RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama emphasized the absence of another 9/11-scale attack on the homeland during his two terms in office and argued that acting “like this is a war between the United States and Islam” would result in more American deaths and “the loss of the very principles we claim to defend.”

Speaking to service members at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa today, Obama highlighted policy moments during his tenure including the Iraq pullout and Afghanistan surge. He claimed that “by any measure, core al-Qaeda, the organization that hit us on 9/11, is a shadow of its former self.”

In the Middle East, he noted, “most dangerously, we saw the emergence of ISIL, the successor to al-Qaeda in Iraq, which fights as both a terrorist network and an insurgency.” He added that keeping U.S. forces in Iraq to help prevent the creation of the Islamic State “was not an option” since “Iraqis wanted our military presence to end.”

The president blamed factors including “the government in Baghdad that pursued a sectarian agenda, a brutal dictator in Syria who lost control of large parts of the country, social media that reached a global pool of recruits and a hollowing out of Iraq security forces, which were ultimately overrun in Mosul in 2014.”

Washington’s response to the fall of Mosul refused, Obama said, “to repeat some of the mistakes of the 2003 invasion that have helped to give rise to the organization that became ISIL in the first place.”

“The campaign against ISIL has been relentless, it has been sustainable, it has been multilateral, and it demonstrates a shift in how we’ve taken the fight to terrorists everywhere, from south Asia to the Sahel,” he said. “Instead of pushing all of the burden onto American ground troops, instead of trying to mount invasions wherever terrorists appear, we’ve built a network of partners.”

“No foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland,” Obama declared. “And it’s not because they didn’t try. Plots have been disrupted, terrorists have been taken off the battlefield.”

The president acknowledged attacks on the homeland “carried out by homegrown and largely isolated individuals who were radicalized online.””These deranged killers can’t inflict the sort of mass casualties that we saw on 9/11,” he said. “But the pain of those who lost loved ones in Boston and San Bernardino and Fort Hood and Orlando, that pain continues to this day. And in some cases, it has stirred fear in our populations and threatens to change how we think about ourselves and our lives.”

Obama began his misspent time in office lying about Islamic terrorism and he ends it in the same shameful way. From Afghanistan to Iraq and right back to Islamic terror at home, he has never stopped lying about the threat that we face.

The speech was bizarre. After two terms of insisting that we weren’t at war with the terrorists, he grandly boasts that, “I will become the first President of the United States to serve two full terms during a time of war.”

Considering that the war was largely caused by his refusal to fight it, it’s an odd form of self-glorification. It’s like a fire chief boasting that the building next door has been on fire for two weeks because he refuses to put out the flames.

Having crippled the military, he claims that he believes it “must remain, the strongest fighting force the world has ever known”.Then there’s the bizarre revisionism of his disastrous Afghan surge and Iraq withdrawal, which considering the rise of ISIS now seems more insane than ever, being replayed one more time.

“When I took office, the United States was focused overwhelmingly on Iraq, where nearly 150,000 American troops had spent years fighting an insurgency and helping to build a democratic government. Meanwhile, al Qaeda had regrouped in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was actively planning attacks against our homeland. So we brought nearly 150,000 troops home from Iraq, consistent with the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the previous administration, and we surged our efforts along with our allies in Afghanistan, which allowed us to focus on dismantling al Qaeda and give the Afghan government the opportunity to succeed.”

Except the CIA had pointed out that there 50 to 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.

As he justified sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $30 billion a year, President Barack Obama’s description Tuesday of the al Qaeda “cancer” in that country left out one key fact: U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country.

Every time a member of the Obama administration makes a statement about domestic or foreign affairs, one is reminded why Donald Trump was elected president last month. Many of those who voted for him despite concerns about his unconventionally brash persona did so in the hope that his picks for top jobs would compensate for his own lack of experience in Beltway politics.

So far, it appears, this was more than a smart gamble. But one of the highest positions, which has yet to be determined, is that of chief diplomat. The list of Trump’s possible candidates now includes former Gov. Mitt Romney, former CIA Director David Petraeus, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and retired Navy Adm. James Stavridis.

But let’s face it: Even Bozo the Clown would be better than Secretary of State John Kerry.

