RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 1989 the Berlin wall tumbled like Humpty Dumpty amid a joyous celebration in Germany and across the West. The symbol of the Russian Communist dictatorship was blasted into bits of concrete. In the subsequent couple of years those states caught in the grip of the Soviet orbit seceded reducing the Russian population by about 150 million people.

NATO expanded to embrace many of these former states including the Baltic nations contiguous to Mother Russia. While the West viewed this new reality with promise liberal democracy would spread, former KGB officials regarded this defeat as humiliation, a humiliation that had to be redressed.
The accession of Vladimir Putin into a leadership position was a clear signal KGB operatives were intent on reclaiming the so-called “Near-Abroad” and extending Russian influence into areas from which it was formerly ousted.

This plan, transparent from the outset was assisted inadvertently or perhaps directly by the Obama administration that “reset” policy towards Russia by remaining “flexible,” another word for accepting Russian goals.

In fact, when President Obama refused to act on his own “red line” over Bashar al Assad’s use of poison gas, he invited the Russians to adjudicate the matter handing Putin a diplomatic victory and a legitimate pathway into Middle East politics.

Putin seized every opportunity. Signs of U.S. withdrawal from the region, offered Russia the chance to align itself with Iran and Hezbollah and fill the U.S. created vacuum, including naval dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean.

In the ensuing months, Russian air superiority over Syria gained one victory after another for pro-Assad forces until the final blow – the bombing of Aleppo, a massacre as noteworthy as the killing fields in Cambodia.

In the course of this year President Donald Trump will improve America’s relations with Russia. He will also start purging the irredeemably politicized U.S. intelligence apparatus. The hysteria of recent weeks will be seen—a year from now—as a bizarre footnote to a failed presidency.

The “dossier” concocted by a British dirty tricks purveyor hired to smear Trump (the only provable instance of foreign meddling in the 2016 election), didn’t even pass the giggle test; the agencies’ joint statement on “Russian malicious cyber-activity” was equally pathetic. As an eloquent British old-leftist has noted, the lies about Russia have made the world’s most self-important journalists laughing stocks: “In the country with constitutionally the freest press in the world, free journalism now exists only in its honorable exceptions.”

John McCain and Lindsey Graham may go on with their dog and pony show, the MSM will go on producing fact-free reportage, but it will not matter. As his Monday interview with The Times of London indicates, Trump remains strongly committed to détente with Russia, and open to the “obsolete” North Atlantic Alliance’s long-overdue downgrading. Washington and Moscow will develop a new modus operandi, based on a realist strategic paradigm and transactional approach to deal-making. That will be a breath of fresh air, a plus-sum game for America, Russia, and the world. The prospect of uncontrollable escalations leading to mushroom clouds—so likely had Hillary Clinton been elected—has been averted. That is a meta-historical feat. Trump is no subtle intellectual, thank God, which enables him to grasp that Russia—Putin’s Russia, which has not been post-modernized to the liking of the bicoastal anti-America—is a natural ally of the church-going, pickup truck-driving, Bud-drinking flyover America.

Unlike his predecessor, Trump also understand that Islamic extremism is an existential threat to our civilization, and that immigration—especially Muslim immigration—must be controlled and radically reduced. Also on Monday, he told the Bild that Angela Merkel had made made a “catastrophic mistake” by taking in hundreds of thousands of migrants. His immigration realism drives Western self-haters insane, but he will not open America’s floodgates to the swarms of unvettable Middle Eastern “refugees.” He knows that there are already more than enough Somalis in the Twin Cities, Iraqis in Dearborn, and Pakistanis everywhere. The author of The Art of the Deal is also (somewhat surprisingly) an instinctive defender of the Western civilization.

With mere days remaining in office, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry returned to Southeast Asia to reminisce with his Communist friends and ideological soulmates in Vietnam.

He was welcomed with open arms in Vietnam, still a Communist dictatorship after all these decades. And why shouldn’t he be? He’s one of the reasons the United States lost the war there.

Kerry’s vicious lies about the behavior of the U.S. military during the Vietnam War launched a thousand draft-card burning ceremonies.

It’s a wonder he wasn’t awarded the Vietnamese equivalent of America’s Presidential Medal of Freedom for his service to Vietnamese Communism.

Throughout his adult life, Kerry has instinctively sided with America’s enemies. After serving in the Vietnam War, Kerry made a long, profitable career out of bashing America, insulting and belittling U.S. troops – even going as far as promoting false stories about them committing war atrocities, and aiding hostile foreign powers.

In 2005, Kerry falsely accused U.S. forces of “terrorizing” the Iraqi people. He Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation”: “And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women…”

A liar and a useful idiot whose Botox obsession has turned his face into a Halloween mask, Kerry is the man who sent American singer James Taylor to France to sing soothing songs to the French people after brutal Muslim terrorist attacks while refusing to acknowledge the attackers were Muslim.

In addition to being a booster of Vietnam and the now-defunct Soviet Union, Kerry has long been an enemy of Israel and a friend of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its nuclear weapons development program, as well as a friend of Communist dictatorships in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada.

So a final, nostalgic trip down the Ho Chi Minh Trail at U.S. taxpayer expense only seems appropriate.

For eight years, the Obama administration misjudged Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as it misjudged most of the Middle East, China, and the rest of the world as well. Obama got wise to Russia only when Putin imperiled not just U.S. strategic interests and government records but also supposedly went so far as to tamper with sacrosanct Democratic-party secrets, thereby endangering the legacy of Barack Obama.

