time out to meet with the billionaire casino owner at the White House. The meeting’s purpose was not confined to the expression of condolences, according to Adelson’s spokesman.
Adelson’s Influence
Adelson is the former chairman and almost certainly the biggest funder of the Republican Jewish Coalition(RJC), an ultra-hawkish group that includes on its board of directors Trump’s second-biggest campaign donor (after Adelson and his wife, Miriam), Bernard Marcus, as well as other wealthy donors whose worldview largely corresponds to that of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party.
And it bears repeating that Trump himself warned specifically about the RJC and Adelson’s desire to control politicians using campaign contributions.
Trump told an RJC audience in December 2015:
You’re not gonna support me because I don’t want your money. You want to control your politicians; that’s fine. …I do want your support, but I don’t want your money.
And Trump mocked his primary opponent, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for seeking Adelson’s financial support, saying:
Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!
After Trump won the nomination, Adelson emerged as Trump’s biggest campaign supporter. And Adelson reportedly has a narrow set of policies (aside from restricting internet gambling) he seeks to influence through his political contributions.
Newt Gingrich, himself a huge recipient of Adelson’s financial largesse during his failed 2012 presidential campaign, said that Adelson’s “central value” is Israel.
Among his policy priorities are tacit if not explicit U.S. approval of Jewish settlement expansion on the West Bank and Jerusalem; moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; and undoing the JCPOA (or, in Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s words, “fix it or nix it.”)
Adelson must be disappointed by Trump’s failure so far to move the embassy; just last week, he signed a temporary order keeping it in Tel Aviv. Indeed, he may have felt obliged to personally explain that decision to Adelson in their White House meeting. “I want to give [peace talks between the Israeli and Palestinians] a shot before I even think about moving the embassy to Jerusalem,” he said. On the other hand, the casino magnate must be very pleased with the relative silence by the Trump administration over the question of settlement expansion which has proceeded at record rates since he became president.
On Friday, however, Trump really came through for his benefactor. Bucking the advice of his secretary of defense and secretary of state to decertify Iran’s compliance with the nuclear agreement, the president effectively gave Adelson (who contributed $35 million to pro-Trump Super PAC Future 45), alongside fellow Republican anti-Iran deal donors Marcus (who contributed $7 million to pro-Trump Super PACs) and Paul Singer (who contributed $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee), their first real shot at sabotaging the JCPOA.
The Role of Cotton
Trump’s announcement effectively punted the decision to Congress whether to reimpose sanctions or take other actions that would almost certainly put Washington in violation of the agreement negotiated by the Obama administration, European allies, China, Russia and Iran.
Senate hawks, led by Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Bob Corker (R-TN), have proposed legislation that would institute automatic reinstatement of sanctions if Iran comes within a year of a nuclear weapons capability and eliminates the JCPOA’s sunset clauses, effectively rewriting of the agreement and potentially putting the U.S. in violation of the accord.
Coincidentally or not, Cotton, who reportedly advised the White House on its Iran policy, is deeply indebted to Singer. Singer was Cotton’s second largest source of funds supporting his campaign. The New York based-hedge fund billionaire contributed $250,000 to Arkansas Horizon, an independent expenditure group supporting Cotton’s 2014 Senate .
(Cotton also received $960,250 in supportive campaign advertising in the last month of his campaign from the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), a right-wing group headed by the neoconservative pundit, Bill Kristol, who infamously predicted that the Iraq war would last two months. At its inception, the ECI was based out of the same Washington office as the Committee of the Liberation of Iraq, a pressure group that lobbied for the 2003 invasion.)
Singer, alongside Marcus and Adelson, also funded anti-Iran deal groups such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which played a leading role in opposing any nuclear deal or serious diplomatic engagement with Iran for more than a decade.
Cotton has himself made no secret of his desire to sabotage nuclear diplomacy with Iran. In March 2015, Cotton organized a controversial letter warning “the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” that the U.S. government might not abide by an agreement made with the Obama administration. At the time, he argued that Congress should work to undermine U.S. negotiators and scuttle talks between the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) that resulted in the JCPOA.