To be fair to Kerry, he was following the foreign policy spelled out by Obama four years earlier: that America was about to embark on a new path, reaching out to enemies who would suddenly transform into friends when faced with a more gentle and multicultural America — one that “leads from behind.”

Nevertheless, it was Kerry who did most of the shuttling, predominantly to the Middle East, alternating between his many trips to Europe to grovel before his Iranian counterpart, and visits to Israel, where he expressed severe displeasure with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not behaving similarly with the Palestinian Authority.

In what was hopefully one of his last public appearances in his role this week — at the 13th Annual Saban Forum in Washington, D.C., where he delivered the keynote address — Kerry highlighted the disaster that constituted his tenure, without an iota of remorse — other than in his failure to force Israel to create a Palestinian state.

While establishmentarian heads continue to explode over President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial phone call with the president of Taiwan last week, one of his potential candidates for secretary of State says it’s much ado about nothing. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who met with Trump on Friday to discuss the vital cabinet position, said on Fox Business Monday that taking the congratulatory phone call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen was “exactly the right thing to do.”

“I think the President of the United States should talk to any foreign leader he thinks its in the interest of the United States to talk to,” Bolton told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs.

“Tsai Ing-wen is a democratically elected president of a representative government in Taiwan — a free government, a free press, a free economy … the whole bit,” he said.

Bolton pointed out that the Taiwanese people have been friends with the United States for decades, even after “we treated them shabbily, time and time again.”

“From what happened with the loss to China in the UN when they were replaced by Beijing, to the derecognition during the Carter administration — over and over again,” he noted. “And they have stood with us — it’s a remarkable record.”

Dobbs said he was “heartened” to see the president step up and talk to whomever he pleases.

Relax. Breathe.

Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan wasn’t a blunder by an inexperienced president-elect unschooled in the niceties of cross-straits diplomacy.

It was a deliberate move — and a brilliant one at that.

The phone call with President Tsai Ing-wen was reportedly carefully planned, and Trump was fully briefed before the call, according to The Washington Post. It’s not that Trump was unfamiliar with the “Three Communiques” or unaware of the fiction that there is “One China.” Trump knew precisely what he was doing in taking the call. He was serving notice on Beijing that it is dealing with a different kind of president — an outsider who will not be encumbered by the same Lilliputian diplomatic threads that tied down previous administrations. The message, as John Bolton correctly put it, was that “the president of the United States [will] talk to whomever he wants if he thinks it’s in the interest of the United States, and nobody in Beijing gets to dictate who we talk to.”

Amen to that.

And if that message was lost on Beijing, Trump underscored it on Sunday, tweeting: “Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!” He does not need Beijing’s permission to speak to anyone. No more kowtowing in a Trump administration.

Trump promised during the campaign that he would take a tougher stand with China, and supporting Taiwan has always been part of his get-tough approach to Beijing. As far back as 2011, Trump tweeted: “Why is @BarackObama delaying the sale of F-16 aircraft to Taiwan? Wrong message to send to China. #TimeToGetTough.” Indeed, the very idea that Trump could not speak to Taiwan’s president because it would anger Beijing is precisely the kind of weak-kneed subservience that Trump promised to eliminate as president.

Trump’s call with the Taiwanese president sent a message not only to Beijing, but also to the striped-pants foreign-policy establishment in Washington. It is telling how so many in that establishment immediately assumed Trump had committed an unintended gaffe. “Bottomless pig-ignorance” is how one liberal foreign-policy commentator described Trump’s decision to speak with Tsai.

Trump just shocked the world by winning the presidential election, yet they still underestimate him. The irony is that the hyperventilation in Washington has far outpaced the measured response from Beijing. When American foreign-policy elites are more upset than China, perhaps it’s time for some introspection.

President-elect Donald Trump has been assembling a national security team stacked with fierce opponents of last year’s comprehensive nuclear deal with Iran, signaling what is expected to be a major departure from the Obama administration’s final bid to preserve the deal before leaving office, according to multiple sources familiar with Trump’s transition plans.

Trump has been installing well-known opponents of the deal to key national security posts for the incoming administration, including at the White House National Security Council, the CIA, and the Department of Defense.

This includes his selection of retired Marine Gen. James Mattis as secretary of defense, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) as CIA director, and retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser, picks that have won plaudits for their vocal opposition to the nuclear deal.

