On September 25, 2017, Iraqi Kurds voted in favor of independence from Iraq in a historic referendum. Out of the 3.3 million Kurds and non-Kurds who voted, 92% voted in favor of independence, which is not surprising. The international community’s reaction is also not surprising: Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Russia, France,  and the United States were all against the referendum, cautioning the Kurdish leadership about the regional impact from various strategic angles. In its quest to secure more non-Arab allies, Israel is the only country that has backed the referendum. The international community’s lack of support is seen as hypocritical by the Kurds, and may very well be. The United States in particular is wary of the creation of new states and their regional impact that tends to increase instability rather than reduce it, like in the case of South Sudan. While discouraging a population from seeking self-determination is thorny—even illiberal—the Kurdish referendum has two important outcomes that should not, be ignored.

First, the referendum has sent a dangerous mixed signal to other populations seeking independence and territorial sovereignty. Currently there are no administrative channels in place that will facilitate Kurdistan’s secession from Iraq—and it certainly cannot be called Kexit in the same vain as Brexit, the nickname for the UK’s vote to exit the EU. For example, Iraq still controls the Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s (KRI) air space and immediately following the referendum, instituted a flight ban from the region’s two international airports. KRI is not economically independent, and the referendum may have actually decreased its chances of becoming so. Even though Kurdistan has been producing 600,000 barrels of oil per day, an impressive feat for a landlocked region surrounded by hostile neighbors, low oil prices gravely impacted the development of its public sector that continues to remain weak and corrupt. Also, Kurds still hold Iraqi passports, and will most likely continue to be Iraqis officially for years to come, if not decades. So how exactly secession will happen is not clear. Therefore, it would be beneficial for other independence-seeking populations like Palestinians, Kashmiris, and Catalonians to pay close attention to how Kurdish independence unfolds, if at all. So then why was the referendum done now? There is speculation that the Kurdistan region’s president, Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, wanted his legacy to be putting Kurds on an internationally mandated path to independence. But Kurds are divided; while a majority of them want independence, many feel that is was not the right time, such as the “No for Now” campaign. In the presence of strong criticism from the international community, the referendum’s claim of providing a mandate for Kurdish independence is also questionable.

Second, the referendum has backed the United States in a corner. U.S. foreign policy has been driven by the idea that a unified Iraq is a better regional and counterterrorism partner than a divided one. In its quest to counter the Islamic State, the United States has often sided with Baghdad over Erbil. Yet, the Peshmerga, the KRI’s military force, has been one of the most effective fighting groups against ISIS, and played a crucial role during the battle of Mosul in 2016. But supporting Kurdish independence would have two negative consequences for the United States: 1) it would create a rift with Turkey, a key NATO ally at a time when the U.S.–Turkish relationship is already strained, and 2) U.S.–Iraq relations could weaken, which would be detrimental not only for Iraq’s stability but also for the region’s. Instead, this is a time for the U.S. to tread lightly and practice restraint. Whether or not the Trump administration will heed this advice will become apparent in the upcoming weeks. 

Donald Trump announced a mini-surge of U.S. forces into Afghanistan a month ago. This week the Long War Journal reported the Taliban now control or contest 45 percent of Afghanistan’s districts, up from 40 percent three months prior, which was an increase from 34 percent a year earlier, and you get the idea. The Taliban control more territory today than at any point since 2001, and they have the momentum.

Sixteen years after invading Afghanistan, toppling the Taliban, and routing Al Qaeda elements there, U.S. goals remain as far out of reach as ever.

However, rather than surge additional forces and fall victim to the “sunk cost” fallacy, the U.S. should withdraw military forces and re-align objectives to the threat and national interests. During his August speech, Donald Trump defended the surge by saying, “our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made, especially the sacrifices of lives.” His emotional appeal implied that grieving Gold Star families should be the nation’s impetus for continued involvement in the Afghan war (which would also lead to more families who would experience that ultimate loss).

Instead of defending a surge on the basis of efforts already spent, U.S. policy towards Afghanistan should rely on the 16 years of data available since initiation of the war on terror. All of that data strongly communicates two points: 1) the terror threat to Americans remains low and 2) a strategy that emphasizes military power will continue to fail.

