RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/good-news-for-the-americas-1536013815

The crisis in Venezuela threatens to destabilize the Western Hemisphere, but doing something about it requires addressing the support from Cuba that is keeping strongman Nicolás Maduro in power despite his overwhelming unpopularity. Ditto for Daniel Ortega, whose government has been killing fellow Nicaraguans.

One man who understands the Cuban role is Mauricio Claver-Carone, who will soon join the Trump White House as senior director of the National Security Council for Western Hemisphere Affairs. The media call Mr. Claver-Carone a “hard-liner” on Cuba and a staunch defender of the U.S. trade embargo, which is true.

But as the son of a Cuban exile, the 43-year-old Mr. Claver-Carone is also a Catholic University-educated lawyer who has spent years fighting for human rights in Cuba. As the editor of the blog Capitol Hill Cubans, he showed a sophisticated understanding of how Cuba uses intimidation and propaganda to attack democracy in the hemisphere. Mr. Claver-Carone has extensive experience working with other countries as a senior adviser for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury and acting U.S. executive director at the International Monetary Fund.

The world has stood by as more than 2.3 million Venezuelans suffering under socialist deprivation have been forced to flee their collapsing country. Mr. Claver-Carone’s arrival is a sign that the White House is serious about addressing the root cause of the problem.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/on-the-palestinian-refugee-issue-president-trump-is-magnificently-right/

President Trump appears to have undertaken a revolution in Middle Eastern diplomacy. Reportedly, the United States will eliminate refugee status for the descendants of Palestinian refugees of 1948, the only group of people anywhere in the world to inherit refugee status. The U.S. also reportedly will eliminate funding for UNRWA, the only UN agency dedicated to a single group of refugees, namely the Palestinian Arabs.

The Times of Israel reports:

The “right of return” is one of the key core issues of dispute in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians claim that five million people — tens of thousands of original refugees from what is today’s Israel, and their millions of descendants — have a “right of return.” Israel rejects the demand, saying that it represents a bid by the Palestinians to destroy Israel by weight of numbers. It says there is no justification for UNRWA’s unique criteria, by which all subsequent generations of descendants of the original refugees are also designated as having refugee status, including those born elsewhere and/or holding citizenship elsewhere; such a designation does not apply to the world’s other refugee populations.

This is long overdue. The 1948 War led to one of the many exchanges of populations during the 20th century — 1.5 million Greeks were expelled from Turkey and 1 million Turks expelled from Greece in 1923, for example. After World War II, 12 million Germans were expelled from the Czech Republic, Poland, and other parts of Eastern Europe, many of whom had lived there for centuries. Millions of Hindus and Muslims moved across the border when Pakistan separated from India upon independence in 1947. None of the transferred populations are treated as refugees, except for the Palestinians.

Roughly equal numbers of Arabs and Jews were displaced as Arab states expelled Jewish populations that in some cases, e.g. Iraq, had lived there for 2,500 years, long before the Arabs. The young Jewish state absorbed almost a million Jewish refugees from Muslim countries while the displaced Arabs were kept in permanent refugee status as a bargaining chip. “Right of return” simply meant Muslim refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state. The so-called peace process in the Middle East always has failed due to the asymmetry of demands: as the Israeli cartoon Dry Bones put it, land for peace means the Arabs want land and the Jews want peace. As long as the Western nations humored the Arab delusion that the Jewish state could be eliminated, the Arab side had no incentive to negotiate. The Arab side refused to accept its defeat in 1948. It is the loser who decides when the war is over, and the message from Washington is, “You lost. Deal with it.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/secretary-of-state-mike-pompeo-taps-foreign-policy-scholar-as-chief-state-department-planner-1535623201

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has tapped Carnegie Mellon University Professor Kiron Skinner, a nationally known author and Hoover Institution research fellow, as the State Department’s top planner.

Ms. Skinner, who has worked with former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and George Shultz, represents what Mr. Pompeo said is a major personnel addition as he moves to fulfill promises to rebuild department staffing.

Mr. Pompeo described Ms. Skinner as “a national security powerhouse” and “a one-woman, strategic thinking tour de force” in a statement to The Wall Street Journal. “I’m confident that she will enhance our influence overseas, protect the American people, and promote our prosperity,” he said.

Foreign policy experts and former holders of the post said Ms. Skinner’s impact will depend on how Mr. Pompeo structures the job, and whether the administration is open to her ideas. “The real question is how will the new director’s role be defined?” said longtime diplomat Dennis Ross, who held the post during the George H.W. Bush administration.

