RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14268/global-zero-nuclear-modernization

As it turns out, the modernization of America’s nuclear deterrent would require, at most, only around 3% of the annual defense budget.

“International arms control relies on adherence to reciprocal obligations and nations should not be required to subject themselves to unilateral observance of them. Arms control more generally is undermined by violations going unchallenged.” — Forces Network, UK, April 4, 2019.

“Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping continue to expand and modernize their nuclear arsenals. Future arms-control agreements must take into account both the Russian and Chinese threats, while ensuring we don’t place one-sided nuclear restrictions on ourselves.” — Senator Tom Cotton; May 13, 2019.

“We must… realize that America will not be able to achieve the necessary changes to New START unless it is negotiating from a position of strength. That means Congress must invest in the modernization of our nuclear triad and the additional low-yield capabilities called for in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. These investments are critical to America’s ability to rein in China and Russia.” — Representative Liz Cheney; May 13, 2019.

Two narratives that provided justification for cutting America’s defense budget in the 1970s and 1990s — détente and the “end of history” — had a key component in common: Both were based on the assumption that existential national-security threats to the United States were either exaggerated or a thing of the past.

In each narrative, this assumption proved to be false.

Détente favored the Soviet Union so markedly in terms of its “correlation of forces” — the balance of conventional and nuclear power — that victory over the U.S. was in sight. Détente also fueled U.S.S.R. expansionism. More than 20 countries were subjected to Soviet aggression, coups, revolutions or wars of national liberation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/john-bolton-was-right-to-meet-with-taiwan/

Its existence as a nation independent from China is a fact.

National Security Adviser John Bolton has caused a furor in Beijing by meeting with his counterpart from Taiwan, leading an entire generation of young Americans to ask: “Where?”

Taiwan once loomed large in the American consciousness, and the American Right was particularly solicitous of its well-being. In the political vocabulary of the time, the Republic of China — Taiwan — was a tiny outpost of freedom menaced by Red China — the so-called People’s Republic.

Taiwan is still a thriving republic. China is still a single-party police state, grown perhaps a slightly paler shade of red. But American politics has changed and, to some extent, moved on.

Bolton, a movement conservative of Cold War vintage, apparently has not moved on. Good for Bolton.

The existence of Taiwan as an independent nation is a fact. It is no more a break-away province of the People’s Republic of China than Massachusetts is a rebellious British colony. Its 24 million people constitute the largest nation to be excluded from the United Nations and from full American diplomatic recognition, and its economy of more than $600 billion is the largest of any country to be marginalized by the global economic and diplomatic communities. The Holy See is one of a tiny handful of sovereign states recognizing Taiwan.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/trump-foreign-policy-challenge-deterrence-without-war/

Trump’s opponents at home and abroad would love to see him get the U.S. into a messy intervention right before the election.

Donald Trump inherited a superficially stable world from Barack Obama that, in fact, was quite volatile. There had been no tense standoffs with North Korea, but also apparent intercontinental ballistic missiles with possible nuclear warheads now pointed at the United States. Obama more or less punted on North Korea, by declaring it a problem — and hoping that Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear testing did not get too out of hand before 2017.

Then there was the “Iran deal.” It was an appeasing agreement that almost surely guaranteed that Iran would soon have nuclear weapons, along with a revived economy liberated from sanctions and empowered with American cash. Iran’s terrorist surrogates were the greatest beneficiaries of U.S. naïveté. At best, Obama assumed that when Iran went nuclear, it would be on someone else’s presidential watch and therefore not his fault. At worst, Obama, in delusional fashion, believed that empowering Iran would balance Sunni states and bring justice to historically oppressed Shiite and Persian minorities who would take their rightful place in the Islamic world.

Everyone knew that China violated almost every aspect of world commerce. Everyone knew that China would never allow the U.S. to trade with China the same way that Beijing traded with America. Everyone knew that 1.3-billion-person China was a neo-imperialist Communist dictatorship that was headed on an announced trajectory of world hegemony. Obama in particular thought that stopping China’s agenda would be medicine that was more painful than the disease.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/05/19/iran-donald-trump-replaces-barack-obama-mirage-editorials-debates/3735836002/

Donald Trump has a well-articulated strategy toward Iran. Like almost every other Republican candidate for president in 2016, he argued that President Barack Obama empowered Iran at the expense of America’s traditional allies and its own vital interests. Trump has implemented instead a policy of containment.

When critics claim that his strategy lacks an “endgame,” they are really expressing nostalgia for the clarity of Obama’s vision. The Iranian regime, Obama told us, was moderating, it was willing to dispense with its ambitions to become a nuclear weapons state and was eager to stabilize the Middle East in cooperation with the West. Taken together, these trends inevitably led to an attractive endgame: strategic accommodation between Washington and Tehran.

