RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/11/12/transacting-with-riyadh/

We do not share values with the Saudi regime

‘We’ve defeated ISIS.” So said President Trump in a recent Associated Press interview. Not for the first time was the president’s exuberance overstated. Military officials quickly added the qualification that the Islamic State’s end appears to be near but it is not yet vanquished.

Welcome news all the same. News that would naturally lead one to ask: Does the dismantling of the jihadist network mean, finally, an end to the brutal enforcement of sharia? Can we close the book on savage beheadings intended to terrorize and to inculcate compliance with a literalist, scripturally based construction of Muslim law, set in stone — or is it stoning? — a millennium ago?

Not a chance. If you are, say, a homosexual, an unmarried woman innocently commingling with non-related men, a Christian who has apostatized from Islam, or even a believing Muslim who questions the ancient consensus on some aspect of Islamic doctrine, you know the peril of decapitation has never been limited to precincts of Syria and Iraq where the Islamic State imposed its caliphate. Beheadings are still routinely conducted in Saudi Arabia, by the governing regime. In fact, for particularly heinous offenses, the regime directs that decapitation be followed by display of the corpse, hung from a horizontal pole along with the severed head in a plastic bag, a practice publicly referred to as “crucifixion.”

And yes, the regime we are speaking of is the same Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that the United States government has long deemed a valuable ally.

The Trump administration so values the Saudis, as both a strategic partner and a lucrative client for military arms, that it has made the alliance the plinth of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Not only was Riyadh the site chosen for President Trump’s first foreign visit; in a major speech there in May 2017, the president maintained that “principled realism” — his coinage for the administration’s professed America-first approach to international affairs — is rooted in the “common values” said to be held by the U.S. and the House of Saud.

Close monitors of radical Islam worry that principled realism is not very realistic. Not for nothing did 15 of the 19 mass-murdering 9/11 hijackers hail from Saudi Arabia. There are reasons al-Qaeda so readily drew on the kingdom for moral and financial sustenance.

What is variously called “radical Islam,” Islamism, “political Islam,” or “Islamic extremism” (and don’t you dare ask what it is that they’re so extreme about) is better diagnosed as sharia supremacism. It is an ideology aimed at imposing the tenets of Islamic civilization and law, the necessary precondition for establishing Islamic societies.

Sharia is not merely a legal code. It is a comprehensive political and social framework that systematically discriminates against women and non-Muslims. Notice, for example, that President Trump gave his ballyhooed speech in Riyadh rather than Mecca or Medina. That is because, as a non-Muslim, the president of the United States is deemed unfit, under sharia strictures derived from Koranic verse, to step foot in Islam’s two sacralized cities.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/news-services/article220595940.html

WASHINGTON – Let’s be clear: the Saudi murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was a despicable act by a regime that, even after enacting modest reforms recently, still tolerates virtually no domestic dissent.

We should all be outraged, we should demand the truth, and we should look for ways to condemn such action in the clearest terms, such as by sanctioning the regime and the individuals involved.

But let’s be clear about something else: The world can be, as Thomas Hobbes said of the natural state of humanity, “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Though, particularly in the post-World War II period, the United States has promoted freedom and democracy, it also has made its necessary “deals with devils” in the interests of arms control, regional stability and other short-term demands.

Washington’s relationship with Riyadh is one such deal, and our urgent needs across the Middle East do not allow us the luxury of making the morally pure decision of severing all ties with the kingdom.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-and-putin-to-meet-next-month-in-paris/

President Trump will meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Paris next month, officials from the White House and Moscow have confirmed.

National-security adviser John Bolton met with Putin on Tuesday in Moscow, where the Russian leader suggested a meeting with Trump would be useful in the wake of “unprovoked moves that are hard to call friendly.”

“We will make the precise arrangements on that, but it will happen in connection with the 100th anniversary, the celebration of the armistice that the French are hosting on November the 11th,” Bolton later told reporters.

The meeting will reportedly focus on the war in Syria, America’s desire for Russia to enforce international sanctions on Iran and North Korea, and Trump’s decision to pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a Reagan-era nuclear-arms deal.

“Russia has violated the agreement. They’ve been violating it for many years,” Trump said. ” I don’t know why President Obama didn’t negotiate or pull out. And we’re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons and we’re not allowed to.”

Bolton gave official notice to Russia on Tuesday that the U.S. is withdrawing from the agreement.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-is-no-isolationist-1540250070

While the world was transfixed by the drama over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Trump administration last week doggedly pressed ahead with some of the most dramatic shifts in American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.

