RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/293996/malley-in-wonderlandLast month, Robert Malley, the former senior White House official who served as point man for President Barack Obama’s realignment strategy, published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “The Unwanted Wars: Why the Middle East Is More Combustible Than Ever,” in which he laid out what he sees as the future of Obama’s foreign policy legacy. The piece came out in the aftermath of Iran’s attack on Saudi oil facilities, and not long after the Iranians shot down a U.S. drone—two highly aggressive events that went without any visible military response from the Trump administration. Yet the main conceit of Malley’s essay is a warning against “war with Iran.” The only alternative to “war with Iran” is presented as diplomatic engagement, the apex of which is Obama’s Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). By unwinding the deal that Obama struck with the Iranian mullahs, the piece contends, the Trump administration’s regional posture sets the U.S. on an inexorable course toward war—whether the U.S. itself takes any kind of military action or not. 

“As long as its regional posture remains as it is,” Malley wrote, “the United States will be just one poorly-timed or dangerously-aimed Houthi drone strike, or one particularly effective Israeli operation against a Shiite militia, away from its next costly regional entanglement.” 

What America should, and must, do when confronted with such a tinderbox is obvious: backpedal away, fast, while kicking our former allies in the region to the curb, hard. The sentence warning of the dangers of Houthi drone strikes and effective Israeli operations encapsulates an attitude perhaps best captured in former Vice President Joseph Biden’s famous line: “Our biggest problem was our allies.” 

America’s allies are a problem, Malley, Biden, and other Obama administration policy kingpins–starting with Obama himself—have publicly stated, because of their capacity to involve the U.S. in a costly regional entanglement with Iran. In other words, America’s allies are actually our enemies. In particular, Saudi Arabia, with its reckless war in Yemen, and Israel, with its aggression against Iranian assets in Syria, Iraq, and  throughout the region, represent the “war” side of the equation—while Iran, the enemy of our allies, represents “peace.” The U.S. has a set of choices for how to engage the region: “diplomatically or militarily, by exacerbating divides or mitigating them, and by aligning itself fully with one side or seeking to achieve a sort of balance.” 

In other words, if our allies are strong, then America should seek to weaken them until “balance” is achieved, which will help bring about more “peace.” If Iran were stronger, and Israel and Saudi Arabia were weaker, then peace would therefore be more likely. American policy, in the present moment at least, should therefore be to strengthen Iran at the expense of Israel and the Saudis. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/why-the-u-s-is-right-to-recognize-west-bank-settlements-as-legal/

Final-status negotiations between Israel and Palestinians will be predicated on the reality of disputed land.

Say what you will about Donald Trump’s mercurial foreign policy, his support for Israel has been resolute in ways that no other president can match.

It was Trump who finally followed the law and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. Every president since 1995 — the year the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which funds the relocation of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizes the city as the “undivided” capital of Israel, was passed overwhelmingly in both the House and Senate — had promised to move the embassy. None did.

It is probably Trump’s uniquely defiant disposition toward group-thinking State Department types that made the move possible. It’s difficult to imagine any of the other 2016 presidential hopefuls braving the massive internal opposition such a decision would provoke. But Jerusalem proper was never going to be the Palestinian capital, and it was about time everyone involved dealt with reality.

It was also the Trump administration that finally recognized Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights, a strategically vital strip of land from which Syria and her proxies have launched numerous wars, bombings, and terror operations against Israeli civilians over the past 70 years. Many of the same experts who claimed to be utterly disgusted by the idea of the U.S. ceding land in northern Syria were also grousing about how counterproductive it was for the United States to unilaterally affirm that Israel would control the Golan Heights. Well, Israel was never going to hand back this land to the Assad regime, or negotiate with it, and it was about time everyone accepted this reality.

And yesterday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that United States would no longer take the position that Israeli civilian “settlements” in the West Bank are “inconsistent with international law.” (Or, as our German ambassador Richard Grenell aptly put it, the United States would “no longer meddle in local Israeli zoning and building-permits issues.”) Many of those “settlements” — cities, really, some of them in existence for decades — are part of a de facto border, and they are never going to be bulldozed. That’s also reality.