This vision, however, was a mirage. Events in Syria during Obama’s administration gave us a preview of the true consequences of his strategy. Out of a misguided belief that recognition of Syria as an Iranian sphere of interest would transform Tehran into an agent of stability, he made no attempt to counter the provocative new moves that Iran and Hezbollah made to save the Assad regime.

This miscalculation allowed Iran and Russia to form a military alliance that bears primary responsibility for the deaths of over half a million Syrians and the displacement of well over 10 million more.

https://bit.ly/2M5Wci1

“Talk-with-Iran was tried by successive US presidents, starting with Jimmy Carter. In 1980, [Iran’s] Mullahs signed an accord with Carter not to seize anymore American hostages in exchange for de-freezing Iranian assets…. Yet, to this day, Iran has always held American hostages – 14 today…. The Saudis tried to improve ties with the Khomeini regime. They helped organize the Islamic Summit in Teheran…, coordinated oil policies and granted Iran an unprecedented Haj [pilgrimage] quota. The reward was the [Ayatollahs/Hezbollah] June 1996 truck-bomb attack on the Dhahran Khobar Towers [19 US air force men and one Saudi murdered and 490 multi-nationals injured] and the ransacking of the Saudi Embassy and Consulates in Iran…. Turkey had a similar experience.  It created a security commission with Iran and closed its borders to Iranians fleeing to exile… Iranian opposition figures were expelled…. The Mullahs repaid Turkey by granting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK terrorists) bases in the Qandyl Mountain region just inside Iran.  They also created a Turkish branch of Hezbollah…. (Amir Taheri, a leading expert on Iran and the Middle East, A Sharq al Awsat Saudi daily, February 22, 2019). 

Since the 1978-1979 Iranian “Islamic Revolution,” most of European and USA foreign policy, media and academic establishments, and especially the architects of the 2015 nuclear agreement (JCPOA), have promoted accommodation with – not sanctions against – Iran’s Ayatollahs, irrespective of the Ayatollahs’ well-documented systematic track record:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273815/why-war-table-conflict-iran-bruce-thornton

The Washington Free Beacon’s Matthew Continetti reminds us of how the Obama administration sold the Iran Nuclear Deal.  In 2016, Obama’s ex national security advisor Ben Rhodes told the New York Times Magazine how the administration “created an echo chamber” in the media in order to sell the terminally flawed Iran Nuclear Deal to reporters who, Rhodes said correctly, “literally know nothing.” The center-piece of Obama’s narrative was an either-or fallacy: sign the deal with Iran, or go to war.

The strategy worked, which may be why in the current crisis we’re seeing it again. Now, however, the media are taking their direction from Iran. A few days ago an advisor to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (pictured above), the alleged “reformer,” tweeted, “You [Trump] wanted a better deal with Iran. Looks like you are going to get a war instead. That’s what happens when you listen to the mustache.” The “mustache,” of course, is National Security Advisor John Bolton, whom the Dems and their media flunkeys have tarred as a “war-monger” leading the cognitively impaired president into war. As Continetti shows, the media have dutifully followed the Iranians’ propaganda: “Their goal is saving President Obama’s nuclear deal by manipulating Trump into firing Bolton and extending a lifeline to the regime.”

While correcting the old “deal or war” fallacy, however, other commentators seemingly take war off the table, while accepting the need for military action that retaliates or deters. These responses are what, so far, the Trump team is threatening rather than war, contrary to the media shills. But these two important tools for dealing with adversaries and enemies are effective only insofar as the threat of war is credible. If an enemy thinks war is not in the cards, he can continue his aggression, absorbing the occasional military strike or economic sanctions, and buying time in which he continues to escalate his aggression, secure in his assumption that he will not face significant or existential damage.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/the-u-s-is-outplaying-iran-in-a-regional-chess-match/

The Trump administration’s ‘bluster’ has forced the Iranians into a defensive posture.

In the first two weeks of May, U.S.–Iran tensions appeared to be careening toward war. In an escalating series of warnings, the U.S. asserted that an attack by Iran would be met with unrelenting force. Iran eventually responded with its usual bluster about being prepared for a full confrontation with Washington. But on the ground the Middle East looks more like a chessboard, with Iran and its allies and proxies facing off against American allies. This state of affairs was brought into sharp relief when Iranian-backed Houthi rebels launched a drone attack on Saudi Arabia and a rocket fell near the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

U.S. media have tended to focus on the role of national-security adviser John Bolton in crafting the administration’s policy — and whether America would actually go to war with Iran. Iranian media have also sought to decipher exactly what the Trump administration is up to. According to Iran’s Tasnim News, the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Hossein Salami told a closed session of Parliament that the U.S. was involved in a “psychological war” with Iran, predicting the U.S. didn’t have enough forces to actually attack Iran yet.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amid-the-fog-trumps-real-agenda-in-iran-11558357519?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=contextual&cx_artPos=4#cxrecs_s

Whatever other assets and liabilities he brings to the table, President Trump certainly offers this: He is a master at sowing uncertainty, so neither friend nor foe really knows what he’s up to.

