RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18681/iran-nuclear-deal-reasons

The EU partly wants the deal so it can buy oil and gas from the Iranian regime.

The EU also appears to want the nuclear deal in order not to lose its other economic relationships and trade with the ruling mullahs of Iran. Despite US sanctions, European countries are still trading with Iran; the Biden administration has yet to hold them accountable.

According to the Financial Tribune, Germany is Iran’s top trading partner, and Italy comes in second.

By reaching a nuclear deal, the Biden administration may think that it can claim a foreign policy accomplishment and a political victory, as the Obama administration did, by arguing — falsely — that it had finally curbed Iran’s nuclear program and prevented the Islamic Republic from obtaining nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, that was about as accurate as Obama’s claim – which he repeated 37 times — that “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.”

After the 2015 nuclear deal, however, the ruling mullahs of Iran were not only gifted a newfound global legitimacy. The removal of sanctions also generated billions of dollars in revenue for Iran’s military institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as for Iran’s militia and terror groups. The regime used those revenues to expand its influence throughout the region, especially in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq….The Iranian-armed Houthis ratcheted up their efforts to cause death and destruction in Yemen, and Hezbollah escalated its involvement and control of large swathes of Syrian territory. The region also saw a greater propensity for Houthi rocket launches at civilian targets in Saudi Arabia, the deployment of thousands of Hezbollah foot soldiers in Syria, and the constant bombardment of southern Israel with Hamas rockets funded by Iran.

The objective of any nuclear deal with a rogue state ought to be anchored in completely and permanently halting that regime from obtaining nuclear weapons. The objective should not be to further empower and embolden it, or to facilitate it becoming a nuclear state.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/all-miss-boris-johnson-united-kingdom-macaulay-byron/

“As I say, there is a lot to criticize about Boris’s performance. But he got a few big things right and his entertainment value was unparalleled. Boris’s hour strutting and fretting upon the stage reminds me of something Santayana says about the Englishman in Soliloquies in England. “It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.” Noted.”

I think that Thomas Babington Macaulay had the last word about Boris Johnson’s forced resignation as prime minister of the UK: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous,” Macaulay wrote, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”

Macaulay’s line needs to be slightly adjusted, it is true, because, ridiculous though public displays of puritanical moralism are, in this case it was mostly Boris’s colleagues in Parliament, not the public at large, that suffered that unbecoming fit of morality. Indeed, throughout it all, Boris — a politician with more élan than any prime minister since Margaret Thatcher — remained popular with the public. He was especially popular, I think, with the American public.

And why not? In the sea of squishy gray on gray that is the political establishment, Boris stood out as a vibrant, technicolor force of nature. He was probably better educated and more amusing than any PM since Churchill. It somehow seems appropriate that Macaulay made his famous comment in the context of a review of a book about Lord Byron. The scolds didn’t like Byron either.

On most of the big issues, I was at one with Boris. The biggest of the big issues, in my view, was Brexit. I do not think that partial recovery of British sovereignty would have happened absent his support.

https://mailchi.mp/da197e976039/shinzo-abe-japans-indispensable-conservative?e=7f5d6321a5

Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated today while electioneering, was his country’s indispensable man. Prime minister of Japan for much of this century, from 2006 to 2007 and 2012 to 2020, Abe’s stature on the world stage eclipsed that of other post-war Japanese leaders, just as his time in office surpassed them all.

For a taste of the shock of his murder, look back to the surprise and incredulity which met his resignation from office in the pandemic’s worst days. Plagued by a debilitating health condition which had earlier caused him to leave office in 2007, Abe concluded he did not have the stamina left to rule.

Outside observers of Japan — who had watched Abe consolidate domestic power, develop a new economic regime, and increasingly come to personify his country in foreign capitals — were left almost speechless. “What will his country do now?” they asked at that time.

For some, that might seem an absurd question. Japan is politically decorous, and notably stable. It is not normally beholden to rancor and political violence. Abe’s successors should have counted upon stable institutions and political deference to  give them the chance to run the country in their own ways.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18660/europe-scientists-china-military

“Western universities need to understand that Chinese military scientists have only one client, and that is the People’s Liberation Army.” — Meia Nouwens, researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Politiken, May 19, 2022.

