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FOREIGN POLICY

Trump Embraces The PLO Fantasy The new president is gearing up to make the same mistake as his predecessor. Caroline Glick

US President Donald Trump is losing his focus. If he doesn’t get it back soon, he will fail to make America great again or safe again in the Middle East.

After holding out for a month, last week Trump indicated he is adopting his predecessors’ obsession with empowering the PLO.

This is a strategic error.

There are many actors and conflicts in the Middle East that challenge and threaten US national interests and US national security. Iran’s rise as a nuclear power and regional hegemon; the war in Syria; Turkey’s abandonment of the West; and Russia’s regional power play all pose major threats to US power, security and interests. The Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, Hamas and other Sunni jihadist movements all threaten the US, Europe and the US’s Sunni allies in the region in a manner that is strategically significant to America.

None of these issues, none of these actors and none of these threats are in any way related to or caused by the PLO and its interminable, European-supported hybrid terror and political war against Israel. None of these pressing concerns will be advanced by a US embrace of the PLO or a renewed obsession with empowering the PLO and its mafia-terrorist bosses.

To the contrary, all of these pressing concerns will be sidelined – and so made more pressing and dangerous – by a US reengagement with the PLO .

And yet, over the past week, Trump has indicated that the PLO is now his focus.

Last Friday, Trump spoke on the telephone with Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas is head of the PLO and the unelected dictator of the corrupt, terrorism-sponsoring, PLO -controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria.

According to media reports, Trump told Abbas – whose legal term in office ended eight years ago – that he views him as a legitimate leader. According to the official White House report of the conversation, Trump also reportedly told Abbas that he supports reaching a deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Such a deal, to the extent it is ever reached, involves expanding PLO control over Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem at Israel’s expense.

Trump also invited Abbas for an official visit to Washington. And the day after they spoke, the Trump administration moved $250 million in US taxpayer dollars to Abbas’s police state where for the past 25 years, Abbas and his cronies have enriched themselves while feeding a steady diet of antisemitic, anti-American jihadist bile to their impoverished subjects.

To build up his credibility with the PLO , Trump put his electoral pledge to move the US embassy to Jerusalem on ice. The real estate mogul ordered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deny Jews the right to their property and their legal right to use state lands in Judea and Samaria.

And swift on the heels of that conversation with Abbas, Trump’s chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt was dispatched to Jerusalem to begin empowering the PLO at Israel’s expense.

Defense Secretary Mattis withdraws Patterson as choice for undersecretary for policy

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has withdrawn retired senior diplomat Anne W. Patterson as his choice for undersecretary for policy after the White House indicated unwillingness to fight what it said would be a battle for Senate confirmation.

U.S. officials said that two members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), were strongly opposed to Patterson’s nomination because she served as U.S. ambassador to Egypt from 2011 to 2013, a time when the Obama administration supported an elected government with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood that was ultimately overthrown by the Egyptian military.

The withdrawal leaves Mattis with a bench still empty of Trump-appointed senior officials, a situation that stretches across the administration as Cabinet secretaries have not chosen or the White House has not approved nominees. Although Obama administration holdovers remain in a few jobs, after eight weeks in office, President Trump has not nominated a single high official under Cabinet rank in the Defense or State departments.

In the service branches, former Republican congresswoman Heather Wilson has been named, but not confirmed, as Air Force secretary, while picks for Army and Navy secretaries have withdrawn from consideration.

The White House plans this week — perhaps as early as Tuesday — to announce a handful of approved nominees proposed by Mattis for senior Defense Department positions, but Patterson will not be among them, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal decision-making.

Mattis’s acquiescence to Patterson’s withdrawal came after he fought and won a major battle with the White House to remove Iraq from the list of majority-Muslim countries whose citizens are barred from U.S. entry under Trump’s executive order on immigration.

RICHARD BAEHR: TRUMP THE PEACE PROCESSOR

At the end of last week came news that U.S. President Donald Trump had phoned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and invited him to visit the White House. This followed a meeting in Ramallah between Abbas and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, as well as other lower level communications between administration officials and the PA, including with Palestinian business leaders.

