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https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fforeignpolicynews.org%2F&data=02%7C01

With expanding competitors and severe domestic challenges, the time has come for Saudi Arabia to publicly engage Israel in order to confront shared opponents and protect mutual interests.
Iran and Turkey

Given its ancient history, large population, and leadership amongst the Shiite community that accounts for roughly two-thirds of Gulf-bordering states (including over 10% in Saudi Arabia), Iran sees itself as the area’s rightful leader[i].  While it has pursued nuclear capability and can potentially cutoff the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s main regional power projection is through its support of fellow Shiites[ii].  After Saddam Hussein served as the principal Arab bulwark against it, Iran has since 2003 steadily consolidated its sway over Shiite-majority Iraq and is developing through it an uninterrupted gateway to the Mediterranean.  Iran’s Shiite ally Assad has emerged victorious in Syria and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah outmatches Lebanon’s army and has more political power than ever[iii].  Iranian support for Yemeni Shiites (who make up at least one-third of the population) exacerbates the impoverished country’s civil war and exposes the narrow shipping lanes through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait heading into the Suez Canal[iv].  The Saudis have the world’s third-largest defense budget but have failed to thwart these Iranian inroads made with far less means at their disposal[v].

Iran has strong ties with China, Russia, and India, and Saudi Arabia cannot depend on a concerted Sunni effort against its aggression.  Egypt pulled out of the so-called Arab NATO in April, its defense budget no longer ranks even within the global top fifty, and it is preoccupied with feeding, employing, and quenching the thirst of its one hundred million people – a daunting task perhaps obstructed more by domestic Sunni extremism and Ethiopia’s newly-constructed dam on the Nile than it is by Iran[vi].  Energy-starved Turkey relies on imports from Iran, the two conduct twice as much trade as Turkey does with Saudi Arabia, and they are united in subduing Kurdish ambitions[vii].  Though Jordanian King Abdullah is credited with coining the term “Shia Crescent” when warning of Iran as early as 2004, his country’s $40-billion GDP provides limited military capability[viii].

Pakistan is the second-largest Sunni state and a recipient of considerable Saudi aid but its major concern is India[ix].  With Saudi Arabia having seven-times their population and nineteen-times their landmass, the four smaller Gulf States are hesitant to coordinate militarily with it as they fear lurking Saudi domination under the guise of containing Iran[x].  The UAE stands firm against it politically but remains Iran’s second-largest trading partner, tiny Bahrain’s Sunni government supports the Saudis but has its Shiite majority to contend with, and both Oman and Kuwait maintain cordial relations with Iran[xi].  After years of dissension over Al Jazeera, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar lost its relations with Saudi Arabia in 2017 and renewed them with Iran[xii].

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/our_media_ignore_but_mullahs_dont_us_assembling_a_devastating_strike_force_in_the_middle_east.html

The American media are paying no attention to it, but you can be sure that the mullahs in Tehran have noticed: The United States is openly deploying the weapons necessary to launch a devastating attack on Iran, should the need arise. The Australian media are not so shy, as news.com.au shows:

The United States is quietly building up its forces in striking range of Iran.

B-1B bombers have arrived in the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia, along with stealth fighters, missile batteries and specialist troops.

Exactly why they’re there depends on who you listen to.

Everything changed when, on September 14, wave after wave of cruise missiles and drones burst among Saudi Arabian oil facilities. Shockwaves rippled around the world.

According to international intelligence agencies, the brazen strikes came from Iranian soil. But few have openly come out and accused the Government in Tehran of being behind them.

Iran insists it has had nothing to do with raids on oil tankers or the bombing of Saudi Arabia. But claims that Yemeni Houthi rebels were responsible have been dismissed as implausible.

It’s a classic example of modern grey warfare, where even implausible deniability shields rogue nations from international consequences.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-recovered-valuable-intelligence-in-baghdadi-raid-11572301388?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=contextual&cx_artPos=6#cxrecs_s

The U.S. military raid resulting in the death of Islamic State founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi also yielded an array of valuable intelligence concerning the militant group and its top leaders, defense officials said, providing details that likely will lead to future operations.

