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August 2017

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Trump Loses Corporate America There is no point in taking brickbats for a president who does not deliver. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on August 16th, 2017

Companies get in bed with politicians when it serves their interests and are quick to run away when it doesn’t. Thus nobody is obliged to interpret the flutter of CEOs away from President Trump’s advisory council since the Charlottesville riot as occasions of courage.

Still, these are some of America’s most delicate PR canaries, surrounded by risk-averse advisers. Mr. Trump’s administration is turning out not to be the administration they were hoping for, though probably the one they realistically expected.

Especially he has not made headway on corporate taxes—the issue that bought him whatever benefit of the doubt America’s CEO class was willing to give him.

Now a handful are fleeing his advisory council because he didn’t say the right words over Charlottesville, or didn’t say them quickly enough. This is big news because the media can’t get enough Trump. He insists on making himself the lightning rod. That’s one problem.

If the president or a scraggly someone close to him in the West Wing is soft on white supremacists because he thinks these groups are a vital bloc, this would be the miscalculation of the century. Their adherents couldn’t swing a race for dogcatcher. It is precisely the left’s fantasy of the right that these people constitute a useful electoral base.

None of the departing CEOs likely believe Mr. Trump is a white supremacist or Nazi sympathizer. They just see no upside to being associated with him. Two of those who quit, Merck’s Kenneth Frazier and Intel ’s Brian Krzanich, implicitly cited an unnamed individual’s failure to speak out forcefully enough against racism.

Kevin Plank of Under Armour perhaps indulged a greater honesty when he suggested his company belatedly remembered that it “engages in innovation and sports, not politics.”

There may be a temptation to liken these men to Google’s Sundar Pichai, who overnight acquired a reputation as a moral coward for firing a diversity-policy dissenter. Other CEOs, like Jeff Immelt of GE, found voices to express opposition to white racism without trying to turn themselves into symbols of anti-Trump resistance.

But Mr. Trump hardly helped with his response, a series of tweets about Merck’s high drug prices. Mr. Trump is the one party to these exchanges who doesn’t have three layers of advisers to help him discover his deepest thoughts. If he did, he might not be frittering away his presidency.

But let’s also notice how little this has to do with Charlottesville. Mr. Trump was essentially correct when he warned in his initial, widely panned comments, about danger from “many sides.” In one of those quirks of old-style magazine publishing, the Atlantic dropped a story, dated September, that went to press before Charlottesville and yet details the “The Rise of the Violent Left,” especially the Antifa movement that was in the middle of the Charlottesville brawl.

Mr. Trump, who perhaps actually paid attention to his Charlottesville briefing, may just have responded the way 99% of Americans would have to the full story. Or the way European publics in the 1920s and ’30s did when they saw Hitlerites and Stalinists battling in the streets and wanted nothing to do with either.

Happily, the social and political condition of America today is nothing like Germany circa 1930, even as both extreme right and extreme left peddle exactly the same delusive line that Trumpism is the force somehow carrying them to the centers of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Soften the Tone and Harden Our Defenses Trump can solve the North Korea crisis by pressuring China and rebuilding the U.S. military at last.By Mark Helprin

By on August 16th, 2017

he North Korean nuclear crisis can be defused peacefully and to America’s advantage if its elements are perceived with strategic clarity, and if U.S. leaders recognize that diplomacy depends less upon signals than upon maneuver.

Kim Jong Un is not entirely irrational. The purpose of his nuclear program is not to court annihilation but to deter American military options on the Korean Peninsula and change the correlation of forces in his favor. North Korea created chemical and biological arsenals that effectively neutralized American tactical nuclear weapons and led to their withdrawal. What we see now is an amplification of that strategy, with the object of eventually driving American forces from Korea.

It is extremely unlikely that Mr. Kim would strike, if at all, before his nuclear forces have matured in numbers and reliability. Relatively few of his delivery systems or miniaturized warheads have been extensively tested. Nor have they been proven to work together. And the U.S. and Japan have multiple layers of midcourse and terminal-phase missile defenses.

Thus, time remains to set in motion options on the escalation ladder between the fatal extremes of either doing nothing or taking precipitous military action. The problem is that these opportunities have not been exploited, the focus having been too much on Pyongyang rather than on Beijing, which can both completely shut down the North Korean economy and credibly threaten military intervention.