President Trump’s foreign policy is anything but isolationist. It is ambitious, interventionist and global. Having determined after almost two years of trying that the three revisionist powers—China, Russia and Iran—cannot, at least for now, be pried apart, the administration is preparing to take them on all at once.

This means, above all, intensifying competition with China. In the two weeks since Vice President Mike Pence’s speech laying out the far-reaching U.S. strategy for containing Beijing, the administration has not let up: The trade war has escalated; Mr. Trump announced U.S. withdrawal from an 1844 postal-services treaty that, in his view, gives Chinese shippers unfair advantages; and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Panama to warn that country’s leaders against Chinese debt-trap diplomacy.

Perhaps more surprising to some of its critics is the Trump administration’s increasingly hard line against Russia. In the same week that Mr. Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, citing Russian noncompliance, an American aircraft carrier visited the Russian Arctic for the first time in almost 30 years. Meanwhile, A. Wess Mitchell, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, described a new era of U.S.-Russia competition in a blistering speech Thursday at the Atlantic Council.

“From the Baltic to the Adriatic, across the Balkan Peninsula and through the Caucasus, America’s rivals are expanding their political, military and commercial influence. Russia is again a military factor in this region, following the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine. Well beyond the frontier, in the countries of Central Europe, Russia uses manipulative energy tactics, corruption and propaganda to weaken Western nations from within and undermine their bonds with the United States,” Mr. Mitchell said. He went on to hail “Ukraine, Georgia and even Belarus” as a “bulwark against Russian neo-imperialism” and signaled increased U.S. support for their independence and sovereignty.

The storm over U.S.-Saudi relations has not deterred the administration from intensifying its campaign against Iran. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is still flying to Riyadh to coordinate U.S. and Saudi economic actions to isolate Tehran. The U.S. remains on schedule to reimpose its most powerful sanctions against Iran on Nov. 5.

Traditionally, countries headed toward confrontation with adversaries look to strengthen their alliances. This has not been the Trump administration’s approach. Without mentioning Germany by name, Mr. Mitchell sharply criticized its dealings with Russia and Iran: “We expect those whom America helps to not abet our rivals. Western Europeans cannot continue to deepen energy dependence on the same Russia that America defends it against. Or enrich themselves on the same Iran that is building ballistic missiles which threaten Europe.”

Yet Mr. Mitchell also signaled a deeper U.S. involvement in Europe that Berlin should welcome. He noted that “many of America’s closest allies in Central Europe operate networks of corruption and state-owned enterprises that rig the system in favor of China and Russia.” Joint efforts by the U.S. and the European Union to stabilize democracy in Central and Eastern European countries could help give the old trans-Atlantic alliance a new lease on life. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/arms-control-for-dummies-1540250764

Donald Trump says the U.S. plans to withdraw from the 1987 INF nuclear arms-control treaty that everyone agrees Russia has been violating for a decade. Yet somehow this is said to be reckless behavior by—Donald Trump? Welcome to the high church of arms control in which treaties are sacrosanct no matter the violation.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty bans ground-fired ballistic and cruise missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers and is an artifact of the late Cold War. Ronald Reagan and NATO deployed mid-range missiles in Europe in the early 1980s to counter Soviet deployments. After years of tense negotiation, Mikhail Gorbachev finally agreed to the modest INF accord on U.S. terms that traded U.S. missiles for Russia’s. This was hailed as a diplomatic triumph.

Yet when the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union collapsed over the next few years, nuclear arms control faded in importance. Which is the key point. Arms control didn’t make the world safer; the fall of the Soviet Union did that. Arms control tends to work when it is between countries that get along, while it fails with adversaries that can’t be trusted.

Enter Vladimir Putin, who has been developing a new medium-range cruise missile since the mid-2000s. The U.S. believes Moscow first tested the new missile in 2008, but the Obama Administration hid that intelligence from the Senate when it debated and ratified the New Start treaty with Mr. Putin in 2010.

The Obama Administration first went public with this news in 2014, and the State Department has noted Russian noncompliance every year. Moscow started deploying its new missiles in late 2016. This is in addition to a new ballistic missile Russia has tested that may be INF compliant only because it can travel slightly farther than 5,500 kilometers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-ditch-riyadh-in-a-fit-of-righteousness-1539645239

The murder (if that’s what it was) of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, was a horror in itself, and a greater horror still in what it threatens to unleash. The Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ayatollahs of Iran are huddled over the corpse, hoping to turn a political profit from the death of an innocent man.

