RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/11/john-boltons-art-of-the-non-deal/

What it takes to survive for long in the Trump White House would fill a tome that may command a seven-figure advance for whoever ends up being qualified to write it. But whatever now-ex National Security Adviser John Bolton ends up writing might solve an even more perplexing mystery: What is really at the heart of this president’s foreign policy?

It cannot be denied that Donald Trump is a hawk, despite his rhetoric sometimes indicating otherwise. He backed large increases in Pentagon spending during his first two years and this year focused on out-maneuvering the Democrats’ majority in the House on federal budget caps to get another increase for fiscal 2020, irking fiscal conservatives as well as dovish liberals. And, of course, Trump used force last year against Syria.

He has also risked military conflict with Iran over scrapping the nuclear deal President Barack Obama agreed to, driving the left to warn of a spiral of dire consequences.

But there is also the Donald Trump whose son-in-law Jared Kushner aspires to solve the unsolvable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Elements of Kushner’s proposal that were floated in June, despite its including a $50 billion handout, were rejected out of hand by Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas.

There is the Donald Trump who decided to be the first U.S. president to negotiate face-to-face with a North Korean ruler, despite the risks of it ending in monumental embarrassment for the United States. And who now seeks an open-ended meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, whose constant smile hides a long history of shrewdly practicing anti-Western deceit at the negotiating table.

It’s no secret to anyone that Trump likes to win at that same negotiating table, particularly when the odds are against victory. “One of the keys to thinking big is total focus,” his “The Art of The Deal,” written more than 30 years ago, says. “I think of it almost as a controlled neurosis, which is a quality I’ve noticed in many highly successful entrepreneurs.” In New York real estate, Trump adds, “you are dealing with some of the sharpest, toughest, and most vicious people in the world. I happen to love to go up against these guys, and I love to beat them.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274911/did-we-learn-anything-911-daniel-greenfield

Two things happened in 2001.

Islamic terrorists carried out their most successful attack on America with the murder of 2,977 people. And the number of immigrants obtaining permanent residency passed a million for the first time in a decade. Before 2001, a million plus was a streak that might linger for a few years before falling back.

These days it’s the new normal. Aside from one blip, we’ve been riding the million plus train for over a decade. The resistance to that trend is currently the one thing we seem to have learned from 9/11.

After decades of being massacred by terrorists who have come here as tourists, refugees and immigrants, we are finally trying to close the door on travelers from Islamic terrorist states.

And it only took 16 years.

That’s because learning nothing from the past has been our specialty.

“A flag bearing a crescent and star flies from a flagpole in front of the World Trade Center, next to a Christmas tree and a menorah,” The New York Times reported in 1997.

Four years earlier, Muslim terrorists had bombed the World Trade Center in an unsuccessful effort to bring down the towers. Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh at the center of the terror plot, had urged, “We . . . have been ordered with terrorism because we must prepare what power we can to terrorize the enemy of Allah and your enemy. The Koran says ‘to strike terror.’”