To the extent that China is shifting, it is because it fears a war on its border, understands what such a war would do to its own and the world’s economy, fears even more that Japan and South Korea might develop nuclear deterrents, and sees that its nuclear calculus has been disrupted by the Thaad radar’s ability to enhance American missile defense via forwarding data on Chinese missile launches in boost phase.

But this is not enough. As the late U.S. ambassador to China James Lilley said: “You won’t get anything from them unless you squeeze them.” In view of America’s disappearing red lines, repeated nuclear capitulations to North Korea and Iran, the largely substanceless “pivot” to Asia, and our passivity in the South China Sea, China will wait to see if we fold.

To date, the Trump administration has failed to apply the kind of intermediate measures on the escalation ladder that are outlined below. It needs to understand that China is watching and waiting, and that absent either overwhelming military superiority or a vast store of credibility—neither of which we now possess—a diplomacy primarily of signals will not produce results. In addition, the Trump administration may think that Pyongyang is too important for Beijing to “abandon.” True, North Korea serves as a “fleet in being” for China, tying down U.S. forces and ready to supply another front to divide them in case of war elsewhere, but now conditions are sufficiently dangerous and different that China can be stimulated to reassess.

That is, if the U.S. takes previously neglected measures to respond to China’s military rise, protect our Asian allies, and guard international waters from maritime irredentism.

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The Invasion of Canada A Somali immigration minister and an open border. Daniel Greenfield

By on August 16th, 2017

Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle. 1,477 people live in this little corner of Quebec with its apple orchards, elderberry fields and small wineries. But now 400 migrants can cross the border in a single day.

On the other side of the border is New York. There the language is English. In Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, the language of choice is French. But these days you’re a more likely to hear Arabic, Urdu or Haitian French being spoken here as Roxham Road fills with clots of migrants scampering out of America.

They’re not the leftist American celebs who threaten to leave for Canada if their side doesn’t win the election. Instead they’re the illegal and dubiously legal who got the message from President Trump.

The overloaded Mounties at the border crossing are being forced to cope with the jabbering illegals, grifters and fake refugees of Trump’s migrant surge. But where Obama’s migrant surge swelled America’s southern border with incoming migrants, Trump’s migrant surge is expelling them north.

The Syrians, or anyone claiming to be, are coming. So are the Sudanese, Somalis and Haitians. This is an informal border crossing and so the rules that might protect Canada from this horde don’t apply. Quebec has become the weakest link in the Canadian border with the vast majority of border migrants invading the “True North” through vulnerable points like the dead end of Roxham Road.

The same thing is happening in Emerson, a town of 689 people named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Minnesota whose Somali settler population is invading and victimizing this peaceful community. At night Somalis can be seen walking up to Emerson to take advantage of a new country and her people.

In a town where once no one locked their doors, locals now check their bolts and turn out the lights. And then they wake up to the nightmare of migrant mobs pounding on their doors and peering through their windows in the middle of the night.

“They banged pretty hard, then ‘ring ring ring’ the doorbell,” a mother of two young girls said. “It was scary.”

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Europe: Migrant Crisis Reaches Spain by Soeren Kern

By on August 16th, 2017

“The biggest migration movements are still ahead: Africa’s population will double in the next decades. A country like Egypt will grow to 100 million people, Nigeria to 400 million. In our digital age with the internet and mobile phones, everyone knows about our prosperity and lifestyle.” — German Development Minister Gerd Müller.

“Young people all have cellphones and they can see what’s happening in other parts of the world, and that acts as a magnet.” — Michael Møller, Director of the United Nations office in Geneva.

“If we do not manage to solve the central problems in African countries, ten, 20 or even 30 million immigrants will arrive in the European Union within the next ten years.” — Antonio Tajani, President of the European Parliament.

Spain is on track to overtake Greece as the second-biggest gateway for migrants entering Europe by sea. The sudden surge in migration to Spain comes amid a crackdown on human smuggling along the Libya-Italy sea route, currently the main migrant point of entry to Europe.

The westward shift in migration routes from Greece and Italy implies that Spain, situated only ten miles from Africa by sea, may soon find itself at the center of Europe’s migration crisis.

More than 8,300 illegal migrants have reached Spanish shores during the first seven months of 2017 — three times as many as in all of 2016, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Thousands more migrants have entered Spain by land, primarily at the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the north coast of Morocco, the European Union’s only land borders with Africa. Once there, migrants are housed in temporary shelters and then moved to the Spanish mainland, from where many continue on to other parts of Europe.