Mr. Khashoggi was a thorn in the flesh of the hyperactive crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad Bin Salman, a man who faces a concatenation of problems the likes of which the House of Saud has rarely seen. Iran, hostile, arrogant and ambitious, has ruthlessly carved a “Shia crescent” from Baghdad through Damascus to Beirut. A gusher of American oil and natural gas has diminished OPEC. Turkey, sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and harboring dreams of restoring its old Ottoman glory, seeks to displace Saudi Arabia as the voice of the Sunni world. Russia has reasserted itself in the region. And inside Saudi Arabia, a growing population with high expectations demands more opportunity and better governance from a traditional monarchy largely unprepared for the 21st century.

It was out of this turmoil and fear that the MBS phenomenon emerged. At home and abroad, the Saudis attempted a series of frenzied initiatives, including a war in Yemen and the privatization of Aramco, to improve their position. Meanwhile, MBS stroked gullible American elites into the belief that he was a democrat.

It worked for a while; gullibility is America’s most plentiful natural resource. But after Mr. Khashoggi’s death, even the most naive observer can see that the crown prince is at best a modernizing autocrat, using dictatorial power to drag his country into the future: Peter the Great, not Thomas Jefferson. At worst, he could end like Phaethon, the Greek demigod who lost control of his horses while foolishly trying to drive the chariot of the sun. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/17/bolton-speech-underscores-trump-administration-putting-america-first-global-stage/

National Security Advisor John Bolton delivered a blockbuster speech at an event hosted by the Federalist Society last Monday, about how monumentally dumb and dangerous the International Criminal Court is for America.

The ICC is a multinational organization established by the Rome Statute. President Bill Clinton signed on to the statute in 2000 but never submitted the international treaty to the Senate. President George W. Bush then unsigned the treaty. President Barack Obama never signed the treaty, but he was friendly to it and cooperated with the ICC.

Bolton made the Trump administration’s position on the ICC ultra-clear in his speech:

The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court. We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us.

It was a powerful rejection of the court. But that’s not all it rejected, and to singularly focus on the ICC misses larger principles that will surely guide the administration’s decisions about other international agreements. Three principles stood out.
The United States Is Not the Peer of Somalia

First, not all countries are equally bad or equally good; the United States is a force for good and rejects the notion that the United States, just like other nations, must be constrained.

“The largely unspoken, but always central, aim of its most vigorous supporters was to constrain the United States,” Bolton said. “The objective was not limited to targeting individual US service members, but rather America’s senior political leadership, and its relentless determination to keep our country secure.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-kerry-meet-george-logan-1537129799

George Logan, call your office. That’s my reaction to news that former Secretary of State John Kerry has, by his own account, been meeting privately with Iranian officials to try to save the nuclear deal.

Logan was the Pennsylvania politician whose unauthorized efforts to end the Quasi-War between France and America led to the Logan Act of 1799, which outlaws freelance diplomacy.

The New York Post has called Mr. Kerry’s conniving a “textbook violation” of the law. President Trump, after all, has pulled out of the nuclear accord and decided on a different course. Iran’s leaders, at least for the moment, are hanging onto the deal. Why not? It has brought billions to their coffers as they expand their military campaigns in the Mideast.

Last week the New York Times quoted “experts” as suggesting that the ayatollahs are “gambling” that Mr. Trump will be “crippled” in the midterm elections or swept out of office in 2020.

So have the Democrats been colluding with them? Or, as radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Kerry last week, has the former secretary of state been “trying to coach” Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif?

“That’s not how it works,” Mr. Kerry said. “What I have done is tried to elicit from him what Iran might be willing to do in order to change the dynamic in the Middle East.” He insisted he’d been “very blunt.” Mr. Kerry also told Mr. Hewitt that the administration appears “hell-bent-for-leather determined to pursue a regime change strategy” in Iran. “I would simply caution that the United States historically has not had a great record in regime change,” Mr. Kerry said. He added that it makes it “very difficult, if not impossible” for Iran to negotiate.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/state-department-warns-john-kerry-against-talks-with-iran/

The State Department on Thursday warned former Secretary of State John Kerry against holding diplomatic talks with Iran behind the current administration’s back, possibly compromising the government’s Iran strategy.

“It’s unfortunate if people from a past administration would try to compromise the progress we’re trying to make in this administration,” the assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs, Manisha Singh told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“I don’t have personal knowledge of those meetings, but if that is happening, again, I would find it very inappropriate,” the senior State Department official said.

Kerry has admitted to meeting “three or four times” with his counterpart Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif after leaving his position as secretary of state. The two were key players in negotiating former President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, which the Trump administration scrapped in May.

“Every secretary of state, former secretary of state, continues to meet with foreign leaders,” Kerry told Fox News on Wednesday. “We don’t negotiate. We’re not involved in interfering with policy, but we certainly have reasonable discussions about nuclear weapons, the world, China, different policies, obviously.”