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FOREIGN POLICY

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Told-You-So Moment The Israeli leader could be opportunistic and vulgar in pressing his case against the Iran deal. He was also right. By Sohrab Ahmari

Benjamin Netanyahu will never be popular in America’s major newsrooms. Or among most of the think-tankers who set the tone and parameters of foreign-policy debate. His name is a curse on college campuses. So it’s worth asking whose vision of the Middle East has held up better under the press of recent events.

His or theirs?

The question comes to mind as Western governments confront this week’s chemical atrocity in Syria, and as footage of children’s bodies convulsing in agony once more unsettles the world’s conscience. Even President Trump, who generally lacks a moral language, was moved, though whether he will act remains to be seen.

His predecessor had a rich moral vocabulary and a coterie of award-winning moralizers like Samantha Power on staff. But President Obama refused to act when Bashar Assad crossed his chemical red line. He wanted to extricate Washington from the region, and he saw a nuclear deal with Mr. Assad’s Iranian patrons as the exit ramp.

Such a deal came within grasp when Hassan Rouhani launched his presidential campaign in Iran four years ago this month. The smiling, self-proclaimed “moderate” was the Iranian interlocutor the Obamaians had been waiting for. Mr. Netanyahu posed the main obstacle.

The Israeli prime minister warned that Mr. Rouhani didn’t have the power to moderate the regime even if he had the will. He reminded the world of Mr. Rouhani’s role in Iran’s repressive apparatus and his history of anti-American rhetoric. He insisted that Iranian regional aggression wouldn’t relent if sanctions were removed. Iran, he predicted, would pocket the financial concessions, then press ahead in Syria and elsewhere.

The Israeli could be opportunistic, given to hyperbole and not a little vulgar in pressing his case. He was also right.

It’s instructive now to compare his account of the regime with the baseless euphoria in the Western media that greeted Mr. Rouhani’s election in June 2013 and marked coverage of the nuclear deal over the next four years.

Start with Iran’s role in Syria. Writing in September 2013, the New York Times editorial board suggested that Iran’s intentions “could be tested by inviting its new government to join the United States and Russia in carrying out the recent agreement to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons. It seems like a natural convergence: Iranians know well the scourge of poison gas.”

Well, apparently they didn’t know the scourge well enough to restrain their chief Arab client from systematically gassing his own people, even after the Russian-brokered chemical deal. CONTINUE AT SITE

Ancient Laws, Modern Wars After eight years of withdrawal, what rules should the U.S. follow to effectively reassert itself in world affairs? By Victor Davis Hanson

The most dangerous moments in foreign affairs often come after a major power seeks to reassert its lost deterrence.

The United States may be entering just such a perilous transitional period.

Rightly or wrongly, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Middle East-based terrorists concluded after 2009 that the U.S. saw itself in decline and preferred a recession from world affairs.

In that void, rival states were emboldened, assuming that America thought it could not — or should not — any longer exercise the sort of political and military leadership it had demonstrated in the past.

Enemies thought the U.S. was more focused on climate change, United Nations initiatives, resets, goodwill gestures to enemies such as Iran and Cuba, and soft-power race, class, and gender agendas than on protecting and upholding longtime U.S. alliances and global rules.

In reaction, North Korea increased its missile launches and loudly promised nuclear destruction of the West and its allies.

Russia violated its obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and absorbed borderlands of former Soviet republics.

Iran harassed American ships in the Persian Gulf and issued serial threats against the U.S.

China built artificial island bases in the South China Sea to send a message about its imminent management of Asian commerce.

In Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State killed thousands in medieval fashion and sponsored terrorist attacks inside Western countries.

Trump’s Push for Mideast Deal Perplexes Israeli Right Many in ruling coalition, and West Bank settlers, are content with the way things are By Yaroslav Trofimov

BEIT EL, West Bank—President Donald Trump’s interest in solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem is running into a stubborn fact: Much of Israel’s governing coalition is pretty happy with the status quo.

The Israeli economy is booming. Jewish population growth has nearly caught up with Palestinian birthrates. And the level of violence remains at historic lows. The wars ravaging the wider Middle East, meanwhile, have distracted regional attention from the Palestinians’ predicament and have even pushed countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia toward more cooperation with Israel.

