RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19705/irans-human-rights-abuses

[J]ust a few days after the regime executed two young men, Yousef Mehrad and Sadrollah Fazeli Zare, for “blasphemy,” Iran was rewarded by being appointed chair of the United Nations Human Rights Council 2023 Social Forum, as well as being handsomely compensated by the European Union.

“Iran human rights role ‘like granting Bin Laden a Nobel Peace Prize’.” — The Telegraph.

As if to underscore this triumph, right after the UN appointment, Iran’s regime on May 19 proceeded to execute three more men — Majid Kazemi, Saleh Mirhashemi and Saeed Yaghoubi – for having participated in anti-regime protests.

“[Iranian] Authorities Execute Over 60 People in Past 2 Weeks.” — Human Rights Watch, May 12, 2023.

“The Iranian authorities’ dramatic escalation of executions in recent weeks is a serious violation of the right to life and should bring international condemnation… Since late April, the Iranian authorities have executed at least 60 people, including an Iranian-Swedish national on alleged terror-related charges. Many were executed after unfair trials or for charges, such as drug offenses as well and two executions for ‘blasphemy,’ that under international law should never result in the death penalty.” — Human Rights Watch, May 12, 2023.

So, Germany, which preaches about human rights and its “feminist foreign policy”, has actually increased its business with Iran….

“We believe it is time to hold the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran to account for its crimes…. We urge your nations to stand with the Iranian people in their quest for change and to take decisive steps against the current regime. This includes blacklisting the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and holding regime officials accountable for their crimes against humanity.” — Letter signed May 23, 2023 by former Vice President Mike Pence and 107 other former world leaders. Fox News; May 23, 2023.

It is abhorrent and unacceptable that the EU and the UN keep propping up a regime that is a world leader in executions and violations of human rights — and that will not hesitate to use its nuclear weapons capability as well as the threat of it.

Not only have the Biden Administration, the EU, and the UN have been silent in the face of the Iranian regime’s increasing human rights violations, but just a few days after the regime executed two young men, Yousef Mehrad and Sadrollah Fazeli Zare, for “blasphemy,” Iran was rewarded by being appointed chair of the United Nations Human Rights Council 2023 Social Forum, as well as being handsomely compensated by the European Union.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19654/iran-nuclear-bombs

At present, the ruling mullahs of Iran reportedly have enough enriched uranium to produce five nuclear bombs.

General Hossein Salami, the chief of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has made the Iranian regime’s plans vehemently clear: “Our strategy is to erase Israel from the global political map,” he stated on Iran’s state-controlled Channel 2 TV in 2019. Khamenei has also published a 416-page guidebook, titled Palestine about destroying Israel — which Iran’s former “moderate” President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, basically referred to as a one-bomb country.

“Iran is 50 North Koreas; it is not merely a neighborhood bully like the dynasty that rules North Korea… This is an ideological force that views us, Israel, as a small satan, and views you as the great satan — and to have Iran being able to threaten every city in the United States with nuclear blackmail is a changing of history.” — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, timesofisrael.com, May 4, 2023.

Finally, there is always the danger of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Iran’s proxy and militia groups, or that the Iranian regime will share its nuclear technology with its allies, such as the Syrian regime or the Taliban in Afghanistan – or sell it to anyone with the funds or political leverage to buy it.

How many nuclear weapons will the Iranian regime — called by the US Department of State a “top sponsor of state terrorism” — obtain before the Biden Administration’s term ends?

The Biden Administration has been the biggest gift to the ruling mullahs of Iran as their Islamist regime has been freely and rapidly advancing its nuclear program to unprecedented levels during President Joe Biden’s term.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19646/biden-harming-ukraine-victory-prospects

While U.S. President Joe Biden has constantly pledged his support for Kyiv, his rhetoric has invariably failed to result in providing the Ukrainians with the military support they require. Even when, as happened earlier this year, the White House reluctantly agreed to provide Ukraine with Abrams tanks – a move that was only approved after Washington came under intense pressure from allies such as Poland – the slow delivery timetable has made Ukrainian commanders despair that the equipment will ever actually arrive.

As for the promised Abrams tanks, U.S. officials readily admit that the Abrams are months away from arriving as the Pentagon looks at its stocks to see what it can send.