When Barack Obama was inaugurated president in 2009, his first call to any foreign leader was made that same day to Abbas. It took seven weeks for Trump to match Obama’s outreach. The difference undoubtedly reflects an overall shift in orientation and emphasis, but also a reflection of how a president can communicate a level of interest and support in a cause or a country even if little of substance has changed.

For eight years, Israelis fretted with good reason that their ties with the United States were threatened by the hostility of the Obama administration, particularly on the issue of settlement construction. Pretty much every Israeli announcement of any phase of a settlement construction project was met with a nasty public rebuke, even if the construction involved work in settlements that have always been assumed by all the American peace processors, Democrat or Republican, to be in communities that would remain part of Israel in a final status deal with the Palestinians. This understanding had been put in writing by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004, but Obama never paid it any heed. The final rebuke was the American acquiescence through its abstention on the noxious Security Council resolution passed just after the 2016 election, which labeled all Israeli activity beyond the Green Line as that of an occupier.

The cold shoulder carried over into American pressure during the last Gaza war in 2014, when the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued an alert about the safety of Ben-Gurion Airport, when a rocket fired by Hamas landed a mile away, thereby shutting down U.S. air traffic to Israel for 36 hours. There were also repeated criticisms of Israeli actions that caused any Gazan civilian casualties, though Hamas seemed to be acting to ensure these would occur by storing and then firing rockets from the grounds of hospitals, mosques, schools and densely populated civilian areas.

And of course there was the American obsession with concluding a deal with Iran on its nuclear program, which effectively traded a short-term reduction in the level of Iranian centrifuge activity for a windfall of $100 billion in cash, sanctions relief, and America looking away as Iran violated other Security Council resolutions on missile development and arms sales, and as Iran stepped up its aggressive activities in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and other countries.

JED BABBIN: WHERE IS THE TRUMP DOCTRINE?

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.

Shattering the State Department’s Echo Chamber By Sarah N. Stern

Most Americans would like to believe that certain ethical qualities are in the mix when shaping American foreign policy, such as intellectual honesty and moral integrity. These qualities, whether part of an individual’s nature or those of national policy, often require some difficult introspection.

Sometimes it even involves the painful admission that one has been wrong. Even if one has been wrong for an extremely long time. And it is human nature that the longer the time, the deeper the resistance to change.

So it is with certain theories that our State Department has clung to for generations now, such as “land for peace.” What we have seen through decades of empirical, and often heartbreaking experience, is that this formula simply hasn’t worked. If the objective is “peace”, one must honestly ask oneself if any of the politically gut-wrenching and internally divisive land withdrawals from the Sinai, Gaza, southern Lebanon and parts of Judea and Samaria, has actually brought us any closer to that objective of peace.

But rather than challenge the premises of this formulation, those in the State Department’s echo chamber simply dig their feet in further and rationalize its failure. Each time there is another excuse. “Israel hasn’t given enough land”, or “Gaza was without a negotiating partner”.

All of the State Department apparatchiks who stubbornly cling to this mantra were one hundred per cent in favor of each of these withdrawals. Then, when those land withdrawal did not bring us closer to the designated objective, they came up with convenient post facto rationalizations.

On Wednesday February 15, five former U.S. ambassadors to Israel, Thomas Pickering, Edward Walker, James Cunningham, William Harrop, and Daniel Kurtzer wrote a letter to the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee casting doubts upon the ability of President Trump’s selection of David Friedman for the position of ambassador to Israel because he has not demonstrated than he has bought into their paradigm, which has proven to be an abject failure, time and time again.

Tehran’s Trump trepidation : Ruthie Blum

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.‎

No Obama ‘Legacy’ on Israel By Dan Calic

Donald Trump has been president for just over five weeks. Yet on many fronts there is little doubt a new era has been birthed. One of the most obvious is relations with Israel compared to the previous eight years under Barack Obama.

From the beginning of the Obama administration he was determined to put the U.S. on a different path with regard to the Muslim world. Indeed, the first foreign leader he called was Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. Obama even made a point of telling Abbas his was the first call to a foreign leader, emphasizing his intent to signal a new direction for the U.S.