To many Israeli voters who have repeatedly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and particularly to the influential lobby representing more than 400,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, this means there is little reason to fix what they see as working just fine.
“There is nothing more sustainable than the current situation that has already existed for 50 years and that is getting better all the time,” said retired Brig. Gen. Effie Eitam, Israel’s former minister of national infrastructure and housing who now runs a private intelligence company in Jerusalem.

That’s why Mr. Trump’s ambition to resolve the intractable dispute—a solution that would likely require Israel to accept Palestinian statehood and give up most of the territory it has occupied since 1967—has confounded Israel’s right-wing coalition just months after it celebrated the U.S. election as divine deliverance from international pressure.

“They’ve been surprised. They’re a bit uneasy,” said Daniel Shapiro, who served as U.S. ambassador to Israel until January and is now a visiting fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. CONTINUE AT SITE

A Resolute Message for China From Taiwan to North Korea, Trump can make clear to Xi that America is no longer in retreat.A Resolute Message for China From Taiwan to North Korea, Trump can make clear to Xi that America is no longer in retreat.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-resolute-message-for-china-1491434611

This week’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping is the most important meeting President Trump will have during his first 100 days in office. The 21st century could well be defined by the Washington-Beijing relationship. Things are not going well so far for the home team. China is on the march globally, and Mr. Trump inherited “no drama Obama’s” U.S., which has been watching it happen.

Remembering Mr. Trump’s campaign promises, the White House may be tempted to focus the summit on China’s many violations of its multilateral trade commitments, including pirating intellectual property; tilting domestic markets in favor of Chinese companies, especially state-controlled ones; and discriminating against foreign litigants in judicial proceedings. China’s mercantilist policies have harmed America and the liberal international trading order generally. All merit extended discussion.

But it’s even more important that Mr. Trump enter the meeting with a coherent strategic plan to address geopolitical and economic disputes. He should feel no pressure to bridge, let alone resolve, any of them now. He should instead focus on conveying clearly his administration’s worldview, which is very different from his predecessor’s.

Making America’s foreign policy great again should mean that apologies, acquiescence, disinterest and passivity are terms that no longer describe or apply to Washington’s leaders. No grandiose final communiqué is needed; a simple statement that the two leaders had a full and frank exchange of views will suffice.

Topping the agenda should be North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, the most imminent danger to the U.S. and its allies. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have made clear how seriously they view the prospect of Pyongyang fitting an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead and threatening targets in the U.S. The president must follow up vigorously, or the Chinese may underestimate how strongly the U.S. feels about the North Korean menace.

The only real way to end the North Korean threat is to reunify the peninsula by merging North Korea into the South. China will find that difficult to swallow. But if the Trump administration can demonstrate the many benefits to China flowing from the regional stability and global security that reunification would bring, Beijing should come around.

North Korea has achieved its current nuclear capabilities despite 25 years of American attempts to halt its progress. U.S. options for stopping Kim Jong Un from taking the final step are now severely limited. Moreover, the U.S. and China must bear in mind that whatever North Korea can do, Iran can do immediately thereafter—for the right price. As Pyongyang inches ever closer to producing deliverable nuclear weapons, the prospect of a pre-emptive U.S. strike against its nuclear infrastructure and launch sites cannot be ruled out.

Beijing has itself threatened to turn the international waters of the South China Sea into a Chinese lake by building bases on disputed rocks and reefs. In the East China Sea, Beijing seeks decisive ways to break through “the first island chain” and into the Pacific. Taiwan is a target; Mr. Xi will repeat the phrase “One China” monotonously in hopes of hypnotizing the Trump team into believing it means what Beijing believes it means, rather than our longstanding interpretation.

The Obama administration’s policy was to call for China, Vietnam, the Philippines and others to resolve their territorial disputes through negotiation. This might have worked had U.S. military forces been sufficiently deployed to support the other claimants and manifest America’s will not to accept Chinese faits accomplis. Instead, Mr. Obama presided over the continuing world-wide decline of our naval capabilities. While Mr. Trump is committed to reversing that decline, it won’t happen overnight. Accordingly, as when Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter, Mr. Trump must display political resolve, buying time until the necessary naval assets are once again at sea. Otherwise, China gets what it wants with cold blue steel, not diplomatic niceties. CONTINUE AT SITE

Why President Trump Should Break the ‘One China’ Spell Standing up for Taiwan, a key democratic ally, will benefit American interests in the long run. By Jianli Yang —****

Accepting the “one China” policy was a meretricious appeasement of Communist China by Kissinger/Nixon which betrayed Taiwan….rsk

— Jianli Yang is the founder and president of Initiatives for China / Citizen Power for China and a former political prisoner of the Chinese government.
During China’s recent “Two sessions,” in which some 5,000 governing elites gathered in Beijing to rubber-stamp the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Wang Hongguang, a retired Chinese general, publicly dared the United States to deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) in Taiwan. He boasted that the deployment would provide the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with an excuse to use force to “liberate” the island.