“It’s no secret that Flynn considers Iran to be the linchpin of a global alliance of hostile rivals seeking to undermine American interests,” said once source familiar with the backroom talks about future national security picks. “He was in the Middle East during the Iraq war and knows first-hand how Iranian proxies killed hundreds of American troops, and he has seen the intelligence showing that they’ve targeted Americans around the world.”

“As long as Iran keeps acting like an enemy of the United States, his NSC will accurately convey that to the president, and he’s building a staff that will make sure of that,” the source added.

Other recent national security picks include KT McFarland, a longtime national security analyst and commentator who has vocally criticized Iran and the nuclear deal, and Yleem Poblete, who served for nearly two decades as a senior staffer for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

By Herbert London President, London Center for Policy Research

Is it possible to detoxify the United States’ relations with Russia, China and the Muslim world? Is there a grand strategy that could maintain the honor of America and at the same time introduce stability in areas of the globe fraught with tension?

With a new administration taking hold in DC, new ideas abound. Among them is the offering of a grand strategy, i.e. an ideology that transcends and yet ameliorates competitive states. An example often cited is the Congress of Vienna (1814 to 1815), chaired by Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, which provided a long-term plan for the resolution of conflict resulting from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Despite conflicting claims and regional wars, the Congress accord did maintain relative tranquility for Europe till World War I, through an elaborate balance of power arrangement.

This model has reemerged with Alexander Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory and the work of several U.S. political theorists from the Kissinger School of Thought. While different in content, all rely on the supposition that “realists” can determine the fate of global affairs based on a system of “recognition and acceptance.” Dugin, for example, contends that if the U.S. were to accept Russian interests in Crimea and Syria, harmony with the U.S. might emerge.

More significant is what Dugin describes as “regional globalization,” what is usually referred to as spheres of influence. Presumably that would include an Anglo-American sphere, a European sphere and a Eurasian sphere including Russia, Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Iran. Dugin is not alone, in my judgment, albeit the carving out of spheres may vary from one philosopher to the next.

It is also presumed that this reconfiguration would occur peacefully through democratic means, on the order of a twenty-first century Congress of Vienna. This, of course, would be a metaphysical shift in world affairs were it to be anything more than a utopian fantasy.

But a fantasy it is. Clearly this idea would legitimate Putin’s imperial vision violating the sovereignty of several states. Second, it is hard to believe eastern Europe and the Baltic states would willingly accede to antebellum Russian domination. Third, the Chinese are already engaged in the subtle, but discernible effort to convert the Pacific Ocean into a Chinese Basin. Alarm bells throughout Asia have already gone off. Yet these arguments stand in stark contrast to America’s core belief in a liberal international order guided by an Enlightenment faith in individual liberty, the rule of law and the free market. Should the U.S. concede on this front in order to acquire global equilibrium, the tenets of international liberalism will be interred.

There once was a time when China was afraid of offending us, but liberal pundits, politicians, and those human equivalents of the dodo bird, career diplomats, are aghast that President-elect Donald Trump took a congratulatory phone call from the democratically elected president of Taiwan Tsai-Ing-wen. Trump acted to “buck diplomatic protocol”, the chattering class harrumphed, and offended China, whose leader, President Xi JinPing, President Obama bowed to in 2014 at the APEC Economic Leader’s meeting in China.

Trump’s hyperventilating critics forget that to accept a call from a foreign leader is not conducting foreign policy. President-elect Trump knows full well the President Obama will be both head of state and commander-in-chief for the next six weeks or so. He also knows that American foreign policy needs to be conducted in Washington, D.C., not Beijing. He knows that our ludicrous “one China” policy has not stopped China from becoming a strategic nuclear threat whose expansionist designs have caused Beijing to lay claim to Japanese islands in the East China Sea and to build its own islands in the South China Sea which China considers a Chinese lake. As Trump protested in a tweet,

We sell Taiwan billions of dollars in defensive weaponry and he can’t take a phone call? So we are arming one alleged part of China to defend itself against the rest of China? Hello?

