RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Trump used his historic trip to Asian nations to bolster international resolve to combat North Korean nuclear adventurism and Islamic terrorism, as well as to promote his signature “America first” trade policies.

The tour was calculated to project American power after eight years of pathetic servility, weakness, and apology tours by President Obama, and, of course, to bolster Trump’s standing as a world leader, among other things. Despite some grumbling from Democrats like Nancy Pelosi who said the Chinese were likely laughing at Trump for treading lightly in China about that country’s trade imbalance with the U.S. after using strong rhetoric domestically, reviews have been generally positive. Trump was presidential, as pollsters like to say.

As he departed the U.S. on Nov. 3, the White House said Trump’s foreign trip, “the longest trip to Asia by an American president in more than a quarter century” to promote his counter-terrorism strategy “and reaffirm the importance of a free and open system where all independent nations are strong, sovereign, and free from the threats of terrorism, coercion, and nuclear war.”

In a nutshell, that is exactly what President Trump did overseas.

In Seoul, South Korea, Trump warned that “three of the largest aircraft carriers in the world” have been sent to the region in case North Korea refuses to make a deal on nuclear weapons. During his visit to Asia the media reported that the carriers USS Nimitz, USS Ronald Reagan, and USS Theodore Roosevelt, were conducting drills in the ocean near the Korean Peninsula.

“We have a nuclear submarine also positioned,” Trump said in a joint appearance with Republic of Korea President Moon Jae-in. “We have many things happening that we hope, we hope — in fact, I’ll go a step further, we hope to God we never have to use.”

In South Korea’s National Assembly, Trump offered a nuclear ultimatum of sorts to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, who has been taunting his neighbors and the U.S. by testing missiles in waters off Japan and not far from U.S. overseas territories.

“This is a very different administration than the United States has had in the past. Do not underestimate us. Do not try us. We will defend our common security, our shared prosperity, and our sacred liberty,” Trump said.

Alas, this is too optimistic…while Trump and Mattis are doing well, our homeland security is damaged by pockets of Isis enthusiasts, lack of a good immigration policy and a State Department that does not recognize the dangers of Radical Islam and jihad. They also ignore Africa and the spread of Islamic terror …..rsk
Remember ISIS? When Obama left office, it was still a growing network of eager sadistic killers, with secret sponsorship by Turkey, by some Gulf Arab regimes, the Wahhabi radicals, and by the Iranians. Today a lot of those boastful YouTube killers are just smoking splotches in the sand.

A single MOAB bomb was dropped on a mountain tunnel complex in Afghanistan, apparently a clean target with no “weddings” going on. The day afterwards the media said that 94 ISIS killers died, but that assumes that somebody had already cleaned up that collapsed tunnel structure; not a chance. So a hundred or more of the worst human beings since Hitler died in one big explosion.

Most important, the United States sent a strong signal of determination. Trump-Mattis announced a strategy of “surround and kill the enemy in place.” For mass-murdering criminals there will be no mercy.

The U.S. media just rolled its eyes and yawned, but the Muslim world got the message loud and clear. They’ve been wondering how long the United States, which was the winning power in the Cold War and the two world wars was going to come back to its senses. Well, the MOAB bombing wasn’t wish-washy, it wasn’t half-hearted and it didn’t signal cowardice and weakness. The United States was finally getting serious.

Obama would never even name the enemy, and most importantly, under Obama the United States lost the moral high ground against child-murdering sadists; we started to support Sunni killer cults in Syria.

If ISIS is just a minor nuisance, as Obama tried to tell us, that would make the genocides of history meaningless. But genocide is first-degree murder on an enormous scale. Murder with malice aforethought is punished for a good reason. The church killer in Tennessee the other day had a previous conviction for attacking a two-year-old baby, and he should have been put away for good. It would have saved many good and decent lives in Tennessee.

ISIS is just like that guy, except they think God wants them to kill babies.

Obama never, ever seemed to get that basic point of morality, nor did Hillary, nor did any other Democrat. Trump and Mattis obviously understand it, and Mattis has been subtly reminding Muslims that yes, they also have a moral code that prohibits baby killing (it depends on the religion of the baby). Since Mattis took over, DOD press releases constantly remind Muslims that baby-killing is the worst evil.