And so it is right now with Iran, where Mr. Trump and his aides have in the past two weeks alternately raised and lowered fears about armed conflict. American warships moved toward Iran amid intelligence reports on pending Iranian attacks on U.S. targets in the Middle East.

Then, Mr. Trump lowered the temperature, telling aides he didn’t want a fight and tweeting: “I’m sure that Iran will want to talk soon.”On Sunday, he ramped the heat back up, tweeting: “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran.” Then he backed it down again, saying in a Fox News interview: “No, I don’t want to fight.”

It’s confusing, which may be the goal. Yet the underlying question is simple: What is Mr. Trump really trying to accomplish?

Here’s a reasonable guess, based on conversations with officials and diplomats tracking the situation:Mr. Trump almost certainly doesn’t seek armed conflict with Iran. He’s gone out of his way to avoid or end clashes involving American forces in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea, and has done little to suggest a military move against Venezuela.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273816/showdown-arabian-gulf-ari-lieberman

During his presidential run, Donald Trump argued that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, colloquially known as the Iran deal, was among the worst deals ever negotiated by the United States with a foreign power and promised to withdraw from the JCPOA if elected. In May 2018, Trump kept his word but granted waivers to eight countries to continue purchasing Iranian oil. In May 2019 those waivers expired, further constricting Iran’s ability to export oil.

Sanctions instantly affected all aspects of the Iranian economy including its banking sector. The U.S. Treasury Department succeeded in disconnecting Iran’s banking industry from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). SWIFT enables banks to communicate with each other and facilitates international transactions. Even if rogue nations, like Turkey, attempted to skirt sanctions and purchase Iranian contraband, it would be nearly impossible for Iran to receive payment given its cutoff from SWIFT.

Iran’s economy is contracting and its currency is in freefall. It is estimated that the ban on oil exports alone is costing the regime some $35 billion a year and that’s before the expiration of the waivers. In April, the U.S. declared the IRGC a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and this past week, the U.S. Treasury Department slapped sanctions on Iran’s industrial metals industry.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/iran-deal-supporters-john-bolton/

The Iran echo chamber tries to save its nuclear deal.

Whatever the opposite of a rush to war is — a crawl to peace, maybe — America is in the middle of one. Since May 5, when John Bolton announced the accelerated deployment of the Abraham Lincoln carrier group to the Persian Gulf in response to intelligence of a possible Iranian attack, the press has been aflame with calls for America to show restraint, pursue diplomacy, and rein in the madman with the mustache before he starts a war.

Never mind that President Trump, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Patrick Shanahan, and Bolton have not said a single word about a preemptive strike, much less a full-scale war, against Iran. Never mind that the president’s reluctance for overseas intervention is well known. The antiwar cries are not about context, and they are certainly not about deterring Iran. Their goal is saving President Obama’s nuclear deal by manipulating Trump into firing Bolton and extending a lifeline to the regime.

It’s a storyline that originated in Iran. Toward the end of April, Zarif showed up in New York and gave an interview to Reuters where he said, “I don’t think [Trump] wants war,” but “that doesn’t exclude him basically being lured into one” by Bolton. On May 14, an adviser to Rouhani tweeted at Trump, “You wanted a better deal with Iran. Looks like you are going to get a war instead. That’s what happens when you listen to the mustache. Good luck in 2020!”

And now this regime talking point is everywhere. “It’s John Bolton’s world. Trump is just living in it,” write two former Obama officials in the Los Angeles Times. “John Bolton is Donald Trump’s war whisperer,” writes Peter Bergen on CNN.com. “Trump’s potential war with Iran is all John Bolton’s doing. But it might also be his undoing,” says the pro-Iran Trita Parsi on NBCNews.com. “Is Trump Yet Another U.S. President Provoking a War?” asks Robin Wright of The New Yorker. Guess her answer.

“We cannot repeat the days before the Iraq war when even many of our most reliable news outlets repeated and amplified what was, in fact, a flimsy case for war,” Wendy Sherman writes in the New York Times. She would rather our most reliable news outlets repeat and amplify anti-Bolton talking points instead. Sure, America suspects Iran was involved when “four commercial tankers were reportedly sabotaged off the coast of the United Arab Emirates,” and “Saudi Arabia also reported that drones sent by Iranian-supported Houthis attacked Saudi oil facilities.” But, look, “Iran has denied this.” What more do you need to know?

This is the Iran echo chamber at work. Recall former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes’s admission to the New York Times Magazine in 2016, when he said, “We created an echo chamber” to attack the Iran deal’s opponents through leaks and tips to the D.C. press. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” And: “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project, and whomever else. So we know the tactics that worked.” They worked because “the average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”