RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/president_trump_is_right_about_syria.html

On the campaign trail in 2012, President Obama took credit for ending the war in Iraq and bringing all U.S. troops home from that country. Military leaders quietly decried the evacuation of troops from Iraq. To do so created a vacuum for hostiles, such as the displaced Baath Party members loyal to Saddam Hussein. In early 2014, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria appeared, rolling through the upper third of a largely unarmed and unprotected Iraq, setting the country ablaze.

Although removing U.S. forces from an unarmed Iraq was an obvious blunder, by September 2014, President Obama was dismissing complaints of his handling of the outbreak of hostilities. He declared that ISIS was the equivalent of “a jayvee team” and was nothing to worry about. In 2016, we learned from Secretary John Kerry that regime change in Syria, the removal of Bashar Assad, was the Obama administration’s goal. Focused on this agenda, the White House intentionally gave arms to ISIS, betting that ISIS’s success would force the Syrian president to acquiesce toward Obama’s terms and step down.

U.S. political and military leaders knew that Iraq was working to build up its military, but it had not been able to reconstitute its armed forces in effective numbers. They knew that Iraqi recruits and pilots were in schools run by Americans and taught by Americans. The timing was right for war, as Iraq was utterly defenseless if ISIS came to town.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/trump_declares_victory_in_syria_too_soon.html

In the midst of the Vietnam War, Sen. George Aiken is reported to have said, “Let’s just declare victory and get out.” In October, President Donald Trump did “declare victory” over ISIS. “I want to get out,” the president said. “I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation.”

This week, it was announced that our 2,000 or so troops would be pulled out. Job done, go home, right?

There was a bit of a hedge by the Pentagon. Chief spokesperson Dana White said the campaign against ISIS is “not over,” but “we have started the process of returning U.S. troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign. We will continue working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates.”

OK, still, we’re pretty much done, right? In the narrowest sense, perhaps, although ISIS remains a regional scourge. But it raises the question of what to do when your war aims change in the middle of the war. The defeat of ISIS was, clearly, the first American goal. We were not involved in the Syrian civil war and not planning to be. So American forces took on what appeared to be a limited job. But nothing is limited in the Middle East.

By design or default, United States forces were serving two other functions. In September, secretary of state Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton made the case for Iran’s continued presence in Syria creating instability that presented a strategic threat to American interests in the region – and would allow Iran to control the “Shiite Crescent” from Iran through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to the Mediterranean Sea.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/mattis-resigning-tells-trump-to-pick-a-secdef-whose-views-are-better-aligned-with-yours/

With a letter offering a foreign policy critique and remaining mum on his thoughts about the commander in chief, Defense Secretary James Mattis announced that he will resign at the end of February after representing the U.S. at a NATO defense ministerial.

Mattis, 68, was commander of U.S. Central Command before retiring from the Marine Corps in 2013. He is currently the longest-serving secretary in President Trump’s cabinet.

Mattis wrote that he is “proud of the progress that has been made over the past two years on some of the key goals articulated in our National Defense Strategy: putting the Department on a more sound budgetary footing, improving readiness and lethality in our forces, and reforming the Department’s business practices for greater performance.”

He emphasized his “core belief” that America’s “strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.”

“While the U.S. remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies,” Mattis wrote, adding that doesn’t mean being “policemen of the world” but using “all tools of American power to provide for the common defense, including providing effective leadership to our alliances.” He praised NATO’s commitment to fighting alongside the U.S. after 9/11.

“Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,” he continued. “It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model — gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions — to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.”

https://www.jns.org/opinion/hail-to-haley/

When Nikki Haley was appointed in November 2016 by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to serve as America’s ambassador to the United Nations, I wrote that there was reason to hope she would live up to the legacies of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and John Bolton as “shining beacons in the Midtown Manhattan snake pit.”

Although Haley, the governor of South Carolina at the time, was not well-known beyond the confines of her state, her personal and political history appeared to indicate that she possessed what I called the “kind of clarity on controversial issues that is required in an arena filled with people whose key purpose is to cloud the distinction between good and evil.”

Four months later, when Haley emerged from her first encounter with the U.N. Security Council and blasted its anti-Israel bias, I was even more optimistic that she had what it took “to navigate the Orwellian universe in which the U.N. operates, where Western values are on a lower hierarchical rung than Third World culture, and where a mockery is made of the concept of human rights.”