Obama seemed to take the side of the enemy, and Bush just called the whole thing “the War on Terror,” totally ignoring the monstrous doctrine that runs Al Qaida and ISIS and other jihad killer cults. American military who were on the ground in Syria and Afghanistan were tremendously demoralized by U.S. failure to cast this war in the proper moral terms. Mattis in particular emphasizes morality in war, a concept liberals can’t even imagine. You kill people because they are beyond evil. You don’t kill innocents. Somehow the Democrats can’t seem to remember that.

So Trump and Mattis have been effective against ISIS because they know they are doing the right thing. So do the rest of us. (But Hillary never seemed to get the point, either.)

Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel recognized that multiculturalism has failed. All scientific studies show that a significant number of Muslims in Europe are fundamentalist; and that thousands of young European Muslims went to Syria to join ISIS. And yet, it is insufferable to Brussels and Berlin, to hear that the people of Central Europe have no intention of following the same path.

The European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU have made sure, through ruling after ruling, that it is virtually impossible to expel a “refugee” after his asylum request has been rejected.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines itself as a scientific body, although in reality, unsurprisingly, it is a purely political body. In composition, competence or functioning, there is not a shred of science in the IPCC. Yet, in the name of this “science”, European politicians are extracting from their people trillions in additional taxes, building pyramids of new regulations and inflicting prohibitions in every sphere of human activity.

On immigration, on sustainable development and on many other subjects, the convergence between the United States and Central Europe is now as evident as the new divide between Western Europe and Central Europe.

The European mindset is shifting. Twenty-three of the 28 governments of the European Union now have parliamentarian majorities on the center-right of the political spectrum. Everywhere in Europe, the “left” is on the run.

This is particularly true in Central Europe. The soon-to-be Austrian Prime Minister Sebastian Kurz won the election on an anti-immigration platform and is on the verge of forming a government with the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) which owes its own success to the same topic.

In the Czech Republic, political parties on the right now hold 157 of the 200 seats in the Parliament and tycoon Andrej Babis­ ­— “the Czech Trump” — is set to be the next prime minister.

All in all, the “Visegrad Group” peoples — Czechs, Hungarians, Poles and Slovaks — plus the Austrians, have voted in the most conservative governments we have seen in Europe for almost 30 years, since the fall of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.

Wow. President Trump wrapped up his visit to South Korea with a speech square in the tradition of President Ronald Reagan. It’s not just that he talked about the long conflict on the Korean peninsula: the “dazzling light” of South Korea versus the “impenetrable darkness” of the North, the glories of freedom versus the toll of tyranny, the line that separates them just north of Seoul, and America’s commitment to defending it. What made this a landmark speech is that Trump explained, vividly and in detail, why the internal depravities of the North Korean regime are intimately entwined with its nuclear program and its threats to South Korea, and the rest of the Free World. Coming from an American president, this was a speech the world has long needed to hear.

In recent decades, previous American presidents have talked about the monstrous character of North Korea’s regime, periodically chiding and deploring, but without illuminating in depth and detail the full picture. President Bush, in his 2002 State of the Union Address, listed North Korea, along with Iran and Iraq, as part of an “axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” But in that speech Bush devoted only a single sentence to North Korea itself, summarizing that its regime was “arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens.” Such short shrift has been pretty much the approach of recent American presidents — Clinton, Bush and Obama — in speaking publicly about North Korea. Chasing the Chimera that appeasement might help promote peace with Pyongyang, they’ve usually left it to their underlings to make the most damning pronouncements, piecemeal, rather than wield the presidential prerogative to speak fully and forthrightly from the bully pulpit.

Donald Trump’s 12-day trip to Asia—on Monday he will be in Japan, followed by stops in South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines—is the longest presidential visit to the region in a generation. That’s no accident: Although many in Washington see only Mr. Trump’s disruption, Asian leaders know his administration has brought a new seriousness and a nuanced agenda to Pacific policy.

The immediate problem is North Korea’s nuclear adventurism. The broader challenge is China’s growing power and ambition. The overarching goal is managing Asia policy in a way that enhances the security and prosperity of the U.S. and its allies.

