Mark Dubowitz

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

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Mark Dubowitz and Richard Goldberg in Ynet News: “Why reassessing Israel’s risky relationship with China matters”

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Why reassessing Israel’s risky relationship with China matters

Analysis: Beijing’s full-throated defense of the Islamic Republic should set off alarm bells for any Israeli who fears a nuclear-armed Iran with advanced ballistic and cruise missiles capable of bringing a second Holocaust.

Hebrew translation available here.

The following is an excerpt:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently called on the United Nations Security Council to reimpose, or “snapback,” international sanctions and restrictions on the Islamic Republic of Iran – a terror-sponsoring regime that seeks to wipe Israel off the map.

Just as the prime minister was speaking, another country was addressing the Security Council in defense of Iran: the People’s Republic of China.

Most Israelis would be shocked to learn this. According to a December 2019 Pew research poll, 66 percent of Israelis hold a favorable opinion of China against 25 percent who hold an unfavorable view.

As support for the Chinese Communist Party plummets worldwide, Israel is one of only nine countries where positive views of Beijing recently increased.

Sino-Israeli comity is particularly evident in the economic sphere: China accounts for roughly 10 to 15 percent of the Israeli economy. Sino-Israeli trade stood at $15.3 billion in 2018, an almost 4,400 percent increase in real dollar terms since 1995.

Admittedly, other American allies have strong ties to China. Chinese trade with Germany, for example, stood at $231 billion in 2018, an almost 2,000 percent increase in real dollar terms since 1992.

But trade hasn’t made Beijing popular in Deutschland. Only 34 percent of Germans, according to the same Pew poll, hold a favorable view of China compared to 56 percent that do not. This is one of the lowest favorability ratings for China in Europe.

[…]

Read Mark and Rich’s piece on the outlet’s website here or on FDD’s website here.

Read the Hebrew translation here.

Mark Dubowitz and Jonathan Schanzer in Newsweek: “Countering China Is for the BIRDs”

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Countering China Is for the BIRDs

The following is an excerpt:

In 1950, as Cold War tensions were on the rise, President Harry Truman asked allies to stand and be counted. Israel reflexively stepped up and backed the president who bravely supported the creation of the Jewish state just two years before.

Seventy years later, new cold war tensions are stirring. This time, the adversary is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The White House is once again asking allies to step forward. Israel is expected to oblige. After all, America is its most important ally. But Jerusalem can’t afford to move too quickly, this time. Its financial stability is at stake.

It all began with Washington’s miscalculation that money would seduce the hard men of Beijing to become responsible global stakeholders. This notion dominated the thinking of U.S. foreign policy and business since President Richard Nixon and his national security consigliere Henry Kissinger began wooing China in 1972 in order to drive a wedge between China and the Soviet Union.

American money soon flowed east. China-U.S. investment and trade skyrocketed. By 2018, the economic relationship between Washington and Beijing topped $778 billion, an increase of roughly 4,750 percent in real dollar terms from 1980. The rest of the West followed. For example, Chinese trade with Germany stood at $231 billion in 2018, an almost 2,000 percent increase in real dollar terms since 1992.

However, after years of Chinese hacking, intellectual property theft and challenges to the American-led world order, Washington is coming to grips with what we might call “Nixon’s Nonstarter” or “Kissinger’s Collapse.” The Chinese Communist Party is not a responsible global stakeholder. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has turned his country into a wealthier, more belligerent authoritarian state.

[…]

Read Mark and Jonathan’s article for Newsweek on the outlet’s website here. 

Mark Dubowtiz and Behnam Ben Taleblu: “Two Years On, the Trump Administration’s Iran Policy Continues to Make Sense”

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Two Years On, the Trump Administration’s Iran Policy Continues to Make Sense

The following is an excerpt of an FDD Insight piece by Mark and Behnam:

In the two years since the United States left the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Trump administration has adopted a policy of “maximum pressure” to address the full range of threats from the Islamic Republic. The administration’s objective is a better agreement that addresses the JCPOA’s fatal flaws. The way to secure such an agreement is to escalate all forms of pressure on the clerical regime until it faces a stark choice between its own survival and the abandonment of its nuclear ambitions, foreign aggression, and grave human rights violations.

From the beginning of his 2016 campaign, President Donald Trump insisted that the JCPOA was a bad deal. Rather than permanently blocking Iran’s pathway to nuclear weapons, the deal opens a patient path; if the JCPOA endures until its key provisions expire (or “sunset”), Tehran would emerge around 2025 with an industrial-scale nuclear program, a short path to a bomb, ballistic missiles to deliver that bomb, a conventional force newly equipped with foreign weapons, and its economy immunized against future sanctions.