From that moment on, Haley continued to exceed expectations. She not only served as a proud and fierce defender of American interests in the world, but did so in her own dignified and powerful voice. Indeed, she made the office her own. It is an accomplishment whose significance cannot be overstated.

Her announcement on Oct. 9 that she would be leaving her post at the end of the year was thus a shock and a disappointment, particularly for Israelis. Her popularity in the Jewish state was on full display at this year’s Fourth of July celebration in Tel Aviv, where the mere mention of her name during U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman’s speech elicited such screeching cheers that one might have mistaken the event for a rock concert.

The ovation was well-deserved. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted upon learning of her resignation, Haley “‎led the uncompromising struggle against hypocrisy at ‎the U.N., and on behalf of the truth and justice of ‎our country.”

Indeed. But that’s not the only extraordinary thing about her. Unlike most people on their way out of a job, she did not slack off for a second. If anything, she upped her game. Her farewell speech at the monthly meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Dec. 18 was just as memorable, if not more, than her previous addresses. The gist of her words—a preview of Trump’s yet-to-be-revealed Mideast peace plan—was that the Palestinians have been abused by their leaders and misled by members of the international community.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-twilight-of-human-rights-diplomacy-11545090825

Pesident Trump’s abandonment of democracy promotion and human rights is among the most striking of his departures from the post-Cold War American foreign-policy consensus. To the despair and fury of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike, Mr. Trump often appears determined to conduct American diplomacy as if human rights abroad were not a concern.

But the human-rights recession in U.S. foreign policy was already under way when the president took office. It isn’t hard to see why: Efforts to base America’s foreign policy on human rights and democracy hadn’t been yielding their desired results for some time.

Think back to 2011, when President Obama knew where the arc of history was headed and planned to steer American policy accordingly. As the Arab Spring toppled Hosni Mubarak, Ben Rhodes told reporters the administration believed “there is not going to be a return to the way things were in Egypt.” The people had spoken, tyranny was broken, and Egyptian democracy was here to stay.

Those were heady times. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was creating an “Islamist democracy” in Turkey. Aung San Suu Kyi was being compared to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela for her reformist advocacy in Burma.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272206/obamas-war-upon-us-kenneth-r-timmerman

Donald Trump has a name for everything and everyone, from Crooked Hillary to Little Rocket Man, who for a time became his best friend. Will he call the next region-wide conflagration in the Middle East, when it breaks out, Obama’s War?

If he hasn’t thought of that already, he should start considering it now. Because the catastrophic policies of our former president have emboldened the Islamic state of Iran and enabled it to threaten the United States and our allies militarily in ways never before possible.

When Obama took office in January 2009, he inherited a strong U.S. military and diplomatic posture across the Middle East.

The U.S.-Israel strategic relationship was at its peak, with the Bush White House openly supporting Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s latest attempt to stop Hamas terror in Gaza.

The U.S. enjoyed a close relationship with a secular Turkey, that itself had strong ties to Israel.

Egypt was at peace, Qaddafi had come into the Western camp and abandoned terrorism and its nuclear weapons program, and the insurgency in Iraq had been crushed.

Al Qaeda truly was “on the run,” while Iran was beginning to feel the crunch of international sanctions over its previously covert nuclear weapons program.

Obama succeeded in reversing every one of these strong U.S. positions, treating Islamic Iran as a friend and Israel as an enemy while promoting the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and its terrorist spawn.

And while President Trump has taken great strides to reverse the enormous damage to our strategic posture Obama caused, fighting his way out of the spider’s web of Iran deal restrictions Obama enacted against the United States has taken nearly two years, time the Iranian regime has put to good use.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/unsavory-allies-from-stalin-to-the-saudis-1543966304

More recently, the Clinton administration’s most frequent foreign visitor was Yasser Arafat, a mass murderer and terrorist, and both Presidents Bush were obsequious to the tyrants of Saudi Arabia…and no one in Congress or the media got too exercised….rsk

The media, Democrats and even some Republicans have been full of moral indignation over the Trump administration’s failure to punish Saudi Arabia for killing writer Jamal Khashoggi.Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia says “the president’s failure to hold Saudi Arabia responsible in any meaningful way” is an “example of this White House’s retreat from America’s leadership on human rights and protecting the free press.”

