“The AUTOPEN,” US president Donald Trump wrote on his “Truth Social” platform on June 2 (referring to Joe Biden), “should have stopped Iran a long time ago from ‘enriching.’ Under our potential Agreement — WE WILL NOT ALLOW ANY ENRICHMENT OF URANIUM!”

Trump’s absolutely right, but only in three ways that don’t reflect the pomposity of his post:

Firstly, the Iranian regime has made clear that there is no “potential agreement” under which it will give up its ability and prerogative to enrich uranium.

Secondly, the US regime never has been, and is not now, in any position to “allow” or “not allow” the Iranian regime to enrich uranium. Nor could it put itself in any such position short of winning a major war against a much bigger and more powerful opponent  than it faced — and lost to — in Afghanistan.

And thirdly, there’s already an agreement. Not a “potential” agreement, an actual one.

It’s called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the “Iran nuclear deal,” and although Trump claims to have “withdrawn” the US from it since 2018, he hasn’t.

The JCPOA is codified as a United Nations Security Council Resolution and is binding on all member states.  The only ways for Trump to “withdraw” the US from it are to “withdraw” the US from its UN membership entirely, or get the Security Council to repeal it (that’s not gonna happen). The US regime hasn’t left the JCPOA. The US is just in continuous violation of the JCPOA. There’s a difference.

Iran began enriching uranium to higher levels of purity — slowly moving toward “weapons grade” — after the US started violating that agreement and pressuring its allies to do likewise.

The Iranians have also been clear and consistent: They’ll be happy to stop enriching to those higher levels of purity, and mix the more highly enriched uranium into less pure uranium, when and if the US starts holding up its end of the agreement, which happens to be binding international law.

The JCPOA represented the culmination of a decade of negotiations consisting of US demands, Iranian acceptances, more US demands, more Iranian acceptances, rinse and repeat ad nauseam, until the US finally took “yes” for an answer.

After which, under Trump, the US defaulted on its own obligations while demanding even MORE from the Iranians. All this, it should be mentioned, in the absence of evidence that the Iranians were interested in developing, or attempting to develop, a nuclear weapon in the first place.

To which the Iranian response was, understandably, “OK, we’ll start enriching to higher levels than we were attempting even before we agreed to the deal — but we’ll stop if you’ll start holding up YOUR end.”

Trump’s powerless to “allow” or “not allow” the Iranians to do anything. Rage-posting on Truth Social won’t change that. He should instead offer them a “new” deal that’s just a freshly printed copy of the JCPOA, then declare “victory” when they accept. His supporters are probably gullible enough to consider that a Trump masterstroke.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Wall Street Journal editor Matthew Hennessey correctly observes that vice-president JD Vance could stand to brush up on his economic education (“Vance is Wrong: The Market Isn’t a ‘Tool,'” May 27). He may have learned the essentials of exchange at Ohio State and Yale, but “speaks as if he didn’t.”

Yet Vance’s remark that “the market is a tool, but it is not the purpose of American politics” is not so much incorrect as an inadvertent self-indictment. To Hennessey, “laws of economics,” akin to “laws of gravity,” mean that economies “can’t be bullied into compliance with a political agenda.” To the contrary, manipulative politicking all too often pushes the populace to take the fall.

Hennessey sees the mechanical-market metaphor dovetailing with Vance’s advocacy of “a revived industrial economy that is planned and directed by enlightened tinkerers for the common good.” A tall order when the Apollo 13 mission team had its hands full kludging a literal square-peg-in-a-round-hole connector from spacecraft spare parts to get back down to Earth.

Vance maintains his social conservative Catholicism, but is realigning its focus to “launch a missile at the market.”  Yet the tradition of Catholic social criticism includes the subject of John P. McCarthy’s Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical combining a “dislike of capitalism and enthusiasm for property ownership,” and so seeking alternatives to “the usual statist solutions,” as well as John Médaille’s call to push the actually existing market economy Toward a Truly Free Market.