The terror threat to Americans remains low as compared to virtually all other threats. Islamist-inspired terrorists have conducted less than one attack per year over the past three decades. In each of those 30 years, though, “regular” Americans murdered between 15,000 and 20,000 of their fellow Americans. Even the horrible attacks of 9/11 represented just a fraction of the Americans murdered that year.

Quite likely, the memory of 9/11 continues to inflate the terror threat, yet September 11^th was an outlier. The world never experienced a similar attack prior or since, and for good reason: significant terror attacks almost always take place in failed or war-torn states. America’s second worst attack occurred in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh killed 168 in Oklahoma City. And few Americans can probably even identify North America’s second worst attack. It took place in 1985 on an Air India flight from Toronto, Canada. Three hundred and twenty-nine died at the hands of Sikh extremists.

In 2001, our homeland security was much different than it is today. The 9/11 hijackers received their pilot training in plain sight. They entered the country legally, using their real names. One lived with his flight instructors, and two even argued their way back into the country by assuring border and customs agents that they were, in fact, students—pilot training students—authorized to be here.

If save havens are a concern, the most important one has been eliminated. Even though terrorists may seek to harm Americans, post‑9/​11 homeland security efforts have severely reduced their opportunity.

America’s overseas war on terror, though, has not made Americans more secure. Instead, the number of Islamist-inspired terror groups and terrorists has grown substantially. In 2001, the Department of State identified Al Qaeda and 12 other similar groups. Today, that list includes ISIS, Al Qaeda, and another 42 like-minded organizations.

The proliferation of terror groups, terrorists, and attacks appears to have only occurred in response to U.S. military action. As the chart below suggests, terror activity spiked after the U.S. initiated its war on terror in those seven countries, not before.

Source: Global Terrorism Database

And the research supports the point: militaries rarely defeat terror groups. Scholars such as Audrey Kurth Cronin, Seth Jones, and Martin Libicki have concluded that instead of military defeat, most terror groups end by entering the political process, being marginalized, or through active policing. Each of those three options represents a line of operation that the U.S. has little control over.

Despite 16 years of assistance, Afghanistan’s government remains more corrupt than 96 percent of all countries, and its security force of 382,000 cannot halt Taliban gains. As Trevor Thrall and I concluded in a recent policy analysis, it’s time for America to “step back.” Eventually the Afghan government will decide whether competency and transparency matter enough, and Afghans will determine whether the Taliban ends by entering the political process, becoming irrelevant, or at the hands of a capable police force. Until then, the U.S. cannot do it for them. 

——–

Please join us October 10^th as Cato hosts a policy forum on the future of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Stephen Biddle of George Washington University, Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings, and I will debate the merits of the primary options: surge, negotiate, and withdraw, and a young Army officer with two deployments to Afghanistan will open the forum with his “boots on the ground” perspective. Register here.

The Economic Freedom of the World: 2017 Annual Report is out today. Co-published in the United States by the Fraser Institute (Canada) and the Cato Institute, it continues to find a strong relationship between economic freedom on the one hand, and prosperity and other indicators of human well-being on the other.

The United States ranks 11 out of 159 countries, indicating a slight improvement recently in its rating, but its economic freedom remains far below what it was in the year 2000, when it began a long decline. Since 1970, the index has typically ranked the United States among the top four countries. The top countries in this year’s report are Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland and Ireland. The least economically free countries are the Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and Venezuela.

There is an important innovation in this year’s report: it takes into account inequality in the economic freedoms enjoyed by men and women. Some countries don’t afford women the same level of such freedoms as men, so the index, for the first time, adjusts for these disparities. In her chapter, Rosemarie Fike explains the data and methodology that she used to create a gender disparity index, one that was then used to adjust the economic freedom ratings.

