John Kerry Goes abroad to Solicit Loans for Iran, Encouraging Banks to Ignore the Warnings of the Treasury Department

On Monday, the U.S. Secretary of State spoke at London’s Chatham House, where he urged big banks to start extending credit to the Islamic Republic, as a reward for its “having met its part of the bargain.” Even as he admitted that he was making “good-faith efforts way beyond” what the nuclear deal specifies, he erroneously reassured potential lenders that as long as they did “due diligence” they would face no problems from U.S. enforcement agencies. (So egregious were Kerry’s remarks that the State Department itself has had to issue a correction.) Elliott Abrams comments:

Despite the innumerable ways in which Iran has demonstrated bad faith—from its continuing support for terrorist groups to its detention of American sailors in January to its arming of the Houthi rebels in Yemen with missiles with which they have attacked American ships—Kerry wants us to bend over backward to help their economy. It isn’t enough to remove sanctions that prevent banks from lending to Iran; Kerry has become a cheerleader urging banks to make more loans, whatever the risks. . . . Kerry is now giving banks bad advice—advice that is directly contradicted by U.S. Treasury officials. . . .

The U.S. Treasury Department’s designation of Iran, including its central bank and financial institutions, as a primary money-laundering concern . . . still stands. As part of that designation, Treasury determined that “the international financial system [is] increasingly vulnerable to the risk that otherwise responsible financial institutions will unwittingly participate in Iran’s illicit activities.” . . .

So . . . Kerry is acting as a salesman for Iran, pressing banks to do business with entities there that present real dangers to the banks. In the past, banks have been fined billions of dollars for such transactions. Treasury keeps reminding them of the dangers—and it is Treasury, not State, that is in charge of enforcement.

Read more at Pressure Points

More about: Iran sanctions, John Kerry, Politics & Current Affairs, State Department, U.S. Foreign policy

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF