RUTHFULLY YOURS

The ceasefire in three Syrian provinces announced Friday after the Trump-Putin meeting in Hamburg is the first step in the right direction that the United States has taken in the Middle East in more than 20 years. The Syrian deal should be understood in the context of President Trump’s address in Warsaw the day before, a challenge to Russia to “join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.” Syria’s civil war has become a school of subversion for tens of thousands of Shi’ite as well as Sunni terrorists, and the major powers have an urgent interest in extinguishing it.

As a first step towards a “broader and more detailed arrangement,” in the words of a senior State Department official, the ceasefire opens a path to what I have called a Westphalian Peace, referring to the 1648 treaty that ended the devastating Thirty Years War. Trump achieved this result by calling Russia to account for past misbehavior while offering a deal that is in both countries’ best interests. It is a small step involving only a fraction of contested Syrian territory, but the agreement nonetheless breaks new ground.

The senior official briefing reporters July 6 said, this is an important step, but it is a first step in what we envision to be a more complex and robust ceasefire arrangement and de-escalation arrangement in southwest Syria. The official added that “there’s an expectation the Russians will use their influence to ensure that [the Iranians] respect the ceasefire.” He added, “The basis of the whole understanding is obviously that each side, each party to it uses its influence with those parties on the ground with which we have relationships. So we and Jordan, in particular, have good relationships with the Southern Front, with the principal armed factions in southwest Syria.”

As I explained in a June 9 essay [“No-one likes Trump, I don’t care”], “There is no way to end the conflict without an agreement with Russia and China, who are backing Iran’s intervention in Syria as much as Washington backed the Sunni rebels fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime. That means both sides must leash their own dogs.”

Trump sent a double message to Moscow in Warsaw. The address was reminiscent of Reagan’s spirited defense of freedom before the Berlin Wall in 1987, and not by accident. The defense of a beleaguered Western Civilization echoes a speech that White House chief strategistSteve Bannon made before a Vatican conference in 2014. The salient fact about the speech, though, is where it was given, namely in Poland, not in the Ukraine. America has fundamental interests in Poland, which is a NATO member and the land of origin of nearly 10 million Americans. It does not have fundamental interests in the Ukraine, a country artificially stitched together from Russian, Ruthenian, Polish and other ethnicities by Nikita Khrushchev as a buffer against the West.

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrived in the Persian Gulf region for a round of shuttle diplomacy aimed at resolving a conflict among U.S. allies that Washington fears will drag on for months.

The former Exxon Mobil Corp. chief executive, who has close ties to many Arab officials in the region and has attempted to mediate the dispute, is throwing himself more deeply into efforts to resolve differences between Qatar on one side and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt on the other.

The four countries accuse Qatar of funding terrorist groups and meddling in their domestic affairs, and severed diplomatic relations and imposed a transport ban on June 5. Qatar denies the allegations and accused the bloc of Arab nations of waging a smear campaign.

Top officials from the feuding nations have been passing through Washington in recent weeks, making their case to Mr. Tillerson and others.

The U.S. diplomat first traveled to Kuwait and later will head to Saudi Arabia and Qatar to try to bring the sides closer to a solution.

It is unclear if he will meet with Emirati and Bahraini officials this week.

“The purpose of the trip is to explore the art of the possible of where a resolution can be found,” said R.C. Hammond, a communications adviser traveling with Mr. Tillerson. “Right now…we’re months away from what we think would be an actual resolution and that’s very discouraging.”

Mr. Tillerson’s trip to the Gulf follows stops in Ukraine and Turkey, where he headed after the summit leaders from the Group of 20 leading nations in Germany.

Last week, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates met in Cairo to formally discuss Qatar’s response to a list of demands that includes curbing diplomatic ties with Iran, severing links with the Muslim Brotherhood and closing the Al Jazeera television network. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump’s ringing defense of Western civilization during his speech in Poland was a welcome answer to the phony cultural relativism, fashionable self-loathing, and smug hypocrisy of leftist Westerners who bash the West but wouldn’t live anywhere else. So it’s no surprise that the progressive establishment bashed the speech as “racial and religious paranoia,” as one screed in the Atlantic was titled.

That headline, and the essays’ claim that “the West is a racial and religious term” and a dog-whistle for alt-right racists, bespeak a profound ignorance about what defines the West. The core ideas of the West began in the city states of ancient Greece, then for centuries were further elaborated by the Romans before Christianity existed. Most important of these ideas was the notion of citizenship, the belief that the laws and customs comprising the political order were a collective possession of free and equal citizens, not of a king or elite defined by birth and lording over subjects. Power no longer belonged to men, to be used to further their personal status or wealth or ambitions. Power became abstract, embodied in the laws, offices, and electoral procedures used by citizens to make the decisions about who should use power, and for what power should be used.