“[T]here is an attempt to take as much knowledge as possible from our research communities back to China. In my home country, the Netherlands, there are researchers who have been working on artificial intelligence with Huawei instead of with NATO. It’s the world turned upside down.” — David van Weel, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges, Politiken, May 23, 2022

In one Danish case… a Chinese military engineer, saying that he came from a Chinese research institute that turned out to not exist, collaborated with Aalborg University in Denmark on advanced radar technology. The engineer was, instead, from the People’s Liberation Army Information Engineering University…. [T]he university did not take steps to vet the Chinese engineer’s credentials. — Politiken, November 30, 2021

“If you look at… 40 years ago, [the CCP] had zero satellites… They had no ICBMs… They had no nuclear weapons… They had no navy…. Look at what they 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 U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, breakingdefense.com, November 4, 2021.

British universities have accepted £240 million from Chinese institutions, many with links to the military, including £60 million from institutions sanctioned by the US government for supplying the Chinese military with fighter jets, communications technology and missiles. In… just six years, the number of research collaborations between scientists in the UK and Chinese institutes with deep connections to the country’s defense forces tripled to more than 1,000. — The Times, February 4, 2022.

[O]ne of the UK’s “foremost” high-tech weapons experts, Professor Clive Woodley at Imperial College London – one of the British universities that has received the most funding from China — had been freely working with China for years…. Most of Woodley’s research has been funded by the Ministry of Defence…. He has advised the MoD about many of its key lethal systems.” — David Rose, investigative journalist, Unherd, May 21, 2022.

“Adapting to a world affected by the rise of China is the single greatest priority for MI6” — Richard Moore, UK’s spy chief, head of MI6, Sky News, November 30, 2021.

New research done by Follow the Money, a Dutch platform for investigative journalism, and ten other European media outlets, found that European scientists have “shared militarily sensitive knowledge with the Chinese army on a large scale.”

The project, known as the China Science Investigation, collected a staggering 353,000 scientific collaborations between Europe and China and found that, of these, 2,994 have taken place with the Chinese military, defined as, “studies where scientists from Western European universities collaborated with Chinese colleagues directly linked to an institute that is part of the Chinese army.”

https://www.aol.com/news/japan-ex-leader-abe-reportedly-031004756-043411862.html

TOKYO (AP) — Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, an arch-conservative and one of the country’s most divisive figures, was shot and critically wounded during a campaign speech Friday in western Japan. He was airlifted to a hospital but officials said he was not breathing and his heart had stopped.

Police arrested the suspected gunman at the scene of the shocking attack in a country that’s one of the world’s safest and has some of the strictest gun control laws anywhere.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Abe was in “severe condition” and he hoped Abe will survive. He called the attack “dastardly and barbaric” and added that the crime occurring during the election campaign, which is the foundation of democracy, was absolutely unforgivable.

Kishida and his Cabinet ministers hastily returned to Tokyo from other campaign events around the country after the shooting. “I’m praying for former prime minister Abe’s survival from the bottom of my heart,” Kishida said at the prime minister’s office after he arrived on a defense helicopter from Yamagata.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18667/nato-family-blackmail

“I don’t know what Turkey’s trying to extract from them, but at the end of the day that’s what this is about. And maybe if we get in the game, they’ll want to extract from us too, which I will be vehemently opposed to. We don’t need for any extraction to take place or any concessions to take place to have two great democracies join NATO.” — US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (D-NJ), June 22, 2022.

Talking to Erdoğan in the language he understands best, in early June, the U.S. State Department and the European Commission expressed their support to Greece and its sovereignty over its islands of the eastern Aegean Sea, and called on Turkey to stop airspace violations and overflights, threats and provocative rhetoric.

That means, in Erdoğan’s language, further economic sanctions on Turkey. And further sanctions will mean Erdoğan’s chances for re-election will get even slimmer amid a punishing economic crisis.

Erdoğan controls 90% of the media in Turkey. That is a big asset in politics.

So, the whole choreography, from the beginning, was aimed at a domestic audience who would feel triumphant from Erdoğan’s victory over the infidels.

The “Nordics in NATO” issue is not entirely over. Full accession will require approval from all 30 NATO parliaments. This, and other future issues, will always give Erdoğan new leverage to blackmail the West’s strongest institution.

