RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21390/when-the-giving-tree-stops-giving: http://goudsmit.pundicity.com

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The United States of America emerged from World War II as the world’s undisputed superpower economically and militarily. The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative to aid Western Europe that gave over $13 billion (nearly $110 billion in 2016 US dollars) in economic assistance to help rebuild Western European communities after the end of the war. The Marshall Plan provided political stability for the world and created a world market for American good.

United States Secretary of State George Marshall delivered an explanatory speech to the graduating class of Harvard on June 5, 1947:

“The modern system of the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down. … Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health to the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is not directed against any country, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Any government that is willing to assist in recovery will find full co-operation on the part of the USA. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270726/trump-frees-europe-angry-socialist-babies-daniel-greenfield

A protester waved a, “Everyone welcome” sign outside Blenheim Palace as President Trump arrived to attend a reception with Prime Minister May.

She didn’t mean Trump. Everyone but Trump was welcome in the United Kingdom.

The angry woman was part of a furious leftist mob that had hounded the President of the United States from his landing at Stansted Airport to his flight to Winfield House to the trip to Blenheim.

A desperate marketing firm had paid the owner of Moat Farm in Stoke Mandeville, who has no opinion on Trump, to allow a 650 foot crop circle reading “F___ Trump” in Russian on his flight path.

And that wasn’t even the most desperate leftist protest stunt by the angry babies of socialism.

Pots and pants were banged outside Winfield House, the United States ambassador’s residence, at Blenheim a sign accused Trump of being the “World’s #1 Racist” and Amnesty International hung up a giant banner calling him a, “Human Rights Nightmare” in an equally nightmarish yellow font.

Momentum, the anti-Semitic left-wing hate group, Stop the War’s Trotskyists, the UK version of the pro-Farrakhan racist Women’s March, and the freeloaders of the Trades Union Congress will be part of a London mob of an estimated 50,000 preparing to protest President Trump’s existence.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/12/reciprocity-is-the-method-to-trump

Critics of Donald Trump claim there is no rhyme or reason to his foreign policy. But if there is a consistency, it might be called reciprocity.

Trump tries to force other countries to treat the United States as it treats them. In “don’t tread on me” style, he also warns enemies that any aggressive act will be replied to in kind.

The underlying principle of Trump commercial reciprocity it that the United States is no longer powerful or wealthy enough to alone underwrite the security of the West. It can no longer assume sole enforcement of the rules and protocols of the postwar global order.

This year there have been none of the usual Iranian provocations—frequent during the Obama Administration—of harassing American ships in the Persian Gulf. Apparently, the Iranians now realize that anything they do to an American ship will be replied to with overwhelming force.

Ditto North Korea. After lots of threats from Kim Jong Un about using his new ballistic missiles against the United States, Trump warned that he would use America’s far greater arsenal to eliminate North Korea’s arsenal for good.

Trump is said to be undermining NATO by questioning its usefulness some 69 years after its founding. Yet unlike 1948, Germany is no longer down. The United States is always in. And Russia is hardly out, but instead cutting energy deals with the Europeans.

More importantly, most NATO countries have failed to keep their promises to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270713/president-trump-confronts-nato-free-riders-joseph-klein

President Trump’s visit to Brussels for the two-day NATO summit got off to an intense start. “It’s very sad when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia where we’re supposed to be guarding against Russia and Germany goes out and pays billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia,” President Trump said at the outset of a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday morning. “We are protecting Germany, we are protecting France, we are protecting all of these countries and then numerous of the countries go out and make a pipeline deal with Russia where they are paying billions of dollars into the coffers of Russia. I think that is very inappropriate.” The president went on to characterize Germany as “a captive of Russia” because of its dependence on Russia to meet its energy needs.

President Trump also repeated his oft-stated criticism that other NATO members were not paying their fair share for collective defense. “Many countries owe us,” the president said before attending the summit at NATO headquarters. “The United States is paying far too much and other countries are not paying enough… This has been going on for decades, for decades, it’s disproportionate and not fair to the taxpayers of the United States.”

German officials did not take President Trump’s barbs lightly.

http://www.atimes.com/article/natos-problem-is-that-europeans-wont-fight/

President Trump outraged European opinion by denouncing his allies on the far side of the Atlantic for their failure to meet NATO’s spending target of 2% of GDP.

Other alliance members, he added, should spend 4% of their output on defense, just like America does. His dudgeon at the Europeans was more than justified: the Europeans really are deadbeats who don’t pay their fair share of the cost of defending their own countries and leave the burden in the hands of American soldiers and taxpayers.

Trump’s remonstrations will fall on deaf ears. Why should Europeans spend money on arms, when they have no intention of using them?
A recent opinion poll found that small minorities in the core European members of NATO were willing to fight for their country under any circumstances.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-the-russia-pipeline-1531349924

President Trump is so prone to rhetorical excess that he sometimes hurts his own case even when he’s right. A case in point is his shellacking of Germany Wednesday for supporting a new Russian gas pipeline.

“Well, I have to say, I think it’s very sad when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia, where you’re supposed to be guarding against Russia, and Germany goes out and pays billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia,” Mr. Trump said during a breakfast with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

“And the former Chancellor of Germany is the head of the pipeline company that’s supplying the gas. . . . So you tell me, is that appropriate? [B]ecause I think it’s not, and I think it’s a very bad thing for NATO and I don’t think it should have happened. And I think we have to talk to Germany about it.”