In all, some 12,000 migrants have arrived in Spain so far this year, compared to 13,246 for all of 2016. By comparison, 14,156 migrants have arrived in Greece so far in 2017.

Italy remains the main migrant gateway to Europe, with around 97,000 arrivals so far this year, compared to 181,436 for all of 2016. Italy has been the main point of entry to Europe since the EU-Turkey migrant deal, signed in March 2016, shut off the route from Turkey to Greece, at one time the preferred point of entry to Europe for migrants from Asia and the Middle East. Almost 600,000 migrants have arrived in Italy during the past four years.

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The Anti-Semitic Jewish Media by Bruce Bawer

By on August 16th, 2017

Almost everyone in a position to do something is a coward. Politicians continue to recite the mantra that “Muslims are today’s Jews,” even though in Europe today Muslims are far more often the tormentors than the tormented, and Jews lead the list of victims of public abuse.

Needless to say, the immigrants Trump wants to keep out of the U.S. are precisely the type who, in Europe, are currently Jew-bashing people like Stephen Miller — and Rob Eshman. But Eshman doesn’t want to think about this ticklish fact, which challenges his own simplistic, self-righteous pontifications.

Linda Sarsour is the very personification of stealth Islamization and an obvious anti-Semite. But as Davidson himself noted, she’s acquired plenty of Jewish allies and defenders, “including Jeremy Ben-Ami, Mark Hetfield, Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Brad Lander.”

For years now, Jews across western Europe have been the targets of harassment by Muslims. Police officers stand guard outside of synagogues. Recently, when I stayed in the Jewish Quarter in Rome, I couldn’t help notice the presence of multiple police kiosks, each manned by an armed cop. Many Jews in European cities have long since ceased wearing yarmulkes or Stars of David. Jewish kids are instructed by their parents to avoid identifying themselves as Jews at school lest they be beaten up by their little Muslim friends.

Meanwhile, almost everyone in a position to do something is a coward. Politicians continue to recite the mantra that “Muslims are today’s Jews,” even though in Europe today Muslims are far more often the tormentors than the tormented, and Jews lead the list of victims of public abuse. Police prefer not to prosecute Muslim perpetrators for fear of being called “Islamophobes.” Teachers don’t want to deal with Muslim bullies in their classes for the same reason.

Yet you would hardly know this to read much of America’s Jewish media. On August 2, the Jewish Journal ran a piece slamming Trump adviser Stephen Miller for dismissing (quite properly) the suggestion by CNN’s Jim Acosta that the new immigration bill favoring English-speakers violated the “spirit” of Emma Lazarus’s Statue of Liberty poem, “The New Colossus,” and emphasizing, as if it had anything to do with the issue, that Miller himself is the great-grandson of Jewish immigrants. This was not the first time the Jewish Journal had gone after Miller for being a Jew who supports immigration reform. In March, another piece in that publication, headlined (I kid you not) “From Hebrew School to Halls of Power,” noted that Miller was “a principal author of Trump’s draconian immigration measures, including the executive order the president signed in late January targeting immigrants from Muslim-majority countries,” even though “[t]hese politics are generally reviled in the liberal circles of his Jewish upbringing.”

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What’s next in Afghanistan? by John R. Bolton

By on August 16th, 2017

As President Trump wrestles with America’s role in Afghanistan, he should first decide what our objectives are today compared to what we wanted immediately after Sept. 11, 2001.

Initially, the United States overthrew the Taliban regime but failed to destroy it completely. Regime supporters, allied tribal forces and opportunistic warlords escaped (or returned) to Pakistan’s frontier regions to establish sanctuaries.

Similarly, while the Taliban’s ouster also forced al-Qaida into exile in Pakistan and elsewhere, al-Qaida nonetheless continued and expanded its terrorist activities. In Iraq and Syria, al-Qaida morphed into the even more virulent ISIS, which is now gaining strength in Afghanistan.

In short, America’s Afghan victories were significant but incomplete. Subsequently, we failed to revise and update our Afghan strategic objectives, leading many to argue the war had gone on too long and we should withdraw. This criticism is superficially appealing, recalling anti-Vietnam War activist Allard Lowenstein’s cutting remarks about Richard Nixon’s policies. While Lowenstein acknowledged that he understood those, like Sen. George Aiken, who said we should “win and get out,” he said he couldn’t understand Nixon’s strategy of “lose and stay in.”