Most countries are only slightly affected (or are not at all affected) by the gender adjustment on the index. However, some 20 countries saw notable changes to their scores. Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, for example, dropped significantly in the index. Over time, the world has seen shifts in the unequal economic freedoms of men and women. The overall level of gender disparity in economic freedom in the world has decreased since 1970. Women are enjoying more economic freedom than before. The locus of inequality has also changed. From 1970 to 1990, African countries dominated the list of nations with the worst gender disparity scores; since 1995, countries in the Middle East and North Africa now dominate that list. Another finding: the greater the level of economic freedom, the more likely that men and women will receive equal legal treatment.

Another chapter looks at the relationship between economic freedom and anti-immigrant populist parties. Although it is often asserted that globalization is causing much of that populist sentiment, authors Krishna Chaitanya Vadlamannati and Indra de Soysa find that countries with lower levels of economic freedom and higher levels of state welfare spending see more support for nativist, populist parties. It appears that some of the policies intended to provide social protection from the market might be encouraging populist politics.

Read about those and other findings in the new report here. 

President Trump signed a new proclamation this weekend that bans or restricts the travel and immigration of nationals from eight countries. This order drops the pretext of being a temporary measure and includes no end date. In our amicus brief for the Supreme Court case challenging his prior executive order banning travel from six countries, we criticized the ban as lacking a basis in the evidence regarding terrorism threats and terrorism vetting failures. This new order fares no better. It is even further divorced from threats of terrorism to the United States than the prior order.

The new targets are the nationals of the following eight countries: Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. Like prior orders, it justifies the restrictions based on the false premise that the government needs certain information to adjudicate visas. In reality, because the visa applicant bears the burden of proof to prove his claim, the lack of information hurts the applicant, not the government. In any case, very few visa vetting failures have allowed terrorists to enter since 9/11 from these countries. Here are the facts:

• Only one nationality (Somalia) of the eight targets has had any immigration vetting failures for terrorism offenders since 9/11. This compares to two nationalities under the second executive order, and three nationalities under the first executive order.
• The three vetting failures of terrorism offenders from Somalia were refugees who the new proclamation does not exclude. The other executive order covered refugees.
• This new travel ban would have prevented no terrorists—that is, people who planned to attack the United States—from entering the United States since 9/11. The only offender whose entry would have been prevented by the new order radicalized after entry—and so was not a vetting failure—and did not attempt an attack in the United States. He played a “minimal role” in sending a small amount of money to a terrorist group overseas.
  

In a prior post, I identified just 34 individuals who entered through the U.S. immigration system legally since 9/11—when the visa vetting system was revamped—and who went on to be killed or convicted of terrorism offenses as of March 2017 when the president signed the second executive order. Of these, I could plausibly describe only 18 as likely vetting failures—people who the government determined radicalized prior to entry or people who committed attacks soon after entry (see here for a longer explanation). Just half of these planned attacks in the United States, and only one killed anyone.

As seen in the table below, the 34 offenders who entered after 9/11 came from 22 different countries and the 18 vetting failures from 13 countries. Only two nationalities (Somalia and Iran) of the seven targeted in the new executive order had any terrorism offenders who entered since 9/11 at all. Only one (Somalia) had any terrorism vetting failures. Critically, as my colleague Alex Nowrasteh points out, no person of a designated country has killed anyone in the United States in a terrorist attack in over 40 years.

Table 1
Foreign Terrorism Offenders Killed or Convicted Who Entered Through the Immigration System After 9/11

Sources: Author’s Calculations Based on Global Terrorism Database; Department of Justice National Security Division; Department of Justice; New America Foundation; George Washington University Project on Extremism

Here are the five terrorism offenders from the two nationalities that entered through the U.S. immigration system since 9/11:

Not vetting failures

• Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud, 2004 entry, was a Somali national who, at the age of 28, won a green card through the diversity visa lottery. He lived in the United States for seven years before he committed his terrorism offense in 2011. He played what prosecutors described as a “minimal role” in a scheme to send money to a terrorist organization overseas. He deposited money into an account for the conspirators. The federal judge described him as a “law-abiding and productive” member of U.S. society before falling in with the conspirators who he only met years after his entry.
• Adnan Fazeli, 2009 entry, was an Iranian national who, at the age of 31, entered the United States as a refugee. After his entry, he converted from Shia Islam to radical Wahhabism. Government investigators established that he radicalized after his entry to the United States. He was killed in 2015 in Lebanon as part of an Islamic State attack on the Lebanese army.

