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" The nuclear deal took a long time. Two historically antagonistic nations sat across the table from one another, trying for months\u00A0to hammer out an agreement.\u00A0Meanwhile, one\u00A0was actively supplying weapons to rebels who used them to kill the soldiers of the other on the ground\u00A0in a third country.\u00A0 You might think that we&amp;#039;re talking about Iran, the United States, and Yemen. After all, last week the U.S. Navy seized\u00A0yet another illegal shipment of weapons\u2014dozens of machine guns and rocket launchers\u2014from an Iranian boat headed to the Houthi rebels fighting the government of Yemen, our nominal ally. That sort of action on the part of Iran is an ancillary betrayal of the nuclear negotiations we completed last year. Except I&amp;#039;m not talking about\u00A0the U.S.\u00A0and Iran; I&amp;#039;m talking about\u00A0the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The nuclear\u00A0talks? The ones that Ronald Reagan initiated in 1982 and that lasted nearly a decade. The third country? Afghanistan, to which we supplied massive amounts of advanced weaponry\u2014including air defense in the form of Stinger missiles\u2014to kill Russians.\u00A0 The irony, she stings. What lessons can we learn from the most recent weapons interception? First of all: Just because you&amp;#039;re negotiating (or have negotiated) a big nuke deal, that doesn&amp;#039;t mean you stop\u00A0being conventional opponents. Also: Allies matter.\u00A0 USS Sirocco, the patrol craft that intercepted the alleged Iranian vessel heading for Yemen, is a diminutive 174 feet in length. It can only stay out on the ocean for a few days or weeks. Its main guns\u201425-mm cannons\u2014are the size of the ones\u00A0on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. She carries 30 sailors, give or take.\u00A0\u00A0 How can such a small American vessel intercept an Iranian boat stacked with weaponry literally halfway around the planet? Because we have friends.\u00A0 USS Sirocco is based in Bahrain, and she needs to come to port often\u00A0for maintenance. This is not a\u00A0technological issue, but\u00A0the physics of the sea: endurance is not possible for such a small vessel. We need help to properly patrol these waters, to prevent an opponent (say Iran) from supplying rebels fighting the leaders of a country we support (say Yemen). Last month, the French Navy intercepted a similar shipment. Two months before that, the Royal Australian Navy did the same. We rely on working together with\u00A0allies to protect our shared interests.\u00A0\u00A0 And yet\u00A0certain American politicians, particularly those of the spray-tanned\u00A0persuasion,\u00A0seem bent on pulling us out of the military alliances that make this synergy possible. &amp;quot;Either they pay up, including for past deficiencies, or they have to get out. And if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO,&amp;quot; said\u00A0Donald Trump\u00A0recently. Yes, the leading presidential candidate for one of our two main political parties is not only suggesting the destruction of NATO; he is actually advocating for it.\u00A0This was predicted in military circles more than half a decade ago. In 2011, I wrote:\u00A0 American public opinion toward Europe has been slowly but steadily dropping over the past 20-plus years\u2026.Public-opinion polls in the United States have subsequently found that 80 percent of Americans think that the United States spends too much on the security of other countries. This sentiment has leaked over to American political elites who have returned a -21 percent vote of no confidence toward NATO\u2014and that was before the American reaction to NATO operations in Kosovo, let alone the perceived tepid response of NATO to the American call for a &amp;quot;surge&amp;quot; in Afghanistan in 2010. This was seen as a hyperbolic bit of doomsaying at the time it was published. Sadly, it is now close to the reality of at least one party&amp;#039;s probable candidate. What would we lose? Well, possibly those other two intercepts that caught more weapons than the US did. We&amp;#039;d lose synergy. We&amp;#039;d lose military-to-military cooperation. And, if you are a pessimist, we&amp;#039;d lose about 15-20% of the additional security that the United States actually experiences, at low cost, because we have friendly allies. In short, we would be losers.\u00A0  As always I can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a43867/us-iran-nato-trump/>