RUTHFULLY YOURS

“It’s not clear to me why the Secretary of State wishes to at once usurp the powers of the Congress and then to derail his boss’s rapprochement with the Israeli government.” — Foreign policy operative, quoted in the Washington Free Beacon.

Since he was sworn in as Secretary of State on February 1, Rex Tillerson and his advisors at the State Department have made a number of statements and policy decisions that contradict President Trump’s key campaign promises on foreign policy, especially regarding Israel and Iran.

“Tillerson was supposed to clean house, but he left half of them in place and he hid the other half in powerful positions all over the building. These are career staffers committed to preventing Trump from reversing what they created.” — Veteran foreign policy analyst, quoted in the Free Beacon.

The U.S. State Department has backed away from a demand that Israel return $75 million in military aid which was allocated to it by the U.S. Congress.

The repayment demand, championed by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, was described as an underhanded attempt by the State Department to derail a campaign pledge by U.S. President Donald J. Trump to improve relations with the Jewish state.

The dispute is the just the latest example of what appears to be a growing power struggle between the State Department and the White House over the future direction of American foreign policy.

The controversy goes back to the Obama administration’s September 2016 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Israel, which pledged $38 billion in military assistance to Jerusalem over the next decade. The MOU expressly prohibits Israel from requesting additional financial aid from Congress.

Congressional leaders, who said the MOU violates the constitutional right of lawmakers to allocate U.S. aid, awarded Israel an additional $75 million in assistance in the final appropriations bill for fiscal year 2017.

Tillerson had argued that Israel should return the $75 million in order to stay within the limits established by the Obama administration. The effort provoked a strong reaction from Congress, which apparently prompted Tillerson to back down.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) “strongly warned the State Department that such action would be unwise and invite unwanted conflict with Israel,” according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Speaking to the Washington Examiner, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) added:

“As Iran works to surround Israel on every border, and Hezbollah and Hamas rearm, we must work to strengthen our alliance with Israel, not strain it. Congress has the right to allocate money as it deems necessary, and security assistance to Israel is a top priority. Congress is ready to ensure Israel receives the assistance it needs to defend its citizens.”

A veteran congressional advisor told the Free Beacon:

“This is a transparent attempt by career staffers in the State Department to f*ck with the Israelis and derail the efforts of Congressional Republicans and President Trump to rebuild the US-Israel relationship. There’s no reason to push for the Israelis to return the money, unless you’re trying to drive a wedge between Israel and Congress, which is exactly what this is. It won’t work.”

Another foreign policy operative said: “It’s not clear to me why the Secretary of State wishes to at once usurp the powers of the Congress and then to derail his boss’s rapprochement with the Israeli government.”

If the nation weren’t already in a foul political mood, it would still be a special kind of hell to have to suffer through the Bitter Betty Book Tour. But the two things combined together is just so 2017.

If you haven’t noticed, Hillary Clinton is making the rounds to promote her political alibi, What Happened. After watching some of her interviews, it seems apparent that Hillary’s book’s title is giving voice to the question that haunts the old gal day and night (except in her head it probably sounds more like “WHAT THE F*CK HAPPENED?!”). How did one of the best “on-paper” candidates with nearly $1 billion behind her effort still manage to lose the presidency to Donald Trump?

In a lengthy interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday night, Clinton reprised her role of victim, martyr, and hero. This is the same Hillary Clinton we have watched for 25 years. Whether it was her failed health care plan, her husband’s infidelity and subsequent impeachment, her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama, her unforgivable handling of the Benghazi terror attacks or her basement email server, Hillary is the best finger-pointer in a business filled with shysters who have Ph.D.s in Finger-Pointing from Low Politics U.

During the 40-minute pity party, Hillary tried to explain why she is on Cooper’s therapy couch instead of in the Oval Office. She identifies at least a dozen culprits in her Blame Game. The answer to her book’s central question (primal scream?) seems to amount to this:

After Bernie Sanders failed to unify the party—although it was clear in March that I would be the nominee—the Russians went online pretending to be Americans and make up bad stories about me, then they bought Facebook ads at the same time Wikileaks made John Podesta’s risotto-making emails public to cover-up Trump’s p*ssy comments and Jim Comey released his letter that swayed suburban Republican women to vote against me, but all Republicans were undergoing “heavy rationalization” because they wanted tax cuts and a Supreme Court nominee and whatnot, but then again some people didn’t vote which makes me mad and there was rampant voter suppression, endemic sexism and misogyny, and the idiot media. But the worst is the Electoral College amirite? Because it is an anachronism designed for another time . . . and oh, yeah, did I mention Russia?

Clinton pats herself on the back for braving Trump’s inauguration, humblebragging about how she attended out of a sense of duty to our country: “Look, I am afflicted with the responsibility gene. I did the right thing. I knew I had to go. I went to the lunch afterwards, I did everything you’re supposed to do.” She Went to Lunch should be the new, She Persisted.

Clinton bashes Trump’s inauguration speech as “divisive” and a “cry from the white nationalist gut” while again reminding anyone who has been living off the grid since November 8 that Trump did not win the most votes: “He didn’t win the popular vote, he squeaked through in the Electoral College. He had a chance to really fill the role [as president] and it didn’t happen that day.”

