Month: June 2019

The first group of 10 Democratic candidates running for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination gathered on stage in Miami, Florida for a two hour debate Wednesday.  As is typical in many debates of this kind, each candidate hoped to break through the crowded filed with a memorable phrase or lengthy quote that would resonate with both voters and political commentators.  VOA’s Richard Green has some key quotes on a variety of issues from each of the candidates.

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Fifty years ago today (June 27, 1969),  police raided The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. The violent protests that followed galvanized the gay rights movement in America. A half-century later, society’s attitudes toward the LGBTQ community has evolved, as highlighted in a groundbreaking exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, DC. For some members of the LGBTQ community, the exhibit is deeply personal. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.

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U.S. President Donald Trump arrived Thursday in Osaka, Japan, where he is attending a summit with other leaders from the Group of 20.

On the sidelines of the main event, Trump is scheduled to hold a number of bilateral meetings, including those with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday and Friday talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The U.S.-China talks are likely to touch on trade after a breakdown in negotiations and an escalation of tariffs by both sides.

U.S. officials said there was no fixed agenda for Trump’s meeting Putin, but acknowledged the two leaders would almost certainly discuss issues involving Ukraine, the Middle East and Venezuela.

Trump is also expected to use the G-20 sessions to convey that his administration intends to continue applying economic pressure on Iran, seeking to deny the country its important oil revenue and bring about fresh negotiations on its nuclear program.

After the summit, Trump flies to Seoul to discuss with South Korean President Moon Jae-in ways to ease tensions with North Korea.

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The U.S. Embassy in Moscow says that it has officially protested the reported mistreatment of a U.S. national who is kept in jail on spying charges.
 
The U.S. Embassy said in a statement on Wednesday that it has sent a note of protest to the Russian foreign ministry, asking it to investigate the allegations that Paul Whelan has been mistreated while in custody and that his safety is ensured.
 
Whelan, who also holds British, Irish and Canadian citizenship, was arrested in a hotel room in Moscow at the end of December and charged with espionage, which carries up to 20 years in prison.
 
The former U.S. Marine, who denies the charges, has publicly complained of poor conditions in prison and said his life is in danger.

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VOA’s Capitol Hill correspondent Michael Bowman and VOA Persian’s Afshar Sigarchi contributed to this report.

Top U.S. and Iranian officials are continuing to fire verbal warning shots at each other while insisting they want to avoid war.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday called the United States the “world’s most vicious regime” and a “source of wars, conflict and plunder.”

Days after being targeted with U.S. sanctions himself, Khamenei said, “Iranians have been wronged by oppressive sanctions but not weakened and remain powerful.”

And he characterized the United States as deceiving other nations when it engages in negotiations.

An Iranian government official was quoted Tuesday as saying that sanctions on Khamenei equal an attack on the nation while Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, said in a televised address that the White House’s actions were “outrageous and idiotic.”

The Iranian president said his country does not want war with the United States but will decisively respond to any aggression.

“Whatever they want to do, I’m ready,” U.S. President Donald Trump said in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

Asked by a reporter what would be his exit strategy if war with Iran occurs, Trump replied: “You’re not going to need an exit strategy. I don’t need exit strategies.”

The U.S. president, earlier in the day, on social media warned that an attack by Tehran on “anything American” would “be met with great and overwhelming force” — adding that in some instances, “overwhelming will mean obliteration.”

In his series of Tuesday morning tweets, Trump dismissed as “very ignorant and insulting” Iran’s statement hours earlier saying it was ending the possibility of diplomatic talks with the United States.

Iran leadership doesn’t understand the words “nice” or “compassion,” they never have. Sadly, the thing they do understand is Strength and Power, and the USA is by far the most powerful Military Force in the world, with 1.5 Trillion Dollars invested over the last two years alone..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2019

….Iran’s very ignorant and insulting statement, put out today, only shows that they do not understand reality. Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force. In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration. No more John Kerry & Obama!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2019

Vice President Mike Pence and acting Secretary of Defense Mark Esper are among the high-ranking U.S. officials making public comments that Washington does not seek war with Tehran.

