RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/20/iran-believes-trump-is-a-dove-and-that-spells-trouble/

Donald Trump is not a dove. The president is also not a neocon, and will not allow the U.S. to become entangled in a protracted ground war with Iran or anyone else. But the departure of John Bolton as national security adviser is one of a number of signs to Iran that this president is shy on the trigger — one of the worst messages America can send to its adversaries.

It might even be the case that the attack on Saudi oil facilities last week by an Iranian regime keenly feeling the pinch of economic “maximum pressure” from the U.S. was spurred by both Bolton’s exit and Trump’s change of mind in June about military strikes on Iran after it downed of a U.S. drone. There are just too many signals of timidity coming from this White House, and for the world’s foremost terrorist state it’s the matador waving the red muleta at a charging bull.

Add to this the president’s apparent willingness to talk to any of the world’s worst actors at any time. Just this month, for instance, he nearly hosted the Taliban at Camp David on the eve of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, refraining from doing so only after a Taliban car bomb attack killed 12, including a U.S. soldier, near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. The stage was even set for a meeting between Trump and Iran’s sly President Hassan Rouhani at the United Nations in New York, with the president in the end rebuffed by Tehran. He has apparently even been mulling the weakening of sanctions on Iran for purposes of diplomatic overture.

This is not a critique of Trump’s prodigious, long-standing talents as a dealmaker. The president, through his personal diplomacy with Kim Jong-un, might indeed still make a breakthrough with nuclear-armed North Korea, which has eluded his three immediate predecessors. And were he to sit at a table, in a definite position of strength, across from Rouhani or the Taliban, we could expect agreements that strongly favor U.S. interests and go a long way toward reducing terrorism. Similarly, American business expects Trump to produce a favorable U.S.- China deal, and that’s a good bet.

But even the savviest players can foolishly agree to meet their opponents on a field tilted to their disadvantage. It is largely forgotten that Ronald Reagan never even met with three successive Soviet premiers spanning his entire first term as president, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, despite the hysterics of Sen. Ted Kennedy and other liberal Democrats that he was courting nuclear war. It was only some eight months after Mikhail Gorbachev took power in Moscow that Reagan met him in Geneva — nearly five years into his presidency. Far from sparking nuclear war, it led to the demise of the Soviet Union without the firing of a shot.

It is impossible to imagine Trump being that patient.

America Cannot Be Seen Blinking, Again And Again

There are suggestions that the president thought tough sanctions alone would make Tehran cry uncle, which is not an outlandish hope considering the toll they have taken on the Iranian economy; indeed Trump this week is intensifying sanctions. But this is not a normal tyrannical regime that adheres to rational rules of behavior.

Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who came to power after the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini 30 years ago, apparently believes himself to be the facilitator of the coming of the Twelfth Imam, who will lead an apocalyptic war against Israel and America, and Khamenei warns that in the meantime jihad (holy war) will continue until the U.S. is destroyed.

“This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front, with America at the head of it,” the ayatollah has said.

Tehran knows only too well that the U.S. is willing to conduct economic warfare against Iran, and a good thing it is we’re doing it. But the mullahs are increasingly coming to believe that Trump is unwilling to attack Iran militarily — especially during the next 13-and-a-half months as he seeks re-election. As Slate columnist and longtime liberal defense analyst Fred Kaplan writes, “it’s possible that, given his recent behavior, the Iranians think Trump won’t strike back.”

Iran’s rulers look through a messianic lens. Pressure on Tehran, whether economic or military, will work only if it threatens their hold on power, which is why the U.S., whatever else it does, should be talking up the possibility of the popular uprising of the Iranian people. If Rouhani and Khamenei believe the U.S. commander in chief will blink, again and again, rather than return fire, it might encourage their apocalyptic strategies to advance well beyond last week’s audacious attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities.

Whether it is America or the Saudis themselves with U.S. backing, a military response seems necessary to convince Tehran it is not dealing with pusillanimous opponents.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-and-trump-are-making-japan-nervous-11568673770

People often say the center of gravity in American foreign policy has shifted to the Indo-Pacific. But what exactly does that mean for America’s alliances and priorities? Many Americans have been slow to understand the critical importance that Japan now plays in American strategy. Australia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore and the rest all have roles to play, but without the economic, political and military assets Japan brings to the table, America’s Asia policy cannot succeed.

Fortunately for the U.S., Japan is committed. Japanese policy makers by and large understand that China’s rise is a global challenge perhaps on the scale of the Cold War—and that Japan is in the path of the storm. The country cannot defend its security and independence without a strong and effective alliance with the U.S.

The Trump presidency has in some ways fortified the relationship. The greater attention to the Indo-Pacific, the military buildup and the more aggressive approach to China on both trade and geopolitical issues are widely applauded in Japan.

Yet Mr. Trump has also caused sleepless nights in Tokyo. The president’s abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, his sometimes startling diplomacy with North Korea, his hard bargaining on trade and over Japan’s financial contributions to the U.S. military presence there have neither enhanced Japanese respect for American acumen nor convinced Tokyo that the U.S. is committed to the alliance.

