RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/05/04/american-foreign-and-defense-policy-between-scylla-and-charybdis/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm

Rather than react, we must chart a course

Fifteen years before the coronavirus pandemic, I wrote a speech for a world-renowned physician who was coincidentally the majority leader of the United States Senate, and thus not without influence. He went, wholeheartedly, all-in, delivering it in the Senate, at Harvard Medical School’s most important annual lecture, at Davos, at the Bohemian Grove (where the only Bohemian to enthuse sufficiently to request a copy was Henry Kissinger), and elsewhere.

And, of course, Senator Bill Frist took it to the White House. He presented a strong — one might even say urgent — case for establishing joint research and vaccine-and-curative manufacturing centers judiciously spaced throughout the country; the doubling of medical- and nursing-school outputs; incentives for commercial pharmaceutical and medical-device research and production; increasing the number of hospital beds; providing for the stocks, structures, and reserve personnel for large-scale emergency field hospitals; and laying up stores of necessaries such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and, specifically, ventilators. Given that the laws of economics were not repealed, the ancillary effect of the supply surge in some of these medical goods — such as doctors, nurses, and hospital capacity — would have lowered their cost or at least slowed its rise. He asked for $100 billion per year. Had spending kept up at that level, which it need not have to assure adequate preparation, it would have amounted to only one-quarter of the monies shoveled into the furnace of COVID-19 in the last few weeks alone. He got a total of $2.4 billion over four years for the Strategic National Stockpile that of late has proved wholly inadequate.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/25/trumps-nigerian-moment-defeating-boko-haram-religious-persecution-and-corruption/

The opportunity exists for the Trump administration to do something now about Nigeria that would lead to real progress in the fight against religious persecution and repeated violations of the rule of law, would help to root out corruption, and deal a significant blow to the Boko Haram terror group. 

The lever available to the U.S. government to do this is $300 million in stolen monies soon to come under U.S. control currently frozen in British and Crown of Jersey accounts at America’s request. Nigeria wants it back and, before America acts, the pressure it’s applying to President Muhammadu Buhari for reforms needs to be stepped up. 

If successful, it would be a big win. U.S. authorities should be dubious about transferring monies back to Nigeria’s control considering there’s a good chance it would be passed back to back to ruling-party officials who were complicit in the original theft. More than that, considering the longstanding corruption in the government of Africa’s most populous nation and the disturbing pattern of human rights abuses committed by Buhari’s regime, it’s not clear the U.S. should turn the money over at all unless and until real reforms are adopted. 

Look at the record. According to the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust, over the past two years, thousands of Nigerian Christians have been murdered. The European Parliament recently blasted the government over ongoing human rights violations. Amnesty International issued a condemnation over the use of “security agents and (the) judiciary as a tool for persecuting people who voice dissenting opinions.” Innocent reform advocates like Grace Taiga, a retired civil servant and practicing Christian, and opposition Senator Shehu Sani have been targeted by the regime and journalists critical of it like Omoyele Sowore has been jailed.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_events_of_the_last_few_months_demand_we_revisit_our_relationship_with_china.html

I was young in 1972 when Nixon went to China, but I still remember the excitement attendant on that visit. For most of us, it was our first look into a formerly hermetically sealed country. Seeing China on the television was almost as exotic as seeing the surface of the moon in 1969 after the Apollo landing. For the Chinese, Westerners were equally exotic. Even as late as 1982, outside of Shanghai or Beijing, Chinese people had often never seen a blonde woman, something a British friend regularly experienced.

While the countryside may have been insular, by the late 1970s, China was opening up to the West and beginning to see opportunities to use its vast human and natural resources to bring money into a country that (like all communist countries) was cash poor. For the West, China’s availability as a manufacturer looked like a boon. Products could be made cheaply there and sold at a good profit in America.

For American consumers, having China make products cheaply also looked like a good deal. Although a lot of factory workers found themselves unemployed as more manufacturing shifted to China, for most people, cheap Chinese production meant that consumer goods that had once been out of their reach were now affordable. It’s thanks to China undercutting American prices that most of us have houses filled with merchandise, from furniture to electronics to cookware to foodstuff.

Many people assumed that, with money flooding in, China would eventually become a free-market economy, but that’s not what happened. Instead, China, while still calling itself communist, actually become a totalitarian mercantilist nation. And if you’ve forgotten your high school economics class, mercantilism is an economic policy that maximizes exports and minimizes imports.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15788/coronavirus-sanctions-iran

In a recent video, a masked man holding a Kalashnikov-style assault rifle warns that the attacks on Taji and Basmaya military camps were only the beginning of a much larger offensive. — Usbat al-Thayireen, or League of Revolutionaries, a new Shiite militia group, Newsweek, March 19, 2020.

“The Islamic resistance of Usbat al-Thayireen vows to strike the occupation forces’ bases and [US] embassy in the coming days and will continue striking the occupation until it exits the country, and the matter will be taken further if the occupier does not leave. We say to the hypocrites who are collaborators at the evil embassy: Your days are numbered and you will face your fate very soon.” — Usbat al-Thayireen, or League of Revolutionaries, a new Shiite militia group, Newsweek, March 19, 2020.

The idea that the ruling mullahs of Iran and the top state sponsor of terrorism will use the extra revenues from the lifting of sanctions for humanitarian purposes is totally irrational. Easing sanctions will enable, embolden and empower the Iranian regime to damage the US and its allies’ national security interests still further and kill more Americans. The US President’s Iran policy of maximum pressure, which should probably be even more maximum, is headed in the right direction.

While the US administration is expanding its maximum pressure policy on Iran, some people, such as US Senator Bernie Sanders, are calling for immediate relief for the Iranian regime. “As a caring nation,” Sanders recently posted on Twitter, “we must lift any sanctions hurting Iran’s ability to address this crisis, including financial sanctions.”

Lifting sanctions on the aggressive regime of Iran would be an extremely wrong move.

What politicians such Sanders seem not to recognize is that the Islamic Republic prioritizes its military adventurism over its nation’s health crisis. In other words, Iran’s regime will almost certainly use the extra revenues to arm its militias across the region that attack the US and its allies’ forces, as it has a pattern of doing in the past.