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May 2022

Will NATO Fight? by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18514/will-nato-fight

If NATO blood would in fact be spilt should Russia invade Poland or the Baltic states, why have we utterly rejected the prospect of spilling it to help protect Ukraine from Putin’s mass killings, torture, rape and destruction? Ukraine is not a NATO member and NATO states have no treaty obligation to come to its defence as they do to each other. But that is surely just a technicality, a few lines on a page. There is no practical or moral difference between protecting a friend who is a member of the alliance and one who is not.

[I]f nuclear terror applies to Ukraine, why doesn’t it apply to any NATO country that becomes the target of Russian military aggression? Why would NATO leaders fear Putin’s nukes any less if he takes a bite out of Poland or the Baltic states? The reality is, if it is true that NATO could not risk intervention over Ukraine for fear of Russian nuclear retaliation, it could not risk intervention over, say, Latvia for the same reason.

On top of that, every country in the West has capitulated to a concerted and systematic assault on its history, its virtue and its self-worth. Past glories are denigrated because they are not in line with 21st century wokeism… Governments, including defence and foreign ministries, the very people that must lead any fight against Russian attack, have succumbed to this sickness to the extent that even they abrogate their own past and repudiate their own present.

Meanwhile, in pursuit of a superstate, the European Union and its cheerleaders have been doing their level best to openly undermine and cancel national or patriotic spirit in member countries…

Can we expect Europeans to fight and die for countries whose histories and modern sense of worth have been roundly denounced and condemned by their own leaders?

No such feeling exists for the EU even as it seeks to replace national loyalty. Allegiance to Brussels is transactional and in only one direction. People ask not what they can do for the EU but what the EU can do for them. Of course many of our young people would fight for their country — with as much courage and commitment as their ancestors ever did — and we witness this whenever we send them into battle. But when the time comes to expand our forces, how many more will answer the call after being educated to despise their own country and the very notion of fighting for it?

If somehow the political and popular will to defend NATO member states did materialise, what would European countries fight with? Constantly expanding social welfare programmes have driven the military out of the marketplace across the continent.

While he remains in the Kremlin, Putin’s objective is the neutralisation of NATO. He knows that the alliance’s failure to fight for its own under his provocation would spell its final humiliation and signal the end of the US-led world order. For the liberty, prosperity and security of future generations, this cannot be allowed to happen.

This is not a rehearsal; it is a foretaste of the far greater threat that will be coming from President Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party.

Great Britain is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public enemy number one. In March the Kremlin branded UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson the most active anti-Russian leader. A few days ago on television, Putin’s propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov fancifully suggested Russia should drown Britain in a radioactive tsunami created by Poseidon nuclear torpedos that would leave survivors in “a radioactive desert, unfit for anything for a very long time”.

The Doctrine of American Unexceptionalism The Biden administration believes that soft power is smart and hard power is dumb. Our allies are paying the price. Michael Doran

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-doctrine-of-american-unexceptionalism?token=

Russian leader Vladimir Putin was supposed to have used his Victory Day speech yesterday to reveal his intentions regarding the Ukraine war. Russia watchers expected him to define his aims, signaling a prolonged conflict or, possibly, a path to peace. As it turned out, Putin did neither. His war against Ukraine drags on.

But although this week failed to clarify the future of the war in Europe, there is still a small chance that it will offer us some clarity on another front: Iran’s ongoing efforts to build a nuclear arsenal. Enrique Mora, the European Union’s Iran nuclear talks coordinator, is visiting Tehran today, May 10, seeking to break the deadlock in the negotiations between Iran and the United States. His mission might teach us whether Tehran has decided to cut a deal with President Biden. Chances are, however, that we will end the week as much in the dark about Tehran’s intentions as we are about Putin’s.

To help us understand why, I turn to Michael Doran, the author of today’s essay. Doran sees a connection between the way the Biden administration has approached both the Ukraine war and the conflict with Iran. Namely: in both cases the White House has profoundly weakened America’s diplomatic hand by shying away from traditional deterrence.

Doran has never gone along with the crowd. He first came on my radar in 2005, after what we would now call “woke” professors mobilized against his bid for tenure at Princeton. I liked him immediately.

He has a knack for writing topical articles that age well. His 2002 Foreign Affairs article on Osama bin Laden, “Somebody Else’s Civil War,” remains one of the best things written on al-Qaeda and radical Islam. When his 2015 piece, “Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy,” first came out, Doran’s view about Obama’s eagerness to please Iran was controversial. It’s now common wisdom. And last year, when Biden took office, he co-authored a piece in Tablet Magazine, “The Realignment,” which predicted that President Biden would zealously follow Obama’s Middle East playbook.