As director of the Policy Planning Staff, Ms. Skinner will be responsible for providing strategic guidance and helping ensure that the day-to-day efforts of the department serve the overall strategy. Ms. Skinner will start on Sept. 4, succeeding Brian Hook, who now heads the State Department’s Iran Action Group.

A key role will be framing U.S. foreign policy against the backdrop of President Trump’s Twitter posts and offhand comments, which frequently catch top advisers by surprise.

During Mr. Trump’s presidential run, Ms. Skinner served as a foreign policy surrogate for the campaign, appearing on television to discuss his objectives. She later joined the State Department and National Security Council “landing teams” during the presidential transition to help staff both entities. She also helped prepare former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for Senate confirmation proceedings.

In an interview, Ms. Skinner described an emerging “Trump Doctrine, or America First foreign policy,” in which the U.S. exercises global leadership while simultaneously sharing the burdens of world crises with other countries. While the past two administrations struggled following the 2001 terrorist attacks, she said, the current administration can craft a longer-term approach.

“I really see the Trump administration as an opportunity to lead us into a grand strategy,” she said.

Ms. Skinner aims to use the administration’s national-security strategy published in December 2017 as the “baseline” for her work, but anticipates updates to the strategy.

Ms. Skinner is director of the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University and the W. Glenn Campbell Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She previously served on the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree from Spelman College. She also has been a Fox News contributor.

Ms. Skinner invoked history in describing her new post, citing guidance issued in 1947 by then-Secretary of State George Marshall to George Kennan, founding director of the Policy Planning Staff, to “avoid trivia”—suggesting this will guide her approach to the role.

Born on Chicago’s South Side and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by parents “deeply involved in the civil-rights movement,” Ms. Skinner said that she shares the commitment—though not the party affiliation—of her grandmother, a Democratic Party precinct captain in Chicago.

“I care more about the republic than partisan politics in the United States,” she said.

“I really feel as an African American that we have a deep stake in the direction of our country and that there’s a natural connection between who we are and America’s role in the world, and that we need to be at the table across all political parties in the United States,” Ms. Skinner said. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/trump-disrupted-american-transformation-into-lead-from-behind-nation/

The ‘unpresidential’ outsider disrupted America’s transformation into a ‘lead from behind’ nation.

Much of the controversy that surrounds the policies of Donald Trump can be explained as a reaction to the past. He was either clumsily disrupting the sacrosanct or trying to resurrect what was lost.

In other words, what you feel about Trump is inseparable from what you think of the world before Trump.

Was the status quo, especially in the years between 2009 and 2017, normal or abnormal — at least compared with the prior half century?

Take the challenge of China. We are now locked in a veritable trade war with the Chinese. Each side escalates with a threatened new round of tariffs. The subtexts of the conflict range from Chinese military ascendency to patronage of nuclear North Korea.

Is Trump creating unnecessary conflicts ex nihilo, or trying to address what was an abnormal, one-sided assault at which most prior presidents had shrugged their shoulders?

Certainly, China is a proven systematic trade cheater. Given its size and clout, traditional international means of rectifying such massive violations had proven impotent.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2018/September/43/9/magazine/article/10845200

President Donald Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and their joint press conference in Helsinki on July 16 have ignited an ongoing paroxysm of rage and hysteria in the U.S. media. Morbid Russophobia and Putin-hate are déjà-vu, but the outpouring of vitriol against Trump has been raised to an entirely new level. The deplorable vulgarian of yore has morphed into a metaphysical incarnation of evil, an “enemy of the people” par excellence. Orwell’s “two minutes of hatred” has become a continuous, 24/7 orgy.

The roll call of attackers reads like a Who’s Who of the U.S. Deep State. The list of their hyperbolic adjectives (including “sellout,” “traitor,” “Putin’s pussycat,” etc.) is familiar to the curious, starting with Barack Obama’s CIA chief John Brennan (“high crimes and misdemeanors”). The outraged were particularly incited by Trump’s refusal to parrot the “Russiagate” narrative, falsely presented as the result of an “intelligence community consensus.”

Trump’s refusal was justified, on factual as well as political and moral grounds. No evidence of any kind exists to prove Russian meddling in the presidential election, or thereafter. It never will be found, for the simple reason that both Podesta’s and DNC emails were leaked, not hacked. The meddling myth is just a tool the Deep State has used since late 2016 to torpedo Trump’s attempt at détente with Moscow. Its operatives saw this attempt, with reason, as a threat to the maintenance of the duopolistic, neolib-neocon system of full-spectrum global dominance.