Communist China’s designs on Taiwan are no different than Nazi Germany’s designs on the Sudetenland prior to World War II. China is rapidly building the naval, air, and missile forces needed to conquer Taiwan and eventually, challenge the U.S. for military, economic, and political domination of the Western Pacific. Why exactly do we have a foreign policy that treats Taiwan as the West treated Czechoslovakia in 1938? When China is ready to attack Taiwan, it will.

Former U.N. Ambassador and Secretary of State candidate John Bolton told Fox and Friends that Trump would be right if he decided to shake up the status quo and treat democratic Taiwan with respect and friendship:

Bolton responded to the news of a phone call between Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, which caused China to submit a complaint with the U.S. through its foreign ministry.

“Honestly, I think we should shake the relationship up. For the past several years China has made aggressive… belligerent claims in the South China Sea,” he said on Fox & Friends.

Beijing views Taiwan as a rebel province of mainland China, and the United States has recognized China’s claim since President Jimmy Carter officially acknowledged the “one China” policy in 1979.

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State John Kerry sharply criticized Israel’s continued construction on contested Palestinian territory and didn’t rule out administration support for action at the United Nations on the Arab-Israeli conflict before President-elect Donald Trump takes power.

Mr. Kerry, speaking at a Middle East forum in Washington, said Sunday that the Obama administration hasn’t made any decisions about actions at the United Nations Security Council, but that other countries are likely to introduce resolutions as they lose patience with the current situation, which Mr. Kerry said was “getting worse.”

“There’s been no decision made about any kind of step that may or may not be taken in that regard,” Mr. Kerry said, when asked if the U.S. would lay down new parameters for the conflict, possibly at the United Nations Security Council. “There are, however, other people out there, who because of this building frustration… [are] talking about bringing resolutions to the United Nations. If it’s a biased and unfair resolution calculated to delegitimize Israel, we’ll oppose it.”

‘If it’s a biased and unfair resolution calculated to delegitimize Israel, we’ll oppose it.’
—Secretary of State John Kerry, on a potential action at the United Nations Security Council

Mr. Kerry said Israel was “heading to a place of danger” as settlement building has narrowed the prospects for peace and a two-state solution. At the same forum earlier Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told attendees via satellite link that settlements weren’t an obstacle to peace. Mr. Kerry pushed back, saying, “Let’s not kid ourselves here.”

“I’m not here to say that settlements are the reason for the conflict.” he said. “But I also cannot accept the notion that they’re not a barrier to peace.”

The White House had earlier this year been exploring options to revive a Middle East peace push.

President-elect Trump’s phone conversation Friday with Taiwan’s democratically elected leader is the kind of engagement that any new U.S. president should undertake as he prepares to take office. In talking with President Tsai Ing-wen, Mr. Trump demonstrated why his presidency has the potential to return badly needed credibility to a host of global challenges where the Obama Doctrine has left vacuums, rising tensions and conflict.

America’s relationship with Taiwan is a good example of the drift in U.S. interests. The Obama administration likes to declare that we are experiencing the “best relationship ever.” But this assessment is predicated on an expectation that neither the U.S. nor Taiwan has ambitions for their relationship. Both have been far too preoccupied with their ties with China—a focus that has emboldened Beijing and fostered instability in the Taiwan Strait.

As a result, a dangerous vacuum has opened up in the U.S. relationship with Taiwan. The administration has all but halted arms sales to Taiwan even though such sales are guaranteed under U.S. law and have long been a mainstay of U.S. security relations with the island. So, too, the trade relationship has faltered. Our trade ties are better suited to those between the U.S. and Malta than with our ninth-largest trading partner. Trade ties drift aimlessly in the absence of broader goals such as investment and tax agreements or a bilateral free-trade accord.

Meanwhile, the Chinese have been pressing their objective: the unification and occupation of Taiwan through peaceful or military means. Beijing pursues economic integration and its smothering embrace, while its military modernization focuses on invading and occupying Taiwan. It points nearly 2,000 cruise and ballistic missiles at Taiwan’s people.

The U.S. has failed to meet this challenge, and it is into this vacuum that Ms. Tsai was elected in January. China’s response to her election has been to pressure Taiwan’s remaining allies, cut off direct communications with Taipei, and damage commerce by restricting mainland Chinese tourism to the island. It has also undermined Taiwan’s efforts to broaden its engagement with the global health community and to integrate better into the world’s global aerospace and transportation organizations. CONTINUE AT SITE