Trump, meanwhile, is casting aspersions on the previous U.S. administration, again criticizing the international pact negotiated by former Secretary of State John Kerry and former President Barack Obama to restrain Iran’s nuclear weapons development.

Trump withdrew from the 2015 agreement last year, reimposing sanctions aimed at debilitating Iran’s economy to try to force it to engage in one-on-one nuclear negotiations with Washington.

The president’s latest tweets underscore a key point, according to a former National Security Council spokesman, Ned Price: “Trump tore up the Iran deal simply because it was signed by the previous administration.”

Price, also a former senior analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, tells VOA “the only foreseeable off-ramp, which appears increasingly unlikely by the day, is that Trump puts his own branding on an agreement that is substantively identical to the Iran deal” of the Obama administration.  

Price contends that national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “don’t want a new deal. They want regime change whether or not it requires military force and leads us down the path of another catastrophic war in the Middle East.”

The Trump administration is saying it could also add sanctions targeting Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Rouhani, in his speech, remarked, “You sanction the foreign minister simultaneously with a request for talks?”

Just prior to Trump’s tweets, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Abbas Mousavi, tweeted that sanctions on Khamenei and Zarif would mean “the permanent closure of the path of diplomacy.”

On the floor of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday morning, minority leader Chuck Schumer termed the tension between Washington and Tehran “a dangerous situation,” adding, “even if the president doesn’t intend war, his erratic, inconsistent and off-the-cuff policies could lead us to bumble into war.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell defended the president and criticized opposition Democrats “afflicted by Trump derangement syndrome that they repeat Iranian talking points and advertise the absurd notion that our country, our administration, our president are somehow to blame for Tehran’s violent aggression.”

The Republican senator added, “Clearly the president wants to avoid war, hence the deliberate and judicious approach he has taken since the shootdown” last week of a U.S. Navy drone by Iran.

Trump has called the new sanctions order a “strong and proportionate” U.S. response to the downing of the unmanned U.S. military aircraft, which Washington says occurred in international airspace near the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran claims occurred over its airspace.

The U.S. leader said he imposed the sanctions because of a series of “belligerent acts” carried out by Iran, which U.S. officials say include Iran’s targeting of Norwegian and Japanese ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz with mine explosions days before the attack on the drone.

Iran has repeatedly denied it was working to develop nuclear weapons, and the U.N. nuclear watchdog charged with monitoring the 2015 agreement has certified Iran is in compliance with the terms of the deal.

As the Trump administration has increased pressure on Tehran in recent months, and as Iran has complained that the other signatories to the nuclear deal have not done enough to help it maneuver around the U.S. sanctions, Iranian officials have pledged to stop abiding by certain restrictions it had agreed to, such as the amount of highly enriched uranium it can have.

In a report published Tuesday, Reuters said three diplomats told the news agency that European powers sent a formal note or diplomatic demarche to Iran on Saturday in response to its threat to violate some parts of the nuclear deal. Reuters cited two of the diplomats as saying the note specifically warned Iran not to scale back its commitments to the 2015 accord.

“I think [Iran’s recent actions] have made it more isolated,” said Michael Pregent, a Middle East analyst at the Hudson Institute, in a Tuesday interview for VOA Persian’s News at Nine show. “They are losing friends, with Russia, China and Europe telling them: ‘Stay in the Iran nuclear deal, don’t move out of it, and don’t take these aggressive actions in the Strait of Hormuz’,” Pregent said.

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U.S. officials are finalizing plans for President Donald Trump’s visit to South Korea later this week. But White House officials are shrugging off speculation that Trump will hold another summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. From Seoul, VOA’s Bill Gallo reports even if another Trump-Kim meeting were to happen, it is not clear how it could move forward stalled nuclear talks.

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Just a month after a state visit to Japan, U.S. President Donald Trump this week heads to the East Asian country again.
 
In Osaka, Trump will attend the Group of 20 leaders’ summit, during which he is scheduled to meet one-on-one on the sidelines with such fellow world leaders as Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
 
“The president is quite comfortable his position going into the meeting” with Xi following the breakdown of U.S.-China trade talks and increased tariffs on Beijing by Washington, a senior administration official told reporters on Monday.  
 
