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https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-china-block-u-n-sanctions-over-syria-chemical-weapons-use-1488315139

UNITED NATIONS—Russia and the U.S. clashed openly at the Security Council over a Syria sanctions resolution, a confrontation signaling Washington and Moscow don’t see eye to eye on some of the world’s top security crises.

The U.S. on Tuesday accused Russia of covering for Syria’s use of chemical weapons, and Russia accused the U.S. of using false pretenses to impose sanctions to try to topple Syria’s government.

The tense exchange mirrored those between Russia and previous U.S. administrations, offering a telling look at deep divisions that remain even as President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, President Vladimir Putin, have vowed to improve ties.

New U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who arrived in late January, has held close to core American policies when it comes to differences with Russia on Ukraine and Syria. On two previous occasions, in early February and last week, Ms. Haley assailed Russia at the Security Council for what she called its “aggressive actions” and “destabilizing” role in Ukraine.

On Tuesday, Ms. Haley went a step further, directly confronting Russia and China over their positions, saying they were taking an indefensible stance by putting the protection of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime ahead of global security.

“It is a sad day on the Security Council when member states start making excuses for other member states killing their own people,” Ms. Haley said. She added the vote signaled to the world that allies of Russia and China would be protected even if they kill their own people.

U.S. allies at the U.N. welcomed the comments, having feared that even the smallest U.S. policy shift toward Russia would have significant impact on issues such as Syria, Europe, counterterrorism and Iran.

But it further dimmed any likelihood of an early rapprochement between Moscow and Washington. The U.S. on Tuesday also countered a Russian assertion that a summit is being planned between Messrs. Trump and Putin, amid growing questions in Washington about contacts between associates of the president and the Kremlin.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said practical preparations have started for a meeting between the two leaders, but added there was “no agreement yet as to the time and place,” Russian news agencies reported.

A senior U.S. official, however, said no preparations are under way.

Mr. Trump’s election had raised hopes in Moscow that the U.S. government would move to roll back sanctions imposed after the Russian government annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and gave support to separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Mr. Putin said in a congratulatory note he hoped Russia and the U.S. could work as equals following years of strained ties with President Barack Obama’s White House. Mr. Trump—who has long expressed admiration for the Russian leader—enjoyed overwhelmingly positive coverage on Russian state-controlled television. CONTINUE AT SITE

Once again, an American has pointed to a failing in European society, and instead of focusing on the problem identified or even admitting that there is a problem, the European response has been to point at the American and blame him for creating the problem he has in fact merely identified.

We are being given an accurate representation of a serious problem.

If the response to every problem is denial, and the response to anyone pointing to the problem is opprobrium, legal threats or hilarity, it suggests that Europe is not going to make the softer-landing it could yet give itself in addressing these issues.

It might make us feel better, but every time we attack or laugh at the messenger, rather than addressing the message, we ensure that our own future will be less funny.

How can one excavate the minds of so many European officials and the extraordinary mental gymnastics of denial to which they have become prone?

One of the finest demonstrations of this trend occurred in January 2015, after France was assailed by Islamist gunmen in the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and then in a Jewish supermarket. In the days after those attacks, Fox News in the U.S. ran an interview with a guest who said that Paris, and France, as a whole, had “no-go zones” where the authorities — including emergency services — did not dare to go. In the wake of these comments, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, chose to make a stand. She announced that she was suing Fox News because the “honour of Paris” was at stake.

It appeared that Mayor Hidalgo was rightly concerned about the image of her city around the world, presumably worrying in particular about the potential effects on tourism.

Of course, Mayor Hidalgo’s priorities were all wrong. The reason Paris’s public relations suffered a dent was not because of what a pundit said on Fox News one evening, but because of the mass murder of journalists and Jews on the streets of the “City of Light.” Any potential tourist would be much more concerned about getting caught up in a terrorist firefight than a war of words. Mayor Hidalgo’s manoeuvre, however, turned out not to be a rarity, but a symptom of a wider problem.

Consider the almost precise replay of that 2015 episode after U.S. President Donald Trump referred in a speech to “what’s happening last night in Sweden.” Much of the press immediately seized the opportunity to claim that Trump had asserted that a terrorist attack had occurred the night before in Sweden. This allowed them to laugh at the alleged ignorance of the president and the alleged concoction of what has become known as “fake news.” Except that it swiftly became obvious to anyone who cared that what the president was referring to — a documentary film about the situation in Sweden that had aired the night before on Fox News — showed the extent of the lawlessness in parts of Sweden. While every authority in Sweden was laughing at Donald Trump, a day after his comments. residents of Rinkeby, a suburb of Stockholm, obligingly had a car-burning riot and attacked police.