That opposition to diplomacy was still evident this June when Cotton told Politico, “The policy of the United States should be regime change in Iran,” a position that puts into question his sincerity about wanting to “fix” the deal.
Indeed, Trump’s decision to decertify and punt the question about reimposition of sanctions, potentially in violation of the JCPOA, to Congress was welcomed by Iran hawks like Cotton and, presumably, by Adelson, Singer and Marcus.
Unsurprisingly, the RJC applauded the White House’s announcement in an email immediately after Friday’s speech. It said:
With today’s decision, President Trump is delivering on a major campaign promise, bolstering security for the United States, Israel, and our allies, as well as creating an opportunity to truly curb Iran’s nuclear ambition and find lasting peace in the Middle East.
Adelson and Marcus rarely speak directly about the Iran deal but when they do, they reveal hawkish and apocalyptic views about how the U.S. should handle relations with Iran and the nature of the Iranian people. Adelson proposed exploding a nuclear bomb “in the Iranian desert” in 2013 as warning of what would happen to Tehran itself if it didn’t abandon its nuclear program. As for Marcus, “I think that Iran is the devil,” he said in a 2015 Fox Business interview.
It seems Trump may be more inclined to listen to them on Iran policy than to his most experienced national security officials.
How Neocons Helped Create Trump
Prominent neoconservatives, led by Bill Kristol, have played leading roles in trying to block Trump’s nomination or repeal it somehow. They’ve lined up fellow-neocons to sign letters opposing his election and/or declining to serve under him should he actually make it to the White House. Some, albeit a relatively small minority so far, have gone so far as to publicly endorse Hillary for president, if only as the lesser evil. Among the most outspoken in the latter group are Bob Kagan, Max Boot, Bret Stephens, and Eliot Cohen. Indeed, it’s very difficult to find a neocon at the moment who publicly supports the Republican candidate.
As I wrote previously, the reasons are many: fear of “America First” isolationism and all it implies for U.S. foreign policy and alliances; the bromance with Putin; the crudest kinds of nativism, racism, and misogyny expressed at his rallies (and the fear that anti-Semitism can’t be far behind); authoritarian tendencies (to say the least); shocking ignorance; lack of self-restraint; hyper-narcissism—all valid points with which I can’t find much fault.
But what disturbs me is the refusal—even among those who say they’ll vote for Hillary—to admit their own contribution to the rise of Trump and Trumpism. Their attitude recalls what happened after the Iraq War went south. With a few exceptions, neocons denied that they anything to do with getting us into the greatest U.S. foreign policy debacle since at least the Vietnam War. Or they maintained that the invasion was still a great idea, but the occupation (for which they also insisted they bore no responsibility) was botched. Or they argued that the “surge,” which they also promoted, was a total success, but the Obama administration subsequently blew it. As with Iraq, neocons have so far refused to take any responsibility for helping create the environment in which Trump’s rise has been made possible.
Boot Shifts the Blame
Consider this recent op-ed published in The New York Times by Boot, entitled “How the ‘Stupid Party’ Created Trump.”
And here’s Boot’s conclusion:
So, the responsibility, according to Boot, for the rise of Trump and Trumpism lies with the Tea Party and “talk-radio hosts and television personalities” and not with those “conservative think tanks” like AEI and Heritage or publications like the Journal’s editorial writers and Commentary. It presumably has nothing to do with Boot’s fellow neocons for whom “soul-searching” might also be in order.
But who extolled the Tea Party and sought to ride it to power? What “conservative think tanks” supplied the guests to all those talk-radio hosts and television personalities to “cater to populist anger with extremist proposals.” Who fanned that “reflexive aversion to elites” or the “anti-intellectual drift?”
The Standard Sets the Standard
Let’s start with a publication that Boot somehow neglected to name even though he’s a contributing editor: The Weekly Standard. Its editor for 20 years now has been Bill Kristol, co-founder of the Project of the New American Century (PNAC), who has so often acted as the hub for the aggressive nationalist (or “Jacksonian”) Christian Right and neoconservative wings of the GOP whose coalition his father Irving did so much to forge to defeat Jimmy Carter’s re-election bid in 1980. That coalition was the tiger that the neocons rode to the invasion of Iraq 23 years later.
