U.S. sanctions on Russia) is indicted as an unregistered Kremlin agent three years later further complicates all of these events.153
Shortly after ACU’s managing director, Alex Copson, hires Flynn in April 2015, Flynn begins linking ACU’s multinational nuclear power deal to American national security, “warning publicly,” according to the Washington Post, “that America’s national security would be at risk if the United States allowed Russia and other countries to spearhead nuclear energy projects in the Middle East”—though his odd solution to the problem is to partner with Russia, rather than to supplant it as the major player in the Middle East energy market or else flatly oppose any nuclearization of the Middle East altogether.154 In Israel in June 2015, Flynn “assure[s] Israeli officials that ACU’s plan [to contract Ukrainians to build nuclear reactors in the Middle East as part of a deal that would end Russian sanctions] could prevent Israel’s enemies from obtaining material for nuclear weapons”—an apparent reference to Iran, which just weeks later will announce the “nuclear deal” with the Obama administration aimed at curtailing its nuclear weapons program.155 The rhetorical link Flynn seeks to establish between his 2015 and 2016 private consulting arrangements and America’s national security offers significant intelligence on what Flynn might have discussed with Trump when the two men first met at Trump Tower, at Trump’s invitation, in August 2015—and what Trump may have been referring to when he said in Iowa that November, “I know more about ISIS than the [active-duty U.S.] generals do.”
As Lawfare has observed, “In order for [the ACU] deal to go through, Flynn would have to convince the Trump administration to ‘rip up’ the sanctions imposed by the Obama administration on Russia for their interference in the U.S. election,” so it is little surprise that by December 2017, as the digital media outlet notes, “a whistleblower has come forward with information suggesting that Flynn’s true motive to soften these sanctions wasn’t to ease tensions with Russia, but to further the financial interests of those selling these reactors.”156 Just as significant, Flynn’s advocacy with ACU for a nuclear deal involving Russian entities, and later for a similar deal—with another company, IP3—involving Chinese entities, poses a clear national security threat as, per the report in Lawfare, while “U.S. civilian nuclear technology sales require significant national security provisions … Russian and Chinese technology agreements do not.”157 Specifically, deals involving American nuclear technology require what is called a “123 agreement,” an Atomic Energy Act–derived standard that precludes American materials and technology from being developed into nuclear weapons when sold to a foreign power.158
To the extent the “consortium” idea Flynn was advocating around the globe in 2015 and 2016 opened the door to sales of U.S. nuclear materials and technology without a 123 agreement—and to the extent Flynn was simultaneously opposing the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal, which was provably curtailing Iran’s nuclear program—the retired lieutenant general’s foreign policy agenda has made more likely a nuclear confrontation in the Middle East in the medium term.159 In a September 2015 interview with the New York Observer, whose owner and publisher at the time was Jared Kushner, Flynn laid out his idiosyncratic plan for nuclear weapons in the Middle East: “Open the entire region to nuclear energy to neutralize Iran from starting a nuclear weapons arm[s] race in the region. Have other nations outside the region, such as Russia or the U.S., conduct the advanced levels of the nuclear in and out fuel cycle processing required to create a nuclear energy program.”160 That Flynn was ambivalent about whether the United States or Russia should oversee the accelerated nuclearization of the world’s most volatile region could not have come as anything but a shock to the U.S. Defense Department and Department of Energy when Flynn first aired the view in mid-2015, which may offer an additional explanation for why President Obama advised President-elect Trump to keep Flynn out of the White House in the forty-eight hours after the 2016 election.161
Trump had not spent the 2016 general election backing denuclearization in the Middle East and around the world, however; instead, he had argued that the United States must “renovate and modernize” its nuclear arsenal, at one point even advocating for precisely the view of a nuclearized Middle East Flynn had been advancing both in the media and behind closed doors: that Saudi Arabia should have not just nuclear energy but nuclear weapons.162 As early as a CNN town hall event in March 2016, Trump indicates that Saudi Arabia could