RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/establishment-adopts-trump-views-china-military-threat-trade/

A new consensus is emerging, and it sounds a lot like what the president has said all along.

Read recent essays on China. Visit think-tank public symposia. Hear out military analysts. Talk with academics and media pundits. Listen to Silicon Valley grandees. Watch Senate speeches and politicians interview on television.

The resulting new groupspeak is surreal. If one excises the word “Trump,” what follows is a seemingly revolutionary recalibration of attitudes toward China that more or less echo Trump’s voice in the wilderness and often crude and shrill warnings dating back from the campaign trail of 2015.

Trump’s second secretary of state, the skillful Mike Pompeo, has been institutionalizing the president’s pessimistic view of China. Insightful but heretofore underappreciated assessments from China scholars such as Miles Yu and Gordon Chang are now being taking seriously. Both have been warning us for years that the Chinese seek domination, not accommodation, and are replacing their erstwhile feigned respect for our strength with an emboldened contempt for our perceived growing weakness, whether real or psychological. Both have warned also that once China achieves military, economic, and cultural parity with the United States, the global order will be quite different from that of the last 75 years.

From the military, one hears more frequently now that we were at a tipping point by late 2016: The Obama Asian pivot had failed — publicly provocative, but in reality without substance, giving the lethal impression of real weakness masked by empty rhetoric. The Chinese militarization of the Spratley Islands was conceded as the inevitable future of the South China Sea. Chinese military and weapons doctrine was aimed at destroying the offensive capability of the U.S. fleet in the Pacific as a way of breaking off allies from America, and then Finlanding them.

https://theweek.com/articles/825598/love-hate-trump-right-about-north-korea

President Trump is doing the right thing in pursuing peace with North Korea.

It feels odd to type those words, and you probably will not hear them repeated by members of America’s foreign policy establishment over the next few days, as Trump meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam. A lot of smart people — including Trump’s own aides — fear the president will do anything to proclaim the summit a success, even if it means trumpeting an agreement that somehow lets Kim keep his tiny nuclear arsenal largely intact.

They are right: That is a likely outcome — it is what happened, in fact, the first time Trump met Kim. But that’s OK. Because not going to war with North Korea is better than going to war with North Korea. And Trump’s strategy with regards to Kim, whatever its faults, makes war with that country less likely.

For more than a generation, American policy toward North Korea has been aimed mostly at keeping that country from obtaining or keeping a nuclear arsenal. That mission failed in 2006, and American presidents have been scrambling ever since to obtain denuclearization. That goal has never been achieved, and there is no reason to believe it ever will be.

No, it is not good that Kim has nuclear weapons at his disposal: The more such weapons that exist in the world, the more likely it is that one will be used — and that would be a disaster. But it is unlikely the United States can ever convince Kim to give up his weapons because he has one very important incentive to keep them: his personal and political survival. (As if to emphasize the point, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio this weekend posted a picture of a bloodied Muammar Gaddafi to Twitter — a warning to Venezuela’s leaders during that country’s crisis, but no doubt also a reminder to Kim that giving up a nuclear program can make a leader more vulnerable to his rivals, internal or external.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/ilhan-omars-big-lie/The Left distorts what happened in El Salvador in the 1980s.

In a viral exchange at a congressional hearing last week, the new congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, who is quickly establishing herself as the most reprehensible member of the House Democratic freshman class despite stiff competition, launched into Elliott Abrams. She accused the former Reagan official and Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela of being complicit in war crimes.

“Yes or no,” she demanded, “would you support an armed faction within Venezuela that engages in war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, if you believe they were serving U.S. interest, as you did in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua?”

Omar was cribbing from the Left’s notes on U.S. Latin American policy, and doing it badly. She made much of the 1981 El Motoze massacre in El Salvador. The idea that Abrams is somehow directly implicated in this bloodcurdlingly awful event is completely absurd. He was assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Reagan administration, then became assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs on December 10, 1981. The massacre occurred the next day. Unless we are to believe the El Salvadoran military unit took his change of jobs as a green light to indiscriminately kill villagers (which unfortunately was not a new practice), Abrams obviously had nothing to do with the massacre.

