RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/trumps_statesmanship_surprise.html

Nobody knew. None of us saw it. Amongst his biggest supporters, maybe a handful suspected it. Many of us expected the economic renewal of the US to happen. Many of us foresaw a significant roll back of Saint Barrack’s horrid, destructive agenda. A lot of us hoped for a major push back on the left.

All of which we have gotten.

None of us, no one I have read, no one I know, expected Donald Trump to be a giant in foreign policy. No one expected him to reshape the world. Yet Donald Trump, in a short time, is doing so.

That was supposed to be one of the reasons to vote against him. He had no foreign policy experience. He did not understand the world. He was going to lead us into wars. He would be taken advantage of by our enemies. He would ruin our alliances. He would be a rube. A bumpkin. An embarrassment. That was what we were told.

Well. Guess what #nevertrumpers? You were so wrong, desperately wrong. Your shame should be bottomless. Bill Kristol, Max Boot, all of you stand up and please voluntarily go into the stocks and throw rotten veggies at yourselves. You should be ashamed to speak. Yep, the entire left-leaning foreign policy establishment as well. All of you.

I did not expect this, never saw this as one of Trump’s strengths. Nonetheless, we have not seen a better, more fruitful, and more capable foreign policy than this administration since the great Ronald Reagan.

Here are some of his accomplishments:

www.jewishpolicycenter.com
Kim Jong Un’s relationship with his military appears shaky.

As President Trump prepares for his summit with Kim Jong-un, there is no telling how it will go, but go it will.

The president has chosen to break the cycle of lower-level meetings that result in North Korean promises regarding their nuclear program followed by American largesse followed by North Korea breaking its promises.

President Obama changed the cycle a bit by refusing to engage at all — “strategic patience” he called it — just waiting for the regime to collapse or for his term to be over, whichever came first. What we are left with is a North Korea that has mastered nuclear technology and is working on miniaturizing a bomb to fit on the ballistic missiles he is pursuing.

It’s hard to see the downside for the U.S. in President Trump’s decision to meet Kim in Singapore. We already have three American hostages back in exchange for an Oval Office photo-op for Kim Yong-chol, North Korean intelligence agent posing as a diplomat. An unpleasant moment, but not devastating.

And remaining in our pocket is America’s “trump card” so to speak. More on that in a minute.

Conventional wisdom says Kim wants his nuclear capability to ensure that he is not invaded and deposed by the U.S. Having seen the U.S. overthrow non-nuclear Saddam Hussein and non-nuclear Moammar Qaddafi, it certainly could make sense that nuclear weapons would make Kim feel invincible. But only if that’s his greatest fear.

Below I repost Uwe Parpart’s Asia Times analysis of the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore. Liberal media is aghast at the president’s rough handling of Canadian boy-band frontman Justin Trudeau, and his confrontational approach overall at the Group of Seven summit. When the dust settles, though, Trump may accomplish what eluded Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama: a stabler and safer world without the need for millions of American boots on the ground. He well may go down in history as one of our great foreign policy presidents. It’s not in the bag, but it is within sight.

North Korea and Iran are decisive issues: Will America and its allies be subject to blackmail by rogue nuclear states? There is a grand compromise that might work in the case of North Korea, and the president reportedly has already put it on the table: Formal diplomatic recognition of the Pyongyang regime in return for full de-nuclearization. In the case of Iran, the president’s tough stance and close coordination with our ally Israel has already pushed Iran back in Syria and put the Islamist regime under extreme stress.