U.S. officials say there is no fixed agenda for Trump’s meeting with Putin although they acknowledge issues involving Iran, Ukraine, the Middle East and Venezuela are almost certain to be discussed.
 
US-Iran

Casting a pall over the G-20 discussions will be nervousness about the deteriorating situation between Washington and Tehran. Leaders in both capitals have been reiterating they want to avoid war but have also repeatedly stated they will not hesitate to defend their interests if provoked.

Trump is to reiterate to his fellow leaders at the G-20 that the United States intends to continue to increase economic pressure on Iran, which finds itself under escalating U.S. sanctions, and eliminate all of the country’s petroleum exports.

“I don’t think Iran is a distraction,” according to James Jay Carafano, vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s national security and foreign policy institute. “I think that’s under control. Trump should strive for a no drama G-20.”  

The G-20 itself no longer has the significance it did after the group’s first several summits late in the previous decade when it cooperated to avert a meltdown of the global economy.
 
Trump prefers bilateral discussions and agreements over multinational events. Administration officials, however, are attempting to counter the notion that they no longer see these types of meetings as vital, pointing to U.S. leadership on advancing 21st century economic issues
 
“We believe that G-20 economies need to work together to advance open, fair and market-based digital policies, including the free flow of data,” a senior administration told reporters Monday on a conference call, also stressing promotion of women’s economic empowerment.
 
Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and a White House adviser, is to give a keynote address on the latter topic at a G-20 side event in Osaka.
 
G-20 host Shinzo Abe, as prime minister of Japan, and many European participants are trying to maintain the international system and its principles.
 
“This is where the absence of the U.S. is really harming it,” says Heather Conley, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its Europe program. “We’re seeing the slow death of multilateralism in many respects. It’s a death by a thousand cuts.”
 
While the U.S. pulls back from such groups, the world is witnessing “the Chinese using international organizations so effectively to shape agendas,” Conley, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, said.  
 
Trump-Xi meetings

Some analysts expect the Trump-Xi meeting in Osaka to be a repeat of their previous dinner last year in Buenos Aires, when the two leaders agreed to trade talks and tasked their trade ministers with reaching a deal within 90 days.

 “I think that that is the most likely outcome, that they’re going to reach some sort of accommodation, a truce like that and push this forward,” predicts Matthew Goodman, a CSIS senior vice president and senior adviser for Asian economics.  
 
“It’s not going to solve the immediate problems,” contends Goodman, who previously served as director for international economics on the National Security Council staff, helping then-President Barack Obama prepare for G-20 and G-8 summits. “Even if we get a deal, it’s unlikely to solve some of the deep structural differences between us in the role of the state in the economy, the governance of technology and data.”
 
Much attention will also be on the Trump-Putin encounter.
 
“Whenever President Trump and President Putin meet there is a very strong (U.S.) domestic backlash after that meeting,” notes Conley. “In part, it’s because there’s a total lack of transparency about the topics of discussion and what the agenda is, and I think the president would have a better policy approach domestically if, again, there was clarity of what the agenda would be, that there would be people participating in that meeting – secretary of state, national security adviser and others.”  
 
Trump is also scheduled to hold talks in Osaka with leaders from Australia, Germany, India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
 
From Japan, Trump flies to Seoul, where he will be hosted by South Korean President Moon Jae-in to discuss how to further ease tensions with North Korea.
 
White House officials brush off speculation Trump could meet on the Korean peninsula with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which would be their third encounter after summits in Singapore and Hanoi. And U.S. officials are not commenting on a possible presidential visit to the Demilitarized Zone, which separates the two Koreas.

There is little pressure on Trump to make any breakthroughs during his visit to Japan and South Korea, according to Carafano.

“I think the U.S. in the driver’s seat with regards to both North Korea and China negotiations,” Carafano tells VOA. “If they come to the table now, fine. If not, fine. Trump can wait until after the 2020 election.”

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The United States is convening an economic workshop in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain Tuesday aimed at jumpstarting the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. America’s Middle East allies are attending but the key players are not there.   

