RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nationalism-is-necessary-but-insufficient-11562626113

As President Trump reveled in air-force flyovers and a tank display this Fourth of July, the idea that dominates his administration’s domestic and foreign policies was on full display. That idea is nationalism, and Mr. Trump hopes it will reshape both American politics and the international order.

At home, Mr. Trump relies on the power of nationalism to isolate and marginalize his opponents. At a time when some on the left believe it is more important to denounce America’s failings than to hail its accomplishments, Mr. Trump seeks to wrap himself in a flag that most Americans revere.

We’ll know in November 2020 if this strategy has paid off at the polls. The results of a frankly nationalist foreign policy may take longer to assess. The Trump administration’s hostility to such multilateral institutions as the European Union, the World Trade Organization and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—and its apparent cynicism toward international law and democracy itself—have astounded and embittered many longtime American allies. This is costly; the trans-Atlantic alliance that grounded American policy for 70 years is visibly and rapidly weakening.

For many of Mr. Trump’s critics, “America First” foreign policy reflects demagogic populism, incompetence or worse. The reality is more complicated. As America’s foreign-policy focus shifts to the Indo-Pacific to balance the rise of China, the globalist, cosmopolitan ideas that guided American foreign-policy makers through the post-Cold War era may create as many problems as they solve.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/07/07/real-way-do-american-diplomacy-leader-leader-thatcher-regan/

In leaked emails, the British Ambassador to the United States, Sir Kim Darroch, describes President Trump as “radiating insecurity”, and speaks of his White House as a “uniquely dysfunctional environment”. 

Sir Kim deserves a smidgeon of sympathy: it is no secret that dealing with the ever-changing Trump team can be tricky. But, overall, his memos raise a question: “What is the valued-added here?” We send diplomats abroad so that they can get closer insight into foreign powers. Sir Kim is effectively saying that he and his team cannot manage this. He blames Mr Trump’s shortcomings for their failures. The information contained in his missives is the sort of stuff you can read every day in posh newspapers and seems to contain nothing from the inside. 

It is not true that no one British can get close to Donald Trump. I can immediately think of at least four people who have managed this in recent years. Three of them – Nigel Farage, Conrad Black and Piers Morgan – are outside the normal systems with which diplomats are familiar; but one was Foreign Secretary when Sir Kim first started writing his plaintive emails. Now that same man, Boris Johnson, is almost certain to become our next Prime Minister. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/unalienable-rights-and-u-s-foreign-policy-11562526448

America’s Founders defined unalienable rights as including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” They designed the Constitution to protect individual dignity and freedom. A moral foreign policy should be grounded in this conception of human rights.

Yet after the Cold War ended, many human-rights advocates turned their energy to new categories of rights. These rights often sound noble and just. But when politicians and bureaucrats create new rights, they blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights granted by governments. Unalienable rights are by nature universal. Not everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right. Loose talk of “rights” unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy.

That’s why I’m launching a Commission on Unalienable Rights at the State Department, chaired by Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon and populated with scholars, legal experts and activists. The commission’s mission isn’t to discover new principles but to ground our discussion of human rights in America’s founding principles.

The commission is an advisory body and won’t opine on policy. My hope is that its work will generate a serious debate about human rights that extends across party lines and national borders, similar to the debate sparked by the human-rights panel Eleanor Roosevelt convened in 1947. The Commission on Unalienable Rights will study the document that resulted from that effort, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, along with our founding documents and other important works.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14499/trump-iran-sanctions-fallacies

…sanctions are working. The mullahs have started to reduce their footprint in Syria and Yemen… Offices in more than 30 Iranian cities, to enlist “volunteers” for “Jihad” in Syria, have been closed, and the recruitment of Afghan and Pakistani mercenaries has stopped. Tehran’s military and diplomatic presence in Yemen has been downsized, ostensibly for security reasons. Smuggling arms to Houthis continues albeit at a reduced rate.

Cash-flow problems caused by sanctions have also forced the mullahs to cut the stipends of proxies, notably the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Palestinian “Islamic Jihad” by around 10 percent with more cuts envisaged…. More importantly, perhaps, the mullahs have frozen their missile program at the current range of 2000 kilometers.

The seventh claim is that Trump’s sanctions strengthen hardline factions and weaken the “reformists” around President Hassan Rouhani. Since Rouhani and his associates have never said or even hinted, what it is they may want to reform, it is hard to speak of a “reformist” faction. Moreover, the extensive purge of the military currently undertaken by “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei does not seem to have affected any “moderates”.

As President Donald Trump tightens the screws on the current ruling elite in Tehran, the debate on the possible consequences of his policy rages on in American media, think tanks and political circles. Moreover, because Trump’s constituency is outside such elite spheres the impression created is that his Iran policy either has failed already or is set to produce undesirable unintended consequences.

In that context, seven claims form the main themes of the campaign launched by the pro-Tehran lobby with support from sections of the US Democrat Party and others who dislike Trump for different reasons. The first claim is that sanctions do not work.

That theme is developed without spelling out what the intended aims of sanctions are. Trump has said his aim is to persuade the Khomeinist clique in Tehran to change aspects of its behavior abroad. In that sense, sanctions are working.

The mullahs have started to reduce their footprint in Syria and Yemen, without quite opting for total withdrawal. Offices in more than 30 Iranian cities, to enlist “volunteers” for “Jihad” in Syria, have been closed, and the recruitment of Afghan and Pakistani mercenaries has stopped. Tehran’s military and diplomatic presence in Yemen has been downsized, ostensibly for security reasons. Smuggling arms to Houthis continues albeit at a reduced rate.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/us-iran-standoff-trump-has-more-choices-than-previous-presidents/

Vis-à-vis Tehran, Trump has more choices than previous presidents have had, partly because the U.S. is now the world’s largest producer of oil and gas.