Wang had earlier dared the U.S. to deploy Marines to guard the site of the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto American Embassy on the island. He has threatened to use harsh countermeasures to retaliate against the government of Tsai Ing-wen, even though she had nothing to do with the decision to deploy the Marines in Taipei.

Wang’s threats came at the time of a major shift in President Trump’s tone and stance toward China. He has recently retreated from his strong rhetoric against the Chinese Communist regime and from his pre-inauguration position that the U.S doesn’t “have to be bound” by the so-called One China policy.

Trump’s flip-flop on the One China policy has caused unnecessary confusion in Asia. It has weakened the administration’s moral position and credibility and has arguably given Beijing the upper hand in the cross-Strait relationship.

In my view, the One China policy is a trap that has been plied by Beijing to legitimize and strengthen the CCP dictatorship, squeeze Taiwan’s international space, and force Taiwan to kneel at Beijing’s feet. President Trump should take a fresh look at the One China policy, and honor the “right” China.

The contentious One China policy arose from the reality of two Chinas: the Republic of China (ROC) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The United States recognized the ROC in 1913, two years after the Chinese overthrew the Manchus’ Qing Dynasty, in 1911. With Stalin’s support, the Chinese Communists won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The ROC, led by its authoritarian ruler Chiang Kai-shek, retreated to Taiwan.

White House Officials Divided on Islam, ISIS, Israel and Iran by Soeren Kern

The decision to select Army Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond “H.R.” McMaster to replace retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn as national security advisor is setting into motion a cascade of other personnel decisions that, far from draining the swamp, appear to be perpetuating it.

Trump has decided to retain Yael Lempert, a controversial NSC staffer from the Obama administration. Analyst Lee Smith reported that, according to a former official in the Clinton administration, Lempert “is considered one of the harshest critics of Israel on the foreign policy far left.”

Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, who served as the NSC’s Iran director during the Obama administration, is now in charge of policy planning for Iran and the Persian Gulf at the Trump State Department. Nowrouzzadeh, whose main task at Obama’s NSC was to help broker the Iran Nuclear Deal, is a former employee of the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), a lobbying group widely believed to be a front group for the Islamic dictatorship in Iran.

“The people who are handling key elements of those conflicts now are the same people who handled those areas under Obama, despite the results of the last election. No wonder the results look equally awful.” — Lee Smith, Middle East analyst.

The people U.S. President Donald J. Trump has chosen to lead his foreign policy team may complicate efforts to fulfill his inaugural pledge to eradicate “radical Islamic terrorism” “from the face of the Earth” — a Herculean task even under the best of circumstances.

An analysis of the political appointments to the different agencies within the U.S. national security apparatus shows that the key members of the president’s foreign policy team hold widely divergent views on the threat posed by radical Islam — and on the nature of Islam itself. They also disagree on approaches to Iran, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the European Union, Russia, globalism and other national security issues.

The policy disconnect is being exacerbated by the fact that dozens of key positions within the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies remain unfilled. The result is that the administration has been relying on holdovers from the Obama administration to formulate and implement U.S. foreign policy.

Current foreign policy advisors can be roughly divided into several competing factions and ideological schisms: career staffers versus political appointees, civilian strategists versus military tacticians, Trump supporters versus Obama loyalists, politically correct consensus-seekers versus politically incorrect ideologues, New York moderates versus populist hardliners, Palestinian sympathizers versus advocates for Israel, proponents of the Iran deal versus supporters of an anti-Iran coalition — and those who believe that Islamism and radical Islamic terrorism derive from Islam itself versus those who insist that Islam is a religion of peace.

The winners of these various power struggles ultimately will determine the ideological direction of U.S. policy on a variety of national security issues, including the war on Islamic terror.

During his presidential campaign, voters were promised a radical shift in American foreign policy, and the consensus-driven foreign policy establishment in Washington was repeatedly blamed for making the world less stable and more dangerous.