It has always been a mistake for the United States to treat disputed territories in the West Bank as occupied. For one thing, it was impossible for Israel to “occupy” Palestinian territories because no such nation has ever existed. Israel spilled much blood taking the West Bank in self-defense from Jordan after that nation joined Egypt and Syria in the attempted destruction of Israel in 1967. Even then, Jordan had no legal claim to the territory. Israel offered 98 percent of the West Bank back right after the 1967 war, and on numerous occasions afterward. It was always refused.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/americans-need-to-stop-funding-the-chinese-g

The Chinese have for decades banked on the world, and in particular its richest nation, prioritizing money over all else, including evidently its long-term national interest.

One can learn a lot about how a nation will treat others by how it treats its own. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) oppressive treatment of its people then should send a chilling message to the rest of the world, considering the regime’s global ambitions, and its aggressive effort to achieve them with our cooperation.

While Hong Kong continues hurtling towards a potential modern Tiananmen Square massacre, recently a claimed member of the Chinese political establishment leaked a trove of purported documents to The New York Times regarding the CCP’s establishment of modern-day gulags in Xinjiang province’s “re-education camps.”

Among the major revelations of the 403 pages described by the Times, encompassing speeches from CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping and other officials, are:

In the wake of several Uighur terror attacks, Xi led the effort to exert totalitarian control over China’s Uighur population, commanding the state to employ “organs of dictatorship” and show “absolutely no mercy” in removing “the toxicity of religious extremism”—manifesting itself in not a targeted counterjihadist campaign but the apparently widespread, indiscriminate, and totalitarian concentration camp-building effort of the last several years;
Xi believed repression of the Xinjiang population was essential as a broader signal to other potentially problematic cohorts, or otherwise “social stability will suffer shocks, the general unity of people of every ethnicity will be damaged, and the broad outlook for reform, development and stability will be affected”—that is, unrest would threaten the CCP’s objectives, chief among them the perpetuation of its own rule;
Consistent with this view, under CCP leader of Xinjiang Chen Quanguo, authorities developed propaganda scripts for officials encountering returning students to Xinjiang whose family members had been taken to the camps that downplayed the authoritarian nature of the detentions while threatening the students should they protest;
Interestingly, perhaps demonstrating a weakness in the CCP system that its foes might exploit, documents indicate a level of resistance among officials tasked with implementing the party’s policies. Thus the party unleashed investigators who conducted more than 12,000 probes into party members alleged to be insufficiently dedicated to the “fight against separatism,” making a public example of one of the most prominent of the resisters. To the extent the leaker’s desires were genuine, and the documents are true, the leak itself might also reflect broader fractures in the system.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-foreign-policy-doctrine-deterrence-without-intervention/

The president bets that a booming economy, a beefed-up military, and U.S. energy dominance will deter enemies without the need for preemptive invasions.

D onald Trump’s 2016 campaign sought to overturn 75 years of bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy, especially as it applied to the Middle East.

From 1946 to 1989, the Cold War logic was to use both surrogates and U.S. expeditionary forces to stop the spread of Communist insurrections and coups — without confronting the nuclear-armed USSR directly unless it became a matter of perceived Western survival, as it did with the Berlin airlift and the Cuban missile crises.

That logic led to major conflicts like Vietnam and Korea, limited wars in the Middle East and Balkans, interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and occasional nation-building in conquered lands. Tens of thousands of Americans died, trillions of dollars were spent, and the Soviet Union and most of its satellites vanished. “We won the Cold War” was more or less true.

Such preemptory American interventions still continued over the next 30 years of the post–Cold War “new world order.” Now the threat was not Russian nukes but confronting new enemies such as radical Islam and a rogue’s gallery of petty but troublesome nuts, freaks, and dictators — Granada’s Hudson Austin, an unhinged Moammar Qaddafi of Libya, Hezbollah’s terrorists in Lebanon, Nicaraguan Communist Daniel Ortega, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, the gang leader Mohamed Aidid of Somalia, the former Serbian thug Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar of the Taliban, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, arch terrorist Osama bin Laden, the macabre al-Qaeda and ISIS, and on and on.

