Well, you got to hand it to President Obama. He has ‘reset’ relations with Russia in the same way that the Bubonic plague ‘reset’ health in medieval Europe. Russia was supposed to become a partner, and yet it has run interference Syria, protecting the Syrian leader as he used chemical weapons and then failed to disarm, commitments otherwise be damned. In recent weeks, Moscow hosted Qassem Soleimani, chief of Iran’s Qods Force, the elite unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and terrorism from Buenos Aires to Baghdad, never mind that international sanctions prohibited his travel. The Kremlin brushed that off. Soleimani was evidently in town to negotiate defense deals; after all, under the terms of the agreement Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated with Iran, the Iranian government will receive upwards of $100 billion in near immediate sanctions relief, the bulk of which will go into Revolutionary Guards coffers.
Proponents of the nuclear deal brag that, should Iran cheat—and there has hardly been an international commitment in the past two decades upon which Tehran has noted cheated—sanctions will automatically ‘snap back.’ Russian leaders have long resisted such a ‘snap back’ mechanism. Perhaps that’s why Secretary of State John Kerry sought to assure the Kremlin in a secret letter that the United States would not do much to enforce sanctions should Iran be caught cheating. Is it any wonder, then, that the Russian leadership openly scoffs at U.S. threats now to impose sanctions, as Moscow prepares to deliver sophisticated weaponry to Tehran?
Yesterday evening, Moscow’s Rossiya 24 television broadcast remarks by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responding to State Department suggestions that any Russian transfer of the S-300 missile system to Iran would violate U.S. sanctions and lead potentially to U.S. sanctions on Russian firms:
American sanctions do not concern us. We are only honoring our international obligations. As far as sanctions are concerned, this, above all, is the decision of the UN Security Council. All other unilateral restrictions imposed in circumvention of the Security Council and in violation of the universally accepted norms of international law do not interest us. That is why we should let our American colleagues study this. Perhaps it will not be useless for them to draw the conclusion that not everything is subordinated to their understanding of international law.
Lavrov is right: Not everyone interprets international law in the way Washington does. Certainly, Russia, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Turkey and the Sudan had their own interpretations, as, for that matter, do Hezbollah and Hamas. At least previous U.S. administrations cultivated and presided over a bipartisan consensus of what American foreign policy and interests should be. Along with American strength, that was a basis of American credibility. Unfortunately, Obama shattered that bipartisan consensus, and with it American credibility on the world stage. Rather than make the world more secure, Obama has guaranteed instability such as the world has not seen since the period between World War I and II.