The “Peace to Prosperity” conference was initiated by U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and Mideast envoy, Jared Kushner. The aim is to revive the peace process with economic incentives, while putting aside the thorny political issues until later.

The plan offers $27 billion in aid to the Palestinians, most of which would be financed by wealthy Arab states led by Saudi Arabia. Some $23 billion would be earmarked for poorer Arab states bordering Israel, namely, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt.

The Palestinian Authority is boycotting the workshop, declaring that the plan is a whitewash and dead on arrival.

“I have not seen in the document any reference to [Jewish] settlements,” said  Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh. “We have not seen in the document any reference to ending [the Israeli] occupation. This workshop is simply a political laundry for settlements and a legitimization of occupation.”

Israel is not attending the conference either, because of Arab opposition to normalizing relations before the Palestinian problem is resolved. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prepared to give the peace plan a chance.

“We’ll hear the American proposition, hear it fairly and with openness; and I cannot understand how the Palestinians, before they even heard the plan, reject it outright. That’s not the way to proceed,” said Netanyahu.

Kushner decided on a new approach after previous U.S. administrations tried and failed to resolve the thorniest issues of the conflict: borders, Palestinian refugees, Jewish settlements and the status of Jerusalem. The Trump administration believes economic prosperity will benefit the entire region and curb extremism, but the Palestinians say they cannot be bought and that their homeland is not for sale.

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Palestinians and their supporters have protested against a two-day conference in Bahrain, where the United States is presenting its peace plan for the Middle East. U.S. President Donald Trump has called the plan created under his son-in-law’s supervision the “deal of the century” for the Palestinians.  It is not clear if the economic plan has any chance of success without a political solution in place. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports the Palestinians have boycotted Washington ever since Trump’s administration recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in 2017.

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VOA’s national security correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.

The United States is set to introduce new sanctions against Iran on Monday, seeking to put additional pressure on the country’s economy in order to extract changes in behavior from its government.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the new measures “significant,” but declined to give specific details to reporters ahead of the official announcement.

He spoke just before embarking on a trip to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to continue the Trump administration’s effort to build a coalition of allies to counter Iran.  Pompeo met Monday with Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

“The world should know that we will continue to make sure it’s understood that this effort that we’ve engaged in to deny Iran the resources to foment terror, to build out their nuclear weapon system, to built out their missile program, we are going to deny them the resources they need to do that thereby keeping American interests and American people safe all around the world,” Pompeo said.

Iran has denied working on nuclear weapons and signed an agreement in 2015 with the United States, Britain, China, France, Russia and Germany to allay those concerns by limited its nuclear activity in exchange for sanctions relief.

But U.S.-Iran relations have deteriorated under President Donald Trump’s tenure, particularly since his decision last year to withdraw from the nuclear deal and put in place new economic sanctions.

Trump objected to the deal as being too weak and not including limits on Iran’s ballistic missile program.

Iran has defended its missile work as legal and necessary for its defense.  And it has sought support from the remaining signatories to the 2015 agreement to provide the economic relief it desires, especially with its key oil program as the U.S. has tightened sanctions in an attempt to cut off Iranian oil exports.

Pompeo said the new sanctions Monday “will be a further effort to ensure that their capacity not only to grow their economy but to evade sanctions becomes more and more difficult, and it will be an important addition to our capacity to enforce sanctions against Iran to ultimately achieve the objective that we’ve laid out.”

Trump said in a series of tweets Saturday about the sanctions that he looks forward to the day when “sanctions come off Iran, and they become a productive and prosperous national again — The sooner the better!”

He also said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that he is “not looking for war” with Iran and is willing to negotiate with its leaders without preconditions.

The comments came after a week of intense actions between the United States and Iran.

Concern about a potential armed confrontation between the two countries has been growing since U.S. officials recently blamed Tehran for mine attacks on two oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, allegations Tehran denies, and Iran’s downing of of a U.S. drone.

Trump said that late Thursday he had canceled a retaliatory strike against several Iranian targets. But on Thursday, according to U.S. news accounts, Trump also approved U.S. Cyber Command attacks on an Iranian intelligence group’s computer systems used to control missile and rocket launches.  

World powers have called for calm after the incidents.

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