The Defense officials and Pentagon leaders on Monday wouldn’t detail the intelligence recovered on Saturday, but said it consisted of data-storage devices and other files that will add to the understanding of Islamic State as the U.S. and allies continue pursuing its leaders and operatives.

In a sign of the continuing nature of the operations, a senior State Department official on Monday said a second U.S. raid closely following the operation against Baghdadi resulted in the death of Islamic State’s top spokesman.

The senior State Department official described the spokesman, Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir, as “kind of No. 2” in Islamic State. The operation was first announced by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which worked with U.S. troops in fighting Islamic State before President Trump ordered a U.S. withdrawal.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-battle-won-in-the-war-on-terror-11572302844

The Washington Post may have hastily changed its embarrassing headline for its obituary of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—“austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State”—but that won’t be the end of the West’s difficulties in understanding and responding to the multifaceted crisis in the Middle East.

Movements like ISIS don’t spring from nowhere. It took centuries of decline, serial humiliations at the hands of arrogant European imperial powers, and decades of failed postcolonial governance to produce the toxic mixture of bigotry and hate out of which Baghdadi and his adherents emerged. That toxic brew won’t quickly disappear. Angry, alienated and profoundly confused people—many young and at best half-educated—will continue to find the message of ISIS and similar groups seductive. Baghdadi’s death isn’t the end of ISIS, and the collapse of the U.S.-backed order in northern Syria could provide conditions for its re-emergence as a serious military force.

Yet Baghdadi’s death was more than a meaningless episode in an endless game of Middle Eastern Whac-A-Mole. The fall of his so-called caliphate brings the U.S. a little closer to the end of its longest war.

Baghdadi’s reign of terror began with prophecies, visions and dreams. He and his lieutenants promised their followers paradise. They crafted a god in their own image—a god of genocide, violence, rape, enslavement—and claimed that this god was powerful enough to give victory in battle. It turned out they were wrong.

Baghdadi’s fate makes the task of recruiting fresh jihadists a little harder. The next “austere religious scholar” seeking recruits will face a bit more skepticism in the marketplace of ideas.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/10/26/the-empty-absurdity-of-the-democrats-dangerous-foreign-policy-2/

Part 2 of 2

The next Democratic president is likely not only to neglect or ignore national security threats requiring military assertiveness; he or she will subordinate U.S. interests to the will of foreign political elites and use American military might to promote socialism abroad.

Foreign policy has not been a great focus of the Democrats running for president, but that doesn’t negate the party’s increasing radicalism on defense.

Despite continuing to post strong polling numbers, even as his edge begins to weaken, Joe Biden, as he shows his age and continues his gaffes, cannot be expected to take the nomination. But if he were to be elected, expectations that he would conduct foreign policy like Presidents Bill Clinton or Barack Obama are misguided.

While boasting in the CNN debate this month that he’s “spent thousands of hours in the Situation Room” in the White House, Biden as he pushes 80 would be dominated by a young crop of advisers, and considering the state of the Democratic Party’s base it would be a bad bet to imagine that the likes of relative moderates such as current Biden advisers Nicholas Burns and Tony Blinken would be able to hold sway.

But what does the most likely nominee right now, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have in mind? During July’s CNN debate, she sent the unsettling signal that the U.S. “is not going to use nuclear weapons preemptively, and we need to say so to the entire world.” According to Warren, uncertainty about U.S. first use of a nuke “puts the entire world at risk and puts us at risk.”

Quite the contrary.

