RUTHFULLY YOURS

Making the click-through worthwhile: Iran deal defenders insist they always knew Tehran was lying all along; some overheated arguments about masculinity and books for kids; how most of the people making the loudest arguments in public discourse didn’t bother to do the homework; and a really strange and implausible accusation against Mitch McConnell.

Wait, Why Did We Ever Trust the Iranians Again?

Fans of the Iran deal scoff at Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu’s presentation about the long and sordid history of Iran’s secret nuclear program: “There was nothing we didn’t already know.” “Everything he said was already known.” “There is nothing new in Bibi’s presentation.”

I don’t quite get how “hey, everybody always knew the Iranian regime lies all the time” is such a sterling defense of the Iran deal. I mean, is that we’re so confident in the limited inspections that we don’t think Iran would cheat by doing things at military sites? You can’t argue, “Oh, we never trusted their word” and “That’s why we have to keep trusting them” in the same breath.

Our new secretary of State:

“I know there are people talking about these documents not being authentic,” Pompeo added. “I can confirm for you that these documents are real; they’re authentic.”

Pompeo said that the files “spell out the scope and scale of the program that they undertook there, and I think makes – I think makes very clear that, at the very least, the Iranians have continued to lie to their own people. So while you say everyone knew, the Iranians have consistently taken the position that they’ve never had a program like this. This will – this will belie any notion that there wasn’t a program like this.”

Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron came to Washington to lobby Donald Trump to break his promise to undo Barack Obama’s “Iran deal.” A few days later, Europe’s biggest figure, Germany’s Angela Merkel, came to town for the same purpose. Trump’s tendency to bend to the latest pressure being no secret, it was also no surprise that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a dramatic speech, citing chapter and verse about Iran’s nuclear program, intended to pull Trump back to his campaign promise: His “No. 1 priority” as president would be to “dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”

Netanyahu’s speech—cast as it was in terms of promises made and broken regarding military security, as opposed to the commercial interests that Merkel and Macron had brought to bear—seems to have had its intended effect. Trump said that Netanyahu’s details proved that he, Trump, had been “100 percent right” about “the deal,” and that withdrawing from it would “send the right message” to North Korea and others.

Netanyahu’s critics did not challenge his contention that the details came from very recent acquisitions of Israeli intelligence. There is no way of knowing the truth of that. More important, they could not dispute the accuracy of those details. The U.S. government confirmed that Iran’s nuclear program continues. Their main rejoinder is that Iran’s nuclear weapons program—which contradicts official contentions that it does not exist—is an old story. No less true for being old.

I doubt anybody is surprised that “the deal” did not pause or slow Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, never mind stop it. Neither can anyone be surprised that the program kept the same director and personnel, and merely changed names as well as (some) venues. Not a few of the deal’s supporters state now that, as in 2015, the program’s strength “vindicates the need” for it.

In short, Netanyahu’s speech brought us back to square one. What should have been done then? What is to be done now?

The Obama administration and the media outlets which disseminated Ben Rhodes’ (admitted) propaganda on the Iran nuclear deal were wrong about everything.

The Republicans, President Donald Trump, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were right.

Here’s a collection of Ben Rhodes on Twitter — now as a likely member of the alliance pushing the comical narrative of a 2018 “#BlueWave” — getting everything wrong on Iran right up until the past few weeks:
Ben Rhodes
✔ @brhodes
It would not be “so easy” since there is a far-reaching inspections and verification regime to ensure that Iran is abiding by its commitments (which it is). Will Trump achieve a similar regime in North Korea? Does he even know how these agreements work?
Ben Rhodes
✔ @brhodes

The Iran Deal imposes strict, verified limitations on Iran’s centrifuges and stockpile to prevent them from obtaining a nuclear weapon. What Trump has talked about on NK – a vague, unverified commitment to denuclearization – is nowhere near as restrictive as the Iran Deal.

Newly confirmed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday said President Trump is “unlikely” to stay in the Iran nuclear deal unless he can get “substantial” fixes.

“There’s been no decision made, so the team is working, and I’m sure we’ll have lots of conversations to deliver what the president has made clear,” Pompeo told reporters during a trip to Brussels for a NATO foreign ministers meeting. “Absent a substantial fix, absent overcoming the shortcomings, the flaws of the deal, he is unlikely to stay in that deal past this May.”

Trump has set a May 12 deadline for European allies to agree to a supplemental deal to cover what he sees as gaps in the international accord or else he will essentially withdraw the United States from the agreement.

The Obama-era deal between the United States, Iran, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany and the European Union provided Tehran billions in sanctions relief in exchange for curbing its nuclear program.

Trump sees three main issues with the deal: several provisions sunset, inspectors can’t demand to see some military sites, and it does not address Iran’s other activities, including its ballistic missile program and support for terrorist organizations.

With more freedom to maneuver on foreign than domestic affairs, and with their eyes focused squarely on their legacies, all modern U.S. presidents have sought to craft the elusive deal that will solve a protracted global conflict. So, with dismal prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace, we shouldn’t be surprised that President Trump is now pursuing a deal to end North Korea’s nuclear program.