Possible Vetting Failures

• Abdinasir Ibrahim, 2008 entry, committed immigration fraud by claiming that he was a member of a persecuted minority clan in Somalia in order to obtain refugee status in fiscal year 2008. In fact, he was a member of a clan persecuting other clans. He attempted to send material support to the al-Shabaab terrorist organization in Somalia in 2014.
• Amina Esse, 2009 entry, entered the United States as a refugee from Somalia. She played a small role in sending $850 to al-Shabaab in 2011 and 2012. Her abusive husband who she married in the U.S. was an al-Shabaab supporter gave her the money to send, and her conspirators in Somalia initially told her that the money was for war orphans. She voluntarily cut off support soon after she discovered the truth. She chose to testify against her co-conspirators, and prosecutors asked for no jail time for her. It seems likely that she was not a vetting failure, but the government did not make a determination one way or another.
• Adul Razak Artan, 2014 entry, came to the United States as a refugee in 2014. In 2016, he attempted to run over students at Ohio State University with his car and then stab them. He failed to kill any and was killed himself. While investigators never discovered any evidence of pre-entry radicalization, the timing of the attack after just two years in the United States suggests that he may have been radicalized at the time of his entry.

Only one of the five terrorism offenders attempted to carry out an attack in the United States. None of the refugees on the list above would have been stopped by this proclamation, which targets only people traveling on visas (refugees receive special status to enter without a visa). Thus, only Ahmed Mohamud who won his immigrant visa in the diversity visa lottery would have been subject to the ban, and he did not attempt an attack against the United States.

President Trump has now issued three different orders targeting terrorist travel, each replacing the prior order. The first singled out Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. The second removed Iraq, and the third removed Sudan and added North Korea, Chad, and Venezuela. Table 2 compares the three executive orders. As it shows, each successive order has actually become less targeted toward nationalities that have a history of evading screening procedures in order to commit acts of terrorism. The share of targeted nationalities which have, at least in one case, evaded screening and committed terrorism offenses since 9/11 has shrunk as well—from 38 percent (3/8) to just 13 percent (1/8).

Table 2
Executive Orders Targeting Terrorist Travel

Sources: Author’s Calculations Based on Global Terrorism Database; Department of Justice National Security Division; Department of Justice; New America Foundation; George Washington University Project on Extremism

This exercise shows the inherent difficulty with blanket discrimination based on national origin. Even if the executive order was perfectly aligned with past incidents, the fact that it is dealing with such rare, low probability, and low-risk events inevitably means that the past will be a poor predictor of the future. But the administration has consistently relied on past events as justification for the restrictions, and yet it fails to match its policies with these events.

Trump’s threat to “totally destroy North Korea” at the United Nations this week generated concern in many corners but a round of applause from many hawks here in the United States. Former ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, for example, called it “the best speech of the Trump Presidency,” praising Trump for his tougher approach to North Korea’s nuclear program. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe also voiced strong support for Trump’s approach. In a New York Times oped, Abe wrote that, “I firmly support the United States position that all options are on the table.”

Abe’s choice of the phrase “all options are on the table” was not accidental. As Figure one indicates, the phrase has steadily gained in popularity since the September 11 attacks, with its use spiking in the first year of the Trump administration, as tensions with North Korea have risen. 

Figure One: The Rise of “All Options on the Table” 

Data source: Factiva Top U.S. newspapers database.

The meaning of the phrase, at least on paper, is clear: the United States is willing to use military force should diplomacy fail. And as tensions rise, as they have over the past months with North Korea, one would expect to hear the phrase more often.

The problem, however, is that despite occasional protests to the contrary, it is increasingly obvious that the Trump administration is ready to take the most important option off the table: diplomacy. By repeatedly arguing that, “talking is not the answer,” and that “we’re out of time” to deal with North Korea’s nuclear program, the administration is raising the stakes of the crisis and the chances that it ends in a military conflict.

