RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.steynonline.com/9730/the-language-of-losing

The eighteenth anniversary of 9/11 was marked by the Administration inviting the Taliban to Camp David, and by the resignation and/or firing of John Bolton as National Security Advisor – which two events may not be unconnected. Because really, when the Taliban are running around Camp David, who needs national security?

For the fifteen years after the launch of SteynOnline in 2002, we re-posted every year on this date material of mine from September 11th 2001 and the days we followed. Two years ago, we ceased that policy, for reasons I discussed on Clubland Q&A:

If this is a war, there’s no agreement on what we’re up against: Terrorism? Islamic terrorism? Islamic extremism? Islam? Whatever it is, a president who, on the campaign trail, mocked his predecessor’s inability to use the words “radical Islam” himself eschewed all mention of the I-word today. September 11th 2001 was supposedly “the day everything changed” – if by “everything changed” you mean “the rate of mass Muslim immigration to the west doubled”. As that absurd statistic suggests, we are not where I thought we would be 16 years on: We run around fighting for worthless bits of barren sod like Helmand province in Afghanistan, while surrendering day by day some of the most valuable real estate on the planet, such as France and Sweden.

That last point may seem obvious. But, if it is, it’s a truth all but entirely unacknowledged by anyone who matters in the western world. I subsequently expanded on it, in a piece we called “The Language of Losing” and which appears to have been succeeded by “The Actions of Losers” – such as inviting the Taliban to Camp David. Hey, why not for the ceremonies in Lower Manhattan? On yet another wretched anniversary I mourn not only the dead of that grim day, but our loss of purpose. All that has changed two years on is that for “sixteenth anniversary” we substitute “eighteenth” – and on and on into the future:

In any war, you have to be able to prioritize: You can’t win everything, so where would you rather win? Raqqa or Rotterdam? Kandahar or Cannes? Yet, whenever some guy goes Allahu Akbar on the streets of a western city, the telly pundits generally fall into one of two groups: The left say it’s no big deal, and the right say this is why we need more boots on the ground in Syria or Afghanistan. Yesterday President Trump said he was committed to ensuring that terrorists “never again have a safe haven to launch attacks against our country”.

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/460829-two-names-who-would-give-trump-an-all-star-security-team-after-bolton

Love him or hate him, Donald Trump knows exactly what he wants when it comes to foreign policy. He wants a clear definition of the American strategic interest across the globe and a commitment that war is always a tool of last resort. 

His stubborn loyalty to those two objectives sometimes is derided as nationalistic and non-interventionist by his critics.

But for those of us old enough to remember, those principles used to be endemic to U.S. foreign policy for decades, until Bill Clinton and Barack Obama took the Iranian appeasement bait and George W. Bush mispositioned America as the unrelenting, trigger-happy global cop.

The murky foreign policies of the past two decades moved America away from defining its strategic interest on each global issue to a more populist, hair-trigger approach, giving us such blunders as Bush’s bogus Iraq WMD claim and Obama’s feckless erosion of a red line in Syria.

With John Bolton’s departure as the president’s national security adviser on Tuesday, President Trump has the rare opportunity to restore the American strategic interest to foreign policy and create a clear global doctrine to govern for years to come.

But it will require something he hasn’t always done well — picking the right people.