RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272620/pompeo-and-regime-change-tehran-michael-ledeen

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently made an astonishing statement to a small group of journalists, in which he appeared to call for revolution in Iran, and pledge American support for it. Adam Kredo reported it:

Pompeo, speaking to reporters in Riyadh, said that the Trump administration’s primary goal is to empower the Iranian people to rein in the ruling regime, which has spent a fortune on foreign wars and terror operations as its own people suffer from a collapsing economy.

While the administration has been careful to avoid characterizing its policy as regime change, it has become clear that it does supports efforts by the Iranian people to end Tehran’s expansionist march across the region, particularly in Syria and Yemen. The administration also has stated that it opposes the hardline regime and would offer its support to opposition elements in the country.

“Our effort is to make sure that the Iranian people get control of their capital, and it becomes a nation that is normal and is not conducting terror campaigns that are unrivaled any place else in the world, Pompeo said.

It may well be that the Trump Administration has always maintained it would support opposition elements in Iran, but although I have long favored such support for revolution against the regime, I haven’t seen much evidence of it. Although the president, the vice president, the national security adviser and the secretary of state have been unstinting in their criticism of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his henchmen, it has been difficult to spot concrete signs of their support for regime opponents, or for what would constitute a revolutionary change in Tehran.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/21/trump-

Official Washington has refused to defend America against ballistic missiles, especially from Russia and China, while spending some $300 billion pretending to be trying. For a half century, it has dissembled its intention with techno-speak. On January 17, however, President Trump released the Pentagon’s long internally disputed Missile Defense Review (MDR) with words that might be summed up as, “This time, for sure!”

Said Trump: “First, we will prioritize the defense of the American people above all else.” Wow. Goodbye Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger. Strike one.

And then: “The United States cannot simply build more of the same, or make only incremental improvements.” Strike two.

Finally: “My upcoming budget will invest in a space-based missile defense layer . . . Regardless of the missile type or the geographic origins of the attack, we will ensure that enemy missiles find no sanctuary on Earth or in the skies above.” Home run!

Most media accounts, and Democrats, took Trump at his word. But whoever fights his way through the MDR’s 8,000 words of bureaucratese, written by people who failed freshman composition, will find no fundamental changes in current policy. It’s a fair bet Trump did not read it.

Tinkering With a Horse-and-Buggy System
The most fundamental of questions—the one that McNamara and Kissinger “settled” with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty before most people reading this were born—is that the U.S government should not even try to defend America against Russian and Chinese missiles, but it may try defending against “theater” threats. The Trump MDR reaffirms their settlement: “While the United States relies on deterrence to protect against large and technically sophisticated Russian and Chinese intercontinental ballistic missile threats to the U.S. homeland, U.S. active missile defense can and must outpace existing and potential rogue state offensive missile capabilities.” Color that no change.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/21/no-forever-war-syria-wont-protect-united-states/

Army Chief Warrant Officer Jonathan R. Farmer, 37, of Boynton Beach, Florida. Navy Chief Petty Officer Shannon M. Kent, 35, of Pine Plains, New York. Defense Intelligence Agency civilian Scott A. Wirtz, 42, of St. Louis, Missouri. Interpreter Ghadir Taher, 27, from East Point, Georgia.

The bodies of the four Americans from four separate parts of the country—victims of a January 16 Islamic State suicide bombing near a popular restaurant in the Syrian city of Manbij—made their final return home to Dover Air Force Base on January 19. It was a vivid and graphic reminder to the American people that U.S. forces remain very much in harm’s way.

To the politicians back home, the deaths of four Americans in a Syrian town few in the United States could find on a map is a sign of ISIS’s sudden resurgence. The American people have been led to believe that President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria is emboldening the enemy. Sen. Lindsey Graham, the interventionist who has never seen a world problem that couldn’t be solved through military force, even suggested that Trump’s decision may have laid the groundwork for the bombing in Manbij. Sen. Jack Reed said the attack is proof the administration needs to “reevaluate” a troop departure.

