RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/trump_versus_the_euroswamp.html

This guy Donald Trump has amazing physical staying power. Right after his end-sprint in the Midterms, which ended pretty well, and only pausing for a White House presser to deliver a kick to Jim Acosta, Donald Trump is in Europe, where the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day is being memorialized on Sunday.

In case you forgot, Armistice Day is the day the guns stopped firing in the trenches in World War I, after the United States sent in our first huge expeditionary force to tilt the balance against the Central Powers, including the German Empire, as Bismarck had rebranded Prussia in1848, and the other German Empire of the time, called the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

During that bloody trench war the German General Staff also sent Vladimir Lenin in a closed train across to Moscow, to stir up revolution against the Romanoff Czars.

Lenin and his Bolsheviks killed the Romanoffs, all of them — men, women and children, and after a civil war that the Bolsheviks won. The rest, as they say, is history. Lenin pulled Russia out of World War I, which was the German aim in smuggling Lenin over there.

So we have another German Empire to thank for the Soviet Union, though we should not blame living people for the sins of the past. But history has a crazy way of repeating, and today we have the makings of a new European Kaisertum, called the European Union.

http://www.atimes.com/article/trump-all-but-announces-trade-deal-with-china/

In a press conference at the White House this afternoon, following better-than-expected results for his party in midterm elections, President Trump all but declared that he had concluded a trade deal with China.

“They got rid of ‘China 25,’” the president said in response to a reporter’s question, in an apparent reference to China’s Made in China 2025 program to eliminate dependence on imports in several key high-tech industries by the year 2025.

“China would have superseded us in two years as an economic power. Now they’re not even close. China got rid of their ‘China 25’ because I found it very insulting. I told that to them. That means in 2025 they’re going to take over – economically – the world,” Trump told reporters.

Significantly, Trump used the past tense, as if referring to a deal that was already well on its way to completion.

He went on to tout progress that he has made in pressuring Beijing, adding: “we’re going to try to make a deal with China because I want to have a great relationship with President Xi – as I do – and also with China.”

I reported from Beijing last month that China was willing to back away from the “Made in China 2025” program in the context of a trade deal with the United States:

By backing off from the 2025 target, Chinese officials believe, Beijing can placate the US Administration, and give President Trump a coup in public relations while keeping its own industrial program intact. The government is exploring a number of ways to present such a deal.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-administration-to-reimpose-last-of-sanctions-lifted-by-iran-deal/

The Trump administration will reimpose the rest of the sanctions lifted under the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with early next week, officials announced Friday.

“This part of the campaign about which we’re speaking today is simple: It is aimed at depriving the regime of the revenues that it uses to spread death and destruction around the world,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a call with reporters.

The 2015 nuclear deal, which was also signed by the U.K., France, Germany, China, and Russia, gave Tehran billions of dollars in relief from sanctions in exchange for a promise to curb its nuclear program. President Trump pulled out of the deal in May, and allowed two periods of 9o and 180 days to let companies phase out their business with Iran.

After the first period, which ended in August, the U.S. reimposed sanctions affecting transactions with U.S. dollar banknotes and trade in gold and precious metals, graphite, and cars. On Monday, the administration will reimpose the more hefty batch of sanctions, affecting the energy, shipping, shipbuilding, and financial sectors.

Eight countries will be granted a waiver from oil and gas sanctions and will still be able to import Iranian oil temporarily, Pompeo said. A list of those countries will be published Monday.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271711/foreign-policy-moral-preening-bruce-thornton

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi regime insider and columnist, in Istanbul continues to dominate the news cycle as the president and Congress consider their response. Despite the dog-bites-man nature of the story–– autocrats and tyrants across the globe regularly eliminate political enemies without such intense outrage from the West–– our media and politicians have conducted an orgy of moral preening, thunderous denunciations, and various proposed punishments of Saudi heir to the throne Mohammed bin Salman.

Once again, the cheap idealism and hypocrisy of the self-righteous West illustrates the dangers that come from a foreign policy based on illusion rather than on the tragic reality of human nature and action.

Much of this outrage results from the fact that Khashoggi worked as a columnist for the Washington Post and possessed a green card. Ignoring the distinction between journalists who supposedly report facts, and an editorial page columnist who gives opinions, both progressive and conservative media have turned Khashoggi into a martyr of the Fourth Estate, an intrepid seeker of facts and watchdog of the public weal.

Only a few commentators have reported on the real nature of Khashoggi’s “analyses.” Khashoggi was an Islamist press agent for Osama bin Laden and the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother-ship of modern jihadism, and a critic of the Saudi regime not for its human rights offenses, but for bin Salman’s war against the Iranian supported jihadists in Yemen, his hostility to the Muslim Brotherhood, his break with Qatar for supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, and his desire for closer ties with the U.S. Khashoggi was a “dissident” alright, but one who opposed the reformist policies of the regime that align with the interests of the U.S., and who wooed gullible Westerners with sweet-talk of Islamists “reform.”

The media’s elevation of Khashoggi, of course, also serves their anti-Trump agenda, ever on the watch for anything that can be turned against the president. Having created the caricature of Trump as an “autocrat” in the making who has a soft spot for fellow autocrats, the media have elevated the killing of Khashoggi, and the ongoing investigation of its circumstances, into 24/7 flogging the president and parsing his every word for signs of indulgence of bin Salman’s actions, or asserting dark conspiracies about “hit lists” coming from the White House.

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.