Warren Collapsing Our Nuclear Umbrella

It may shock many Americans to hear it, but, as Fred Kaplan, author of the forthcoming “The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War,” writer for Slate, and no conservative, recently pointed out, “from the dawn of the atomic age until now, U.S. policy has explicitly stated that we would use nuclear weapons first, if some crisis called for it … The threat of nuclear first-use — the assurance that we would risk New York for Paris, or Washington for London — lay at the heart of the U.S. security guarantee for the NATO alliance. It was — and still is — called ‘extended deterrence’ and the ‘nuclear umbrella.’”

This U.S. policy prevented nuclear war over the course of decades and restrained the expansionist Soviet Union until its collapse. As Kaplan put it with the plainest clarity, “you have to make adversaries believe you’d actually push the button, in order to keep them from getting too aggressive.” And as Kaplan further noted, “the Russian military now has a doctrine of using nuclear weapons first if NATO troops make incursions on Russian territory — mainly as a way of countering America’s supremacy in conventional arms.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/10/25/th

Despite the huffing and puffing during last week’s CNN debate against President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, the Democratic Party’s deep thoughts about America’s strategic role in the world are more dovish and non-interventionist – and illogical – than ever.

We see this from some members of Congress who may not be household names, but who for years have been vying to be a future Democratic president’s secretary of state.

Take Maryland’s Sen. Ben Cardin, second in seniority among Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Cardin always presents himself as tough against the terrorist state of Iran, having been one of only four Democratic senators who voted against the resolution supporting Obama’s deeply flawed 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He loves to lash out at “one of the most nefarious actors on the world stage, playing a destabilizing role across the Middle East and proudly carrying the mantle of the greatest nation-state threat to Israel today.”

But by the time two years ago that Trump pulled out of the deal, which released $100 billion to Tehran with which to go on a terrorism spree, Cardin had fallen in love with it. He said, “I did not support the agreement, but we want to make sure the agreement is enforced. We don’t want the United States to be the one who walks away from preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear weapon state.”

And asked last month on Fox News if there should be a U.S. military response in the event of another attack by Iran on American ally Saudi Arabia, Cardin replied, “there’s really not a military solution to the problem of Iran. We need to make diplomacy work.” He added, “We have to defend ourselves, no question about that, but … It would be disastrous if we got into a fighting war in Iran.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/untenable-alliance-is-no-turkish-delight/

Turkey opposes, if not detests, almost every American ally in the region, and befriends almost every U.S. enemy.

There are about 5,000 members of the U.S. military, mostly airmen, stationed at the huge, strategically located air base in Incirlik, Turkey, northwest of the Syrian border.

The American forces at Incirlik are also the custodians of about 50 B61 nuclear bombs. Data on these weapons is classified, but at their maximum yield each is ten times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, according to Stars and Stripes.

It’s a “Dr. Strangelove” scenario: No one quite knows how the American contingent could manage to secretly remove the deadly nukes from their concrete vaults, bring them out to the tarmac, load them on planes and fly them out safely over Turkish objections.

Turkey in the past has threatened to go nuclear itself should the U.S. ever dare to transfer the lethal arsenal. Apparently, Turkey’s theory is that possession of bombs in one’s territory is nine-tenths of the law of nuclear weapons ownership.

In the aftermath of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, which led to a U.S. arms embargo, Turkey shut down all U.S. operations at Incirlik. American forces were expelled for three years — until Washington caved and resumed arms supplies.

In 2016, Turkey cut off power to the base and forbid U.S. flights, fearing that the dissident Turkish generals of a failed coup attempt might use the American facility as a sanctuary.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15046/saudi-arabia-iran

Senator Bernie Sanders failed to mention that the “catastrophic war” to which he was referring was initiated solely by the Iranian regime, which encouraged and enabled Houthi terrorists to overthrow the internationally recognized government of Yemen.

A key danger to the US also lies in its relinquishing the maritime chokepoint, Bab el-Mandeb, through which — along with the Strait of Hormuz — approximately one-third of the world’s oil production passes every day. Iran’s ability to disrupt or interdict this daily movement of oil would give Tehran enormous leverage over the global economy.