No matter how happy that makes the hawks, conflict with a nuclear and well-armed North Korea would be both a military disaster and out of touch with the desires of the American public. In survey after survey over the years, Americans have voiced greater confidence in diplomacy than military strength as the best path to peace.

For those with concerns about Trump’s language, it is important to note that although Trump’s bellicose style is very different from that of his predecessors, he is not much more hawkish than either George Bush or Barack Obama. As Figure Two shows, the three post‑9/​11 presidents all have had “hawk indexes” higher than the three previous presidents. 

The hawk index is the ratio of how often a president appears in news stories that mention the words “war” or “military” compared to how often he appears in stories that mention the words “peace” or “diplomacy.” The score reflects not only the state of the international arena the president is coping with, but also the relative frequency that he discusses military options compared to diplomatic ones. As Figure Two reveals, American discourse and news coverage has always focused far more heavily on war than peace. 

Figure Two: The Hawk Index from Reagan to Trump

Data source: Factiva Top U.S. newspapers database.

Given this data, Trump’s tough talk at the United Nations should come as little surprise. Nor, given the American track record of almost non-stop military intervention since the end of the Cold War, should we be surprised if “all options on the table” actually turns out to mean: “we are about to fight another war.”

This has not been a good week for President Trump’s Iran policy. As the president has indicated, he plans in mid-October to decertify Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal, or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated and signed in 2015, which rolled back Iran’s nuclear program, placed severe restrictions on it for the foreseeable future, and imposed the world’s most intrusive inspections regime on what remained.

Leaving aside for now the various and profoundly negative ramifications of Trump’s stated intention to declare Iran in violation of the agreement, the most immediate problem for the president has always been that Iran is, in fact, not in violation of the deal. As attested to by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and all other signatories to the agreement – including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, China, and Russia – Iran is fully compliant with its obligations under the JCPOA.

But this week brought significant pushback to Trump’s plan. Following the president’s speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, world leaders and diplomats reportedly pressured the president and members of his administration in numerous meetings to reconsider his plan to scuttle the JCPOA. Allies publicly criticized him. “Renouncing [the Iran deal] would be a grave error, not respecting it would be irresponsible,” said the French president Emmanuel Macron, suggesting further that decertification could create another nuclear crisis like North Korea.

In a press conference following a meeting with representatives from every signatory country, Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the European Union, said that if the United States walks out of the deal, Europe would make sure it remains in place anyways. She further indicated, “The international community cannot afford dismantling an agreement that is working and delivering…Iran is complying.”

Mogherini confirmed that all of the parties to the JCPOA, including the United States, agreed in the closed-door meeting that “there is no violation.” This prompted questions for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who had to sheepishly admit that “from a technical standpoint, the IAEA reports continue to indicate and confirm that Iran is in technical compliance of the agreement.”

Foreign Policy reported that the Trump administration’s ploy to use the threat of decertification to reopen negotiations on the JCPOA and squeeze more concessions out of Iran “collapsed on Wednesday as key European powers persevered in their effort to rescue the deal from an American walkout, and Iran’s president made clear his government wouldn’t revisit the terms of the pact.” The New York Times reported that Trump’s repudiation of the international consensus and his brash denunciation of the JCPOA was unintentionally generating global sympathy for Iran, while damaging U.S. credibility and trust.

Even members of Trump’s own party began to break ranks. On Tuesday, Rep. Ed Royce, Republican Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told CNN that Trump should not withdraw from the Iran deal, but rather continue to “enforce the hell out of it.” Senator Rand Paul (R‑KY), who opposed the deal when it was signed in 2015, told reporters, “if [Iran is] complying with it, I think we should stay in it.”

Then, on Wednesday afternoon, the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, General John Hyten, in a speech at the Hudson Institute, said, “The facts are that Iran is operating under the agreement that we signed up for under JCPOA… We have an agreement that our nation has signed and I believe that if the United States of America signs an agreement, it’s our job to live up to the terms of that agreement, it’s our job to enforce that.”