Nonetheless, the Omar attack is an opportunity to examine the premises of the Left’s narrative on Reagan’s policy in El Salvador, which supports the persistent attacks on Abrams as a “war criminal.” To paraphrase the famous Mary McCarthy line about Lillian Hellman, every word in this narrative is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

In what follows, I rely throughout on Russell Crandall’s book The Salvador Option: The United States in El Salvador, 1977–1992, a fair-minded, factual account that’s a marked contrast to the tendentiously left-wing material that dominates online.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-honor-of-elliott-abrams/

Three weeks ago, Elliott Abrams returned to government. This was very good news for U.S. foreign policy. He is the State Department’s special representative for Venezuela. And his presence on the public stage has reignited passions about the Reagan administration’s record in Latin America.

Abrams was the assistant secretary of state for Latin America in Reagan’s second term. During the first, he had been assistant secretary for international organizations, and then for human rights. (Abrams joined the administration when he was in his early 30s.)

Like many others he was caught up in the Iran-Contra affair, and he pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress. (Two misdemeanor counts.) He was pardoned by the first President Bush. There is a story to be told about all this, which we will not get into here. Abrams told it in a book, Undue Process: A Story of How Political Differences Are Turned into Crimes.

The second President Bush made Abrams part of his national-security team, first in the area of democracy and human rights. Then he gave Abrams a Middle East portfolio. Later, Abrams wrote a memoir, Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. In recent years, he has been a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In short, Elliott Abrams is one of the wisest, most experienced foreign-policy heads in this country. He is also a steadfast advocate of freedom, democracy, and human rights, or American values, if you like.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/donald-trumps-iran-deal-withdrawal-is-clear-success/

Europe is coming to acknowledge and act on the nuclear threat posed by Tehran.

Despite howls of protest by the Left, the foreign-policy establishment, and European leaders, and contrary to misleading assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies, it is now clear that President Trump’s decision last May to withdraw the United States from the controversial 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the JCPOA) was the right call and is a huge policy success.

Trump’s JCPOA withdrawal did not lead to war with Iran, as many critics predicted. Instead, Iran is far more isolated than it was when President Trump assumed office. The United States has worked to unite its Middle East allies, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia, against Iran and, in Warsaw this month, will co-chair an international conference with Poland on the threat from Iran. Iran’s economy is under unprecedented pressure thanks to reimposed U.S. sanctions, especially oil sanctions, with negative 1.5 percent growth in 2018 and an expected negative 3.6 percent growth in 2019. Iran’s current year-on-year inflation rate through last month was 40 percent.

Some Trump critics predicted that any effort by the president to reimpose U.S. sanctions lifted by the JCPOA would have little effect, since other parties to the agreement — in particular the EU, Germany, France, and the U.K. — would not follow suit. But numerous European companies have resisted pressure from their governments to defy reimposed U.S. sanctions. On January 31, European leaders announced a special finance facility to help European firms skirt U.S. sanctions on Iran, but that initiative is months behind schedule and few experts believe it will work.

Instead, as a result of reimposed U.S. sanctions, European airlines Air France, British Airways, and KLM ended service to Iran last year. European companies Total, Siemens, and Volkswagen also withdrew from Iran, along with U.S. companies GE, Boeing, and Honeywell and the Russian oil firm Lukoil. In November, Germany’s Bundesbank changed its rules so it could reject an Iranian request to withdraw 300 million euros from Hamburg-based trade bank Europäische-Iranische Handelsbank, to protect the central bank’s relationships with institutions in “third countries.” That is, the United States.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272787/time-frank-discussion-nato-ari-lieberman

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in 1949 as a collective defense pact against the aggressive designs and intentions of the Soviet Union. Turkey was accepted into NATO in 1951. The latest NATO entry was the tiny Balkan nation Montenegro, which ascended in 2017.

The United States shoulders the lion’s share of NATO’s budget and the defense of Europe. According to one estimate, US expenses associated with the defense of Europe totaled US$36.0bn in 2018, which represents 5.5% of the US defense budget and 6.3 times the amount President Trump is asking to facilitate the construction of a barrier or wall on the US-Mexico border.