Although much can change, the current incarnation of the national security team indicates that the administration’s foreign policy, especially toward the Middle East and the broader Islamic world, may end up being more similar than different to that of the Obama administration. Those hoping for a radical change to the politically correct status quo may be disappointed.

Intellectual Whiplash on Israel By Lawrence J. Haas

The same administration that’s defending Israel in refreshingly bold fashion at the United Nations is discussing Israeli-Palestinian peace this week with a Palestinian leader who promotes the murder and kidnapping of Israelis and who spent 15 years in prison for throwing a grenade at an Israeli Army truck.

The invitation to Jibril Rajoub, secretary of the Fatah Central Committee, to speak with U.S. officials is just the latest reason why, with regard to the administration, Israel-backers are suffering from a kind of intellectual whiplash – with positive developments followed by distressing ones, fueling an anxious uncertainty.

The embrace of Rajoub raises profound questions as to whether President Donald Trump has a coherent policy toward Israel or, as seems more likely, disjointed policies are emerging from competing power centers across the administration that view Israel and the U.S.-Israeli alliance in profoundly different ways.

Israel backers were enthused by Trump’s vow to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and his appointment of hardliner David Friedman as his ambassador, and they were thrilled by the efforts of Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to challenge anti-Israel orthodoxy at Turtle Bay. Her recent full-throated challenge to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel left them overwhelmed.

At the same time, Israel backers were dismayed by Trump’s failure to mention Jews on International Holocaust Remembrance Day as well as his focus on Israeli settlements as a key obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Now, they’re undoubtedly outraged that he’s legitimizing Rajoub as a potential partner for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

“The U.S. government does not endorse every statement Mr. Rajoub has made, but he has long been involved in Middle East peace efforts, and has publicly supported a peaceful, non-violent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” a State Department spokesman told The Washington Free Beacon. “We continue to press Fatah officials, including Rajoub himself, to refrain from any statements or actions that could be viewed as inciting or legitimizing others’ use of violence.”

That, to put it bluntly, is absurd. Rajoub is no peace activist who just needs to tone down his rhetoric. He’s a hardcore Israel rejectionist who honors “martyrs,” promotes murder and kidnapping, and envisions a Palestine that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, erasing Israel in the process.

Tillerson Talks Tough With NATO Allies Over Military Spending German foreign minister said U.S. demands are misguided and unrealistic By Julian E. Barnes

BRUSSELS—The Trump administration kept its European allies on edge Friday by dispatching Secretary of State Rex Tillerson here with new and tougher demands that North Atlantic Treaty Organization members boost military spending, clashing with Germany in particular.

The top U.S. diplomat’s appearance Friday came as NATO diplomats expressed concerns that the alliance has been whipsawed by the Trump administration, getting understandings from high U.S. officials only to have President Donald Trump send out Twitter messages that appear to counter them.

Like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Vice President Mike Pence on previous occasions, Mr. Tillerson balanced a message of reassurance with a demand for a new commitment from NATO allies to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.

Mr. Tillerson made clear for the first time that the U.S. wants allies at the May summit of NATO leaders to back a U.S. initiative that would have countries adopt plans to meet alliance spending goals by 2024, and to agree to annual milestones to ensure the target is on track.

“As President Trump has made clear, it is no longer sustainable for the U.S. to maintain a disproportionate share of NATO’s defense expenditures,” Mr. Tillerson said at a meeting.While many allies accept the U.S. proposal, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel contested the target on Friday. He said it was misguided and unrealistic to think that Germany would be able to raise its defense spending by $37 billion a year to achieve the 2% level. Mr. Gabriel acknowledged the need to spend more on the military, but said true security required spending on foreign assistance, the refuge crisis and other priorities. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Continuing Syrian Crisis and America’s Conundrums by Andrew Harrod

A Hudson Institute panel examines the difficult choices facing the United States in Mesopotamia.

“It is a vexed question, the end state,” stated Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Michael Doran concerning conflict-wracked Iraq and Syria during a March 10 Hudson Institute presentation in Washington, DC. His assessment would strike many as a dramatic understatement concerning the difficult challenges facing American policy in a murderously sectarian region discussed by him and his fellow panelists.

Providence Managing Editor Marc LiVecche criticized international inaction by the United States and other countries during the Syrian civil war between the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship and rebels since 2011. “The longer you continue avoiding, or not making intentionally, the right decisions then the negative consequences continue to barrel along through history, multiplying like bunnies.” The resulting quagmire is “making any right thing incredibly difficult, first to identify, and second to do.”