Today’s essay tries to make sense of this administration’s baffling foreign policy strategy, which seems to offer succor toward our enemies, like Iran and China, while isolating allies in the Gulf and Israel. As Doran explains, this is not borne out of incompetence, but out of a deeply held ideology about the trajectory of America and the West. — BW

A MIDGE DECTER SAMPLER

https://www.nysun.com/article/a-midge-decter-sampler?utm_content=The%20Evening%20Sun%3A%20Taliban%20

Following is a sampler of writing by Midge Decter, who died Monday at the age of 94:

— from “Belittling Sholom Aleichem’s Jews,” Commentary, 1954:

“The truth is that ghetto Jewry was not pleased with itself at all. If it could be humorous, that was because it was sitting on a keg of spiritual dynamite and had no other way to protect itself against the big explosion. American Jews can afford to be pleased by the ghetto. Time and distance and indifference have settled most of its conflicts for us. And even we can only enjoy the ghetto by retroactively making of it something it was not quite: a new Jewish folk tradition.”

— from “A Commentary Report: Women at Work,” Commentary, 1961:

“The question of why it is that the American women can find it preferable to do any amount of routine drudgery on some assembly line or behind some sales counter rather than involve herself in all the physical details of caring for her husband and children has become a matter of grave concern to observers of American society — and even to herself. For her new pattern of living is undoubtedly plunging this country into a domestic crisis of major proportions, from which it will emerge with a good number of traditional family arrangements no longer intact.”

— from “The Strangely Polite ‘Dr. Strangelove,’” Commentary, 1964:

“‘Dr. Strangelove’ makes no overt political gestures in the end, but it does make a few covert ones. Indeed, for a work that so obviously regards itself, and that has been so readily taken, as a radical disruption of the going complacencies, ‘Dr. Strangelove’ is strangely polite in its choice of enemies: Jack D. Ripper is not only crazy, he is right-wing crazy; Buck Turgidson is not only sappy, he is sappy on the side of established military power; and the mad scientist, Dr. Strangelove, is a Nazi. No liberals are ridiculed in this ‘anarchic’ movie, unless one considers President Muffley a liberal, and even then he comes off relatively well. Nor was Kubrick quite daring enough to have risked portraying his nuclear strategist as a Jew — not a Nazi, but a refugee, in fact, from Hitler, as so many real-life nuclear strategists are.”

Biden’s Jerusalem itinerary, White House meeting with Abdullah concern Israelis

https://www.urshalimvoice.com/bidens-jerusalem-itinerary-white-house-meeting-with-abdullah-concern-israelis/

U.S. President Joe Biden’s expected White House meeting this week with Jordanian King Abdullah over the Temple Mount and a proposed visit to eastern Jerusalem without an Israeli escort on his first trip to the 

country since coming into office,could symbolize a change in U.S. policy that concerns Israelis.

The Jordanian monarch is arriving in Washington Monday. The meeting with the president will focus in part on the recent flare-up of violence at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and on attempts to reduce the subsequent 

Palestinian-Israeli tensions, a senior Jordanian official told Walla News.

Pushing their self-proclaimed role as “custodians” of the holy site, Jordanian leaders blamed Israel for police measures taken to prevent Palestinian rioters from injuring visitors to the Mount and below at the 

Western Wall. They publicized a list of demands, including that the Jordanian-funded Waqf (Islamic trust) administrators on the Mount should be in charge of security instead of the Israeli police and be given the right to pre-approve non-Muslim visitors.

According to a government readout of a call Biden made to Abdullah during the Ramadan violence last month, he “recognized the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s role as the custodian of Muslim holy places in Jerusalem” and called for preservation of the “status quo” on the Mount.

Israeli leaders have pushed back and said only Israel would decide what happens in their capital.

Taliban Afghanistan Keeps Getting Worse Americans still can’t get out as restrictions on women increase.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-keeps-getting-worse-burqa-mandate-special-visa-interpreters-biden-blinken-women-rights-

Though it gets little Western coverage these days, Afghanistan continues to regress. On Saturday the ruling Taliban ordered all women to fully cover themselves in public. This is a tragedy for the women and men of Afghanistan, and it’s a reminder of the nightmare for the Americans still trapped there.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently testified on Capitol Hill that 126 Americans remain in Afghanistan. He added that 37 seek to leave and are being assisted by the State Department. A congressional source told us that the figure may underestimate the number of U.S. citizens who want to get out, as some want to leave but need to get their affairs in order first.

Mr. Blinken noted that the U.S. had helped more than 600 American citizens leave the country since the end of August, but hundreds have come forward since the panicked withdrawal ended. The process has been uneven: Some freedom-of-movement issues are resolved, then others spring up. Leaving the country remains difficult.

