One of the biggest handicaps of U.S. policy is that across administrations, U.S. policymakers expect rogues to conform to Washington’s bureaucratic geography rather than vice versa. After my first trip to the Horn of Africa, the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs sought a debriefing about Fahad Yasin, a former Al Jazeera journalist with close ties to both Qatar and the al Shabaab terrorist group, who appeared to be funding unrest and terrorism in Somalia while working for Somalia’s U.S.-supported intelligence agency. For the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, however, Qatar’s influence was not on the agenda. It politely declined due to lack of interest.
The same pattern has long existed across other bureaucratic fault lines: Turkey’s support for Hamas, the Islamic State, and other terrorist groups flew under the radar for too long because those most concerned about terrorism in the Middle East worked in a different bureaucracy. Azerbaijan’s effort to destabilize New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific, surprised for the same reason.
None of that, however, compares to the blind spot that a compartmentalized State Department enables when countering the ambitions of rogue regimes to develop nuclear weapons and other sanctioned goods.
Iran’s covert nuclear program shot onto the public agenda in 2002 after the exposure of the covert enrichment facility at Natanz. The International Atomic Energy Agency subsequently published a report outlining the “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s program, highlighting activities that had no place in a civilian energy program: projects involving nuclear warhead design, implosion devices, and mathematical modeling for nuclear explosions. The Iranian nuclear archives stolen by Israeli agents fleshed out those activities in further detail.
President Barack Obama and his surrogates lied when they said their 2015 nuclear deal was airtight. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action dealt mostly with limits on enrichment. Iran pledged to suspend military activities, but its knowledge remained. This is likely why Israel presumably began assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists. Secretary of State John Kerry’s concession to allow Iran to work on ballistic missiles under the guise of a satellite launch program enabled Tehran to acquire delivery systems.
Perhaps the biggest hole in the deal, however, was Iran’s ability to relocate its work outside of the country. Centrifuge cascades may be difficult to hide, though the Islamic Republic did so for years, but weaponization laboratories can be far easier to conceal. Mathematical modeling needs little more than a classroom, and even warhead construction can occur in a small warehouse. If Iranian scientists work in North Korea or Russia, and North Koreans and Russians work inside Iran on projects subject to inspections in their home countries, then they can essentially play anti-sanctions three-card monte, constantly shifting their work to evade detection.
More recently, the Iranian press acknowledged that Iran would export certain nano-catalysts to Russia to help Russian factories evade Ukraine-related sanctions on key industrial processes.
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It has now been more than 22 years since President George W. Bush spoke about an “Axis of Evil.” At the time, diplomats and pundits pilloried him. Today, he appears prescient. Axis members have shifted, but the willingness of rogues to cooperate and work across borders with the common goal to defeat the liberal order has only increased.
Political campaigns polarize, but not every issue should be a political football. The world’s rogues will test the mettle of whoever wins. That may not be new, but the nature and breadth of the test will be larger as American enemies coordinate in ways not seen since World War II. As the next administration and Congress take office, it will be essential to approach security as it is now rather than approach it with a complacent belief that America’s enemies and their strategies have failed to evolve.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.