Yet Doran’s analysis indicated that appeals for action are easier said than done, particularly concerning safe zone proposals for Mesopotamian populations seeking shelter from the region’s maelstrom. “If you want to have control over it, you are talking about a significant application of direct American force and Americans, or working through proxies that have their own agenda that we may or may not agree with it.” He wondered about possible American responses if Assad’s Iranian and Russian allies “start pushing refugees into the safe zone” through this coalition’s favored tactic of ethnic cleansing. Alternatively, “what if Al Qaeda, ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria], and the Iranians and the Russians start creating sleeping cells in the safe zones?”

“In order to police the actual safe zone, you have to be ready to impose costs on the Iranians and Russians if they take any step that threatens your policy,” Doran stated. Thus “you are immediately in a competition with the Iranians and the Russians and you have to be willing to win the competition ladder. That requires a very significant American force package in the region.” “If our action in Syria is seen as a threat to the Iranian position, and it will be, the Iranians could act anywhere—it is one strategic theater” in the Middle East; “they could flood the Green Zone in Baghdad with Iraqi Shiite militiamen and so on.”

Doran noted that establishing safe zones “is not a solution, it has to be part of something larger” and that in fighting ISIS, “we need to be aware of the larger strategic context while we are taking care of this urgent problem.” He thus concluded:

Let’s drop the notion that defeating ISIS is our grand strategic goal in the region. Our grand strategic goal in the region is to build a new order in the region. To build a new order in the region we need partners. To get the partners we have to show that we are willing to compete with the Iranians and the Russians and that means we are also hostile to the Assad regime. It doesn’t mean we have to say regime change in Syria tomorrow, it doesn’t mean we have to drive the Russians all the way out of the region.

“We want to create an order that is favorable or at least acceptable to our major partners in the region,” Doran stated, but currently “what everybody sees is that the United States is ushering in an Iranian-Russian order.” This strategic situation helped explain why over 60 nations in an anti-ISIS coalition had not defeated ISIS’ “30,000 nasty guys in pickup trucks for over a year” as these nations “don’t really want to do the job.” America is the “only power on earth that thinks the destruction of ISIS is the number one priority in the Middle East. Everybody else is asking themselves what new order is going to replace the ISIS order, is it going to work to my advantage or not.”

Nuclear Weapons: Trust But Modernize (Part II), by Peter Huessy

The United States is planning to modernize its nuclear deterrent over the next 25 years, an effort already two decades late in implementation. That delay, a procurement holiday, resulted in all elements of our nuclear enterprise-the warheads, the communications, the submarines, the land based missiles and the bombers and their associated cruise missiles-reaching the end of their service life nearly simultaneously.

The new modernization effort will thus take many years to complete and it is going to cost $27 billion this year. By the middle of the next decade probably $36 billion a year. In embarking on this effort, the new administration has said let’s have a “Nuclear Posture Review”, a review also done previously in 2010, 2003, and 1994.

Here is some advice for the review consisting of a Baker’s Dozen of nuclear “facts” we first have to get right.

The nuclear Triad is not a jobs program. It is not an invention of the secret so-called “military industrial complex”. As General Bernard Schriever told me some 35 years ago, we first developed the early versions of both the sea and land based intercontinental ballistic missiles we have today in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. Our very national survival was at stake. How did we know in advance both new missile types would work? No missile with a 2000 kilometer or more range had previously been deployed that could be fired from a submarine and no solid-fueled reliable land based missile based in the USA could yet reach the Soviet Union.

But we deployed Polaris submarines in 1959 and Minuteman missiles in 1962. Schriever helped direct both breakthrough technologies in record time. It was no conspiracy. It was actually a miracle.

We now know that nuclear deterrence-based on the Triad-works. It’s value should not be recklessly discarded or minimized. As former USAF Chief of Staff General Larry Welch explained in a 2015 speech “Nuclear deterrence has worked 100% of the time for 70+ years. It’s been perfect”. There is a reason he could say this. We got nuclear deterrence right.

Our nuclear armed missiles are also not on computer hair trigger alert. Just the opposite. As President Kennedy told the nation, our just deployed Minuteman missiles were his “ace in the hole” in preventing the Cuban missile crisis from ending up in doomsday. So stable have our nuclear missiles been, they have been on alert a collective 67 million minutes and never ordered to be launched by an American President.

So much for being in danger of being launched “accidentally” or on “hair trigger.”