RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274857/lets-not-make-deal-taliban-bruce-thornton

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 began a needed reassessment of our ossified foreign policy doctrines. Trump has rejected in part the shibboleths of “multilateralism,” “transnational institutions,” “democracy promotion,” and “diplomatic engagement” as the most important elements of foreign relations. He’s returned the focus to America’s national interests and security, and to America’s military strength as the guarantor of both. Allies now are valued insofar as they complement our interests, and honor reciprocal obligations. Matching action to words, he’s withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords and the multinational agreement with Iran on limiting its program to develop nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them, and scolded NATO allies over their meager spending on defense.

These moves have all been a welcome corrective to the Obama-era globalist prejudices and received ideas that reduced the U.S. to just one of many international players, one “mindful of its own imperfections,” as Obama put it, and morally obligated to cede sovereignty to supranational institutions and multinational treaties. The subsequent howling of the decrepit internationalist establishment about Trump’s “disrespecting” allies and violating the “rules-based, liberal international order” is the sound of feckless, moribund institutional oxen being gored.

Yet it is testimony to the staying power of such globalist institutions that even Trump seemingly ascribes to some of their dogma. Foremost is the idea that diplomatic negotiation, what Trump would call “the art of the deal,” can resolve differences and settle conflicts without a credible threat of overwhelming force to punish violations of the agreement. Hence the ongoing negotiations with the Taliban, the jihadist movement that nurtured al Qaeda in the years before 9/11, and continues to shelter and support other jihadist outfits like ISIS bent on attacking our interests and security.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/05/why-is-trump-surrendering-to-the-taliban/

President Trump may be the author of The Art of the Deal, but how can someone who knows so well that the Obama-Kerry agreement with terrorist Iran was a bad deal, and who understood the importance of annihilating ISIS (and who then did so) at the same time think the terrorist Taliban in Afghanistan will be restrained by a piece of paper backed up by no credible U.S. military pressure?

The administration has enlisted the diplomatic prowess of an admittedly impressive personage in Afghan-American former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (and, before that, to Afghanistan and to Iraq) Zalmay Khalizad, who held numerous foreign policy posts under Reagan and both Bushes.

But has there ever been a more impressive diplomat than Henry Kissinger? Yet the deal he negotiated with North Vietnam in 1973, for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize, was followed two years later by the Communist North’s conquest of South Vietnam. As the disaster materialized, South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu justifiably declared: “the United States did not keep its word … The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom.”

The Vietnam Syndrome must stop. There is simply no way to negotiate successfully with an anti-democratic aggressor without military force hanging close over that aggressor’s head. And yet President Trump has already announced that U.S. troops in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has been making territorial gains for years, will soon be reduced by more than a third, from 14,000 to 8,600. A deal would reportedly mean the withdrawal of most U.S. forces by November 2020.

It will soon be 18 years that our military has been in Afghanistan. Let’s scan the early history. “In late 2001, the CIA led a campaign to topple the Taliban with the support of the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s foe inside Afghanistan,” the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel wrote in 2009, noting that, “the results were spectacular and came quickly. By early 2002 the Taliban were routed, al-Qaida was on the run and the two were retreating into Pakistan.”

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

LAF soldiers on a foot patrol along the Blue Line in the vicinity of Meiss el Jabel.

American security assistance generally is predicated on the principle that a smaller or poorer country that has U.S. equipment and training will be better able to defend common interests than one that doesn’t. Sometimes it works that way. But sometimes it puts the U.S. in bed with people who want our weapons and training but do not share our bottom line — their enemy is not ours; their rules of engagement are not ours; their government, in fact, is not a friend of ours, but maybe if we reward it thoroughly enough it won’t actively oppose our interests.

In that latter category is Lebanon.

As Hezbollah announced it is preparing to attack Israel, we must consider the role of the United States in arming and training the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), the national army of Lebanon that technically is an arm of the Hezbollah-dominated government in Beirut.

Lebanon is not a functional country and there are those — the Assad family in Syria, for example — who don’t think it should be a country at all. Syria didn’t recognize the independence of Lebanon until 2008, after a 29-year occupation that ended in 2005. By law, power is shared among religious and ethnic groups — 19 in the current parliament.

Hezbollah, created, armed and run by Iran as a Shiite supremacist military force, has both the majority in the political cabinet in Beirut and a separate, private army complete with precision missiles and rule-making authority in the southern part of the country. Lebanon has little economy, but Hezbollah runs rackets — mostly arms and drugs, mostly in South America — and kills people in Europe, and Jews and Israelis around the world.

Hezbollah kills Americans, too. Until 2001, it had killed more Americans than any other terror organization — including 241 American service members in 1983 in their barracks in Beirut, the greatest loss of American Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/rouhani-is-not-at-trumps-level/

French president Emmanuel Macron made news by inviting Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif to the sidelines of the G-7 summit in Biarritz last weekend. Macron wants to renew European leadership on the global stage — as well as his standing at home — by jump-starting diplomacy between the United States and Iran. At a press conference yesterday, Macron said he’d given President Trump prior notice. “He was informed at each minute about the solution — the situation, sorry,” Macron said. “And the idea for me was, in case of structural move and — important move and important solutions — perhaps to have meeting between ministers, not at President Trump’s level, because President Trump’s level is President Rouhani.”

Pardonnez-moi, monsieur le président. Rouhani is not “Trump’s level.” Rouhani is prime minister of Iran. He plays an important role in Iranian politics. He is the public face of the regime. But he is neither head of state nor, in actuality, head of government.