With the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the threat of a mass Soviet invasion of Western Europe instantly vanished. Western style democracy and free enterprise triumphed decidedly over totalitarianism and stifling socialism.

Despite the diminished threat, NATO still served a valuable purpose in that its collective defense doctrine promoted regional and world stability. Indeed, following the 9-11 attacks, NATO invoked the principles of Article 5, providing for collective defense of alliance members. It was an extraordinary expression of solidarity with the United States, which witnessed the worst attack ever perpetrated on its soil.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/02/05/trump_administration_threads_the_needle_in_venezuela_139363.html

The Trump administration has clear goals in Venezuela and is determined to achieve them with limited means. Those goals are straightforward:

–Out with the fraudulently elected regime of Nicolás Maduro, its Chávez-style socialism, and its strong ties to Cuba, Russia, Iran, and China;

–In with the duly elected moderate Juan Guaidó.

To do that without sending U.S. troops means squeezing Maduro with harsh economic pressure, recognizing Guaidó as the legitimate leader, and naming an experienced point man, Elliott Abrams. It also entails, and this would be a departure for President Trump, building a supportive coalition of Latin American nations and major economic powers.

The coalition helps in two ways. First, it blunts Maduro’s knee-jerk claim that any effort to replace him is simply Yankee imperialism. His claim sounds ludicrous when there are massive protests inside Venezuela itself and after nearly every country in South America (Bolivia and Uruguay are the exceptions) recognized Guaidó as the country’s legitimate leader.

Within the region, Maduro’s support comes mainly from Cuba, an ideological fellow traveler with few resources to help. Outside the region, his support comes from Russia, Iran, and China, the triumvirate that now challenges the U.S. around the globe. They would hate to lose their foothold in Latin America.

Of the two coalitions, America’s is obviously much larger and richer, much more capable of exerting economic leverage. Sanctions are key. The heaviest blow was Washington’s decision to place Venezuela’s oil revenues in escrow. With a stroke of the pen, the U.S. Department of the Treasury cut off Maduro’s primary source of foreign exchange, his only way to pay the army. When he desperately tried to move his country’s gold reserves out of Britain, the Bank of England refused. The European Union is likely to impose additional sanctions this week.

These restrictions won’t add much more pain for Venezuela’s ordinary citizens, who already face grim conditions. The economy is in free fall, food is scarce, and inflation tops 1 million percent, according to Reuters. When currency becomes worthless, as Venezuela’s has, the economy is reduced to barter. What will the sanctions do, then? They will make it very hard—nearly impossible—for Maduro to buy food and essential supplies for his soldiers. If they defect, the regime dies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-foreign-policy-critics-are-losing-11549325062

Is President Trump losing control of the foreign-policy agenda? Last week the administration suffered a stinging political defeat as the Senate voted 68-23 to advance a bill that criticizes his plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan. This comes on the heels of Congress’s refusal to accede to Mr. Trump’s demands for further funds to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border and the Senate’s December vote to end U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia’s operations in Yemen. It is now clear the president’s foreign-policy and national-security approach faces increasing and often bipartisan congressional opposition.

Yet the White House shows no sign of backtracking. Far from meeting his critics halfway, Mr. Trump and his foreign-policy team announced progress in Afghanistan negotiations that opponents call a surrender, doubled down on plans to withdraw troops from Syria, announced its impending withdrawal from an arms-control agreement many consider foundational to the post-Cold War security order in Europe, and attacked the judgment of his senior intelligence officials. The administration also advanced an aggressive hemispheric strategy aimed not only at Venezuela, but also at Cuba and Nicaragua—the other two regimes in what national security adviser John Bolton calls the “troika of tyranny.”

There is no sign Mr. Trump can or will be persuaded to reconsider his approach. He does not believe existing arms treaties serve American interests; his withdrawal from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty was motivated by the same considerations that drove his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Meanwhile, he wants to reduce American commitments in the Middle East and sees close links with Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt as the best way for the U.S. to retrench militarily while containing Iran.