The Administration vows to assist any Americans who want to leave. But that is the least it can do after the rushed retreat and the casual approach to evacuations that preceded it.

China Accelerates Nuclear Buildup, Military Modernization; Biden Speeding U.S. to Defeat by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18472/china-nuclear-buildup

“The PRC likely intends to have at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, exceeding the pace and size the DoD projected in 2020.” — Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2021, US Dept. of Defense.

“In space, China is putting up satellites at twice the rate of the United States and “fielding operational systems at an incredible rate.” — General David Thompson, the Space Force’s first vice chief of space operations, quoted in The Washington Post, November 30, 2021.

“Look at what they [CCP) have today…. We’re witnessing one of the largest shifts in global geostrategic power that the world has witnessed.” — General Mark Milley, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, breakingdefense.com, November 4, 2021.

“[T]he Chinese are building up their military capabilities in space, cyberspace, and in the conventional force. It’s all happening at the same time.” — Timothy Heath, senior international and defense researcher at Rand Corporation, Business Insider, January 4, 2022.

“To fully assess the China threat, it is also necessary to consider the capability of the associated delivery system, command and control, readiness, posture, doctrine and training. By these measures, China is already capable of executing any plausible nuclear employment strategy within their region and will soon be able to do so at intercontinental ranges as well.” ­­— Admiral Charles Richard, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, Senate Committee on Armed Services, April 20, 2021.

There is now as well the added probability of China and Russia engaging in military coordination…. a strategic partnership of “no limits” and with “no forbidden areas” in an agreement that they said was aimed at countering the influence of the United States.

This cooperation has already seen China undermining Western sanctions on Russia and supplying Russian President Vladimir Putin with the lifeline he needs to continue his war in Ukraine.

“The friendship between the two peoples is iron clad.” — Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Associated Press, March 7, 2022.

“For the first time in our history, the nation is on a trajectory to face two nuclear-capable, strategic peer adversaries at the same time, who must be deterred differently.” ­­— Admiral Charles Richard, Senate Committee on Armed Services, April 20, 2021.

[T]his is NOT the time for the US to cancel the sea-launched nuclear cruise missile (SLCM-N), as President Joe Biden plans to do.

Meanwhile, Biden’s proposed defense budget risks speeding the US to defeat by insufficiently taking into account the current skyrocketing inflation, as acknowledged in early April by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Pentagon comptroller Mike McCord. “This budget assumes an inflation rate of 2.2%, which is obviously incorrect because it’s almost 8%,” said Milley. “Because the budget was produced quite a while ago, those calculations were made prior to the current inflation rate.”

“Nearly every dollar of increase in this budget will be eaten by inflation. Very little, if anything, will be left over to modernize and grow capability.” — Representative Mike Rogers, (R-Ala.) House Armed Services Committee, Defense News, April 5, 2022.

Amidst Multiple Crises, Biden’s DHS Releases Children’s Coloring Book By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/06/amidst-multiple-crises-bidens-dhs-releases-childrens-coloring-book/

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently released a coloring book for children, even as the agency faces widespread criticism for failing to handle a number of domestic crises.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the book is titled Jobs We Do. The book features 14 different images that children can color in, each depicting the kind of work that DHS agents engage in. Images include a man in a biohazard suit, a TSA dog at an airport, and a hurricane warning over a map of the United States. The book, the first of its kind in the history of the DHS, was published by the agency’s “Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer.”

An anonymous senior staffer at DHS, speaking to the Beacon, described the book as “laughable.”

“It makes a lot of sense that [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is just standing there not doing anything,” the staffer said. “But if they wanted to make it more realistic, they’d have ICE handing over families to NGOs to board planes destined for secret locations across the U.S. interior.”

Under Joe Biden’s watch, the DHS has presided over the largest mass migration crisis in modern history. After Biden openly campaigned on an open-borders approach and supporting mass amnesty and federal handouts for those who come into America illegally, hordes of illegals have stormed the border since he came to power in January of 2021. In March, there were over 220,000 illegal border crossings, the highest yet since Biden took office.

The Exasperated American Will the voters channel their furor at this regime of lies into an unprecedented turnout at the polls in November?  By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/08/the-exasperated-american/

A large majority of Americans now have no confidence in Joe Biden and his administration, which often polls below 40 percent, with negatives nearing 60 percent.

Despite the 15-month catastrophe of his regime, the level of his own unpopularity remains understandable but still remarkable. After all, in 2020 voters already knew well of his cognitive deficits and the radicalism of his agenda. They saw both clearly starting in 2019 and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the primary debates, and the general election.

So what did Biden’s voters imagine would happen when a cognitively challenged president, controlled by hard-Left subordinates, entered office—other than what he has done?

