RUTHFULLY YOURS

As a matter of arithmetic, Iran is flat broke at the prevailing price of hydrocarbons. Under the P5+1 nuclear deal, Iran will recoup somewhere between $55 and $150 billion of frozen assets, depending on whether one believes the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury or one’s own eyes. The windfall is barely enough to tide Iran over for the next two years.

P5+1 nuclear diplomacy with Iran went forward on the premise that Iran would trade its strategic ambitions in the region for economic prosperity. The trouble is that prosperity is not a realistic outcome for Iran, which has nothing to gain by abandoning its strategic adventures.

Iran now exports 1.2 million barrels a day of oil. At $30 a barrel, that’s $14 billion year (and perhaps a bit more, given that some Iranian light crude goes at a higher price). Iran also sold (as of 2014) about 9.6 billion cubic meters of natural gas, which might bring in another $4 billion at today’s market prices.

As of 2014, the Iranian government spent $63 billion a year, according to Western estimates. No data is available for 2015, and the Iran Central Bank doesn’t publish data past mid-2013. That brought in a bit over $40 billion a year (not counting gas exports). Iran has a $40 billion hole to fill. Unfrozen assets will tide the country over for a couple of years, but won’t solve its problems. This year Iran plans to spend $89 billion, the government announced Dec. 22.

The Middle Kingdom’s economy is slipping and, if things go from bad to much worse, the Beijing elite’s grip on power with it. What better way to distract and unite a restive populace than a showdown with the rest of the world?
So Australia is considering performing its own freedom-of-navigation exercise in the South China Sea. That’s good. Things are coming to a head and this will let everyone know which side we are on, and, indeed, that we have taken sides. For maximum effect what the RAN should do is visit the Sierra Madre on Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratlys. This is a World War 2 tank-landing ship that the Philippine Navy ran up on the reef in 1999. It is manned by a dozen Filipino marines. As a Filipino naval asset, an attack by China on the Sierra Madre would trigger the US-Philippines Defense Treaty. China keeps two of its coast guard vessels circling the reef in an attempt to stop resupply of the base. The Philippines has resorted to air-dropping supplies to the Sierra Madre. This has been going on for a few years now and apparently China is somewhat miffed that the Philippines hasn’t given up yet. An Australian visit to the Sierra Madre would be much appreciated.

We needn’t be concerned about the possible effect on trade. The prices of the commodities we send to China have fallen to near what our operating costs are, so we aren’t making much of a profit anymore. In effect we are digging up a lot of dirt as a sort of public service, in this case for the benefit of ingrates who are planning to dominate and subjugate the East Asian region. This has been coming for a long time. Consider the following map which is from a Nationalist primary school textbook from 1938:

According to an internal military document, the Swedish army is preparing for war. Per a Breitbart report, “the chief of the Swedish army General Anders Brännström told men under his command they could expect to be fighting a war in Europe against skilled opponents ‘within a few years’.”

The 28-page document was directed to soldiers, civil servants, politicians, and guests who will be attending next week’s military demonstrations that will focus on the army’s ability to fight and survive a winter war.

…the General said the deteriorating security picture in Europe was the main factor behind his warning, indicating the Islamic State conducting military campaigns in Europe and spreading instability from the Ukraine could lead to conflict. Sensationally, he suggested a Third World War was just round the corner. He told the paper:

“One can draw parallels with the 1930s. A great uncertainty and [political] dynamics which then led to a great war. That time we managed to keep out. But it is not at all certain we could succeed this time”. (snip)

The symbolic gesture of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ‘resetting’ relations with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in March 2009 has been engrained in the minds of most people.

With the push of a button, all would be made right between the United States and the Russian Federation. Well, not exactly.

Russia’s forays into Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria are all well-documented. However, Russia is on the rise elsewhere and it’s not where you might think. Russian influence, under President Vladimir Putin, is growing in Latin America and it concerns the United States.

Daniel Wiser of the Washington Free Beacon suggests that Russia’s expansion into Latin America, including Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and, of course, Cuba, is due to President Obama’s negligence in the United States’ own backyard.

As the United States pulls economic, and military resources out of the Americas, Putin sees the chance to once again take advantage of American weakness abroad.

Putin has established strong relations with the nations of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), an intergovernmental organization established by former Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez. The organization was created in opposition to the United States-backed Free Trade Area for the Americas, which has been seen by many Latin American and Caribbean countries as a form of American imperialism.

Some wonder how history will treat Barack Obama’s presidency. That depends on who writes the histories.

Secretary of State John Kerry’s account will fist-pump the Iran nuclear deal as the central foreign-policy event of the Obama presidency, a triumph for Western diplomacy.

But news photographs in recent weeks are producing a different history. These photos document the abject humiliation of the West by Iran. Americans who plan to vote in their presidential election should look hard at these photos, because the West’s direction after this will turn on the decisions they make.
The first photo is of a hallway in Rome’s Capitoline Museums, a repository of art dating to Western antiquity. Out of what the government of Italy called “respect” for the sensibilities of visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, the museum placed large white boxes over several nude sculptures, including a Venus created in the second century B.C.

Then, because Mr. Rouhani will not attend a meal that serves alcohol to anyone, the nominally Italian government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi declined to serve wine.

