RUTHFULLY YOURS

War has consequences. Callous incompetence has consequences. The world is watching those consequences unfold in Syria today. No one can look at images of children dead from gas attacks and not be moved.

Let’s stipulate two things: First, there were never any easy American choices in Syria. Second, the Obama administration got virtually every hard choice wrong. Or, to be more precise, the choices it did make did nothing to either stop the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the new century or block our enemies and rivals, Iran and Russia, from exerting their will in Syria.

The result is the Syria we have today, a patchwork quilt of competing zones of control that in some ways looks more complicated than it is. Let’s make sense of the map below:
syria-battle-map.jpg

The red, government-controlled areas represent the most populated and economically consequential sections of the country. This is where Russia and Iran have asserted their will, and this is where Assad is spilling the blood of innocents to expand and maintain his grip on power. Yes, he’s still opposed by rebel groups, but they’ve been decimated, and many of the groups that remain are dominated by jihadists.

In the north, our Kurdish allies are on the move, but not against the regime — against ISIS. In other words, Assad has beaten his main foe and is leaving the United States, the Kurds, and assorted other allies to deal with our main foe, ISIS. After the battle for Raqqa, Syria is likely to be effectively partitioned, with American-backed forces controlling the north, the Russian-backed regime controlling the west, and some small forces still battling it out on the borders.

As we confront the Assad regime’s gas attack — which is just one of its countless violations of the law of war, and hardly its most deadly — we also have to confront this core reality: Our leading geopolitical rival — a traditional great power and a nuclear superpower — has quite obviously decided that the survival of a friendly regime in Damascus is a core national interest. It acted decisively while we dithered, and it has boots on the ground.

Thus, we now face a quandary. Retaliate against Syria so strongly that it truly punishes and weakens Assad, and you risk threatening Russia’s vital interests. Respond with a pinprick strike that Russia effectively “permits,” and you do nothing important. Assad has demonstrated that he cares little about his own casualties and may (like many other American enemies before him) actually feel emboldened after “surviving” an American strike.

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

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.

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.”