Now, as then, the media is fused to the progressive agenda and does—and did—its best to turn a non-compos mentis Biden into a bite-your-lip centrist empath in the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” mode.

The American people know that on every occasion their president speaks, he will slur his words at best. At worst, he will have little idea where he is, where he has been, or what he is supposed to be saying or doing. When he is momentarily cognizant, he is at his meanest, or he simply makes things up.

Our new normal of a mentally incapacitated president is not entirely new in American history—Woodrow Wilson was an invalid during the last months of his presidency. But Wilson’s condition was well hidden. Quite novel is the idea that the American people know the man in the White House is cognitively disabled and simply expect him to confirm that bleak diagnosis each time he opens his mouth.

If Donald Trump exaggerated, Biden flat out lies daily. His most recent untruth was his assertion that the MAGA movement represents “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.” Biden cannot really believe that roughly half the country is now more dangerous than Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Weathermen, the American Nazi Party, the American Communist Party, and the Ku Klux Klan. And this comes from the mythically moderate “good old Joe from Scranton”?

Biden Taps Anti-Israel Activist, CNN Spouse as White House Press Sec Adam Kredo

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-taps-anti-israel-activist-cnn-spouse-as-white-house-press-sec/amp/

The White House announced on Thursday that Karine Jean-Pierre, a veteran anti-Israel activist who is married to CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux, will replace outgoing press secretary Jen Psaki, raising potential ethical quandaries.

The announcement drew celebratory headlines in the mainstream press: Jean-Pierre is the first black woman and openly gay person to serve in the role.

But her relationship with the CNN reporter raises ethical questions about her new role. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about whether Jean-Pierre would recuse herself in dealing with CNN. Malveaux’s colleagues include Valerie Jarrett’s daughter, CNN justice correspondent Laura Jarrett, and Israel ambassador Tom Nides’s wife, Virginia Moseley, who serves as CNN’s senior vice president of news gathering.

“Suzanne Malveaux will continue in her role as CNN national correspondent covering national/international news and cultural events but will not cover politics, Capitol Hill, or the White House while Karine Jean-Pierre is serving as White House press secretary,” a CNN spokesperson told the Washington Free Beacon.

Jean-Pierre’s anti-Israel past—which includes a stint as senior adviser and national spokeswoman for MoveOn.org, a far-left anti-Israel group that advocates for boycotts of the Jewish state—is raising red flags in the pro-Israel community. The selection of an Israel critic is also likely to further strain ties with the pro-Israel community and Israeli government, which already is strongly opposed to the Biden administration’s efforts to ink a new nuclear deal with Iran.

Jean-Pierre has been open about her animosity toward the Jewish state. She has accused Israel of committing “war crimes” and has backed efforts to boycott the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the United States’ most prominent pro-Israel lobbying shop, cheering Democrats in 2019 for boycotting the group’s annual gathering in Washington, D.C., for “boldly [choosing] to prioritize diplomacy and human rights over the power of a lobbying organization.” AIPAC, she claimed, helped the Trump administration “sabotage” the Iran nuclear deal and also “supported the group that’s credited with inspiring President Trump to enact the Muslim Ban and has been known to spread anti-Muslim racism.” She accused the group without evidence of trafficking in “severely racist, Islamophobic rhetoric.”

Idiot Grandson of Haitian General Explains Why He Hates the Constitution A guide to the unconstitutional ignorance of Elie Mystal. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/idiot-grandson-haitian-general-explains-why-he-daniel-greenfield/

Elie Mystal, the grandson of a Haitian general and the son of a lying politician, made headlines when he told the fellow constitutional scholars of The View, that the Constitution is “trash”.

The idiot racist son of a Haitian immigrant, whose gratitude for the country that took in his worthless family is only matched by his aptitude for wearing his hair like it was just caught in an exploding vacuum cleaner, was on tour to promote his book, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, by insulting the document that allows him to do so.

Despite (or because of) a degree from Harvard Law, Mystal can barely spell “Constitution”.

That hasn’t stopped MSNBC from having him on every 5 minutes to offer deep thoughts on how everything is racist, the Founding Fathers were dumb and the Constitution is terrible.

In his book, which seems to have been researched by reading random tweets, Mystal claims that our “current interpretation of the Second Amendment was invented by the National Rifle Association in the 1970s” because in “the 1960s, Republicans were all about gun control, because in the 1960s Black people thought that they should start carrying guns.”

It’s understandable that Mystal, whose father had just arrived from Haiti on a soccer scholarship in the sixties, knows nothing about American history. If you believe Mystal, the right to bear arms was something Republicans came up with in the sixties because they hated black people.