Of course, Trump can’t please everybody. German Chancellor Angela Merkel complains that Trump is being too nice to Russia by suggesting that it rejoin the Group of Seven. Considering that Germany spends just 1.2% of GDP on defense and can’t get more than four fighters in the air at any given moment, that’s chutzpah. Merkel’s policy is to talk tough about sanctions against Russia while rolling over for Putin when it comes to Germany’s gas supplies, which will be supplied by the just-started Nord Stream II pipeline from Russia. Germany likes to wag a finger at Russia over its depredations in Ukraine, but only 18% of Germans say they will fight to defend their country. Trump’s policy is to rebuild American strength and stand up to Russia, while looking for ways to strike agreements with Russia–on American terms. That’s the difference between speak softly and carry a big stick, and declaim loudly while waving a bratwurst. If the Germans don’t want to spend money on defense, let alone fight, that’s their business, but they shouldn’t lecture us about how to handle the competition.

When President Trump announced last month that America would leave the global nuclear deal with Iran and reimpose U.S. sanctions, Europe’s leaders vowed to create financial mechanisms that would enable their firms to do business with Tehran and protect them from U.S. financial retaliation.

On the eve of Trump’s May 8 decision, for instance, senior diplomats from the European Union, Britain, France, and Germany met with Iran’s deputy foreign minister in Brussels, pledging to find ways to continue delivering economic benefits to Iran in hopes of keeping as much of the nuclear deal in place as possible.

When Trump formally announced his decision, European officials reacted angrily, with French Finance Minister Bruno Le Marie declaring that it was “not acceptable” for the United States to play “economic policeman of the planet.” Since then, Tehran has pressed Europe’s leaders to take such steps as preventing its firms from complying with the sanctions and finding creative ways to finance deals with Iran.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/stay_out_of_yemen.html

The United States is already militarily involved in Yemen, with special forces targeting al-Qaeda and Islamic State operatives who are then attacked by American drones. Thus far, however, it has stayed mostly outside the Yemeni civil war, in which Iranian-backed Houthi forces are fighting the Saudi-UAE-supported Yemeni government, although there are reports that Americans are helping locate and destroy ballistic missiles and launch sites that Houthi rebels have used to attack cities in Saudi Arabia.

Why should the United States increase its support for the anti-Houthi faction, particularly lacking any congressional support for additional involvement in Yemen? The Houthis are not America’s enemy; the enemy is Iran, which declared war on us in 1979 and pursues a variety of strategies to wear us down while it pursues its illicit nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Expanding the American role in Yemen would serve Iran’s strategic interests rather than our own. The Iranians hope a bigger American footprint in Yemen – along with deployments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria – will sap American resources, cost lives, sow civil discord, and reduce American prestige. Iran believes that its stock will rise accordingly.

According to news reports, the UAE has asked for U.S. help in an operation to take control of the port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s fourth largest city, sitting on the Red Sea near the entrance to the Gulf of Aden. It is a strategic location for Red Sea shipping and an important stronghold for the Iran-backed Houthi fighters. The port has played an important role in the delivery of emergency aid supplies to Yemen. Hodeidah has been bombed on different occasions by Saudi-coalition air forces, and facilities at the port – especially large cranes and dock equipment – have been destroyed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/singapore-or-bust-1527894119

The Trump Presidency is often harrowing but never dull, so perhaps it was inevitable that a summit between Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un would be back on again. The two adversaries who were publicly trading schoolyard taunts a few months ago will now meet on June 12 in Singapore after all, and the only thing we can say with any confidence is that no one has a clue what will happen.

Mr. Trump announced that the summit is back on a week after he cancelled it amid North Korean insults and unanswered phone calls. But in a sign of the surreal nature of this diplomacy, Kim then sent a top emissary who is on the U.S. sanctions list, Kim Yong Chol, to meet in New York with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. On Friday Kim Yong Chol met with Mr. Trump for more than an hour in the Oval Office, and the summit was full speed ahead.

“I think we’re over that, totally over that, and now we’re going to deal and we’re going to really start a process,” Mr. Trump said at the White House. “The relationships are building and that’s a very positive thing.” Asked if the North had committed to giving up its nuclear weapons, Mr. Trump said, “I think they want to do that. I know they want to do that.”