The Trump administration begins with a hardheaded view of deterrence. Mr. Trump has rattled some Americans with his threat “to totally destroy North Korea” in “fire and fury” if it attacks the U.S. or an ally. But there is no ambiguity in the message this sends Kim Jong Un. To whatever extent North Korea can be deterred, Mr. Trump has done the job by laying down a clear marker of what war will cost Pyongyang: everything.

Previous presidents’ policies toward North Korea were naive in the extreme. Neither the Agreed Framework in 1994 nor the “six party talks” last decade prevented Pyongyang from getting nuclear weapons. Mr. Trump rightly believes rushing into new negotiations would further enable North Korean deception and stalling, while the regime would continue to develop a nuclear-armed missile capable of hitting the U.S. Negotiating holds the most promise when it is done from a position of American strength.

The White House rightly believes that the best chance of shifting Mr. Kim’s course is with pressure from the Chinese. Although Mr. Trump often invoked China as a nemesis during the presidential campaign, he has since dealt deftly, winning unexpected Chinese support for a Security Council resolution this past September imposing stiff sanctions on Pyongyang. Far from having a rancorous relationship, Mr. Trump has reached out regularly to President Xi Jinping.

Increased cooperation from Beijing isn’t the product of any newly benevolent view of America. On the contrary, pressure from the U.S. has helped to cause the turnaround. The Chinese have heard Mr. Trump’s sharp criticisms of their trade and currency policies. But despite his previous threats, the administration so far hasn’t labeled China a currency manipulator. “Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem?” Mr. Trump cagily tweeted in April. “We will see what happens!” When Mr. Trump stops in Beijing on Wednesday, expect blunt talk urging specific promises from China to further tighten the screws on North Korea.

The administration of Pres. Donald Trump is considering whether to disallow the sale of Boeing passenger planes to Iran. This hideous addendum to the horrendous P5+1 deal with Iran, where the U.S. was the most important signatory, was another one of Pres. Barack Obama’s expressions of “goodwill” to the murderous, anti-American regime of crackpot ayatollahs. Jonathan S. Tobin, writing at the time of the transaction with Boeing, tells us, “Not only has Boeing gotten into bed with terrorists, the same can be said of those who are counting on all the new business ties changing the nature of a terrorist regime.”

Presumably, having a big business deal with a terrorist nation (Iran is still on the U.S. State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism) does not, per the American left, make us complicit with terrorism; rather, it is a way of ameliorating “tensions” and “strains.” Nonetheless, the American left is still fond of quoting Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address caution that the U.S. constitutional republic faces threats from the “military-industrial complex.” In light of this precedent, perhaps we may consider the “Boeing exception” as ushering in a new age: that of the terrorist-industrial complex.

This shift, whereby global business interests, the government of the United States, and our P+5 partners all collude with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, is ominous for Europe and the U.S., as well as for the stability of the Middle East. And the implications extend even farther than that. This deal portends a great shift in the moral-ethical climate of the entire planet. The entire power elite of the world is hereby going beyond mere greedy excess or dealing first and foremost in terms of expediency.

The deal with Boeing is the essence of the yetzer hara (bad tendency of mind or spirit) that Solomon Schechter wrote about in a couple of wonderful books. The deal and its “exceptions” reek of the moral poison that comes from violating the Commandments “Thou shall not bear false witness” and “Thou shall not covet.” It also reflects a failure to follow a New Testament teaching wholly consistent with the Hebrew Scriptures: “You cannot love both God and mammon.” Please be forewarned: God will not be mocked.

Who says humans are basically good? It is a fiction. Were we good, there would be no need for the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament). There would be no need for a Christ. The prophets and the forefathers would have no relevance. There would be no need for prayer, study, tzedakah (charity), mitzvoth (good deeds), blessings. There would be no need for repentance (tshuva). There would be no need for grace and mercy. There would be no need for atonement, for the Cross. Anything honorable and worthy is honorable and worthy only in contrast with what is not honorable and worthy. If expedience were the standard, then there would be no room for the moral, honorable, or worthy.