RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19839/china-outmaneuvered-biden

U.S. policy toward China appears to be suffering from a belief in magic – that, for instance, withdrawing from Afghanistan would be a great idea; that Putin would be happy with a “minor incursion” into Ukraine; that the Chinese spy balloon was “silly;” that the mission of education and the military should be to ensure “equity,” leading one veteran to say that the US is “trying to out-pronoun our enemies;” and that America’s southern border, with agents trying to process reportedly 8,000 illegal migrants each day, thereby leaving vast swaths of land open to traffickers, smugglers and terrorists, is “secure.”

Regrettably, the Biden Administration seems to be letting itself be outmaneuvered in countering the imminent threat of war posed by China’s leader Xi Jinping and his ruling Communist Party.

Blinken swallowed the airport insult and met anyway with, among others, his Chinese counterpart and Xi himself. They held what the State Department called “a productive conversation, a real exchange.” Chinese officials likewise said the talks were “candid, in-depth and constructive.” Oh good! Then we have nothing to worry about!

At home, Xi has continued to tighten party control over the economy even as economic growth has faltered and unemployment climbed. Why pursue antagonistic policies abroad and counter-productive ones at home?

Xi’s objectives are not economic growth or good relations but rather to insulate China from outside sanctions and other pressure like that, orchestrated by the United States and NATO against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. — J. Kyle Bass, founder of Texas-based Hayman Capital Management, July 12, 2023.

“The day Yellen landed in China, Xi told the Eastern Military Command to prepare for war. I think it’s highly likely he invades Taiwan.” Not by 2027, as estimated by U.S. intelligence, but “in 12 to 18 months.” — J. Kyle Bass, July 12, 2023.

U.S. policy toward China appears to be suffering from a belief in magic – that, for instance, withdrawing from Afghanistan would be a great idea; that Putin would be happy with a “minor incursion” into Ukraine; that the Chinese spy balloon was “silly;” that the mission of education and the military should be to ensure “equity,” leading one veteran to say that the US is “trying to out-pronoun our enemies;” and that America’s southern border, with agents trying to process reportedly 8,000 illegal migrants each day, thereby leaving vast swaths of land open to traffickers, smugglers and terrorists, is “secure.”

Regrettably, the Biden Administration seems to be letting itself be outmaneuvered in countering the imminent threat of war posed by China’s leader Xi Jinping and his ruling Communist Party.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/rewarding-an-inimical-iran/

“It is dead, but we are not gonna announce it,” Joe Biden said of the Iran nuclear deal in a surreptitiously recorded video last year. “Long story,” he added. The story isn’t really that long. Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran was never ratified as a treaty by the GOP-led U.S. Senate, which warned that a future Republican administration would void the agreement. That’s exactly what happened. The end.

But while the Biden administration may privately accept this reality, it seems to believe that it is obliged to behave as though the JCPOA can be resurrected. Since he took office, the president has made a variety of fruitless overtures to the Iranian regime, the most recent of which occurred this week.

According to Reuters, a U.S. official confirmed that Washington had provided the government in Baghdad with a waiver allowing it to purchase Iranian electricity via non-Iraqi banks. The State Department has retailed the move as a humanitarian initiative — “a step Washington hopes may keep Tehran from forcing unpopular power cuts during the sweltering Iraqi summer,” the Reuters report read. But the currency waiver is a concession to Tehran.

The latest waiver was expanded to permit payments to banks outside Iraq at the request of the Iraqi government, apparently in the hopes that this might transfer some of the pressure that Iran has exerted on Baghdad to other countries.

“We have to help the Iraqis with this perennial pressure from the Iranians to access the money,” said the U.S. official.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that “these funds will remain in accounts where they can only be used for non-sanctionable activity, and with every transaction approved in advance by the Department of Treasury.” But coming on the heels of the Treasury Department’s decision to sanction 14 Iraqi banks over allegations that they were siphoning money for Iran, the waiver provides Tehran with new access to hard currency that the Islamic Republic desperately needs.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19783/iran-deal-congressional-approval

When President Joe Biden entered the White House… he eased off on sanctions and made it blatantly obvious he would do almost anything for a deal with Iran.

The consequence has been uranium enrichment from 5% to 60%, and with some material up to 84%, according to IAEA suspicions — verging on the levels needed for a bomb.

Biden was so fixated on gaining a deal that he allowed Moscow to take the lead on international negotiations, and his plans even envisaged Russia getting control of Iran’s highly enriched uranium. All of this as Putin has been threatening the West with his own nuclear weapons and savaging Ukraine while US taxpayers spend billions of dollars to counter him.

In return for virtually nothing, Tehran would get an initial $20 billion release of frozen assets with perhaps hundreds of billions more to follow, plus US undertakings not to add further sanctions or pursue resolutions against Iran in the UN Security Council or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

This freeze-for-unfreeze deal makes no sense on any level, especially with Iran, a country that has a track record of breaching the terms of the JCPOA not to mention its documented violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which it signed.

With Iran’s long history of violence across the region and around the world, the administration can’t point to any signs of a reformed, more peacefully-inclined regime that might provide some rationale for thinking it can be dealt with like a civilised country.

The list really does go on and on. It is proof positive of Iran’s continued violent intent which will be enabled and fuelled by the huge cash injection Biden is proposing. Some of this money will also of course be funnelled into Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.

Biden will also be peering down the barrel of further policy failure if Ukraine cannot prevail against Russian military might despite enormous quantities of US aid. He knows that if Kyiv cannot prevail, some of the responsibility for that will lie at his own door, given his drip-feeding of weaponry when a deluge was not only necessary but also possible. It will represent another defeat for the US and NATO on his watch.

Add to all that Biden’s misjudgement in the Middle East: not only his appeasement of Iran but also his petulant and insulting treatment of Saudi Arabia, which opened the door to the Chinese Communist Party becoming a major regional power broker.

Israel, above all nations, cannot afford for Iran to become a nuclear-armed state. It is Tehran’s number-one target. Jerusalem cannot take any chances with a regime that has repeatedly stated its intention to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and is developing the means to do so.

What is clear is that Biden has no more intention of standing by his repeated undertakings to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran than Obama had. Like his Democratic Party predecessor, Biden has rolled over to the inevitability of Tehran getting the bomb and is opting for a policy of containment based largely on appeasing the ayatollahs, camouflaged by a nuclear agreement. It amounts to nothing less than capitulation to Iranian blackmail.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19775/us-troops-syria

The primary agenda of the Russian-Iranian meeting was reportedly “to discuss expelling the United States from Syria, which may indicate Russia’s intent to facilitate Iranian-backed attacks on US forces.”

Above all, the US presence is important as a blocking force to deny Iran an uninterrupted land bridge to Lebanon and the eastern Mediterranean, and to check the Iranian regime’s long-term expansionist dream of “exporting the revolution.”

Iran already effectively controls three countries in addition to its own – Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen – and has been broadening its influence throughout Latin America.

Any drawdown of the US troop presence at al-Tanf will also tempt adversarial “great powers” in Syria — such as Iran, Russia and especially Turkey — to attack US allies in the region, starting with the Kurdish-majority Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The US presence, in addition, greatly helps safeguard the liberty of countless Syrians from the tyrannical Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad…

The pro-democratic forces in Syria and border regions in Iraq also help to prevent the remnants of the Islamic State (ISIS) from reconstituting itself into a robust terrorist entity, as they have already started to do.

US Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Wallander, during her September 2022 visit to the region, characterized the mission of these forces as “to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS.”

Departure also would likely further decrease confidence in US pledges to defend vulnerable democracies throughout the world. Both Taiwan and archipelago countries in Southeast Asia would probably be the most affected by any US plan that abandoned the Kurds to Turkey, Iran and ISIS.

A withdrawal of US forces from their current Syrian redoubts will almost certainly imperil the sovereignty of Iraq, Syria as well as the mission of Kurdish troops. These missions include: guarding prisons that hold hundreds of incarcerated ISIS jihadists as well as monitoring the expansive displaced persons camp at al-Hol, which hosts tens of thousands of the wives and children of ISIS jihadists.

If the Kurds are not able to execute their mission of suppressing ISIS, the failure would quickly lead to a rapid expansion of the terrorist group.

[C]losure of the US mission in Syria would cause alarm among allies and risk accelerating an already precipitous decline in US influence throughout the Middle East…. There is little doubt that the image of US primacy on the world stage, as after the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, will deteriorate even further. Ally and adversary alike will seek non-American alternatives to protect their national interests.

Although continued US troop presence in Syria is not without risk, withdrawal from the region would no doubt trigger an even greater risk to America’s interests — while remaining in Syria accomplishes much at minimal cost.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19758/dangerous-nuclear-deal

“I urge the Administration to remember that U.S. law requires that any agreement, arrangement, or understanding with Iran needs to be submitted to Congress.” — Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a letter to US President Joe Biden, June 15, 2023.

“INARA [the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015] was enacted with strong bipartisan support to ensure Congressional oversight of U.S. policy regarding Iran’s nuclear program…. This definition makes clear that any arrangement or understanding with Iran, even informal, requires submission to Congress.” — Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a letter to US President Joe Biden, June 15, 2023 [Emphasis added].

[T]he return to the nuclear deal means that the current sanctions against Tehran will be lifted and the regime would reportedly receive $100 billion a year “to Destabilise [the] Region,” as well as legitimately to rejoin the global financial system. Through the nuclear deal, the Iranian regime will again buy itself a blank check to advance its aggressive and fundamentalist policies across the Middle East, just as it did after the 2015 nuclear deal, but this time with the potential of threatening other countries with its nuclear breakout capability.

“To give them another windfall of cash like we did as a result of the 2015 nuclear deal, which led to an expansion of their proxy wars in the Middle East, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not in our national interest…. They’re gonna fuel their proxy wars and they’re seeking domination and control in the Middle East…. No, it’s not a good deal. It wasn’t a good deal in 2015. It’s not a good deal now.” — Retired U.S. Army General Jack Keane, The Hill, June 18, 2023.https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19758/dangerous-nuclear-deal

“I urge the Administration to remember that U.S. law requires that any agreement, arrangement, or understanding with Iran needs to be submitted to Congress.” — Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a letter to US President Joe Biden, June 15, 2023.

“INARA [the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015] was enacted with strong bipartisan support to ensure Congressional oversight of U.S. policy regarding Iran’s nuclear program…. This definition makes clear that any arrangement or understanding with Iran, even informal, requires submission to Congress.” — Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a letter to US President Joe Biden, June 15, 2023 [Emphasis added].

[T]he return to the nuclear deal means that the current sanctions against Tehran will be lifted and the regime would reportedly receive $100 billion a year “to Destabilise [the] Region,” as well as legitimately to rejoin the global financial system. Through the nuclear deal, the Iranian regime will again buy itself a blank check to advance its aggressive and fundamentalist policies across the Middle East, just as it did after the 2015 nuclear deal, but this time with the potential of threatening other countries with its nuclear breakout capability.

“To give them another windfall of cash like we did as a result of the 2015 nuclear deal, which led to an expansion of their proxy wars in the Middle East, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not in our national interest…. They’re gonna fuel their proxy wars and they’re seeking domination and control in the Middle East…. No, it’s not a good deal. It wasn’t a good deal in 2015. It’s not a good deal now.” — Retired U.S. Army General Jack Keane, The Hill, June 18, 2023.

The Biden Administration, in an attempt to revive the Iran nuclear deal, has been quietly negotiating with the theocratic regime of President Ebrahim Raisi, known — for his crimes against humanity and his involvement in a massacre of nearly 30,000 political prisoners — as “the Butcher of Tehran.”