But there is the rub. If the North is committed to giving up its weapons, it hasn’t said so publicly. It has merely committed to a diplomatic process and a “phased” denuclearization in return for certain unspecified concessions from the U.S. But that is also what the North committed to do in the 1990s and again in the 2000s only to continue its nuclear work in secret and eventually toss out United Nations inspectors.

The summit will be an immediate propaganda coup for Kim, a sanctioned rogue who will appear on the world stage with a U.S. President for the first time. The question is what Mr. Trump will be able to take away beyond the photos of a presidential meet and greet. Mr. Trump is nothing if not confident in his negotiating abilities, and he clearly savors dominating world attention with this kind of made-for-global-TV drama.

But he also isn’t known for mastering policy details, and it was only days ago that the North released three American hostages after months of captivity, and only months ago that it essentially murdered American tourist Otto Warmbier after arresting him for trying to take home a wall poster.

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/05/trump-dumped-business-usual-asia/

Despite the best hopes of the liberal-minded West, the globalisation and modernisation of China have made its communist rulers less democratic at home and, on the international stage, more belligerent. Trump is prepared to accept this reality and acts accordingly.

In his seminal book Why I Am Not a Conservative (1960), F.A. Hayek contended that conservatism—at least the British and European version of conservative politics at that time—did not “offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving”. While the British Tory party, for example, might “succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments”, it “could not prevent their continuance” since it failed to “indicate another direction”. The populist-nationalism of President Trump, I suggest, is emancipatory to its core, not the least reason being that he has clearly articulated and is now pursuing “another direction” in Asia.

The “current tendencies” and “undesirable developments” in America—and we could extrapolate to most Western nations—have to do with a dynamic and mutually fortifying relationship between politically-correct ideology and the development of a new power elite. Today’s ruling class, to borrow from James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution, is not the old-time family entrepreneur in league with a national parliament, but a managerial elite of “operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians … administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on”. This evolving ruling class, warned Burnham, would not necessarily be committed to economic freedom, personal liberty, parliamentary sovereignty and patriotism, their interests being monopolistic rather than market competitive, oligarchic rather than parliamentary, transnational rather than local, global rather than patriotic.

The America First creed is in obvious conflict with the globalist worldview. President Trump’s nationalist insurgency exists on a number of fronts, with each serving the same populist goal: to push back against the “insiders” or power elite who have hijacked the nation to serve their own agenda; an agenda which is at odds not only with the interests of the “outsiders” but also with the long-term viability of American self-determination. Take Trump’s tariff initiatives, for instance. His argument was not advanced simply on economic grounds but also in terms of national security. Tariff announcements on steel and aluminium imports have made Wall Street jittery, and yet President Trump expressed the obvious in one of his tweets: “When our country can’t make aluminum and steel … you almost don’t have a country. We need great steel makers.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/05/making_the_iranians_mad.html

There is much to be learned from the endgame between the Reagan administration and the final leaders of the Soviet empire that can be applied to the current situation with Iran.

When Ronald Reagan proposed the “Zero-Zero Option” for no intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe, the pundits – and the Europeans – said, “The Russians will never agree to that.” They demanded that Reagan put forward what the Russians could accept – or not aggravate the Russians by putting U.S. Pershing missiles in Europe.
When Israel defines its aims in negotiations as recognition of its legitimacy and permanence as a Jewish State in the Middle East, pundits – and lots of other people – say, “The Arabs will never agree to that.” They demand that Israel not build houses in places the Palestinians don’t want them, not welcome the U.S. embassy in its capital, and not ensure that rioting Palestinians determined to enter Israel to “rip the hearts out of Jews” are stopped before they get to the aforementioned Jews. It will only make the Palestinians angry and there won’t be any more “peace process.”
When President Trump said his goal in discussion with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is the de-nuclearization of North Korea, pundits – and Democrats – said, “He’ll never agree to that.” Other administrations bribed the Kim family to abandon their nuclear project. It didn’t work, but hey, at least we weren’t making them mad.