Then there was Brett McGurk, who viewed Trump’s order as so detrimental to the counterterrorism effort that he resigned his position as U.S. envoy to the counter-ISIS coalition in protest. In a Washington Post editorial McGurk warned that the entire mission was now at risk of being jeopardized. “The president’s decision to leave Syria,” McGurk wrote, “was made without deliberation, consultation with allies or Congress, assessment of risk, or appreciation of facts.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/donald-trumps-middle-east-strategy-and-the-kurds/

There’s a problem with getting too close to Turkey.

President Trump is right to dismiss the “freedom agenda” in the Middle East. Long experience has disproved that idea that, under the umbrella of U.S. military might and with American encouragement, tribal Muslim societies with medieval and theocratic cultures and institutions will transform themselves into free democratic republics. Instead of an Arab Spring, we got years of jihadi civil war, culminating in the ISIS scourge of violence and terror.

With the ISIS fanatics largely (though not entirely) brought to heel in Syria, and all other reasons for having U.S. troops in the Middle East exhausted, Trump aims to bring the troops home. As Hudson scholar Michael Doran argued in a recent, widely read Mosaic article — with Walter Russell Mead concurring in the Wall Street Journal — this doesn’t mean Trump has no Middle East strategy. Doran notes that Trump is trying to forge a Sunni–Turkish–Israeli coalition as a realpolitik counterbalance to Iranian power in the region, rather than leaving a vacuum for jihadists to fill, and argues that this is the right strategy.

But there’s a problem with getting too close with Turkey, one that the strategy’s advocates acknowledge but have done too little to address: the country’s treatment of our allies the Kurds. It is a matter of national honor not to abandon our allies to slaughter, as we abandoned the Montagnards after Vietnam and our translators and spies in Iraq. It is disgraceful that, as Henry Kissinger has said, while it is dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, to be its friend is fatal.

Certainly we ought to do something to try to protect them from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Doran writes, but he doesn’t specify what this is. Both National Security Advisor John Bolton and Trump himself, meanwhile, have issued categorical demands to Erdogan for specific protections for the Kurds.

You can see from Erdogan’s ferocious outrage over these demands — he wouldn’t even see Bolton when he came to Turkey recently — the fatal flaw in the Doran-Mead argument: Turkey is not our friend. Erdogan, as Mead quotes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as charging, is an anti-Semitic dictator. In fact, to my mind, the speed and determination with which he has dismantled Ataturk’s secular state and turned it into a Muslim sharia regime shows that admitting Turkey into NATO was as foolish a miscalculation of the striped-pants liberal globalists as letting China into the World Trade Organization. Admitting power-hungry dictators into the global club does not transform them into rule-abiding, contract-respecting, peace-and-freedom-loving liberals. It just opens the door to subversion of the West.

https://bit.ly/2AOjVey

The January 10, 2019 Cairo, Egypt speech by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – which was cleared by the White House – was a course-setting presentation of the US role in the Middle East.

Pompeo’s ideological and operational speech was aimed at bolstering the US’ posture of deterrence and reassuring pro-US Arab regimes. It was diametrically opposed to President
Obama’s vision of the Middle East, which was presented in Cairo, Egypt on June 4, 2009.

In 2009, in Cairo, President Obama introduced his own vision of rejuvenated US relations with Islam and Muslims, highlighting the following guidelines:

“Islam has always been a part of America’s story…. Since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, served in government, stood for civil rights….

“Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism – it is an important part of promoting peace….

“America and Islam are not exclusive… they overlap and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings…. The interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart…. Throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality….

“More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a cold war in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam….

“Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance….”

In 2019, in Cairo, Secretary of State, Pompeo, introduced his own assessments of Middle East reality and bluntly recommended policy guidelines:

“When America retreats, chaos often follows. When we neglect our friends, resentment builds. When we partner with enemies, they advance….

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-mideast-strategy-11547509876

As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo concludes his swing through the Middle East, the Trump administration’s regional strategy is coming into view. Like President Obama, President Trump wants to reduce American commitments while promoting stability. But their strategies differ. Mr. Obama thought the best hope for a reduced U.S. footprint was conciliating Iran. Mr. Trump, by contrast, seeks to build a coalition of U.S. regional allies—even if those allies fall well short of perfection—that can provide a stable security architecture and offset Iranian strength as the U.S. steps back.