While he then went over the top in saying “Germany is totally controlled by Russia,” Mr. Trump’s rant is an accurate summary of Berlin’s role in the Nord Stream 2 project. The pipeline would link Russia and Germany via the Baltic Sea, doubling the capacity of the existing pipeline in that corridor, and bypassing other pipelines through Ukraine and central and eastern Europe.

The Kremlin hopes to increase the dependence of Germany and Western Europe on Russian gas while depriving Ukraine and other inconvenient states of the transit fees Russia must pay to use current pipelines. Moscow could then also shut off the gas at will to states Russia still considers its satellites.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/07/11/trump_vs_nato_sec_were_suppose

President Trump and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had a riveting exchange Wednesday morning at a table featuring representatives from both the U.S. and NATO at a meeting in Brussels. Trump came out swinging on the hypocrisy of NATO’s goal to protect countries from Russia while at the same time making energy deals with the nation.

“So we’re supposed to protect you against Russia but they’re paying billions of dollars to Russia and I think that’s very in inappropriate,” Trump said. “And the former Chancellor of Germany is the head of the pipeline company that is supplying the gas. Ultimately, Germany will have almost 70% of their country controlled by Russia with natural gas. So you tell me, is that appropriate? I’ve been complaining about this from the time I got in.”

The U.S. president said Germany is “totally controlled” by Russia through its oil and gas deals with the country, also calling it “very sad.” Trump said NATO is essentially protecting Russia also. He called it a bad deal for NATO and asked if the NATO Secretary General if he thought that was appropriate.
“They’ll say wait a minute we’re supposed to be protecting you from Russia but why are you paying billions of dollars to Russia for energy? Why are countries in NATO, namely Germany having a large percentage of their energy needs paid to Russia and taken care of by Russia?” Trump asked.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/wrecking_nato.html

The Washington Post headline blared, “Trump is bent on wrecking NATO. Prepare for catastrophe.” The Post fears that President Trump’s diplomacy will benefit Vladimir Putin to the detriment of American and European interests. European Council president Donald Tusk sniped, “Dear America, appreciate your allies. After all, you don’t have that many.”

The NATO countries are, indeed, among America’s closest allies, but some of them appear more interested in oil, natural gas, and trade with Iran than in the Fulda Gap. Some of our “closest allies” have been working overtime to undermine America. If Mr. Trump is irritated with them, there is a reason.

Iran is preparing to take $300 million in cash out of German banks to get ahead of impending U.S. banking sanctions. While American intelligence officials are concerned that the money will finance terrorism, the German government says it has “no evidence” to that effect. According to the German newspaper Bild, “Iran … says that they need the money ‘to pass it on to Iranian individuals who, when travelling abroad, are dependent on euros in cash due to their lack of access to accepted credit cards.'” The German government appears to think that one million Iranian tourists might need $300 each – or perhaps 300 tourists might need $1 million each.

The plan to send dollars to Tehran is in line with European negotiations, led by Germany and France, to help Iran mitigate the economic fallout of the American withdrawal from the JCPOA – the Iran deal. The E.U. has also begun to update its “blocking statute,” the rule that will prevent European companies from complying with impending Iran sanctions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-trump-plans-to-change-the-world-1531177521

Eighteen months into Donald Trump’s presidency, the nature of his foreign policy continues to elude most observers. The problem is not, as some admirers claim, that he is playing an elaborate strategic game that his critics can’t grasp. Nor is it, as some detractors believe, that Mr. Trump is simply a creature of impulse with no fixed views. The president’s approach to foreign policy may well fail—indeed, there is a case it deserves to. But a Trump doctrine exists, and neither friends nor foes can afford to remain blind to it.

Mr. Trump is hard to understand not because he is deep but because he is different. American presidents since the 1940s have primarily sought to conserve the post-World War II order. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, is a revisionist who wants to alter the terms of the world system in America’s favor. From the president’s perspective, America’s superior military strength and its large trade deficit provide important advantages in international politics. Mr. Trump wants to boost America’s military edge while using military and economic tools to persuade other powers to accept his revisions to the world system.

Mr. Trump respects China as a serious long-term rival but believes that its economy depends more on Sino-American trade than the U.S. economy does. This is partly because China is much poorer than the U.S. on a per capita basis. Further, Mr. Trump believes that America’s bilateral trade deficit means that the current arrangement heavily favors China, and that China would be less able to withstand a disruption to that relationship.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/news-services/article214350249.html
The Human Rights Council’s recent vote to investigate Israel for its response to “protests” on its Gaza border highlights everything that’s wrong with this hypocritical body, and why the United States was right to leave it.

First, the vote reflects the council’s longstanding obsession with Israel, which has far more to do with its status as the world’s only Jewish state than with any serious council concerns about the world’s biggest human rights problems.

The United Nations created the council in 2006 to replace its Human Rights Commission, which by then had become an object of derision due to its anti-Israel bias.

In 2002, professor and dogged U.N. watcher Anne Bayefsky reported that over the previous 30 years, the commission spent 15 percent of its time on Israel and made it the subject of a third of its country-specific resolutions.

The commission’s successor, however, has only proved worse. The council has made Israel its only permanent agenda item, which means that it discusses the Jewish state at each of its three meetings a year but it doesn’t necessarily discuss such true humanitarian horrors as North Korea, Syria and Venezuela, nor such regular human rights abusers as China, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Cuba.