They did so for the same reason that beggars grub change in front of Rome’s churches. Freed by the Obama nuclear deal with Iran, Italy’s tin-cup businesses signed about a dozen deals with Mr. Rouhani this week, totaling $18 billion.

WASHINGTON—Libya is emerging as a new destination of choice for extremists, as both Islamic State and al Qaeda have used the chaos since the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi to seize territory and parts of the economy, a report by a security consulting firm said.

Wednesday’s report warned that Libya could become a dangerous new base for terrorist groups because of the country’s ungoverned hinterlands, long, porous borders and huge oil reserves.

Already, the absence of law and proliferation of weapons and violence in Libya “have allowed violent extremist groups such as the Islamic State and al Qaeda to thrive,” said the report by The Soufan Group, founded by a former U.S. government official who investigated the 2001 terror attacks.

Three suicide bombers, all women, killed themselves and 10 other people during an attack on Wednesday in Chibok, the northeast Nigerian town where Boko Haram kidnapped 276 teenage girls from a school in 2014.

The attackers, suspected members of Boko Haram’s Islamist insurgency, struck a market, as well as two residential neighborhoods, said eye witness Bitrus Mark.

Residents of the small town helped carry at least 30 injured people to a nearby clinic, according to local bystander Emmanuel Samuel, who helped tally the number of people killed.

At least 219 of the schoolgirls taken from Chibok in April 2014 remain missing, even as Nigeria records successes in the wider war on Boko Haram. This time last year, Islamic State-allied insurgency controlled a section of Nigeria the size of Belgium. Now, Boko Haram has been chased into hiding, although the group continues to lash out by attacking ordinary people in public places.

PARIS—France’s justice minister resigned Wednesday after a clash with President François Hollande over his proposal to adopt a constitutional amendment stripping some homegrown terrorists of their nationality.

Christiane Taubira “agreed on the need to put an end to her mandate as the debate on the constitutional amendment opens in Parliament today,” the president’s office said. The president appointed Jean-Jacques Urvoas, a senior lawmaker, to succeed Ms. Taubira.

Her departure highlights the fault lines within Mr. Hollande’s Socialist Party over his strategy for tackling terrorism. His government has imposed a raft of state-of-emergency measures—permitting police to conduct warrantless raids and detain people without court orders—that critics say contrast with the French Republic’s status as a beacon of civil liberties.

However, it was Mr. Hollande’s recent decision to strip terrorists of their nationality—an idea long supported by France’s right-wing parties—that opened the divide with Ms. Taubira.

“I’m leaving the government over a major political disagreement,” Ms. Taubira said, after tweeting: “Sometimes you resist by staying, sometimes you resist by leaving.”
In December, the French government unveiled a proposal for constitutional amendments that would shield the state-of-emergency measures from legal challenges and strip dual citizens of their French nationality if they are convicted of terrorism.

French law already allows the government to take away citizenship from convicted terrorists if they are born abroad. But Mr. Hollande was under pressure from France’s right-wing parties to go further.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Nader Modanlo was facing five more years in federal prison when he got an extraordinary offer: U.S. President Barack Obama was ready to commute his sentence as part of this month’s historic and then still-secret prisoner swap with Iran. He said no.
To sweeten the deal, the U.S. administration then dropped a claim against the Iran-born aerospace engineer for $10 million that a Maryland jury found he had taken as an illegal payment from Iran, according to interviews with Modanlo, lawyers involved and U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
The surrender of the U.S. claim, which has not previously been reported, could add to scrutiny of how the Obama administration clinched a prisoner deal that has drawn criticism from Republican presidential candidates and lawmakers.

A Washington-based spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment on discussions over the $10 million, which the jury found that Modanlo was paid to help Iran launch its first satellite in 2005. Modanlo says the money was a loan from a Swiss company for a telecoms deal.
In the prisoner swap, five Americans held in Iran were released at the same time as seven Iranians charged or imprisoned in the United States were granted pardons or had their sentences commuted. The deal accompanied the Jan. 16 implementation of a landmark agreement that curbs Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Analogizing Palestinians to the Jewish victims of the Nazis: that’s how the UN is marking this week’s “International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.” The epicenter of modern antisemitism on a global scale is not somewhere over there, but in the middle of Turtle Bay.

For public tour groups, and their busloads of impressionable American students from around the country, the UN ‘s permanent “Palestine” exhibit has now been arranged to be within a few feet of the UN’s permanent Holocaust exhibit.

This week’s activities follow suit.

On January 25, 2016, a temporary exhibit called “Holocaust by Bullets” was opened in the UN visitors’ lobby. The painstaking research of the French organization Yahad-In Unum substantiates how two million Jews were shot to death in the presence of normal folks all over Europe.

But “Holocaust by Bullets” follows the UN’s December exhibition, which is titled “Palestinian Children: Overcoming Tragedies with Hope, Dreams, Resilience and Dignity.” That month-long display in the visitors’ lobby consisted of scenes of Palestinian children suffering from “devastating” wanton, unprovoked Israeli “operations.”

Father Patrick Desbois opened Yahad-In Unum’s exhibit by explaining that his team locates the bodies of Nazi victims and then honors the dead. He is driven to ensure that Europe does not bury “all its values” by building its future on unacknowledged and unvalued human beings in mass graves.