RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274101/trump-vs-mullahs-bruce-thornton

In any fight, keeping your opponent off balance is critical, and telegraphing your punches is dangerous. Feints and tactical retreats are ways to avoid becoming predictable. Even threats and bravado can be used to confuse the enemy, as boxing legend Muhammed Ali proved. But eventually, you have to punch your opponent in the face hard enough to knock him flat.

Whether by design or instinct, Donald Trump’s foreign policy so far has followed this age-old strategy. He has abandoned the West’s predictable foreign-policy narrative that conflicts can be resolved with “diplomatic engagement,” “international summits,” “UN Resolutions,” “multilateral agreements,” and all the other verbal rituals for avoiding risky action while the enemy uses the time for working more mischief. His direct, blunt, sometimes wild public pronouncements blow through the understated, vapid, stylized diplo-speak of “grave concern” and “deeply troubling” that are mere verbal place-holders, ways of providing the press copy without saying anything significant. And he has dropped the pretense that thugs and fanatics deserve to be treated with the “mutual respect” due to legitimate leaders of free nations.

But two years of Trump’s using this strategy with Iran may be becoming predictable, at least to the mullahs. In the last few months, attacks on six commercial vessels in the Gulf, and now the destruction of one of our drones flying over international waters, suggest Iran believes that for all his tough talk, Trump is a typical Western leader who will not back his words with action.

Take the drone incident. Conflicting reports say that the president ordered a strike on three of Iran’s military sites, then called it off after the jets were already in the air, though the president disputes the claim that the strike was “cancelled,” but rather is “on hold.” More baffling are Trump’s reasons for holding back. He speculated that a rogue Iranian officer was “loose” and did “something stupid” not approved by the regime. That’s not likely with a military tightly controlled by the ayatollahs, who have demonstrated in the past the brutal wages of acting without their approval.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-for-restraint-in-the-gulf-11560813331

The latest crisis with Iran illustrates an important but widely neglected point about world politics: Amid all the talk about American decline, American power in the international system has actually grown. Even five years ago the U.S. could not force Iran out of world oil markets without causing a devastating spike in oil and gas prices that would destabilize the world economy. Today, world energy markets are so robust that Brent crude prices have fallen since the first set of attacks on oil tankers in May.

Simultaneously, the U.S. has developed the ability to globalize unilateral sanctions. Washington doesn’t need the support of its allies to isolate Tehran economically, because “secondary sanctions” can effectively compel other countries to comply with the U.S. effort. That the administration has accomplished this while also engaged in trade battles with nearly every important American trading partner underscores the magnitude of U.S. economic power and the administration’s determination to bring it fully to bear on Iran.

As the shades of Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy can testify, however, great power does not automatically confer wisdom. Having demonstrated an impressive ability to squeeze Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, the Trump administration now needs to translate raw power into policy success. This goal remains elusive with all three countries so far, and the path forward is anything but clear.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-arent-ready-for-cold-war-ii-11560207604

A series of conversations with Trump administration officials at every level as well as leading Democrats points to two clear and disturbing conclusions. First, the U.S. is increasingly committed to a historic turn in its relations with China as opinion hardens on both sides of the aisle. Second, we aren’t ready for what is coming.

In some ways the situation is comparable to the mid-1940s, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union moved quickly from wartime alliance to Cold War. President Truman and a handful of State Department and War Department officials saw the clash coming early, but public opinion was slower to move. Winston Churchill’s now-famous “Iron Curtain” speech in March 1946 was widely criticized as too hawkish; Truman, who sat through the speech and applauded it, had to distance himself from Churchill’s hard line. It took the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the start of the Berlin Airlift in June, and the reinstitution of the draft in July to bring the reality of the Cold War home to the American public.

Today both Washington and Beijing are maneuvering themselves for some kind of long-term competition—but just as few observers in 1946 could imagine a four-decade global standoff, neither we nor the Chinese can predict the scale, scope or consequences of the emerging rivalry. It is likely both to echo the Cold War in some ways and to diverge radically from it in others.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/447235-more-us-talks-with-iran-are-doomed-to-fail

The latest U.S. offer of negotiations with Iran prompts the same question with which every administration of recent decades has grappled: Is behavioral change in Tehran possible without regime change?