I n the current American–Iran stand-off are a number of global players. That is hardly new, but what is novel is that, for the first time in decades, there’s almost no power that can obstruct or alter U.S. efforts to confront Iranian aggressions in America’s own time and fashion.

In other words, the United States is almost immune from the sort of pressures that usually coalesce to dictate, modify, or thwart U.S. decision-making in the Middle East. Such liberation from outside coercion is singularly unusual in the post-war American overseas experience.

The Muslim World
Usually in any showdown with a Muslim state of the Middle East, especially a large, theocratic country like Iran, the United States would be subject to the usual Islamic boilerplate slurs of Islamophobia, racism, imperialism, and colonialism, and we’d see popular anti-American unrest. But in the Muslim world, Iran is probably more unpopular than even the Trump administration. Renegade allies such as Hezbollah, Bashar al-Assad’s rump remains of Syria, and Hamas are reminders that Iran has no friends. Hatred for Tehran in the Middle East transcends the ancient Persian–Arab and Shiite–Sunni fault lines, and it’s fueled by 40 years of Iran-backed terrorism, bullying, and backing of insurgent movements throughout the Middle East.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/25/lessons-from-bill-call-the-s-o-b/

In January 2016, Bill Clinton’s presidential library made public transcripts of telephone calls between the president and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The calls, placed between May 1997 and December 2000, represent, as the New York Times noted, “a time capsule . . . captur[ing] the priorities and perceptions of the moment that, judged with the harsh certainty of hindsight, look prescient or wildly off base.”

One remark of the former president is striking, not so much for its prescience or its predictive error but rather for what it tells us about the American foreign policy status quo and the potentially tragic enslavement of our presidents to media narrative. Speaking with Blair about Saddam Hussein, Clinton said, “If I weren’t constrained by the press, I would pick up the phone and call the son of a bitch. But that is such a heavy-laden decision in America. I can’t do that and I don’t think you can.”

Clinton’s statement is a loaded one. It tells us much about the traditional power of “media optics” in our national politics, much about the constraints such optics have placed upon our presidents—and much, also, about how President Donald Trump stands apart.

Would the world be a different place today if President Clinton had actually picked up the phone and called the S.O.B. in Baghdad? Clinton hoped to assure Saddam of his intentions: that he wanted the elimination of any chemical or biological weapons programs, not the destruction of the Iraqi regime itself. But, to keep the media at bay, Clinton relied upon third parties to make his point to Saddam. We are left only to wonder if Clinton’s message was ever really conveyed. And even if it was, did the Iraqi leader believe it given the impersonal and roundabout manner of its delivery?

As Winston Churchill once remarked, “meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” This was not a call for some type of spineless appeasement—surrendering to the insatiable demands of a tyrant and strengthening that tyrant, in turn, to do his worst. Churchill’s call was for dialogue and interpersonal summit politics: discussion between leaders at the apex of government, without interference, and certainly without bowing before the dictates of the media.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-goes-to-japan-and-japan-to-him-11562020774

Even before he stunned the world by arranging an impromptu summit with Kim Jong Un, President Trump worked his media magic at the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, last week. Whether shaping the world economy through discussions with Chinese President Xi Jinping or elevating his daughter Ivanka to senior-diplomat status by bringing her into critical meetings, Mr. Trump and his trademark dazzle-and-spin approach to foreign affairs fascinated, worried and flummoxed diplomats and pundits.

Many hope that such personalized, improvisational and unilateral diplomacy will fade from world politics when Mr. Trump returns to private life. But two developments in Japan suggest the Trumpification of world politics may be here to stay.

First, a small fleet of whalers set out on the first commercial hunt in Japan in 31 years, as Japan’s departure from the International Whaling Commission became effective. The IWC may not be one of the world’s most important multilateral institutions, but its troubles typify the crisis increasingly gripping its peers.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/01/trump

Vladimir Putin may be the expert on interfering in U.S. elections, but this past weekend Donald Trump gave North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un the power to tilt the 2020 election decidedly in favor of whoever his Democrat opponent ends up being.

The president on Friday evening tweeted: “I will be leaving Japan for South Korea (with President Moon). While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!”

Assuming the tweet didn’t disguise previous secret arrangements, it was a shortest-of-short-notice cold invitations. Press reports say it was entirely spontaneous, the president’s own idea, and at variance to the advice of national security aides. Had Kim rebuffed him, it would have been arguably the greatest embarrassment of Trump’s presidency and would have dominated the coverage of the establishment media for days, and provided fodder for heavy attacks from the Democrats running for president.

Instead, Kim came a running to the infamous Demilitarized Zone at the South Korean border. Trump’s tweet, from Japan, was at 6:51 p.m. Eastern time on Friday; he and Kim met just before 2 a.m. Eastern on Saturday. To get a notorious dictator to show up at a place of your choosing in seven hours is a dazzling rarity, if not a first, in the annals of diplomacy.

After shaking hands at the line dividing north and south, Kim invited Trump, and we saw the dramatic spectacle of the first sitting president of the United States setting foot on North Korean soil. Their encounter went on for an hour, much longer than expected, and in its practical effect it clearly erased the stalemate in Hanoi; they agreed to arrange for officials to meet and discuss the differences left unresolved at that second summit in Vietnam in February.