The principle that power resides in laws, not men, was the foundation stone of our own Constitution and every subsequent political order that vests power in free citizens. And this order exists to ensure and protect political freedom and equality, ideas likewise born in ancient Greece and found only in the West or its imitators.

Thus the other uniquely Western goods that Trump touched on came into existence to protect that unprecedented invention of citizenship and consensual rule. Free speech, for example, the ability of citizens to discuss and deliberate openly without fear of retribution, arose among the ancient Greeks, who had two words for free speech. Search the ancient empires contemporary with the Greeks and you will not find anywhere the ideas of free speech, or constitutional government, or politics, or citizenship, or words expressing each. You will find only power: rule by coercion and force.

The other defining idea is critical consciousness: the freedom and inclination to question and examine everything, from the gods to nature to one’s own political-social order. Examining nature and trying to understand it apart from traditional myths, and by relying on reason and empirical evidence, sowed the seeds of modern science. An astonishing example of this new drive to know and understand without reliance only on tradition or religion can be found in the Hippocratic corpus of ancient writings on medicine. In a book on epilepsy, known in antiquity as the “sacred disease,” the author writes: “It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men’s inexperience, and to their wonder at its peculiar character.” That sentence could be the motto of modern science and medicine alike.

On climate change and other issues, Donald Trump has departed the G20 summit at odds with much of the world. That was to be expected, given his compliant predecessor is much missed by Merkel & Co. Nowhere are the two presidents’ differences greater than in the Middle East.

Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump began their presidencies with outreach to the Islamic world—and that, with one exception, is where the similarities between their respective Middle East doctrines begin and end. President Obama’s June 4, 2009, Cairo speech, delivered at Al-Azhar University, can be read as the manifesto for a post-America world. President Trump’s May 22, 2017, Riyadh speech, in startling contrast, was an unapologetic exposition of his America First creed.

The insinuation, in some quarters, remains that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim and perhaps even a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the activist Salafists who aim to destroy the West from within using the strategy of “civilisational jihad”. Key political Islamic organisations in the United States, including the Council of American-Islamic Relations, are impenitent affiliates of the transnational Muslim Brotherhood movement. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, in the form of Mohamed Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party, ruled the country from June 2012 to July 2013. Activist Salafism and Salafi jihadism (Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Boko Haram, Jemaah Islamiyah, and so on) are not one and the same but they are first cousins. Embracing the views of Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood scholar who argued for the restitution of an Islamic state in Egypt and throughout Dar al-Islam, might not automatically turn a Muslim into a terrorist but it does encourage an apposite degree of contempt for the kafir (disbeliever).

Almost completely unreported at the time of the December 2, 2015, San Bernardino massacre was the fact that the husband-and-wife terrorists, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, were aficionados of the works of Sayyid Qutb. The homicidal duo posted on Facebook their allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State before murdering fourteen Americans and wounding another twenty-two at a work-related Christmas luncheon. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton responded to the slaughter-fest by intoning against the laxity of America’s “gun safety laws”. Presidential candidate Donald Trump, on the other hand, made an explicit connection between a certain kind of modern-day Muslim and terrorism: “I would close up our borders to people until we figure out what’s going on … We don’t learn … The whole thing gets worse as time goes by.” President Obama, to be fair, upgraded his erstwhile depiction of Islamic terrorism from “workplace violence”—à la the 2014 Fort Hood Massacre—to “larger notions of violent jihad”. Whew! Barack Hussein Obama, the apotheosis of modern-day chic, was prepared, at last, to make a connection, however indirectly, between the “religion of peace” and the murder of the innocent.

But it was not always so. President Obama’s Cairo Address could almost have been written by a Muslim Brotherhood scribe, blaming as he did the anti-West “tensions” in the Muslim world on European colonialism and Cold War machinations that treated Muslim-majority countries as “proxies without regard to their own aspirations”. Additionally, American-style “modernity and globalisation” caused “many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam”. The only thing omitted from his mea culpa was Christendom’s involvement in the Crusades. It was, naturally, Islam that paved the way “for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment”. That said, Obama singled out the likes of Al Qaeda for censure, but even then he tacitly blamed 9/11 on the West itself for creating the “tensions” that “violent extremists” in the Muslim world were able to exploit.

We’ll find out in the coming weeks how Vladimir Putin sized up Donald Trump in their first mano a mano meeting on Friday, but one bad sign is the Trump team’s post-meeting resort to Obama -like rhetoric of cooperation and shared U.S.-Russia purposes.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson frequently lapses into this form of John Kerry-speak as he did trying to sell the new U.S.-Russia-brokered cease-fire in a corner of Syria. “I think this is our first indication of the U.S. and Russia being able to work together in Syria,” Mr. Tillerson told reporters.