So it was inevitable that when secretary of state Mike Pompeo listed twelve objectives that would make Iran a positive actor on the international stage – objectives the United States plans to pursue – the pundits would cry, “They’ll never agree to that.”

Inevitable, but the level of angst is actually a bit startling. “Sound, fury, and ‘regime change’ lite.” “Economic war on Iran.” In an ironic nod to pop culture and perhaps a veiled threat to President Trump, “[i]n the 1976 media satire Network, the frustrated and emotionally unhinged anchor Howard Beale, facing termination, goes on air and shouts ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.'” And Pompeo used “elements of a presentation … by Benjamin Netanyahu, a strident critic of the accord.” “European allies alarmed.” “Iran’s people will punch U.S. Secretary of State in the mouth.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-gives-europe-a-wake-up-call-1527201614

The Iran nuclear deal, cosigned by France, Germany and the United Kingdom, was hailed as a success for Europe’s style of multilateral diplomacy, so President Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement sent shock waves through the Continent’s capitals.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, for the second time in a year, that Europe could no longer rely on the U.S. to protect it. The president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, tweeted: “Looking at latest decisions of @realDonaldTrump someone could even think: with friends like that who needs enemies.” Some commentators even proclaimed the end of the trans-Atlantic alliance.

There is a crisis all right, but it isn’t in diplomatic relations. It’s a crisis of European weakness. In a world increasingly defined by great-power competition, Europe is finding it increasingly hard to defend its preferred model of multilateral decision-making and soft-power diplomacy. As Mr. Trump decided to make his U-turn on Iran, he looked to other American allies: Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates.

Mr. Trump’s snubbing of Europe is a continuation of the broader trend in U.S. foreign policy. President Obama came into office intent on a pivot to Asia. His administration canceled a missile-defense system for Poland and the Czech Republic in 2009, and retired two U.S. Army brigades from Europe in 2012. As of 2016, there were 62,000 U.S. troops on the Continent, down from more than 300,000 at the end of the Cold War.

When Mr. Trump calls on Europe’s wealthy nations to invest in the common defense, the diplomatic establishment practically faints. But Mr. Obama made the same point, at one point saying that “free riders aggravate me.”

During Mr. Obama’s tenure, European leaders similarly resented being left out of White House decision-making, such as when American policy on Afghanistan was being reviewed. On issues like Syria or even during the Iran negotiations, which began through a secret back channel in Oman, Mr. Obama prioritized his view of U.S. interests.

Yet America is still doing the heavy lifting to defend Europe. The European Deterrence Initiative, which positions allied troops in Eastern Europe, was reinforced by the Trump administration with $4.8 billion in 2018. American funding is expected to grow to $6.5 billion in 2019. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/north-korean-summit-should-stay-cancelled/

It’s not exactly Donald Trump’s Reykjavik, but he has done the right thing by calling off the misconceived summit with Kim Jong-un.

The North Koreans have been yanking our chain over the last week or so, presumably trying to establish their leverage and begin a negotiation over the negotiation. They seemed to make some progress, with Trump saying the other day that maybe we could settle for something short of complete, verifiable denuclearization, which is supposed to be our core demand. The president may have tempted the North Koreans into the gamesmanship by occasionally seeming over-eager to take credit for a stupendous diplomatic success (stripping North Korea of its nukes) that hadn’t happened yet and is unlikely to happen.

On the other hand, unpredictability is a typical North Korean negotiating tactic, so the sudden shift from warmth and sunshine to blustery demands and threats shouldn’t have been unexpected.

It was always far-fetched that the North would be willing to give up its nuclear weapons. For Pyongyang, the value of a summit wouldn’t be the opportunity for a good-faith negotiation at the highest levels but the chance to use a superficially successful meeting to unravel the sanctions against it, the way it has in the past.