The Republican Strategic Vision on Iran, Russia and China

After a slow analysis of the proposal recently published by the Republican group in the US Congress, we could be forgiven for suspecting that the complexity of multipolarity overwhelms US legislators to the point of not being able to present proposals that do not have economic punishment as their central focus. The detailed and rigorous document recommends a turn of the screw in US policy towards Tehran, not only by tightening the sanctions against Iran in the petrochemical, financial, automotive and construction sectors, but also by punishing the Iranian interests that have been placed in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen; advocating the cessation of all economic aid to members of the Lebanese Army suspected of links to Hezbollah and designating the Yemeni Hutus as a terrorist organization; and implementing a series of measures aimed at weakening Iranian influence, both within the Interior Ministry and the Iraqi Federal Police.   

The reasoning of the Republican committee to justify the measures against Beirut and Sana'a is based on highlighting the parallelism between Hezbollah's stalking of Israel and the Hutus' stalking of Saudi Arabia. However, this recommendation contrasts with the official position of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has so far been against inflicting economic damage on Lebanon, a doctrine that is unprecedented, but closely aligned with the vision of Israeli hawks such as former Defense Minister Lieberman, who draws an equivalence between Hezbollah and Lebanon as a whole.  

News of the existence of the Republican committee's document must have caused consternation among the Lebanese elite, many of whose members hold dual US citizenship. Not only because of the situation of total economic collapse in which the country finds itself, but also because the proposals seem to give letter of nature to the vision of the main American-Lebanese thought group -quoted in the document itself- whose central idea is that "Lebanon's stability, insofar as it means the stability of the Iranian order and forward missile base there, is not, in fact, a US interest". To put it more succinctly: Washington is interested in instability in Lebanon. 

In line with this, among the Republican proposals, the request to prohibit the International Monetary Fund from bailing out Lebanon stands out. It follows that the calculations of the document's author committee include pushing Lebanon into a civil war situation in order to disrupt the ascendancy of Hezbollah, following the pattern of Palestinian internal struggles from 1975 to 1990 that resulted in the weakening of the PLO.  

However, the Republican document itself explicitly admits the low specific weight of Tehran as a strategic threat to Washington, compared to Beijing and Moscow. Therefore, it is doubtful that the recommendations have much legislative mileage in an election year and under a Democratic majority in Congress, even if they might attract the sympathies of pro-Israeli congressmen. But given the horrendous socio-economic situation in Lebanon, which will be aggravated by the implementation of the "The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, - designed to harm the Asad regime and its cronies - which will close one of the few channels available to Lebanon to conduct business transactions through Syria, It is reasonable that the mere publication of the Republican document, as a declaration of intent, is in itself sufficient to precipitate Lebanon's descent into an irreversible state of failure, without the need for any law in the United States Congress.  

The other side of the document that Republican congressmen have produced over the past 18 months is markedly electioneering. The preamble to the proposals unequivocally reproaches the former administration of Barack Obama for the weakness of policies that, in the committee's opinion, strengthened America's enemies, not only in relation to Iran, but also in relation to China and Russia. Therefore, the document is also part of a government program that complements the upcoming presentation of a new criminal code developed by the Republicans. 

From this perspective, the inclusion of China and Russia in the list of "the most aggressive global adversaries to the United States" is not too surprising. With regard to Russia, to which the document dedicates only 9 of its more than 100 pages, the Republican editors resort to rhetoric reminiscent of the Cold War by referring to Moscow as the head of the "Russian imperial movement", "state sponsor of terrorism", against which actions are proposed against those who bid for contracts with its hydrocarbon industry, subjecting SWIFT to coercion to exclude Russia from the system of interbank financial transactions and even sanctioning INSTEX, a European alternative system to SWIFT, used to circumvent the American blockade of electronic transactions, in whose standardisation Moscow has the greatest interest, in order to facilitate trade with Iran.  

However, the conciseness of the chapter on Russia is misleading; in fact, its pages contain the toughest set of sanctions ever proposed against Moscow by the US Congress and include restrictions on access to the international financial markets by Russian companies sympathetic to Putin. Regarding China, to which the report dedicates 25 pages, the Republican congressmen elucidate the "Chinese dream" of subverting the world order so that the Chinese Communist Party can establish global control. Based on this premise, the document proposes a range of five lines of action to undermine Chinese expansion, consisting of combating Chinese industrial espionage and intellectual property theft; putting spokes in the wheels of Chinese influence and propaganda; denouncing human rights violations; undertaking a military escalation with Beijing and strengthening alliances in the Indo-Pacific region.  

At the same time, the document identifies Hong Kong as a bridgehead in this strategy, to the point of formulating personal sanctions on Chinese officials involved in Hong Kong affairs, notably the head of the Politburo Standing Committee, the director of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office and the director of the Hong Kong Liaison Office; the imposition of sanctions on high-ranking officials of the Communist Party of China, such as the Secretary of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Party, the Secretary of the Committee of the Party of the Autonomous Region of Tibet and the Minister of Public Security of the Communist Party of China, whose implementation would be carried out under the "Magnitsky Global Human Rights Accountability Law", currently in force in the United States.   

The volume and weight of the package of measures published by the Republican Studies Committee of Congress will make it inevitable that a substantial part of the proposals will end up acquiring a charter, especially if Trump renews his mandate. Nevertheless, the tenor of the strategy contained in the document denotes a more comminative than persuasive intention, which, by abounding in the rhetoric of the zero-sum game, leaves little room for constructive understanding and augurs more for conflict than harmony.