He added: “I would tell you that, by and large, our objectives are exactly the same. How we get there, we each have a view. But there’s a lot more commonality to that than there are differences. So we want to build on the commonality, and we spent a lot of time talking about next steps. And then where there’s differences, we have more work to get together and understand. Maybe they’ve got the right approach and we’ve got the wrong approach.”

The same objectives? The Russians want to help their client Bashar Assad win back all of Syria while retaining their military bases. If they are now talking about a larger cease-fire, it’s only because they think that can serve Mr. Assad’s purposes. The Trump Administration doesn’t seem to know what it wants in Syria after Islamic State is ousted from Raqqa, and we hope Mr. Tillerson isn’t saying the U.S. shares the same post-ISIS goals as Russia.

As for the right or wrong “approach” to Syria, the Pentagon believes Russia knew in advance about Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons this year. The U.S. fired cruise missiles in response and has since shot down an Assad airplane bombing U.S. allies on the ground, which drew a threat of Russian reprisal if the U.S. did it again. Somehow “approach” doesn’t capture this moral and military difference.

Then there’s Mr. Trump’s Sunday tweet that “Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded.” No doubt Mr. Putin, the KGB man, would love to get an insight into America’s cyber secrets, though don’t count on any of those secrets being “guarded,” much less “impenetrable.”

Republican Senator Marco Rubio had it right on Sunday when he tweeted that “partnering with Putin on a ‘Cyber Security Unit’ is akin to partnering with Assad on a ‘Chemical Weapons Unit’.” He added, in advice Mr. Trump could help himself by taking, that “while reality & pragmatism requires that we engage Vladimir Putin, he will never be a trusted ally or a reliable constructive partner.”

Mr. Trump’s actions toward Russia so far, such as bombing an Assad airfield and unleashing U.S. oil and gas production, have been far tougher than anything Barack Obama dared. But the U.S. President clearly wants a better relationship with Mr. Putin, and the comments by both Mr. Tillerson and Mr. Trump after their Friday meeting aren’t exactly hardheaded. Next time they should invite national security adviser H.R. McMaster or U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley into the meeting. Those two seem less impressed by the Kremlin conniver.

Congress can play a fortifying role here by moving ahead with the bill toughening sanctions against Russia for its election meddling. The Senate passed the bill 98-2, and Republicans can move it quickly in the House with some fixes for oil investments. The White House objects that the bill takes away discretion from Mr. Trump to reduce sanctions unilaterally. But that discretion shouldn’t be granted until Messrs. Trump and Tillerson show that they understand that Mr. Putin is not America’s friend.

President Trump has never been coy about what he wanted from Russia and from President Vladimir Putin: relations with the United States that are substantively better than they were under President Obama.

By any metrics in the early months of his administration, the president did not get his wish. Ties with Russia ebbed to a post-Cold-War low point, in part because of global skepticism about Trump’s inexplicably rosy embrace of Russia during his presidential campaign.
Friday, during the two leaders’ first face-to-face meeting, the pleasantries and handshakes between Trump and Putin bloomed into a substantive discussion about Russia’s election interference, a U.S.-Russia brokered cease-fire in Syria that is to begin on Sunday, and an appraisal of Bashar al-Assad’s limited future as president in light of a civil war that nudged Russia and the United States to back opposite sides.

The two leaders also talked about the hazards of North Korea’s nuclear program, according to the top diplomats from both countries.

Agreements were few, but the “chemistry” was pronounced good, and the conversation went long.

The meeting in Hamburg during the G20 summit consumed an extensive two hours and 16 minutes, most of it focused on Syria. The discussion, which included Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and two translators, was described as productive, although, as expected, accounts from each country about what was said by Trump and Putin differed in key respects.

President George W. Bush, President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton discovered in the months after their respective initial meetings with the former KGB agent that their soulful personal confidences, tutorials about global leadership, and gimmicks about resets and new starts altered little during a persistently fraught relationship.

With Putin, it’s never the first meeting or the early phone calls that set a mood. He has a record of publicly exploiting opportunities to appear to offer Western leaders some of what they seek, only to take assertive actions in the opposite direction later on.

“Putin sees geopolitics as a zero-sum game in which, if someone is winning, then someone has to be losing,” Clinton wrote in “Hard Choices,” her book about her years as secretary of state.

What interests Putin in the United States is not the personal chemistry and camaraderie he might forge with its various leaders, but rather how the United States and its policies can be altered or undercut to support his nationalist ambitions and his demands that the West acknowledge Russia’s global influence.

“Putin is a master at pressing his geopolitical advantage when he senses complacency in the West,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized last year.

U.S. intelligence agencies determined last fall that Putin and forces at his disposal interfered with the 2016 presidential election in an effort to help Trump win, believing the New York reality television celebrity would be more accommodating to Russia than his Democratic opponent, whom Putin despised.