USN&WR - DHS Seeks Sanctions on Countries that Refuse Deportees

Alan Neuhauser at U.S. News & World Report (" a multi-platform publisher of news and information") did a nice job of laying this out:

Money quote(s):

"immigration authorities have been forced to release people who are in the U.S. illegally because their home countries declined to issue the necessary travel documents for their return"

CAA commented on another article that was more specific but this one does a better job explaining the whys and hows.

"Lapan would not identify which nations are facing sanctions, but they are among a list of 12 so-called "recalcitrant countries" identified by DHS: Burma, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Guinea, Hong Kong, Iran, Laos, Morocco, South Sudan and Vietnam.

The letter from DHS could effectively suspend travel to the U.S. from the four designated countries. Section 243(d) of the Immigration and Nationality Act requires the State Department to stop granting travel visas in recalcitrant countries when it such a request to do so from the Homeland Security secretary."

CAA gathers there's quite a bit of back and forth between DOS and DHS as to precisely how each country's visa sanction will shape-up in practice, tailoring it to the circumstances.

"Countries can get removed from the list if they cooperate with U.S. efforts. Iraq, for example, was on a list of some 22 countries considered recalcitrant, but it was removed after high-level government negotiations led to an agreement to again begin accepting deported nationals, Lapan said."

It's unfortunate when you have to use a club like this to leverage another country into action, but if you get a record and a reputation for doing it from time to time, simply the threat will come to suffice as a motivator.  Inaction on the part of these countries was a product of their years of experience in us not acting.

WT - Trump punishes sanctuary countries, halts visas for nations that refuse to cooperate on deportations

Stephen Dinan at The Washington Times ("hard-hitting news and fearless journalism") explained recent visa sanctions against four countries.

Money quote(s):

"Sanctions have been triggered only twice before — once in 2001 against Guyana and again late last year against Gambia. In both instances, they produced quick results. Guyana moved within months to issue travel documents to take back 112 of the 113 deportees stuck in a backlog."

Limiting the ability of foreign officials and their families' ability to visit the U.S. is what CAA likes to call "The Miami Sanction."

For much of Central America and the Caribbean, Miami provides Third World countries with a First World "capital city."  It's where they send their wives to shop and their kids to school.  Los Angeles and New York City fill similar roles for different regions as London and Paris do for much of the developing world in that hemisphere.  There are direct air-links to those cities from many Third World countries.

The "Miami Sanction" puts an exquisite pressure on foreign government officials.

"State Department officials said the sanctions begin Wednesday, halting issuance of at least some categories of visas to would-be travelers from Cambodia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Eritrea.

“The Secretary of State has ordered consular officers in Eritrea, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia to implement visa restrictions effective September 13, 2017,” the department said in a statement provided to The Washington Times. “The Secretary determined the categories of visa applicants subject to these restrictions on a country-by-country basis.”

The law allows for all visas to be halted to any country that refuses cooperation, but the department decided to impose less-draconian penalties in each of the four cases.

In Cambodia, only top diplomats and their families will be denied temporary tourism or business visas. In Eritrea, the U.S. Embassy will stop issuing business and tourist visas to all citizens.

In Guinea, government officials and family members will be denied business, tourist, and student and exchange program visas. In Sierra Leone, the government’s diplomats and immigration officials will be denied business and tourist visas."

Interestingly, the visa sanctions against the four countries show a graduated, even nuanced, set of penalties:

Eritrea - no B1/B2 visas for anyone, no how, no way;

Guinea - no B1/B2, F, or J visas for government officials and their families;

Sierra Leone - no B1/B2 visas for either diplomats or immigration officials;

Cambodia - no B1B2 visas for top diplomats and their families.

(CAA would love to know what factors resulted in this range of sanctions, but it's the kind of inside-baseball that only comes to light decades later in some diplomat's small-batch memoir.)

re: "Iranian bomb plot blows up deterrence theory"

Robert Haddick at the Small Wars Journal blog ("facilitates the exchange of information among practitioners, thought leaders, and students of Small Wars, in order to advance knowledge and capabilities in the field") examined the problem of applying deterrence to Iran.

Money quote(s):

"U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder revealed an Iranian plot to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States by bombing a restaurant in Washington. Holder’s description of the plot – which allegedly involved a bungled attempt by Mansour Arbabsiar, a dual citizen, to recruit the notorious Zeta cartel from Mexico – appeared simultaneously brazen and inept. What should worry policymakers the most is how this incident undermines the theory of deterrence, which some hope to use against Iran after it acquires nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles. If Iranian policy cannot be checked with Cold War-style deterrence, the prospect of an inevitable shooting war against Iran will go up."