It’s not clear that this overwhelming resistance to decertification will dissuade President Trump. But the American people should know that if Trump goes through with it, he’ll be doing it in defiance of the facts, the international community, much of his own cabinet, and at least some prominent members of his own party.

This may soon become Congress’s responsibility. According to legislation passed subsequent to the signing of the JCPOA, that requires the president to certify Iranian compliance every 90-days, decertification triggers a 60-day clock for Congress to decide by majority vote whether to re-impose nuclear-related sanctions on Iran. A decision to do so and join President Trump in his misbegotten scheme to unravel the Iran deal would be dangerous and irresponsible.

Donald Trump’s speech to the UN General Assembly underscored his intention to adopt highly confrontational policies toward both North Korea and Iran. He threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea in the event of war and re-emphasized Washington’s long-standing determination to compel Pyongyang to renounce its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. The president scorned Iran as “an economically depleted rogue state” and described the current multilateral nuclear agreement with Tehran as “an embarrassment” to the United States. If Trump is not merely engaging in bombast, Washington appears to be ginning-up two major foreign policy crises simultaneously.

As I discuss in a new article in the National Interest Online, administration officials and hawks throughout the U.S. foreign policy community increasingly link the issues involving the two countries. Specifically, they seek to use the surge of tensions surrounding Pyongyang’s behavior to scuttle the P5+1 agreement, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that President Obama and other international leaders negotiated to place limits on Tehran’s nuclear activities.

Hawks contend that their goal is to “renegotiate” the JCPOA and produce a new agreement that would put greater restraints on Iran. However, statements past and present from leading neoconservative militants such as former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, Foreign Policy Institute scholar Joshua Muravchik, and Colonel Ralph Peters, the former commander of U.S. forces in Okinawa, intensify suspicions that the real goal is forcible regime change. Those individuals and their ideological allies were in the forefront of the campaign that lured the United States into the disastrous regime-change war in Iraq, and apparently they want a second crusade against a Middle East regime.

The attack on the JCPOA suffers from one embarrassing difficulty: despite the allegations of UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and other Trump administration officials, the bulk of the evidence indicates that Iran has complied with its obligations under the agreement. President Trump and his advisers must resort to expressing complaints that Tehran is violating “the spirit” of the accord. That is an extremely lame argument. A key reason why nations spell out the binding aspects of an agreement through written provisions rather than relying on oral comments and handshakes is that disagreements about the spirit or intentions could be endless.

An increasingly popular line of argument among proponents of a militant policy toward Tehran is that North Korea’s behavior is a harbinger of what the United States will face regarding Iran, if Washington does not harden its approach. Hawks openly excoriate Bill Clinton for concluding the 1994 nuclear agreement with North Korea. Clinton’s naïve decision, they argue, enabled Pyongyang to flout the so-called restraints on its nuclear program, and we now face a much worse situation than we did two decades ago. They emphasize that U.S. leaders must not make the same error by adhering to a similar, fatally flawed, agreement with Iran.

Using North Korea’s conduct as an excuse to trash the nuclear agreement with Iran is dangerous ploy. The alternative to the JCPOA is not “a better agreement.” Both Tehran and the other members of the P5+1 (Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China) have all made it clear that they vehemently oppose reopening negotiations. The United States stands alone in taking the contrary stance. The real alternatives to the JCPOA are a renewed Iranian nuclear-weapons program and a subsequent U.S. war against Iran. The former would be distressing, the latter would be catastrophic.

Even venturing down that path underscores the broader problem with U.S. policy toward Iran. North Korea is an obnoxious little state, and its nuclear ambitions are worrisome, but the country has little significance beyond its immediate neighborhood. Matters are quite different with Iran. Like it or not, that country is a major diplomatic, military, and economic player throughout the Middle East and even into Central and Southwest Asia. As the principal representative of Islam’s Shia branch, Tehran exercises considerable influence in such countries as Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen. Trying to isolate Iran has been—and will continue to be—an exercise in futility. And launching a military attack on that country would trigger another disastrous war in the Middle East with far-reaching and entirely negative consequences. The Trump administration needs to ignore the hawks and adopt a more sensible policy.