Putin was probably bewildered by Obama’s media-driven and belated concern, given that the Russians, like the Chinese, had in the past hacked U.S. government documents that were far more sensitive than the information it may have mined and leaked in 2016 — and they received nothing but an occasional Obama “cut it out” whine. Neurotic passive-aggression doesn’t merely bother the Russians; it apparently incites and emboldens them.

Obama’s strange approach to Putin since 2009 apparently has run something like the following. Putin surely was understandably angry with the U.S. under the cowboy imperialist George W. Bush, according to the logic of the “reset.” After all, Obama by 2009 was criticizing Bush more than he was Putin for the supposed ills of the world. But Barack Obama was not quite an American nationalist who sought to advance U.S. interests.

Instead, he posed as a new sort of soft-power moralistic politician — not seen since Jimmy Carter — far more interested in rectifying the supposed damage rather than the continuing good that his country has done. If Putin by 2008 was angry at Bush for his belated pushback over Georgia, at least he was not as miffed at Bush as Obama himself was.

Reset-button policy then started with the implicit agreement that Russia and the Obama administration both had legitimate grievances against a prior U.S. president — a bizarre experience for even an old hand like Putin. (Putin probably thought that the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq were a disaster not on ethical or even strategic grounds but because the U.S. had purportedly let the country devolve into something like what Chechnya was before Putin’s iron grip.)

In theory, Obama would captivate Putin with his nontraditional background and soaring rhetoric, the same way he had charmed urban progressive elites at home and Western European socialists abroad. One or two more Cairo speeches would assure Putin that a new America was more interested in confessing its past sins to the Islamic world than confronting its terrorism. And Obama would continue to show his bona fides by cancelling out Bush initiatives such as missile defense in Eastern Europe, muting criticism of Russian territorial expansionism, and tabling the updating and expansion of the American nuclear arsenal. All the while, Obama would serve occasional verbal cocktails for Putin’s delight — such as the hot-mic promise to be even “more flexible” after his 2012 reelection, the invitation of Russia into the Middle East to get the Obama administration off the hook from enforcing red lines over Syrian WMD use, and the theatrical scorn for Mitt Romney’s supposedly ossified Cold War–era worries about Russian aggression.

As Putin was charmed, appeased, and supposedly brought on board, Obama increasingly felt free to enlighten him (as he does almost everyone) about how his new America envisioned a Westernized politically correct world. Russians naturally would not object to U.S. influence if it was reformist and cultural rather than nationalist, economic, and political — and if it sought to advance universal progressive ideals rather than strictly American agendas. Then, in its own self-interest, a grateful Russia would begin to enact at home something akin to Obama’s helpful initiatives: open up its society, with reforms modeled after those of the liberal Western states in Europe.

The People’s Republic of China sent its aircraft carrier, Liaoning, through the Strait of Taiwan early this month, at least in part responding to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s phone conversation congratulating President-elect Donald Trump.

That’s Beijing’s style: Make an unacceptable long-distance phone call, and an aircraft carrier shows up in your backyard. It is akin to proclaiming the South China Sea a Chinese province and constructing islands in international waters to house military bases; to declaring a provocative Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea; and to seizing Singaporean military equipment recently transiting Hong Kong for annual military exercises on Taiwan.

It is high time to revisit the “one-China policy” and decide what America thinks it means, 45 years after the Shanghai Communiqué. Mr. Trump has said the policy is negotiable. Negotiation should not mean Washington gives and Beijing takes. We need strategically coherent priorities reflecting not 1972 but 2017, encompassing more than trade and monetary policy, and specifically including Taiwan. Let’s see how an increasingly belligerent China responds.

Constantly chanting “one-China policy” is a favorite Beijing negotiating tactic: Pick a benign-sounding slogan; persuade foreign interlocutors to accept it; and then redefine it to Beijing’s satisfaction, dragging the unwary foreigners along for the ride. To Beijing, “one China” means the PRC is the sole legitimate “China,” as sloganized in “the three no’s”: no Taiwanese independence; no two Chinas; no one China, one Taiwan. For too long, America has unthinkingly succumbed to this wordplay.

Even in the Shanghai Communiqué, however, Washington merely “acknowledges” that “all Chinese” believe “there is but one China,” of which Taiwan is part. Taiwanese public opinion surveys for decades have shown fewer and fewer citizens describing themselves as “Chinese.” Who allowed them to change their minds? Washington has always said reunification had to come peacefully and by mutual agreement. Mutual agreement hasn’t come in 67 years, and won’t in any foreseeable future, especially given China’s increasingly brutal reinterpretation of another slogan—“one country, two systems” in Hong Kong.

Beijing and its acolytes expected that Taiwan would simply collapse. It hasn’t. Chiang Kai-shek’s 1949 retreat was not a temporary respite before final surrender. Neither the Shanghai Communiqué nor Jimmy Carter’s 1978 derecognition of the Republic of China persuaded Taiwan to go gentle into that good night—especially after Congress enacted the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.

Eventually Taiwan even became a democracy, with the 1996 popular election of Lee Teng-hui, the peaceful, democratic transfer of power to the opposition party in 2000, and further peaceful transfers in 2008 and 2016. So inconsiderate of those free-thinking Taiwanese.

What should the United States do now? In addition to a diplomatic ladder of escalation, we can take concrete steps helpful to U.S. interests. Here is one prompted by China’s recent impoundment of Singapore’s military equipment. Spoiler alert: Beijing will not approve. CONTINUE AT SITE