Cold warriors like CAA will recall deterrence theories such as MAD and the like; the bottom line was that while it's unclear just how much of which theories actually worked, clearly something worked and the world did not end in nuclear fire, despite decades of bipolar international standoff.

"(T)he operation may have been authorized by the highest level of the Iranian government. This would indicate that top-level Iranian officials are not concerned with the possible retaliatory consequences of a mass casualty attack in downtown Washington, DC. Iran’s leaders would come to that conclusion either because they perceive the U.S. government to be self-constrained or because they perceive the maximum likely U.S. retaliation against Iran to be inconsequential to their interests. Either way, U.S. retaliation against Iran lacks credibility, something the U.S. government will have to fix if it is to usefully employ deterrence theory in the future."

U.S. retaliation against Iran has, ever since the 1979 revolution, amounted to sanction regimes of varying strictness. Why would the Iranian regime ever consider that a U.S. response to provocation would ever amount to anything more than that?

"(I)ntermediate-level Quds Force officers may have initiated the operation without authority from top-level decision-makers. If so, this too would undermine deterrence theory. Deterrence is not useful if those to be deterred don’t have complete control over their weapons, an assumption U.S. and Soviet leaders both correctly made during the Cold War. Alternatively, the organizational culture inside the Quds Force may reward mid-level officers who “freelance” their own operations. Once again, not a comforting conclusion for deterrence theory." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

The theory of deterrence requires a target of that deterrence. If the target (i.e., top Iranian leadership) doesn't actually have full control over their WMD, then the situation is drastically destabilized.

"(I)t is hard to believe that there is some attainable level of financial and travel sanctions, even with the best possible international cooperation, that will change the behavior of either top-level Iranian leaders or officers inside the Quds Force. The U.S. is thus left with a deterrent strategy against Iran that lacks credibility and in any case may be unsuitable for the situation.

Washington should expect more provocations and thus more pressure to eventually display a retaliatory response that will impress Iranian leaders. What kind of display would impress Iranian leaders is a subject many in Washington would prefer to avoid."

Unlike, for instance, the kleptocratic leadership class of various south-of-the-border countries, attempting to put a crimp into the Miami/New York/Paris-bound shopping trips of the mullahs just doesn't register on the viable-threat-o-meter.

10/12

re: "Libya: Did Citizen Evacuations Stand in the Way of Better Policy?"

Peter Spiro at Opinio Juris ("a forum for informed discussion and lively debate about international law and international relations") is, as always, asking some of the right questions.

(Even if he is a lawyer.)

Money quote(s):

"It now seems to be the conventional wisdom (hard to shake once in place) that the U.S. has been slow off the mark on Libya. That may have consequences for U.S. standing in the region."

Conventional wisdom isn't always wrong. It just seems like it most of the time.

Still, perception influences reality, even if it does not (as some believe) equate to reality.

"The Administration got a defense out (on background) that it held off on more decisive action — such as imposing the sanctions that were finally put in place last night — pending the evacuation from Libya of U.S. citizens, U.S. diplomats in particular. As always, safety of U.S. citizens is said to be the highest priority in such unstable situations. Apparently, the U.S. embassy compound in Tripoli is poorly secured, with no Marine guards in place to defend."

No marines in Tripoli? Sounds like the inspiration for a Country & Western song, perhaps using the "Do They Know It's Christmas" tune from 1985.

But I digress.

"That’s a tough place to be. Obviously you don’t want to end up in a hostage situation (the politics of that would be horrific for Obama in addition to all the other reasons — the Carter comparison perfected). But does it have to be the case that U.S. policy itself is held hostage?

Perhaps the lesson here is to have contingency plans in place to pull U.S. officials out of such situations quickly (as of today, think Sanaa, Libreville, Yaounde, among others). That would have the downside of leaving other U.S. citizens without exit assistance, at least not in place. But many of them are taken care of by their corporate employers. Many others will be dual nationals, and only nominally American, and should be able to fend for themselves as well as locals."

There are contingency plans for lots of things. The Marine Corps has something of a sideline in NEOs (non-combatant evacuation operations), but some of the sketchier places tend to rather out-of-the-way and would need some assistance to get out and that assistance would take time getting there.

Recall that during the Rwandan genocide, our embassy folks had to convoy out of the country on their own, something that good RSOs and consular chiefs keep in the back of their minds as one of the nightmare scenarios to prepare against.

The argument about dual nationals has come up before, and The Onion recently did a piece lampooning the American practise of having to evacuate visitors to places nobody in their right mind should want to visit. I don't have an answer to either question, but it's nice to see people asking in public fora what consular officers sometimes ask each other quietly, where the public can't hear us.

(Don't get me wrong, we'll do everything we can to help, but think of us as firemen who can't help but wonder to one another just why you were playing with matches.)