Given this reality, it is inexplicable for Congress to advocate a policy based on tying the hands of Saudi Arabia, an ally, while giving free rein to Iran, which has been a sworn enemy of the US for decades. In addition, Saudi Arabia, unlike Iran, is not on any glide-path to producing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them.

Many of the US administration’s critics in Congress are, perhaps unsurprisingly, exhibiting hypocrisy where American policy is concerned. Less than a year ago, the Senate passed a resolution, co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Mike Lee (R-UT) and Chris Murphy (D-CT), to discontinue military support for the Saudi-led effort to defeat the Houthis — Marxist-Islamist terrorists backed by, and serving as, a proxy to the Iranian regime in its war in Yemen.

Sanders defended the resolution by declaring: “The bottom line is that the United States should not be supporting a catastrophic war led by a despotic [Saudi] regime with an irresponsible foreign policy.”

Sanders failed to mention that the “catastrophic war” to which he was referring was initiated solely by the regime in Tehran, which encouraged and enabled Houthi terrorists to overthrow the internationally recognized government of Yemen. These terrorists continue to use hospitals and schools in Yemen as troop barracks and supply dumps, and dragoon pre-pubescent children into their ranks.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/22/is-it-time-for-america-to-begin-decoupling-from-communist-china/

The longer businesses in the West remain wedded to Chinese profits and Chinese money, the stronger the Chinese Communist Party will grow, at our long-term expense.

Perhaps the most momentous part of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) was its acknowledgment that the U.S. government’s historical premise “that support for China’s rise and for its integration into the post-war international order would liberalize China” was wrong. Recent events indicate that not only was the theory underlying all U.S.-China policy for nearly 50 years incorrect, but that perhaps the opposite is true: Support for China’s rise and for its integration into the post-war international order has actually illiberalized America.

Stated differently, there is a case to be made that since President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China, the United States has become more like China than China has become like us. We may have been sowing the seeds of our own destruction.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is just one of many prominent Western industries as diverse as automobiles, fashion, and lodging that have cowed to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) line, and engaged in self-censorship out of a desire for the almighty dollar. While the NBA is a particularly deserving target of ire, given the fact its social justice warriors have shown themselves to be hypocritical sellouts, one would be hard-pressed to find any entity with substantial profits or funding tied to China willing to permit the voicing of views that might rankle the CCP.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/dont-blame-trump-syria-bruce-thornton/

President Trump is facing intense criticism for his decision to withdraw fewer than 1000 U.S. troops from northeastern Syria. The dispute largely reflects the bipartisan NeverTrump penchant for politicizing every Trump decision in order to weaken the president. But there are honest people on both sides of the issue who have compelling arguments for their positions. Unfortunately, no rational argument can resolve this disagreement over our presence in Syria, for its causes run much deeper than military tactics and foreign policy strategies: The divided aims underlying our interactions with the world that have left us with a schizophrenic foreign policy.

America has long tried to reconcile our desire to be wary of “foreign entanglements,” with our involvements abroad forced on us by changes in technology like the steamship and the telegraph, and by a growing global trade that enriched our own economy at the cost of increasing “entanglements” in foreign affairs. Our participation in the Great War of 1914-1918 made us a global power, just at the time that the ideology of “moralizing internationalism” had taken hold in the West, famously expressed in Woodrow Wilson’s call “to make the world safe for democracy.” For many, the return to isolationism following the war, evident in the Senate’s refusal to ratify the Versailles Treaty, was a disaster that helped spark the much more devastating Second World War.

During the Cold War, our standoff with a nuclear armed communist superpower legitimized our deep involvement in managing and defending the Free World we now led. Multinational alliances, conventions, institutions, treaties, and covenants were the means for promoting liberal democracy and human rights, and for adjudicating international disputes and global conflicts while limiting armed violence to proxy duels. The successful end of the Cold War created the illusion that our traditional isolationism was no longer viable, given what George H.W. Bush called the “new world order.”