In Boot’s golden years of the 1980s, the younger Kristol, then known as “Dan Quayle’s brain,” played a leading role in the “family values” campaign against, among other things, Murphy Brown’s unwed motherhood, a significant waystation on the road to the “anti-intellectual bias” of which Boot complains today. That particular contribution to anti-intellectualism and “populist anger,” however, pales in comparison to Kristol’s promotion of then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a clear precursor and early Trump endorser, as John McCain’s running-mate some 16 years later. Lest we forget, Kristol positively gushed after her nomination, in precisely the same way that Trump’s new campaign chief, Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon, would later extol Palin in his 2011 fawning biopic about her (“…[S]he is an existential threat to the establishment”). Here’s Kristol:
Paul Rosenberg makes the point in the title of his excellent Salon essay in June about Kristol’s anti-Trump campaign: “Bill Kristol Protests Too Much: It’s Kristol, Not Donald Trump, Who Dumbed Down the GOP.” Subtitle: “Wait, the man who brought us Palin, Quayle and Thomas thinks the party is being overrun by a know-nothing? Rich!”
Indeed, Kristol’s Standard has fed its readers a steady diet of anti-“elite” rhetoric for two decades. Just type in “elite” on the website’s Search application. In the last three years, no less than 511 articles, blog posts, or podcasts mentions the word, with Kristol himself leading the pack with 91 posts, followed by his son-in-law, Matthew Continetti, with 84. Talk about an idee fixe. If Boot is worried about the GOP’s “reflexive aversion to elites,” he might start by talking to his editor. (And when Trump rails againstpolitical correctness, he’s merely echoing another favorite Kristol hobby horse, which one of Boot’s Reagan-era intellectual heroes, Bill Bennett, rode to fame and fortune.)
The Journal and Commentary Pile On
As to the other publications Boot cites, the Journal’s editorial board and Commentary (to which Boot is a regular contributor), it’s just hard to take him seriously. It’s not for nothing that the long-standing joke among the Journal’s generally excellent reporting staff has been that the paper didn’t need a comics section when the editorial pages sufficed. How often have those pages promoted nutty conspiracy theorists, from Claire Sterling to Laurie Mylroie to the “Terror Master” wizard and serial intriguer,Michael Ledeen? Or all manner of Islamophobes, Iranophobes, and, Arabophobes? (See Bret Stephens’most recent column which Eli Clifton commented on Wednesday.) Who can forget all the effort the editorial board spent on proving that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11? Or the op-ed by Bernard Lewis it published almost exactly ten years ago in which he predicted that Israel could very well be subject to an apocalyptic nuclear attack by Iran two weeks later (precisely on August 22, 2006)?
In apparent revolt against the scientific elite, the Journal’s editorial pages have also been the nation’smost consistent and influential platform for climate change deniers for some two decades now. So, when Trump calls global warming a “hoax,” perhaps he got the idea from “the intellectual labor” of theJournal’s editorial board.
For those contributors who seek personal or professional publicity, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journalcertainly qualifies for invitations to Fox News and other broadcast news and talk shows of the kind that Boot blames for Trumpism.
As for Commentary, its intellectual decline began with the ever-rightward trajectory on which its dominant figure for nearly a half century, Norman Podhoretz, took the magazine beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By Reagan’s arrival, it had essentially become a Likudist rag that extolled American exceptionalism and military power while denouncing the diabolical natures of the Soviet Union, the United Nations and American liberals. The publication has long since reflected Podhoretz’s Manichaean, and frankly apocalyptic worldview. In 1976, for example, he railed against détente with Moscow, warning that the U.S. faced
Thirty years later, he was referring to a “World War IV” struggle against “Islamofascism” and “militant Islam”—by which he meant Iran, as well as al-Qaeda—comparing them to the existential threats posed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Quoting Bernard Lewis, he told one interviewer in 2007, “Either we bring them freedom or they destroy us.” If neocons like Boot object to Trump’s Islamophobic and apocalyptic rhetoric, they need to take a hard look at the role played by their movement’s “bible” in fostering and promoting it over the last decades.