It was another happy time in Madrid, of half-baked, Kodak-moment pleasantries when the leaders of 30 NATO member states posed for the cameras with broad family smiles. They were on display for Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for having removed his veto against the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO. How did that happen? The stick.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/iran-regime-fires-irgc-intel-chief-arrests-senior-vijeta-uniyal/

Amid failed Iranian terrorist plots abroad and the assassination of several operatives linked to its nuclear weapons program, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s military and foreign terrorist arm, appears to be in total disarray.

News reports say that the Iranian regime fired the IRGC’s intelligence chief and arrested a senior IRGC commander on a charge of spying for Israel.

Hossein Taeb, who reportedly masterminded the recently foiled terror plot to kill Israeli nationals in Turkey, has been fired from the post of IRGC’s intelligence chief.

The Times of Israel noted, “Taeb was identified by Hebrew media last week as the Iranian official behind planned attacks on Israelis in Turkey.”

“The reports, citing Israeli security officials, said that Taeb was under intense pressure to carry out an attack, amid growing frustration in Iran over repeated Israeli successes in penetrating Iran’s most secret organizations,” the Israeli news website added.

Taeb’s plot was foiled last week after Israeli intelligence warned the Turkish authorities of an impending terror attack that led to the capture of several Iranian and local operatives in Istanbul.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/some_wonderful_news_out_ofwait_for_itsaudi_arabia.html

Trump may be gone from office, but the beneficial effects from the Abraham Accords just keep flowing (with a little help from both Obama and Biden).

For a long time, Saudi Arabia was one of the intellectual homes of antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment. The Wahabi clerics whom the Saudi royal house supported held a special animus for Jews and that animus infused education in Saudi Arabia. Now, though, Saudi Arabia is backing away from this hostility to Israel and its textbooks are reflecting the increasingly friendly relationship between the two nations.

Two things are responsible for the change to that dynamic. The first was that Barack Obama worked hard to set Iran on the road to being a nuclear power, something that terrified Saudi Arabia and pushed it closer to Israel. The second was Trump’s Abraham Accords, which sidelined the troublesome Palestinians and encouraged Muslim nations in the Middle East to make separate peace agreements with Israel for both profit and national security.

While Saudi Arabia never officially entered into an Abraham Accords agreement with Israel, Trump (and, I’ve heard, Jared Kushner, who had a good relationship with Prince Mohammed bin Salman) nevertheless managed to create a behind-the-scenes conduit between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The external pressures bringing these two nations together have become even stronger as Biden picks up where Obama left off in terms of sheltering Iran on its way to becoming fully nuclear.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18652/turkey-erdogan-aegean-trouble

Various opinion polls put [Erdoğan’s] popularity at less than 30%, compared to the 52% with which he won re-election in 2018.

Many Turks, although starving, are nevertheless proud that they have a leader who can confront the “infidel West” — including their traditional rival and neighbor, Greece. It is precisely this feeling that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose popularity has been plummeting in recent months, sees as a national weakness to stoke.

What should Erdoğan do, therefore, as former loyalists of his powerful Justice and Development Party (AKP) seem to be deserting en masse?

Erdoğan has already set the stage for the new episode of his theatrical extravaganza. His coalition partner, ultranationalist leader Devlet Bahçeli, claimed that U.S. military bases in Greece pose a “direct threat” to Turkish security… How could a peaceable NATO ally, Greece, pose a direct threat to another NATO member, Turkey, home to US military bases? Are US bases in Turkey a direct threat to Turkey?

Erdoğan did not mention that the same treaties also ban the militarization of Turkey’s islands in the Aegean Sea and Turkey’s Dardanelles and Bosporus straits.

Fortunately, all these theatrics are about barking, not biting. Turkey does not have the political, military or economic might to invade a member of the EU… Turkey invading Greece is not Russia invading Ukraine. Erdoğan is a gambler who has used the same tactic for domestic consumption many times before. The ruse never ended up in a war across the Aegean. This one is no exception: Erdoğan, whatever he is, is not suicidal.

Turkey is a year away from presidential and parliamentary elections. Many Turks are starving. Literally. Their per capita GDP of around $9,500 has crushed many of them under a triple-digit inflation rate and a fast-depreciating national currency, while independent economists warn that this may be only the beginning of worse torment in a country of 84 million people, excluding 9 million refugees and migrants.