These put-downs, some successful and some not so much, were apparently viewed by the post–Cold War establishment as our versions of the late Roman Republic and Empire policies of mowing the lawn, with an occasional weeding out of regional nationalists and insurrectionists like Jugurtha, Mithridates, Vercingetorix, Ariovistus, Boudicca, and the like. The theory was that occasionally knocking flat a charismatic brute discouraged all others like him from trying to emulate his revolt and upend the international order. Having one or two legions always on the move often meant that most others could stay in their barracks. And it kept the peace, or so the U.S., like Rome, more or less believed.

But the problem with American policy after the Cold War and the end of the Soviet nuclear threat was that the U.S. was not really comfortable as an imperial global watchdog, we no longer had a near monopoly on the world economy that subsidized these expensive interventions, and many of these thugs did not necessarily pose a direct threat to American interests — perhaps ISIS, an oil-rich Middle East dictator, and radical Islamists excepted. What started as a quick, successful take-out of a monster sometimes ended up as a long-drawn out “occupation” in which all U.S. assets of firepower, mobility, and air support were nullified in the dismal street fighting of a Fallujah or a Mogadishu.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/timmerman-vs-puder-us-presence-syria-frontpagemagcom/

The exchange below is a dialogue/debate Frontpage is hosting on Trump’s recent decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria. Joseph Puder argues that U.S. should remain in Syria — while Ken Timmerman counters with an anti-interventionist argument. Frontpage will be  continuing a discussion on this vital issue.

The U.S. Must Have an Active Presence in Syria.
By Joseph Puder

The physical elimination of the arch-terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS who sought to be the “Emir of the Believers,” has made the world a safer place. Al-Baghdadi’s cruelty and his campaign of murder, rape and enslavement of the Yazidis, made him the world’s number one criminal. The Trump administration deserves credit for his demise, and the special forces that hunted him merit the highest awards and rewards. The killing of Al-Baghdadi notwithstanding, the current U.S. policy of withdrawing from Syria and ultimately from throughout the Middle East is a fatal mistake. In today’s world, the oceans alone are no barriers from terror, or catastrophic attacks as the 9/11 terror attack has shown. 

Trump Puts the Interventionists on the Ropes.
By Kenneth R. Timmerman  

A U.S. withdrawal from Syria would be a “fatal mistake.” This is a refrain we have been hearing from interventionists across the political spectrum for some time.

It would be a mistake, the interventionists say, because the U.S. departure creates a vacuum that has already been filled by our adversaries, makes us appear an “unreliable” partner, and opens a “clear path” for Iran to reach the Mediterranean and directly threaten Israel.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijing-will-give-you-cold-war-nostalgia-11572909192

America’s 21st-century competition with China is likely to be more dangerous and more complex than its old Cold War with the Soviet Union. This is partly because China’s economic power makes it a much more formidable and resourceful opponent than the U.S.S.R., and partly because the technological environment has changed so dramatically in the past generation.

The development of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles shaped the Cold War. The resulting nuclear “balance of terror” kept the Cold War cold; neither power was willing to risk total annihilation. Arms-control talks became a centerpiece of superpower relations as both sides sought to stabilize the nuclear balance.

The information revolution has brought new dangers to the fore. Cyberweapons can devastate their targets, crashing power grids and transportation networks, paralyzing financial systems, and destroying the functionality of anything from hospitals to government offices. The development of these weapons is much harder to control and their use much more difficult to deter.

It isn’t hard to know where a nuclear missile comes from. Cyberattacks are harder to trace and can easily be pinned on proxies. It is also harder to retaliate—one key to deterrence. U.S. companies and government agencies are daily subjected to cyberattacks from a variety of criminal groups and governments around the world. Should the U.S. launch retaliatory strikes against countries that commit cyberaggression against us? If so, what’s the proper magnitude of response? If the retaliation is too weak, it won’t deter future attacks. If it is too strong, it may trigger an escalation that could be very hard to control. Deterrence is difficult to establish in the murky, ever-evolving cyberworld.