On Monday, the White House announced its decision to designate North Korea as a sponsor of terrorism—a designation that had been removed in 2008. Also on Monday, the Treasury Department declared that it had discovered, and plans to punish, a sophisticated counterfeiting scheme run by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC); whatever sanctions it imposes in response will have been made possible by President Trump’s prior decision to consider the IRGC a terrorist group. Noah Rothman applauds these moves:
Pyongyang has exported conventional weapons and nuclear and missile technology to other U.S.-designated state sponsors of terrorism, such as Iran and Syria, and terrorist groups including Hamas and Hizballah. It helped to construct a nuclear reactor in Syria, which Israel thankfully destroyed just a few years before the region in which it was built fell into the hands of Islamic State. . . .
Since Trump has taken office, the administration has been busily restoring sanctions on the Iranian regime that were relieved as a result of the . . . nuclear deal. President Trump’s decision to punt the Iran deal back to Congress is likely to preserve it while avoiding responsibility for that outcome. Yet his administration’s outward determination to abrogate the agreement has allowed it the freedom to call balls and strikes when it comes to the Islamic Republic, even if that angers America’s “partners” in Tehran.
Take, for example, the U.S. Treasury Department’s most recent sanctions on Iran. . . . This is not the first time Iran has been implicated in currency counterfeiting. In 2010, U.S. military officials seized at least $4.3 million in counterfeit American currency in Iraq. . . . The sudden influx of false notes was believed to be part of a campaign by Iran to influence forthcoming elections in Iraq, which was apparently successful. Within days of those elections, three of the country’s four major political alliances sent delegations to Iran for political guidance. The head of Iraq’s secular, anti-Iranian bloc noted at the time that America’s silence was deafening. . . .
[D]eclaring North Korea and the IRGC supporters of terrorism is a decision that seems obvious only to those who are not steeped in granular diplomatic contrivances.
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