Hennessey claims that “the idea that markets exploit the weak and release corrosive social forces has always been popular on the left.” Less subtly, the online edition’s subtitle calls Vance “as economically illiterate as any leftist Democrat,” forgetting the 2020 Journal op-ed headline recalling the Carter administration: “When Democrats Were Deregulators.”  In 1992, George McGovern had even written for the Journal to chide Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, who aimed to assist “entrepreneurs who will risk their capital” to “create job opportunities,” for failing to “consider whether we are choking off those opportunities.”

If politicians and pundits across the political spectrum increasingly echo Robert Kuttner, quoted by Hennessey decrying “the utopian worship of free markets” in 1998, they should note how the fettered enterprise of the current decade was foreshadowed in 1943 by what Astounding Science Fiction called “a rigidly frozen economy” where interplanetary incomers with innovative “inventions to sell” could be stymied to starvation by “a law against inventions” in Henry and Catherine Moore Kuttner’s “The Iron Standard.” (That early in the twentieth century, the Kuttners could imagine their stagnant “world state” would at least be blessed with “no wars and no tariffs.”)

Hennessey rues Americans receiving “miseducation … from philosophy professors.”  They could learn something from Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long, who emphasizes that “devaluing of compassion” or assuming its incompatibility with laissez-faire liberty stymies efforts “to visualize and formulate the institutions of a free society.” That false dichotomy likewise empties the toolbox necessary for building a fair one — and getting methods that distort supply and demand and inhibit honest cooperation out of the picture.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On April 14,  Mohsen Mahdawi arrived at a government immigration office in Vermont for a citizenship interview. After 10 years as a “legal” US resident with a “green card,” he wanted to officially become an “American.” Instead, he found himself handcuffed, hooded, and whisked away to a cage pending deportation. He was finally released on bail two weeks later.

On April 15, Kasper Eriksen arrived at a government immigration office in Tennessee. Eriksen, also a “green card” holder, with a family and pregnant wife in Mississippi, also thought he was attending a citizenship interview. He was also arrested and caged pending deportation. As of this writing, he has yet to receive bail.

On April 30, Ming Li Hui, better known to her friends and neighbors in Kennett, Missouri as “Carol,” found herself summarily ordered to report to an immigration office in St. Louis. Carol arrived in the US as a refugee from Hong Kong in 2004. Twenty years later, she’s gainfully employed, a convert to Catholicism, and has a family including three children. The US government locked her up pending deportation back to Communist China.

One of her local friends, Vanessa Cowart, interviewed by the New York Times, puts it bluntly: “I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here. But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves. This is Carol.”

Why are ordinary people, living ordinary lives, some even seeking to become American citizens, finding themselves in cages and facing deportation?

Let’s not kid ourselves: It was going to come to this eventually. Authoritarian police states never stop looking for victims and scapegoats. They eventually collapse, thankfully, but until they do it’s open season on enemies, real and imagined.

But why so soon? Because Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions of immigrants has, so far, proven itself an epic fail. At the moment, the US government is deporting people at half the pace of the Obama regime.

In late May, Axios reports, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem called the Trump regime’s top immigration thugs in for a dressing down. They’re unhappy with the slow rate of immigrant abductions and want it tripled to 3,000 per day.

And there’s your answer: It’s easier to reach an artificial “quota” by kidnapping immigrants who show up to appointments on demand than it is to track down a handful of real criminals in their lairs, or nab foreign-born workers quietly making their livings (and making our lives better) while avoiding contact with “law enforcement.”

In the opening salvos of his first administration’s nativist push, Donald Trump groused about immigrants from “sh*thole countries.”

Now he’s discovering that the only way to stop immigration to the US is to turn it into one of those sh*thole countries that no one wants to live in.

He’s doing his best to accomplish that, and even his supporters are starting to notice.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY