RUTHFULLY YOURS

The world isn’t going to wait.

Tomorrow, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet face-to-face with President Trump for the first time, each to take the other’s measure. Mr. Trump has previously criticized Mrs. Merkel for her open-door immigration policy and, by implication in his criticism of NATO, for Germany’s paltry defense spending.

Mrs. Merkel, the European press says, is on the defensive against Mr. Trump’s nationalist-populist positions, including his criticisms of the European Union. A few weeks ago, she floated the idea of more defense spending, but it turns out that her 2018 budget raises defense spending to the lofty level of 1.23 percent of Germany’s Gross Domestic Product, well below the 2 percent that all NATO members committed to a decade ago. Free riders like Germany deserve a repeated dose of “Dutch uncle” counseling by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has a lot on his plate. General Joe Votel, commander of Special Operations Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that the Taliban has fought us to a standstill in Afghanistan. It remains a permanent war, a quagmire, resulting from Mr. Bush’s nation-building approach.

Mr. Trump sent about 200 Marines and their artillery to the fight to take Raqqa, Syria, from ISIS. As good as they are, they are far too small a force — even combined with our air forces and special operations guys in Syria — to determine the outcome of the war. And what comes after? Mr. Trump hasn’t said what our plan is for the future of Syria, assuming that ISIS can be defeated there. If ISIS is defeated in Syria, what does he propose to do about ISIS in Libya and elsewhere? How long and large a war is he in for?

On the other side of the globe, the threat from North Korea grows by the day. The North’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs are, by almost universal judgment, going to be capable of attacking the continental U.S. with nuclear weapons in less than five years. Secretary of State Tillerson is visiting Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul this week. What will he be telling those nations, and what will he be asking of them?

Those are only the most visible parts of the international status quo. Mr. Trump would do well to remember that President Reagan said that “status quo” was Latin for “the mess we’re in.”

Mr. Trump has no experience or expertise in defense or foreign affairs, so he is left to make decisions based only on the advice of others. Sitting atop the advisers’ pyramid is the National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who is entirely ill-suited for that position.

As I’ve written earlier, McMaster is a politically correct product of the Bush and Obama eras who insists that there is no connection between Islam and terrorism despite the fact that the connection is thoroughly documented and compelled in Islamic scripture. McMaster, having refused to retire to join the Trump administration, is a careerist, trying to ensure he gets his fourth star after his term in the White House.

Speaking to governors at the White House on Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a ‎sharp increase in the military budget. According to some assessments, the allocation in question could ‎reach wartime levels.‎

If so, rightly so.‎

Americans may not feel it on a day-to-day basis, but their country is the target of global jihadists, some ‎of whom have been committing small-scale killing sprees on U.S. soil, while others are training in the ‎Middle East and honing their skills to execute operations on a grander, more 9/11-type scale.‎

Still, although Trump, like many other leaders and lay people, seems to consider the group Islamic State ‎to be the world’s bogey man, as al-Qaida used to be viewed, the greater danger is posed by the ‎regime in Tehran and its proxies. ‎

For one thing, unlike the Sunni rogues who like to decapitate people on YouTube, Shiite Iran is an ‎actual country with all that this entails, including a place at the proverbial and literal table. What should ‎have been its lowly station in the overall hierarchy of things was lifted to great prominence when the ‎Obama administration and five other governments — those of Britain, France, Russia, China and ‎Germany — groveled before its leaders, begging them to agree to a deal to retard their race to a ‎nuclear weapon.‎

The disastrous end result of this mass genuflection was the acceleration of Iran’s nuclear program ‎through the infusion of billions of dollars into its coffers. Even more unfathomable was what the ‎ultimate agreement — called, oddly, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — included: a clause ‎handing over the responsibility for monitoring activity at Iran’s nuclear facilities to members of its ‎parliament. It would be funny if it weren’t so horrifying. Indeed, the Iranian regime was chuckling, ‎while Israel and others in the West who opposed the JCPOA winced and braced for fallout.‎

When Trump won the U.S. presidential election in November, however, the ayatollahs suddenly ‎stopped laughing. Touted by all Democrats and many Republicans as crazy, unpredictable and a loose ‎cannon, the real estate mogul and reality TV star who took to Twitter and other platforms to bash his ‎detractors made Tehran extremely nervous. The shift from a White House and State Department ‎characterized by appeasement to America’s enemies — refusing even to name them as Islamists — to ‎an administration headed by someone who declared that it would be necessary to perform extreme ‎vetting of Muslims entering the United States could not have been sharper.‎

We all know about the Obama administration’s lies and treachery regarding Benghazi. But how many of you know about the Obama administration’s lies and treachery against the American families of the Americans ambushed and murdered on the orders of Raul Castro?

Thought so … Well, please read on:

You see, amigos: This week 21 years ago three U.S. citizens and one legal U.S. resident who belonged to a humanitarian volunteer organization known as “Brothers to the Rescue” were busy at their volunteer humanitarian jobs when Raul Castro (then head of Cuba’s military) gave orders for his air force to ambush and murder them. Raul Castro himself boasted about these orders.

These American volunteer workers were tangibly saving more innocent lives (countless men, women and children) than most Peace Corp workers or “community-organizers” could ever show for their work, despite all the media hype.

You see, amigos: Twenty times as many people (men, women, children) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany. So during the mid-1990s a volunteer outfit known as Brothers to the Rescue based in south Florida flew unarmed Cessnas over the Florida Straits alerting the U.S. Coast Guard to the location of these desperate escapees from Stalinism and keeping many from joining the terrible tally of death by drowning, dehydration or getting ripped apart and eaten alive by sharks. By 1996 these American humanitarian volunteers had flown 1,800 missions and helped rescue 4,200 men, women and children.

Considering how prior to Castroism Cuba was swamped with more immigrants per-capita (mostly from Europe) than was the U.S.–considering how people once clamored to enter Cuba–the exodus from Castroite Cuba and the rescue flights were viewed by Castro (and his innumerable U.S. agents-of influence) as very bad publicity for the Stalinist regime.

So in preparation to murder Brothers to the Rescue (the historic Castroite remedy for this type of thing) Castro infiltrated a KGB-trained spy named Gerardo Hernandez into south Florida and into the humanitarian group. On Feb, 24, 1996, Hernandez passed to Castro the flight plan for one of the Brothers’ humanitarian flights over the straits.

With this info in hand, Castro’s MIGS ambushed and blasted apart (in international air space) the lumbering and utterly defenseless Cessnas, murdering the four humanitarian volunteers. Three of these murdered men were U.S. citizens, one was a Marine who volunteered for two tours in Vietnam.

The murdered Armando Alejandre Jr. came to the U.S. at age ten in 1960. His first order of business when he reached the age of 18 was fulfilling his dream of becoming a U.S. citizen. His next was joining the United States Marine corps and volunteering for service in Vietnam. He returned with several decorations. As a member of Brothers to the Rescue he often dropped flowers over the sea, in memory of the thousands they’d been unable to rescue in time.

A man with a weapon or with both hands free to fight has always palsied the Castros with fright. The notion of Raul Castro facing a United States Marine in combat mode is simply laughable, in a pathetic sort of way. So Castro waited for Alejandro and his brothers to be carrying flowers–and made his move, ambushing and murdering them in cold blood. Migs against Cessnas, cannon and rockets against flowers.

Note: Michael Anton is Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications, National Security Council. This article was prepared before the author accepted his current position. The views here reflect only those of the author. They do not represent the views of the Trump administration, the National Security Advisor, or the U.S. government.

In a year of upset political apple carts, none were rattled harder, or lost more fruit, than traditional notions of American foreign policy. Donald Trump shocked a lot of people over a lot of issues. But no anti-Trump Republican economists orchestrated elaborate letters, with hundreds of signatories, to swear they would never serve in a Trump administration. No dissident Republican trade negotiators ostentatiously switched parties and vowed to support Trump’s opponent. Nor did Republican immigration experts flood the cable networks to renounce and denounce their party’s nominee.

Yet all of the above—and more—happened with respect to foreign policy. The specific reasons why Republican foreign policy operatives chose to denounce Trump’s plans may never be clear. We shall instead explore what we think they had in mind.

Nearly all opponents of President Trump’s foreign policy, from conservatives and Republicans to liberals and Democrats, claim to speak up for the “liberal international order.” A word may have been different here or there (e.g., “world order”) but the basic charge was always the same. Whether voiced by Fareed Zakaria and Yascha Mounk on the left, Walter Russell Mead in the center, Eliot Cohen and Robert Zoellick on the right, or Robert Kagan on the once-right-now-left, the consensus was clear: Trump threatens the international liberal order.
Guarding the Liberal International Order

Sticklers may notice two problems with this argument. First, while a few critics hung their anti-Trumpism on the peg of “temperament,” most preferred to charge Trump with policy recklessness—yet then went on to insist that Trump had no policies at all. We shall leave this objection aside as excusable political hyperbole.

The second problem is much greater: why is it that no one quite got around to saying what, exactly, the “liberal international order” is? One must therefore infer a definition from their complaints, and I shall try to do so fairly, the goal being to understand these writers as they understand themselves.

In ideological terms, the liberal international order (hereafter “LIO”) is the post–World War II consensus among the victorious great powers (excluding the Soviet Union, and later mainland China) on (in descending order of consensus) security, trade, and internal political arrangements. In more concrete terms, it is the constellation of institutions built to further that consensus: the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, and other, later entrants such as the World Bank.

Celebrants of the LIO seem to think that no explanation of its utility or value is necessary. Affirmation is enough because its goodness is self-evident. Trump’s implicit questioning of that order therefore sounds blasphemous. And clerics tend to confront blasphemy not with patient clarification but with strident denunciation.