If Mr. Trump is re-elected, policy makers here wonder, what would that mean for Japan? Would a second Trump term see a continuation of aggressive policies to reduce American trade deficits? Will the president withdraw U.S. troops from the country? What endgame does the administration have in mind for the meetings with Kim Jong Un ? And while broadly welcoming America’s newly hawkish approach to China, Japan also has important economic interests there. Will Mr. Trump’s decision-making on trade and China policy take Japanese concerns and priorities into account?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/our-foreign-policy-muddle-bruce-thornton/

Hard upon President Trump’s misguided outreach to the Taliban, rumors are circulating of a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting. Trump has also publicly stated he doesn’t want regime-change in Tehran. This “let’s make a deal” mentality, even with foes who have repeatedly declared and carried out their malign intentions against us, bespeaks more than just the president’s volatile personality and experience in Manhattan real estate.

Indeed, after the probably Iranian-engineered missile attacks on Saudi oil refineries that knocked out half its productive capacity, Trump’s gestures of outreach to the mullahs have now become even more dangerous, and made the need for long-overdue significant military action to punish and deter the mullahs more urgent,

Equally urgent is the revision of a foreign-policy paradigm many years in years in the making and mired in received wisdom. It took root after World War II ended the malign ideologies of fascism, Nazism, and Japanese racist militarism. Even though those murderous movements put the lie to the long dream of a global “harmony of interests” institutionalized in transnational treaties and supranational organizations, the West created the UN, NATO, the World Bank, and other global institutions that would help contain the Soviet Union while the global economy increased wealth and distributed it more widely. The collapse of the Soviet Union fed the illusion that the triumph of liberal democracy was assured, and that its last ideological rival was dispatched without another world war.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/boltonism-must-not-be-allowed-to-disappear/

In the wake of the national security advisor’s departure, members of the Trump administration have been at pains to stress that there will be no let-up in America’s policy of reimposing sanctions on Iran.

John Bolton’s departure from the Trump administration should have had the left cheering from the rafters.

Bolton has long been a bogeyman in liberal circles on account of his refusal to appease the enemies of America and the West, a disposition that the left regard as belligerent war-mongering.

When Bolton was made National Security Advisor, his liberal foes behaved as if U.S. President Donald Trump had signed up in person one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Now that Bolton’s appointment has abruptly terminated, though, there’s been no rejoicing from his ideological foes. That’s because their blind hatred of Trump means he can never do anything right. So Bolton’s ouster is merely viewed sourly as further proof of Trump’s psychological flaws.

The curious fact, however, is that the left hate Bolton for reasons very similar to Trump’s own inability to see eye-to-eye with him. For the left have more in common with Trump than they would ever care to acknowledge.

On foreign policy, both are isolationists, although for different reasons.

The left never support the West fighting wars in its own interests, viewing it as innately bad and oppressive, while its enemies are inescapably its victims and therefore morally above reproach.

For his part, Trump wants to end America’s involvement in foreign wars and doesn’t want to get involved in any new ones.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/to-pressure-china-we-must-clarify-and-strengthen-our-relationship-with-taiwan/

The imperiled island democracy has become more isolated, and its relationship with the U.S. has grown ill-defined. Trump can and should change that.

Whatever other legacies President Trump leaves after his time in office, he will be remembered as a figure who realigned the GOP by bringing many of its core tenets into question. The party is no longer reliably supportive of multilateral trade agreements and opposed to tariffs. It is no longer interested in reforming entitlements, or in balancing the federal budget. It is no longer a proponent of the overseas deployment of U.S. forces for the sake of maintaining stability in unstable places. None of these shifts are necessarily permanent. To be sure, there will be reassessments of all of them after the Trump presidency, as the party decides what it wants to be going forward.

Here’s another shift, one I hope the party holds firm to over time: For the first time since the Nixon presidency, the GOP is no longer willing to accommodate Beijing. Republicans no longer see China as a benign emerging power to be nurtured as it merges into the society of nations. In action if not in fact, the Trump administration has redefined China as an economic and military adversary, and a human-rights abuser of massive and systematic proportions.

This is an overdue and welcome shift. There are practical actions that the administration can take to ensure that it lasts beyond Trump’s time in office as something more than a bargaining tactic in trade-deal negotiations. An important one is rethinking the role the U.S. has played as the handmaiden in Beijing’s decades-long global isolation of Taiwan.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/09/dont-believe-tired-myths-ending-18-year-war-afghanistan/

Zalmay Khalilzad, the Trump administration’s chief negotiator with the Taliban, has endured a lot of pressure in the last week. Former U.S. ambassadors, Fox News pundits, and think tank analysts alike have denounced his draft agreement in full without knowing what is in the final document.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s advisers have already expressed that the terms of the accord “need serious debate and revision.” Words such as “surrender,” “defeat,” and “abandonment” are being tossed in the air as if the United States has an obligation to serve as the Afghan government’s defenders in perpetuity.

Khalilzad and his boss, President Trump, will feel even more heat as additional details become available to the public. Trump’s cancellation on September 7 of a direct meeting between himself, the Taliban, and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is a blinking red light that the president is increasingly experiencing second-thoughts about the entire process. So it is as good a time as any to reexamine the usual myths that will resurface in editorials and television segments over the ensuing weeks as opponents try to tank any agreement that could conclude U.S. involvement in this 18-year war.

Myth 1: The U.S. Is Signing Its Own Defeat