The administration also dispensed with the fiction adopted by its predecessor that the nuclear agreement would moderate the mullahs by flooding them with cash and integrating them into the global economy. That theory of “moderation through economic seduction” failed miserably with the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin. The Islamic Republic has been at war with the United States for decades, murdering Americans and seeking to dominate the Middle East through its terrorist proxies. The JCPOA only super-charged such malign conduct by returning tens of billions of dollars for Tehran to fund its destructive activities. The Islamic Republic no longer had to make painful budgetary choices between guns for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF), Lebanese Hezbollah, and pro-Iran militias in Iraq, as opposed to butter for its citizens. Cash did little to transform the Islamic Republic’s leaders into more responsible global citizens or improve their treatment of the Iranian people.

[…]
Read Mark and Behnam’s FDD Insight on FDD’s website here.

Mark Dubowitz and Saeed Ghasseminejad: “Tehran Can Afford to Fight COVID-19 Even Without Sanctions Relief”

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Tehran Can Afford to Fight COVID-19 Even Without Sanctions Relief

The following is an excerpt:

The Iranian government is leading an international campaign to pressure the United States to lift sanctions. American and European negotiators of the ill-fated Iran nuclear deal, along with dozens of pressure groups, are lending their support. They claim U.S. sanctions have made it impossible for Tehran to fight COVID-19 and are killing the Iranian people. They are wrong.

To fight and control the virus, the Iranian leadership has to do what most governments around the world are doing: Curb its spread by imposing strict social distancing measures and ramping up the capacity to identify and treat the infected until a vaccine is discovered. Social distancing inflicts substantial economic damage, which most governments are mitigating by sharply increasing their own spending. What the advocates of lifting sanctions fail to understand is that the Iranian government can still afford both the public health measures and the economic relief programs necessary to deal with COVID-19.

The Islamist regime’s officials say they have achieved self-sufficiency and face no shortage of testing kits, medicine, or personal protective equipment; this contradicts numerous messages directed at Western audiences, which assert there are dire shortages. Indeed, Tehran claims it is producing testing kits beyond its needs and is ready to export them. What Tehran lacks in domestic production, it can import from other countries, especially China, the largest producer of personal protective equipment – and a close ally. Reports show that Tehran is doing precisely that. European trade data and remarks by Iran’s public health officials confirm that Tehran does not face any significant trouble importing what it needs.

Yet Tehran has so far refused to implement strict social distancing measures, which, as other countries have demonstrated, requires the shuttering of major parts of the economy. This kind of shutdown is always costly, but the last two weeks have coincided with the country’s traditional two-week Persian New Year holiday, during which economic activity is normally limited. This was the opportunity for Iranian officials to impose quarantines and stay-at-home measures on a mass scale. Despite grave warnings issued by Iran’s public health officials, President Hassan Rouhani resisted such measures, and so millions of Iranian traveled across the country during the New Year holiday. Now Rouhani is trying to reopen key sectors of the economy.

[…]
Read Mark and Saeed’s FDD Insight piece on FDD’s website here.

Mark Dubowitz and Richard Goldberg in Foreign Policy: “The Coronavirus Is Absolutely No Excuse To Lift Sanctions on Iran”

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The Coronavirus Is Absolutely No Excuse To Lift Sanctions on Iran

Exploiting Iran’s coronavirus crisis to demand an end to sanctions is fundamentally dishonest—and panders to a brutal regime.

The following is an excerpt:

Iran’s clerical dictatorship cares more about its own survival than it cares about the welfare of the Iranian people. But you wouldn’t know it from the chorus of Americans and Europeans exploiting the coronavirus crisis in Iran to push the Trump administration to lift sanctions against Iran. This is fundamentally dishonest—the sanctions do not restrict medical supplies and other forms of humanitarian aid—and plays into the hands of a brutal regime.

Iran’s human rights record is one of the worst in the world. Last fall, the regime killed 1,500 people who peacefully protested the dictatorship’s mishandling of the economy. Soon after, it blew a passenger airliner out of the sky, killing everyone on board. A few weeks ago, Iranian-backed militias killed two U.S. and one British soldier in Iraq.

Last week, we learned that Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent held by Iran, died in captivity. His captors refused to provide information on his whereabouts to his long-suffering family for 13 years. More Americans and other foreigners, arbitrarily detained and falsely accused of being spies, remain hostage in Iranian jails today.

Are we to believe the same Iranian leaders committing these human rights crimes when they say they need wholesale relief from U.S. sanctions to combat the coronavirus? To an unwitting American audience, such Iranian propaganda can be quite persuasive, particularly when the request for sanctions relief is endorsed by the United Nations secretary general, the Chinese foreign minister, European politicians, and even former officials from Barack Obama’s administration.

Let’s separate fact from fiction.

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Read Mark and Richard’s piece for Foreign Policy on the outlet’s website here.