Aside from excuse-making and finger-pointing, that signature Clintonesque pathos is Hillary’s most unappealing characteristic. While she cloaks her agenda in the ruse of trying to help future female candidates navigate the bumpy road of electoral politics, this is clearly all about her. Her brand is bitterness, not empowerment. She complains to Cooper that she wants to explore what happened in the election because “I hope nobody ever faces what I faced.”

What is that, exactly? A rigged primary election designed to hand her the nomination? A powerful political structure—three decades in the making—that mostly capitalized on her husband’s name? An obsequious and dishonest national media committed to her victory? (Despite what she says about Trump’s news coverage, take a look at every major newspaper endorsement leading up to Election Day.) Hundreds of millions in easy campaign donations, not to mention immense personal wealth?

Future candidates can only dream of having her good fortune.

America is experiencing a diversity and inclusion conundrum—which, in historical terms, has not necessarily been a good thing. Communities are tearing themselves apart over the statues of long-dead Confederate generals. Controversy rages over which slogan—“Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter”—is truly racist. Antifa street thugs clash with white supremacists in a major American city. Americans argue over whether the USC equine mascot “Traveler” is racist, given the resemblance of the horse’s name to Robert E. Lee’s mount “Traveller.” Amid all this turmoil, we forget that diversity was always considered a liability in the history of nations—not an asset.

Ancient Greece’s numerous enemies eventually overran the 1,500 city-states because the Greeks were never able to sublimate their parochial, tribal, and ethnic differences to unify under a common Hellenism. The Balkans were always a lethal powder keg due to the region’s vastly different religions and ethnicities where East and West traditionally collided—from Roman and Byzantine times through the Ottoman imperial period to the bloody twentieth century. Such diversity often caused destructive conflicts of ethnic and religious hatred. Europe for centuries did not celebrate the religiously diverse mosaic of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians, but instead tore itself apart in a half-millennium of killing and warring that continued into the late twentieth century in places like Northern Ireland.

In multiracial, multiethnic, and multi-religious societies—such as contemporary India or the Middle East—violence is the rule in the absence of unity. Even the common banner of a brutal communism could not force all the diverse religions and races of the Soviet Union to get along. Japan, meanwhile, does not admit many immigrants, while Germany has welcomed over a million, mostly young Muslim men from the war-torn Middle East. The result is that Japan is in many ways more stable than Germany, which is reeling over terrorist violence and the need for assimilation and integration of diverse newcomers with little desire to become fully German.

History offers only a few success stories when it comes to diversity. Rome, for one, managed to weld together millions of quite different Mediterranean, European, and African tribes and peoples through the shared ideas of Roman citizenship (civis Romanus sum) and equality under the law. That reality endured for some 500 years. The original Founders of the Roman Republic were a few hundred thousand Latin-speaking Italians; but the inheritors of their vision of Roman Republican law and constitutionalism were a diverse group of millions of people all over the Mediterranean.

History’s other positive example is the United States, which has proven one of the only truly diverse societies in history to remain fairly stable and unified—at least so far. Although the Founders are now caricatured as oppressive European white men, they were not tribal brutes. The natural evolution of their unique belief that all men are created equal is today’s diverse society, where different people have managed, until recently, to live together in relatively harmony and equality under the law.

Months of mounting frustration with the lack of progress in the Republican-led Congress drove President Donald Trump to cut legislative deals with top Democrats, according to White House officials, raising the prospect of future collaborations on subjects from immigration to a tax overhaul to spending bills.

In the past week, Mr. Trump has held two private sessions at the White House in which the Democratic congressional leaders walked away with either a deal or a path to one—largely on their own terms. Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans were stunned by the shift from the president—whose chief interest is in jump-starting the stalled legislative agenda, say White House officials.

In one recent White House session, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was listening to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin beseech congressional leaders to raise the debt ceiling to steady U.S. markets, and the California Democrat grew impatient.

“Wall Street is one thing. You’re used to that world,” Mrs. Pelosi told Mr. Trump and Mr. Mnuchin. “Here the vote is the currency of the realm. It’s all about having the votes.”

In an interview Friday, Mrs. Pelosi said of the White House and Republican leaders: “They don’t have the votes.” She added: “Here we are in the minority…and we’re dealing from strength because they don’t have the votes.”

Mr. Trump has made clear that he is willing to use those Democratic votes to get legislation passed after splits in Republican ranks stymied his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, White House officials said.

In meetings, he has been apt to criticize legislative leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), for taking a summer recess with so much unfinished business, and to complain of betrayals by GOP lawmakers whose votes he thought were locked in, White House aides said.

One senior White House official described an Oval Office meeting in which Mr. Trump said to him: “What’s wrong with you Republicans?” The official said of Mr. Trump: “Every time I’m in there, he’s like, ‘The Senate can’t get anything done. Why isn’t Mitch working? Why did they go home?’ ”

Mr. Trump now is courting Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Mrs. Pelosi to see if he can propel tax, budget and immigration plans before Congress turns its attention to the 2018 midterm elections.

It’s unclear whether these new partnerships will endure. He once called Mr. Schumer a “clown” and Mrs. Pelosi “incompetent.” Still, “his No. 1 priority is to get the best deal: China, North Korea, Iran, Congress, Republican, Democrat—he’s about deals,” said Sean Spicer, former White House press secretary. “That’s it.”

Immigration has divided the Republican and Democratic parties a lot more than it has united them. That equation was scrambled this week when President Trump had dinner with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and emerged with the outlines of a deal on Dreamers. The WSJ’s Gerald F. Seib breaks down the odds of bipartisanship on immigration.