Just three weeks after the Helsinki summit, it is tricky to discern its implications and likely consequences, but three themes seem clear.

First and foremost, nothing of substance has been settled. It is of course possible and desirable to make a fair and enduring deal with Russia on all contentious issues (Ukraine, Syria, cyberspace, terrorism, trade, etc.). In operational terms, the biggest problem for Trump is not how to keep his supporters loyal; it is how to ensure that his own bureaucratic machine will obey and apply his vision, regardless of what Putin and he may yet agree to next fall. A chronically disloyal civil-service apparatus—especially at the Department of State and the CIA, but also at Defense—overwhelmingly subscribes to the Weltanschauung of Trump’s haters and detractors.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/chinese-military-buildup-dangerous/The Chinese armed forces will surpass ours unless we allocate more funds for modernization.

Robert Hood, the assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, recently stated that the DOD does not expect, and evidently will not request, another significant budget increase in financial year 2020. Given what is happening in East Asia, that is inexplicable to me.

Four years ago, I wrote two columns in these pages detailing the ongoing buildup of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the reasons for it. The buildup has continued apace since then. Here is a graphic that I first posted a year ago showing how the balance of power in East Asia has shifted:

The implications of this graphic are exactly what they appear to be: Chinese arms now dominate, albeit imperfectly, the East Asian strategic environment. It’s become their sphere of influence. The peace of the region, and the ability of other nations to trade and travel through it on equal terms, now hang on the margin of China’s fear that a major confrontation would trigger escalating armed conflict with American and allied forces before they are ready for it.

https://nypost.com/2018/08/11/trumps-foreign-policy-is-actually-boosting-americas-standing/

A story is supposed to have  two sides, but there is only  one when it comes to President Trump’s foreign policy. Most American media treat his every effort as a savage assault on a harmonious world order.

Whether it’s the trade dispute with China, his pushing North Korea to scuttle its nukes or his demand that NATO members spend more on defense, the headlines sound the same shrieking note: “Trump inflames . . . Trump escalates . . . Trump doubles down . . . Trump risks . . .”

The parade of horribles continues to this day, but it will be hard to out-fear-monger a Time magazine headline from May: “By Violating Iran Deal, Trump Jeopardizes National Security.”

But since the world hasn’t ended and since we’re not dead yet, I humbly suggest it’s time to take a deep breath and consider the other side of the story.

We don’t have to look far. Numerous signs are popping up that the impact of Trump’s policies is far from the disastrous scenario the media predict. By wielding America’s power instead of apologizing for it, and by keeping his focus on jobs and national security, Trump is making progress in fixing the ruinous status quo he inherited.

America First, it turns out, is more than a slogan. It is a road map to reshaping America’s relationship with friend and foe alike.

Take China. Despite press accusations that Trump risks a global recession with tariffs on Chinese imports, recent reports from China say there is growing criticism there over how President Xi Jinping is handling Trump. One brave professor published an essay citing “rising anxiety” and “a degree of panic” about Xi’s combativeness on the issue and his autocratic ways.

http://thehill.com/opinion/international/399610-nato-needs-to-be-fully-financed-and-nimble-going-into-the-future

It has been said time and again that NATO is indispensable as a defense of the West. Even Trump accepts this assertion. What he doesn’t accept is the U.S. burden to sustain the treaty. A combative President Trump has made it clear member states must meet their obligation to spend at least two percent of gdp on defense. The U.S. presently spends 3.6 percent or about twice the average expenditure

Trump noted as well the irony of Germany’s reliance on a new $11 billion pipeline to import Russian natural gas into Western Europe when a significant portion of NATO’s defense budget is to buttress against Russian ambitions. How odd he notes to pay Russia and at the same time defend against Russia.

Chancellor Angela Merkle – who grew up in East Germany when it was controlled by Russia – speaks passionately of a united and free Republic of Germany today, a sound debater’s point but distraction from Germany’s defense spending. Although not always said explicitly, the allies hope that Trump will sign off on a summit deal to deter Russian aggression. It also appears as if Trump’s jaw-boning has had some effect since eight new nations are about to meet the two percent threshold. How this will unfold remains unclear. An alliance that is indispensable must be sustained. My guess is that NATO nations including Germany will be playing a more active defense role than has been the case heretofore. This will be a test of Merkle’s political skill with elections just over the horizon.