In seeking a reduced Middle East presence and retreating from expansive human-rights goals, both Team Obama and Team Trump have reacted to significant changes in American politics. Public support for U.S. military action and democracy promotion in the Middle East has all but collapsed, for two reasons. First, decades of engagement in the region have brought neither stability nor democracy. Second, as America’s dependence on Middle East energy recedes, many voters see less reason to prioritize the region. Pundits can argue that these reactions are shortsighted, but politicians must take them into account.

The Trump administration hopes that with limited American support, Israel, Turkey and the Sunni Arab countries can together contain Iran. If so, Mr. Trump can claim credit for improved Israeli-Arab ties and a more stable region even as he cuts back on American troop and aid levels. This is a sounder strategy in the abstract than the Obama team’s gamble on Iranian restraint. U.S. relations with the Sunni Arab powers, Israel and Turkey are sometimes difficult, but a policy based on continued cooperation with them is more feasible than subordinating their interests to chase after an improved relationship with the deeply hostile regime in Tehran.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13534/nuclear-disarmament-demands

The notion of a unilateral U.S. cut completely disregards Moscow’s large-scale nuclear modernization that has been going on since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the effort in April 2000.

During his state-of-the-nation address on March 1, Putin boasted of technological breakthroughs in Russia’s nuclear-weapons capabilities, which have rendered NATO’s U.S.-led missile defense “useless.” In 2014, Putin announced that Russia’s nuclear capabilities would be 100% modernized by 2021. Meanwhile, America’s nuclear upgrades — including a new bomber, submarine and land-based missile — will not go into the field until 2027 at the earliest, and will not be completed before 2042.

Reagan’s successful policies involved not the elimination of all nuclear weapons, but the simultaneous modernization of all legs of America’s nuclear Triad in a manner that enhanced national security and strategic stability.

The disarmament community in the United States — made up of organizations such as Global Zero and the Ploughshares Fund — believes that America’s nuclear modernization program is “stoking a new arms race.”

Downplaying threats from North Korea, Iran, China and Russia, pro-disarmament groups want the U.S. unilaterally to eliminate more than 90% of its strategic nuclear delivery vehicles and drastically reduce strategic nuclear bombers, submarines and silo-based missiles.

The notion of a unilateral U.S. cut completely disregards Moscow’s large-scale nuclear modernization that has been going on since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the effort in April 2000. It is a build-up that includes thousands of additional theater nuclear systems, as well as deployments that directly violate the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) between the U.S. and Russia.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/10/disputes-taiwan-trade-space-will-define-u-s-relationship-china/

Which country is more dangerous to travel to for Americans: Myanmar or Communist China? If you picked Myanmar, a country that has been in civil war since its independence in 1948, you would be wrong.

The U.S. State Department issued a level II travel advisory to China last week, which means Americans should exercise increased caution when travelling in China. That is the same warning level the State Department issued in a travel advisory for Myanmar. Don’t forget that the last time the State Department issued a travel advisory to China was in 1989, right after Chinese government brutally suppressed student protesters in Tiananmen Square.

What prompted the travel advisory this time? China has arrested 13 Canadian citizens recently, on trumped up charges, in retaliation for Canadian authorities’ December arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of China’s telecom giant Huawei. The U.S. Justice Department requested Meng’s arrest on allegations that she had violated sanctions against Iran by committing financial fraud. Now, the American government is working on extraditing Meng to the United States.

Since Meng’s arrest has ignited nationalist fever in China, with the Chinese government no doubt in a revenge mood, U.S. authorities are concerned that Chinese authorities may “prohibit U.S. citizens from leaving China by using ‘exit bans’” and “U.S. citizens may be detained without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime.” Given the enormous economic ties of the two countries, it’s extraordinary for the United States to warn against its citizens travelling to the second largest economy in the world.

China, of course, dismissed such warning as unjustified. But this represents a new low in the Sino-U.S. relationship. How much worse can the Sino-U.S. relationship get before it gets better? It depends on how the two nations address three top thorny issues: trade disputes, technology competition, and Taiwan.