President Trump has balked at all of this, noting that the Saudis are valuable allies against Iran. The “Death to America”-chanting fanatics who make up the Iranian regime are the world’s foremost sponsors of terrorism, and they are committed to building nuclear weapons that could reach not only Israel but also Europe and the U.S.

The president’s critics must be a bit short on American history. During World War II, the U.S. and President Franklin D. Roosevelt were in bed comfortably with one of the most murderous dictators in history. Joseph Stalin didn’t kill one citizen of the Soviet Union. He killed millions, before and during the war. He was quoted saying: “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.” Maybe, frighteningly, he was right.

Stalin played a double game with the Nazis until Hitler stabbed him in a the back by attacking the Soviet Union in June 1941. When the U.S. entered the war six months later, FDR sought out Stalin as an ally and provided the Soviets with an endless supply of military equipment—all interest-free under the Lend-Lease Act.

Hollywood papered over Soviet crimes. “Mission to Moscow,” a 1943 Warner Bros. movie, portrayed the Soviet people as happy and prosperous under Stalin’s benevolent rule. The purges and show trials were depicted as efforts to rid the country of German agents. The film’s producer called it “an expedient lie.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-china-trade-truce-1543790868

Donald Trump had one of the most productive foreign trips of his Presidency this weekend as he announced a tariff truce and new trade negotiations with China. Then he threatened to blow up his Presidency by terminating Nafta before Congress passes a replacement. More on the latter nearby, but at least his cease-fire with China is good news for the economy and American workers.

Mr. Trump and President Xi Jinping stepped back from the brink of total trade war while giving themselves room to strike a deal over new trading and investment rules. Mr. Trump agreed to hold off on raising tariffs to 25% from 10% on $200 billion of Chinese goods in January. This would be a huge tax on American consumers, as well as businesses that have Chinese suppliers.

The White House says China will start buying U.S. farm goods immediately, which will be a relief in farm states where incomes are down. China will also buy an unspecified “but very substantial” amount of farm, energy, industrial and other products to reduce the bilateral trade deficit. More customers are better, though the overall U.S. trade deficit won’t fall much. The U.S. will run a trade deficit with the world as long as it also runs a capital surplus.

Far more important, the two countries will begin talks this month on China’s predatory behavior including forced technology transfer, intellectual property and cyber theft, and regulatory abuses against foreign companies. The parties have 90 days to agree or Mr. Trump will apply the 25% tariff—and presumably more on top of that.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-chinas-most-valuable-export-1543525958

Investors are still guessing whether and how the United States and China will settle their differences when President Trump sits down to dinner with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping this weekend. But even if Mr. Xi won’t agree to stop stealing U.S. technology, Mr. Trump can get Chinese help in enhancing American intellectual property.

A Reuters report today suggests that for now the White House is focused on playing defense:

The Trump administration is considering new background checks and other restrictions on Chinese students in the United States over growing espionage concerns, U.S. officials and congressional sources said.

In June, the U.S. State Department shortened the length of visas for Chinese graduate students studying aviation, robotics and advanced manufacturing to one year from five. U.S. officials said the goal was to curb the risk of spying and theft of intellectual property in areas vital to national security…

Every Chinese student who China sends here has to go through a party and government approval process,” one senior U.S. official told Reuters. “You may not be here for espionage purposes as traditionally defined, but no Chinese student who’s coming here is untethered from the state.”

Having practiced its surveillance techniques on associates of the Republican party in the U.S., perhaps America’s intelligence community can now gather important information about espionage directed by the Communist party in China.

But the U.S. can play offense, too, by untethering Chinese tech talent from the state. For Chinese students who don’t appear to pose any threat, the U.S. should seek to recruit more of them to study in the U.S. and ultimately to create new intellectual property here. Whether native or foreign-born, innovators are treated less well in China than they used to be.

The Chinese regime’s official publication People’s Daily says that billionaire Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma is a member of the Communist party. Li Yuan reports in the New York Times that for businesspeople in China calling themselves communists is “often a matter of expediency. Party membership provides a layer of protection in a country where private ownership protections are often haphazardly enforced or ignored entirely.”