That the foreign policy establishment of the United States is a kind of priesthood is not necessarily a bad thing. Priests can be useful. Aristotle identifies the priestly function as one of six elements vital to his best regime. More to the point, in every regime, strategy is determined and diplomacy is conducted by an elite. Thinkers and doers from Plato to Machiavelli to the American Founders saw no way around this reality and no reason to find it unjust or worrisome.

Yet the arrangement becomes a problem when the elite forgets or at least can no longer articulate the original rationale for the policies it still advocates. That is the situation American foreign policy has faced since the end of the Cold War, if not before—a situation Trump pointed out in often pungent language.

At first blush, Luis Almagro would seem an unlikely candidate for the disfavor of the current Cuban regime. A man of the political Left, he took office as the tenth secretary general of the Organization of American States in 2015, vowing to use his term of office to reduce inequality throughout the hemisphere. Yet Secretary General Almagro was recently denied a visa to enter Cuba. Why? Because he had been invited to accept an award named in honor of Cuban democracy activist Oswaldo Payá, who died in 2012 in an “automobile accident” that virtually everyone not on the payroll of the Castro regime’s security services regards to this day as an act of state-sanctioned murder. Payá’s “crime” was to organize the Varela Project, a public campaign for basic civil liberties and free elections on the island prison, and he paid for it with his life.

The regime’s refusal of a visa for the head of the OAS caused a brief flurry of comment in those shrinking parts of the commentariat that still pay attention to Cuba, now that Cuban relations with the United States have been more or less “normalized.” But there was another facet of this nasty little episode that deserves further attention: While Almagro’s entry into Cuba was being blocked, a U.S. congressional delegation was on the island and, insofar as is known, did nothing to protest the Cuban government’s punitive action against the secretary general of the OAS.

According to a release from the office of Representative Jim McGovern (D., Mass.), the CoDel, which also included Senators Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), Thad Cochran (R., Miss.), Michael Bennet (D., Colo.), and Tom Udall (D.,N.M.), and Representative Seth Moulton (D.,Mass.), intended to “continue the progress begun by President Obama to bring U.S.–Cuba relations into the 21st Century and explore new opportunities to promote U.S. economic development with Cuba,” including “economic opportunities for American companies in the agriculture and health sectors.” I’ve no idea whether those economic goals were advanced by this junket. What was certainly not advanced by the CoDel’s public silence on the Almagro Affair while they were in the country was the cause of a free Cuba.

There were and continue to be legitimate arguments on both sides of the question of whether the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba should be lifted. And those pushing for a full recission of the embargo are not simply conscience-lite men and women with dollar signs in their eyes. They include pro-democracy people who sincerely believe that flooding the zone in Cuba with American products, American technology, and American culture will so undermine the Castro regime that a process of self-liberation will necessarily follow. That this seems not to have been the case with China is a powerful counterargument. Meanwhile, my own decidedly minority view — that the embargo should have been gradually rolled back over the past decade and a half in exchange for specific, concrete, and irreversible improvements in human rights and the rule of law, leading to real political pluralization in Cuba — seems to have fallen completely through the floorboards of the debate.

But as pressures to “normalize” U.S.–Cuba relations across the board increase, there ought to be broad, bipartisan agreement that Cuban repression, which has in fact intensified since the Obama initiative two years ago, should have its costs. If, as Congressman McGovern averred, he and others want to move Cuba–America relations into the 21st century, then let him and others who share that goal agree that Cuba should be treated like any other country: meaning that when it does bad things, it gets hammered by criticism and pressures are brought to bear to induce or compel better behavior in the future.

SEOUL—Plans for back-channel talks in New York between government representatives from North Korea and former U.S. officials were scuttled Friday after the State Department withdrew visa approvals for Pyongyang’s top envoy on U.S. relations, according to people familiar with the matter.

The talks, which were scheduled to take place on the first two days of March at a hotel near the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, where North Korea has a mission, were contingent on the granting of a visa for Choe Son Hui, the director-general of the American affairs bureau in the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The plans for the unofficial meeting, which were reported earlier by the Washington Post, came together after several approaches from the North Korean side following Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, according to one of these people.

It isn’t clear what led the U.S. to deny Ms. Choe the visa. But North Korea’s recent provocations, including the test-firing of a new missile during Mr. Trump’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe earlier this month and the suspected assassination in broad daylight of the half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, may have played a role in souring sentiment on the U.S. side.A State Department spokesman declined to comment, saying it doesn’t discuss the details of individual visa cases.

The meeting, which would have been the first between the two sides on U.S. soil in nearly six years, was to have included two former U.S. officials who planned to push for the release of two Americans imprisoned in Pyongyang.

Ms. Choe has been a frequent interlocutor with her U.S. counterparts in the past, but was less active during the latter half of the Obama administration as the White House turned its focus to striking deals on Iran and Cuba. CONTINUE AT SITE