Today in Afghanistan, the pertinent question is what we seek to prevent, not what we seek to achieve. Making Afghanistan serene and peaceful does not constitute a legitimate American geopolitical interest. Instead, we face two principal threats.
Taliban’s Return To Power

First, the Taliban’s return to power throughout Afghanistan would re-create the prospect of the country being used as a base of operations for international terrorism. It is simply unacceptable to allow the pre-2001 status quo to re-emerge.

Second, a post-9/11 goal (at least one better understood today) is the imperative of preventing a Taliban victory in Afghanistan that would enable Pakistani Taliban or other terrorist groups to seize control in Islamabad. Not only would such a takeover make all Pakistan yet another terrorist sanctuary, but if its large nuclear arsenal fell to terrorists, we would immediately face the equivalent of Iran and North Korea on nuclear steroids. Worryingly, Pakistan’s military, especially its intelligence arm, is already thought to be controlled by radical Islamists.

Given terrorism’s global spread since 9/11 and the risk of a perfect storm — the confluence of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction — the continuing threats we face in the Afghan arena are even graver than those posed pre-9/11. Accordingly, abandoning the field in Afghanistan is simply not a tenable strategy.

However, accomplishing America’s goals does not require remaking Afghanistan’s government, economy or military in our image. Believing that only “nation building” in Afghanistan could ultimately guard against the terrorist threat was mistaken. For too long, it distracted Washington and materially contributed to the decline in American public support for a continuing military presence there, despite the manifest need for it.

There is no chance that the Trump administration will pursue “nation building” in Afghanistan, as the president has repeatedly made clear. Speaking as a Reagan administration alumnus of USAID, I concur. We should certainly continue bilateral economic assistance to Afghanistan, which, strategically applied, has served America well in countless circumstances during the Cold War and thereafter. But we should not conflate it with the diaphanous prospect of nation building.

Nor should we assume that the military component in Afghanistan must be a repetition or expansion of the boots-on-the-ground approach we have followed since the initial assault on the Taliban. Other alternatives appear available and should be seriously considered, including possibly larger U.S. military commitments of the right sort.

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The Real Lessons from Charlottesville by Ruthie Blum

By on August 16th, 2017

Although Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules the Gaza Strip, is shunned by U.S. negotiators, Fatah, the party headed by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, is considered a potential partner for peace with Israel.

Official Fatah social media pages, however, openly laud and encourage “lone wolves” to arm themselves with knives and vehicles with which to slaughter Israelis whenever and wherever possible.

Abbas and his henchmen in the PA do not allow freedom of expression. They do not “weep” over the “thuggish” and “deliberately murderous” conduct of their populace. Instead, they champion it and fund it. A Palestinian who uses his car as a deadly weapon is viewed by his peers and rulers as a hero. Physical violence is officially sanctioned and rewarded. An American who commits violence is demonized by everyone other than a handful of hard-core bigots.

A day before the car-ramming attack in Charlottesville, Virginia — which left 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead and 19 others wounded — the White House announced that it would be dispatching President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and special adviser, Jared Kushner, Special Adviser on International Affairs Jason Greenblatt, and Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategy Dina Powell to the Middle East for the second time since June.

The stated purpose of their trip, the scheduled date of which has yet to be disclosed, is to revive the peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). Justifiably, the Trump administration’s declaration that it would resume efforts to broker negotiations between Jerusalem and Ramallah was drowned out by the events in Charlottesville.

The act of domestic terrorism, committed by 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio, mimicked a choice method employed by Palestinian organizations Hamas and Fatah in Israel, and ISIS in Europe. The car-ramming so horrified the American public that it instantly became the key issue of the day, with candlelight vigils and memorials held across the country — indicating mass consensus that such abhorrent behavior is anathema to American values and will not be tolerated.

James Alex Fields rams his car into a crowd of “antifa” marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12. (Image source: Al Jazeera video screenshot)

The otherwise universal condemnation of the Charlottesville clashes between the “Alt-Right” and extreme “Antifa” (short for anti-Fascist) movements — sparked by the city’s decision to remove a statue of Civil War Confederate General Robert. E. Lee from Emancipation Park — has, however, been clouded in two points of controversy.

One involves the fact that, while dubbed “Unite the Right,” the protest was actually a gathering of neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and other racists, xenophobes and anti-Semites — most, it turned out, imported from out-of-state.

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