The coming summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un presents the riskiest of situations for the United States, however, for it pits the least knowledgeable modern-day president on foreign affairs against a shrewd young dictator who’s maintaining the family dynasty in the same iron-fisted way as his father and grandfather.

That raises the stakes immeasurably for the United States, which seeks a full rollback of North Korea’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief and a warming of relations between the two nations – and it has huge implications for U.S. relations with China and such American allies as South Korea and Japan.

Worse, Trump will square off against a leader whose predecessors cut multiple deals of a similar, though less ambitious, nature with Washington – a North Korean freeze or partial rollback of its nuclear program in exchange for U.S. aid – only to see Pyongyang renege and later resume its nuclear advancement.

French President Emanuel Macron’s three-day visit to Washington started on an awkward notewhen he kissed an obviously uncomfortable President Donald Trump. The scene was a symbolic reminder that the two leaders do not enjoy an “intense, close relationship” invented by the media. In reality Macron is, both ideologically and temperamentally, the polar opposite of Trump. The latter was admittedly impressed by the welcome he received for the Bastille Day celebration in Paris last year, and Macron has the distinction of being the first foreign leader to come for a state visit to Trump’s Washington, but there is less than meets the eye to their alleged “chemistry.”

To start with the basics, Trump and Macron are not “two alpha males,” and I have this sneaky suspicion that the leftist-liberal media machine is keen to award the French president Trump’s indubitable “alpha” status in order to neutralize suspicions about Macron’s sexual orientation. In reality, while Trump is a heterosexual who evidently likes pretty women younger than himself, Macron is most likely a bisexual who was fond of older women as a teenager—his wife is 24 years his senior—but now prefers handsome younger men, like the former Radio France president Mathieu Gallet.

Trump is an eccentric in many ways, to be sure, but for all his faults he is genuine and honest, a true albeit diminishing American type. Macron is the poster-boy of Europe’s postmodern transnational elite, a former international banker and fanatical Euro-integralist. He is also an Islamophile (“No religion is a problem in France today . . . What poses a problem is not Islam, but certain behaviors that are said to be religious and then imposed on persons who practice that religion”) and an open-borders enthusiast (by allowing over a million migrants in, “[Chancellor] Merkel and German society as a whole exemplified our common European values. They saved our collective dignity”). In February 2017 he lampooned Trump’s promise to protect America’s southern border by pledging never to build a wall of any kind.

The news from Korea is dramatic, but not quite historic. In the run-up to his proposed summit with Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un has floated a repackaged version of virtually every concession North Korea has ever proposed, from suspending its nuclear and missile tests to accepting the continuing presence of U.S. troops on the Korean Peninsula following a peace treaty between Seoul and Pyongyang.

Given that Messrs. Trump and Kim are two of the most unpredictable leaders in modern times, the frenzied pace of North Korean diplomacy has raised hopes for a breakthrough in the summit. But Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump are more likely to reframe the longstanding U.S.-North Korea standoff than to end it.

The first thing to understand is that North Korea’s nuclear weapons are not going away. Pyongyang is willing to sit at a table where their removal is discussed, and perhaps even to sign pieces of paper stating that their removal is a goal. But talking is one thing; disarming is something else.

The North Korean leadership follows the news. It knows what happened to Ukraine, to Saddam Hussein and to Moammar Gadhafi without nuclear arms. No piece of paper offers a country the serene peace of mind that it gets from a few atom bombs in the missile silos.

But there’s something else. Nuclear weapons aren’t only the centerpiece of North Korean security policy. They are the centerpiece of its political and economic strategy as well. The Kim dynasty hasn’t chosen the Chinese or Vietnamese path for prosperity based on international integration. Instead they cling to the idea of “juche,” or self-reliance, and have one of the least open, least dynamic economies in the world.

The reason is fear. Compared with China, where many companies have a market value greater than North Korea’s total gross domestic product, North Korea is a minnow swimming next to a whale. And there are other whales in the sea. If North Korea opened up for trade and investment, Chinese, South Korean and Japanese investors and traders would swallow it whole. The Kims would rather be the absolute rulers of a poor country than the former rulers of a middle-income one. North Korea spends an estimated 22% of its GDP on the military; that expenditure makes the country poorer but keeps the regime in control.

Those nukes give the Kims clout and they bring in cash. Kim Jong Un can provoke an international crisis by test- launching a missile; few other leaders of small and poor countries have that ability. China, Japan, South Korea and even the U.S. have been willing to make economic and political concessions to keep Pyongyang sweet. North Korea won’t trade all that away for a treaty. That the U.S. is negotiating with North Korea rather than bombing it surely seems to the Kims like proof that their nuclear strategy has worked.

But if Mr. Kim doesn’t want to give up his nukes, the U.S. doesn’t want war. Besides the 28,500 troops, there are more than 200,000 American civilians in South Korea on any given day. The first day of hostilities in a new Korean War could see tens of thousands of U.S. civilian casualties with more to come. The total cost of such a war in treasure and in blood is both incalculable and unacceptable. CONTINUE AT SITE