The Role of Think Tanks
That Boot cites the Heritage Foundation as a think tank noted for its “intellectual labor” is puzzling if only because Heritage has always been the perch for the kind of angry Boltonesque foreign policy (albeit free-trade) nationalists and Jacksonians that have become Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters. In fact, although most prominent neoconservative and many realist Republicans have signed either the Cohen letter in March declaring their intention to boycott a Trump administration or the most recent letter of former policymakers denouncing him as unfit for the presidency, the Heritage foreign policy people have by and large kept mum or defended him on cable news and talk shows. After all, Heritage’s president, Jim DeMint was a darling of the Tea Party when he served in Congress, and, if elected, Trump would likely recruit heavily from its fever swamp.
As for AEI, it will always be remembered for teaming up with (and/or being conned by) Ahmad Chalabifrom very early on to persuade the U.S. to pursue “regime change” in Iraq. Until his apparent retirement, its most prominent foreign policy voice was Richard Perle, whose highly influential friends included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz and whose proteges and colleagues at either AEI or the Defense Department (under Reagan) included at one time or another Mylroie, Ledeen, Douglas Feith, David Frum, Kirkpatrick, David Wurmser, Joshua Muravchik, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Frank Gaffney, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Michael Rubin, Harold Rhode, Dinesh D’Souza, Newt Gingrich, among many others who have long found ready access to the Journal’s editorial pages, among other right-wing and neo-conservative publications, particularly in the run-up to the Iraq War.
To get a sense of AEI’s “intellectual labor,” just read a few passages from the 2003 book that Perle co-wrote with Frum, An End to Evil.
Does any of this sound familiar? Anything that Trump or his latest campaign chief would take issue with?
All these think tanks, publications, and “public intellectuals”—I exclude George Will and George Shultz, despite his chairmanship of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq—have worked closely together for decades. The individuals involved served (and still do) on each other’s advisory boards, boards of directors, and editorial boards; they signed letters that were dutifully published or promoted by theJournal’s editorial board, Commentary, The National Review, or the Standard, all of which formed a highly effective echo chamber amplified by sympathetic (Fox News) or less partisan or unwitting electronic media. In terms of foreign policy, neoconservatives wrote the talking points that were then disseminated through their various institutions and publications and eventually the mass media.
Neoconservatives may now denounce Trump, but they helped create Trumpism with their relentless attacks against “elites” and “political correctness,” their Manichean and apocalyptic rhetoric, their Islamo-Arabo-Iranophobia (due in major part to their Likudist sympathies), and their championship of U.S. exceptionalism, military power, and unilateralism (which is not unrelated to isolationism). They clearly abhor Trump’s authoritarianism, isolationism, and nativism (and latent anti-Semitism, as noted ruefully by Stephens last March). But that’s what they get for forging alliances with—and helping empower—the Jacksonians and the Christian evangelicals who gave Trump the Republican nomination. (“It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years,” Stephens fretted.)
The party’s pro-corporate economic policies, which neocons also supported, have hit the latter two constituencies particularly hard over the last 30 years, making them very angry and particularly receptive to an anti-intellectual, anti-elite, anti-globalist, highly nationalistic political campaign led by a charismatic non-politician/celebrity who “tells it like it is.” The neocons thought they could maintain control over these constituencies, at least with respect to the GOP’s foreign policy agenda, but the economic realities have caught up with them.
In fact, neoconservatives beginning with Kristol pere made a series of devil’s bargains beginning back in the 1970s when, beaten by anti-war McGovernites in the Democratic Party and repelled by Kissingerian Republican realists, they forged alliances with aggressive nationalists and Jacksonians to derail détente and then with the Christian Right to defeat Jimmy Carter. The bargain, as described by Daniel Luban in a brilliant analysis six years ago, was “one of mutual convenience, in which the base furnishes the neocons with mass political support in exchange for marks of intellectual respectability (Ivy League degrees, think tank affiliations, and, to be sure Jewish last names) to dress up its blood-and-soil nationalism.” Despite some brief defections to Clinton in the 1990s (due to disillusionment with Bush I), that same coalition largely endured, ultimately led the drive to war in Iraq after 9/11, and cheered on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, effectively setting the stage for Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. Although the neoconservatives now want out, their fingerprints are all over the scene of the crime.