Obama furthered his effort at a new direction by making his first international speech in Cairo. During his speech he lamented about how the Palestinians suffer “humiliation under occupation,” and criticized Israel for building “settlements.”

Plus, throughout his two terms, it was clear Obama did not like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Right up to the bitter end, the Obama administration went out much as it began, with a slap at Israel. The final kick in the stomach was UN resolution 2334, which singled out Israel’s construction of settlements as the main obstacle to peace. Not a word was mentioned about ongoing Palestinian terrorism and murder of innocent Israeli civilians. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the U.S. has veto power and could have killed the resolution. However, knowing this would be his last opportunity to make a statement against Israel, Obama directed the U.S. to abstain from the voting, thus allowing it to pass.

Contrast this against the early stages of the Trump administration. Throughout his campaign he made it clear that the U.S. had treated its closest Middle East ally terribly. Since Trump has taken office, the difference can only be described as startling.

For example, he has called the Iran nuclear deal “the worst deal ever negotiated,” and has already imposed new sanctions on Iran.

His Secretary of State Rex Tillerson criticized former Secretary of State John Kerry for how he handled Israeli-Palestinian issues. “Israel is, always has been, and remains our most important ally in the region” according to Tillerson. He characterized UN resolution 2334 as an effort to “coerce” Israel to change course, further stating, “that will not bring a solution.”

The Forgotten Treachery of Obama’s State Department Obama’s reward for Castro regime spies who helped murder Americans. Humberto Fontova

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.

America and the Liberal International Order By Michael Anton

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.

U.N. Human Rights Council Quicksand: Get Out or Drown by Anne Bayefsky

The U.N. “Human Rights” Council starts its main annual session on Monday in Geneva with elected members and human-rights aficionados such as Saudi Arabia, China, and Qatar settling into their seats. The question hanging over the head of President Trump is whether his administration will take its place beside these other states and legitimize the most anti-Israel, twisted bastion of moral relativism in the U.N. system.

Barack Obama deliberately designed a quicksand trap before leaving office. He put the U.S. forward for Human Rights Council membership in a U.N. election that occurred just ten days before the American presidential election. Attempting to rule from the grave, Obama knew full well that the U.S. would be occupying a three-year spot that officially commenced on January 1, 2017. The Bush administration had refused to join the Council, or to pay for it, when the Council was first created as a faux renovation of the discredited U.N. Human Rights Commission back in 2006. Joining the Council was one of Obama’s very first foreign-policy moves in 2009.

The only way out of the quagmire for the Trump administration, therefore, is to resign.

The State Department’s Obama holdovers are pushing hard for the status quo. State Department spokesman Mark Toner told Politico: “Our delegation will be fully involved in the work of the HRC session which starts Monday.” This result would be the very opposite of draining the swamp.

Moreover, the only survivors in the U.N. Human Rights Council swamp are the crocodiles. There is a permanent agenda of ten items that governs proceedings at every Council session. One agenda item is devoted to human-rights violations by Israel and one generic agenda item is for all other 192 U.N. member states that might be found to “require the Council’s attention.” In classic State Department double-talk, the Obama administration promised that by joining the Council, the U.S. could reform the Council agenda from the inside. The Obama administration tried and predictably failed. But the Obama administration then justified staying on the Council — despite back-of-the-bus treatment for the Jewish state — as a price worth paying for other people’s human rights. Pitting minorities against each other was, after all, an Obama specialty.

Every year at the Council’s main March session, the Council’s Israel agenda item gives rise to four or five resolutions condemning Israel. That is four or five times more than the Council condemns any other state on the planet. Ten years of Council practice incontrovertibly indicates that we can expect a small handful of other countries to be subject to a single resolution and that about 95 percent of states can count on none at all.

Fully aware of this scenario, the Obama routine went like this. The United States would vote against the anti-Israel resolutions, often 46 to 1, with slight variations for the times that European Union states screwed up the courage to abstain. Team Obama would make a nice speech for public consumption about supposedly unacceptable bias against Israel at the U.N. and then turn around and spend American taxpayer dollars to implement those very resolutions.