According to a 2016 investigation by Balkan journalists Marko Vesovic, Vladimir Otasevic and Hasan Haydar Diyab, the Montenegrin government is indirectly involved in the funding of Islamic terrorism.

Charges were dropped due to former PM and President Milo Đukanović’s diplomatic immunity, but not before he admitted his involvement in the criminal enterprise. In other words, while Đukanović was signing the accession protocol with NATO, boatloads of illegal cigarettes from Montenegro were apparently making their way into ISIS-controlled areas.

For all his talk of rethinking America’s foreign commitments, it appears that President Donald Trump has also made the decision to endorse Montenegro’s membership bid.

While Đukanović stepped down in October in favor of Duško Marković, a former intelligence chief and a close ally, he is widely believed to be the power behind the throne and to be planning a comeback in the 2018 presidential elections.

Between its apparent links to the funding Islamic terrorism, its flawed democracy, and its still-insufficiently developed army, Montenegro is not yet a reliable partner for the West.

Does a country involved in financing Islamic terrorism deserve to be invited to join the world’s biggest military alliance, and receive all the perks that come with it? Many may argue this is the case with the small Balkan state of Montenegro, whose NATO membership will soon be taken up for consideration by the U.S. Senate.

According to a 2016 investigation by Balkan journalists Marko Vesovic, Vladimir Otasevic and Hasan Haydar Diyab, the Montenegrin government is indirectly involved in the funding of Islamic terrorism. More precisely, between 2013 and 2015, 3.5 million kilograms of cigarettes were illegally delivered from the Montenegrin port of Bar to Libyan areas under the control of terrorists close to al-Qaeda and ISIS. And such a movement of cargo would not have been possible, they claim, without the explicit endorsement of high-ranking Montenegrin officials. According to Vesovic, in an interview with Sputnik News, the former Montenegrin prime minister and president Milo Đukanović, who kept himself in power for the past quarter of a century (until 2016), would be himself a case in point.[1]

As revealed by Italian prosecutors in 2001, it seems that Đukanović was involved in the smuggling of cigarettes around the Adriatic by Italian crime syndicates in the 1990s. Charges were dropped due to Đukanović’s diplomatic immunity, but not before he admitted his involvement in the criminal enterprise. According to Vesovic:

“The same Montenegrin elite is (now) involved in a very complex system of organized crime, based on the smuggling of cigarettes to North Africa. In the 1990s they were smuggled to Italy…. Now, as we see, they found a new market.”

In every Muslim-majority country, especially in the Middle East, the Islamic terrorist genie came out from under the ashes, built the Islamic state and threatened the West — both with terrorist operations and from inside, in a more surreptitious, seemingly peaceful manner, as the Muslim Brotherhood does.

It is important to understand that Islam is a religion that includes, in its structure, political power that governs and controls and spreads the force of arms.

US President Donald J. Trump has succeeded in naming a jihadi problem, political Islam, but it is hard to single out defective products from the factory without closing the factory — if one does not want them to appear again.

This does not mean that what Trump intends to do is not important; on the contrary, we need him after most Western politicians faced Islamic terrorism awkwardly, if they faced it at all. Sometimes they even cooperated with these terrorist organizations, invited their members to the White House; to Iftar dinners during Ramadan, and hugging what they falsely call “moderate Islam” — especially the Muslim Brotherhood, the incubator that most terrorist organizations come out of — instead of the true “moderate Muslims” who have been struggling to be heard above the crush of “influence,” infiltration and petro-dollars.

We can say that so far “Trumps’s recipe” for facing radical Islam had been tried before and failed. Dictatorships and military regimes in the Middle East, such as the presidents of Egypt Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, and now el-Sisi, faced political and radical Islam. Russia did, and Saddam did in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, Bourguiba in Tunisia and others.

Perhaps the saddest failure is the Turkish model. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk built a dictatorship-state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. He decisively confronted all forms of political Islam, and destroyed the military wing of the army that dreamed of restoring that Empire. Atatürk founded a dictatorship guarded by the army’s broad powers, but within a constitutional and legal framework, to deter Islamists who might want to change his modernist structure. It was also meant to stop any move to Islamic rule that might want to change the relatively open and pro-Western ideas of the Kemalist Republic.