We Americans want to think so, but the evidence of four decades suggests otherwise. Consequently, President Donald Trump and his team may be headed toward another fruitless U.S. effort to create a better Iran.

With the president concerned that growing tensions between Washington and Tehran were setting the stage for war, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this week that the administration is ready to talk with “no preconditions.”

That came days after the president himself sought to ease tensions by deriding National Security Advisor John Bolton’s enthusiasm for regime change. Of the Islamic Republic, Trump told reporters in Tokyo, “It has a chance to be a great country with the same leadership. We’re not looking for regime change. I just want to make that clear. We’re looking for no nuclear weapons.”

The new U.S. offer of talks marked a dramatic change of direction for an administration that, as Pompeo announced a year ago, said it wouldn’t talk to Tehran until the regime satisfied a list of sweeping demands that included an end to its ballistic missile tests and its support of militants in Syria and Yemen.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-case-against-europe-11559602940

“Why does he hate us?” is the question American foreign-policy types often hear from European friends and colleagues when the subject of Donald Trump comes up—as it often does. With Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Europe this week, it seems an auspicious time to attempt an answer.

The news isn’t all bad. When Mr. Trump and senior administration officials talk about China, they attack it for abusing the international system in a ruthless quest for global hegemony. Their reading of Europe is different: that a mix of dysfunctional policies, unrealistic ideas about world politics, and poor institutional arrangements has locked the Continent on a trajectory of decline. As Mr. Trump’s team sees it, they aren’t trying to weaken Europe; they are trying to save Europe from itself.

There are five elements of the Trump critique of the European Union. First, some of the “new nationalists” believe multinational entities like the EU are much weaker and less effective than the governments of nation-states—so much so that the development of the EU has weakened the Western alliance as a whole. In this view, cooperation between nation-states is good and through it countries can achieve things they couldn’t achieve on their own. But trying to overinstitutionalize that cooperation is a mistake. The resulting bureaucratic structures and Byzantine politics and decision-making processes paralyze policy, alienate public opinion, and create a whole significantly less than the sum of its parts.

A second concern—in the Trump view—is that the European Union is too German. As some on the president’s team see it, German preferences mean the Continent is too hawkish when it comes to monetary and fiscal policy, and too dovish when it comes to defense. A fiscal and monetary straitjacket has cramped Europe’s growth, while the refusal of Germany to live up to its NATO commitments weakens the alliance as a whole.

A third concern is that the EU is too liberal—in the American meaning of the term, which is to say too statist on economics and too progressive on social issues. Besides the common American conservative view that statist economic policy undermines European dynamism and growth, Mr. Trump seems to believe European migration policy—especially Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to welcome more than a million mostly Muslim migrants to Germany—is a tragic mistake.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-puts-trump-to-the-test-11559507350

President Trump’s Iran policy has so far been effective at keeping the regime off balance. He especially distinguished himself by defying conventional opinion and withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, and imposing painful economic sanctions, which have undercut Tehran’s finances and exacerbated internal pressures.

But American reliance on sanctions, which Iran has weathered in the past, signals an unwillingness for confrontation. Tehran is pushing back. First, it announced it would stop abiding by certain JCPOA restrictions on its nuclear program. Second, despite Mr. Trump’s warnings and swift deployment of U.S. assets to the region, Iran-backed forces sabotaged oil tankers off the Emirati coast and a Saudi pipeline, and launched a rocket that landed near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Third, Iran followed up with defiant rhetoric. Mr. Trump warned, “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the end of Iran”—but eight days later he played down any chance of conflict, clarifying that “we’re not looking for regime change.” Tehran acted as if it had succeeded in calling the president’s bluff. “The Americans are unwilling and unable to carry out military action against us,” a military aide to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei asserted.

Deterrence requires Mr. Trump to maintain U.S. credibility. Otherwise, Iran will intensify its aggressive behavior and ratchet up its nuclear effort, making conflict likelier. Most immediately, the U.S. must retaliate with precise military action against critical Iranian assets. CONTINUE AT SITE