Mike McFaul: Putin and Xi Jinping Will Be Celebrating Trump’s ‘Preemptive War’ on Iran

MOHYELDIN: “Ambassador McFaul, it’s good to have you on. I wanted to kind of close out this program with something that the president tweeted out, which is, ‘Now is the time for peace,’ and suggesting there is a door for diplomacy. Interestingly enough, how do you begin diplomacy when you have just engaged in an act of war?”
McFaul: “Well, I wish the president well. I hope he can bring about peace. I hope he can bring about an agreement as soon as possible. It’s happened before, capitulation after an attack like this, so it could happen. But it’s not what I’m predicting. The idea that they will now sit down and negotiate with us some long-term deal in the immediate run I think is highly unlikely. And again, I want to emphasize. Nobody has ever argued that Iran should have a nuclear weapon. We — Democrat and Republican presidents for decades have been acting to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. It’s always been about the means, diplomacy or war?Now that the president has chosen war, he’s eliminated that program and I applaud that. That’s a good news for today. But we need to think about what are the first, second, third and fourth order of consequences after this. Most immediately, they are going to retaliate — and I hope we are prepared to prevent that and prevail — against our forces in the region. But second, I think where we’ve really got to understand our other interests in the world that might be affected by this attack today. This is a preemptive war. The world does not support preemptive wars. We learned that in 2003. Putin will be celebrating this because he did his own preemptive war in Ukraine and now it’s like, well, this is just what great powers do. Maybe Xi Jinping is going to think the same. He’s going to say, ‘Well, if they can do it here, we can do it in Taiwan.’ And the last thing I would say in terms of the tertiary consequences that we won’t know about for years to come is, are we now isolated from the rest of the world because we don’t care about the United Nations, we don’t care about the U.N. Security Council, we’re just going to go it alone? That worries me a lot, especially when I think the greatest threat to American security is China, not Iran. And I worry that those national security interests in the long run could be damaged. I hope I’m wrong.”