In a recent interview with Foreign Policy magazine, Sasha Ustinova, a Ukrainian lawmaker, confirmed the U.S. military had delivered far less than what Valeriy Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top general, had asked for from the Pentagon. U.S. military aid is only arriving piecemeal as the Biden administration warns it is nearing the end of its ability to provide weapons that can be pulled off of the Pentagon’s shelves to give to the Ukrainians.

Ustinova said that Ukraine hoped to begin the offensive in April, but the lack of weapons has pushed the launch date back indefinitely.

Certainly, any delay in the Ukrainians launching their offensive will only help to convince the Kremlin that, despite all the setbacks it has suffered over the course of the past year, it may still end up winning the war.

The Biden administration’s constant dithering over supplying weapons to Ukraine is proving to be a decisive factor in the Ukrainian military’s decision to delay its long-awaited spring counter-offensive against Russian forces.

Since the end of last year, when the Ukrainians inflicted a series of humiliating defeats against their Russian foes, Kyiv has been warning that it is in urgent need of fresh supplies of military equipment from its Western allies if it is to continue its campaign to liberate Ukrainian territory from Russian occupation.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19653/biden-china-aggression

[Hostile elements in senior Chinese Communist Party circles], thanks to the State Department, now have additional incentives to engage in belligerent conduct, and, in light of Washington’s craven behavior, every nation that looks to America for security has to be extremely concerned.

[Rick Waters, deputy assistant secretary of state for China and Taiwan] informed subordinates that Secretary of State Antony Blinken… had delayed already-planned actions [in response to China’s spy balloon] to avoid increasing tensions with Beijing.

Those planned actions included export-control licensing rules for Huawei Technologies and sanctions on China’s officials for repression of Uyghurs. Reuters reported that these China measures “have yet to be revived.”

Why did the Biden administration delay taking action? It is still devoted to policies that have failed for three decades. “The recent revelation that senior State Department officials purposefully directed the postponement of actions against China following the discovery, and eventual shootdown, of a probable PLA reconnaissance balloon reflects a return to the ideology of engagement at all costs,” James Fanell of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy told Gatestone.

In short, China has successfully intimidated the American government.

Defenders of the State Department’s postponement of the Huawei and Uyghur measures have suggested that Washington will gain support among fence-sitting countries by showing that the United States was doing all it could to accommodate Beijing, ultimately making China appear the recalcitrant party.

Such an argument might have made sense three decades ago, but certainly not at this late date. If countries by now do not perceive the danger posed by China, they never will. The way to obtain that consensus is Reagan-style American leadership — and American coercive diplomacy. Both, at the moment, are in short supply.

Lowest common denominator solutions — the inevitable result of consensus building — do not work when danger is imminent. Now, Ukraine has become a great-power battleground, China and Russia are rapidly destabilizing North Africa, and the world looks as if it is just one conflict away from global war.

Unfortunately, China cannot stop talking about war and is fast making preparations for it. Chinese President Xi Jinping is implementing the largest military buildup since the Second World War; he is trying to sanctions-proof China; he is stockpiling grain and taking control of all agriculture; he is surveying America for nuclear weapons strikes; and, most ominously, he is mobilizing China’s civilians for battle. China’s military has, Cultural Revolution-style, launched a purge of officers opposed to war. The recent death sentence handed down to retired Air Force General Liu Yazhou, who had argued against an invasion of Taiwan, is of particular concern.

We are running out of time. There is, however, almost no sense of urgency in Biden’s Washington and in the most senior levels of the Pentagon.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had more than 10 hours of meetings with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, in Vienna on the 10th and 11th of this month. The free-wheeling discussions have restarted what Washington Post columnist David Ignatius approvingly called “constructive engagement.”

Beijing, unfortunately, is merely playing the same old game of three decades: holding out the prospect of talks in order to get American presidents to delay taking action. Dialogue with a cynical Beijing is almost always fruitless. At this moment, China is trying to prevent both the G7, which will meet in Hiroshima starting May 19th, from taking action against Beijing’s coercive economic diplomacy and the Biden administration from issuing long-awaited rules prohibiting investment into Chinese technology sectors.

Xi appears to believe he has no reason to work “constructively” with America. “Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years,” he proclaimed on March 22 while bidding farewell to Vladimir Putin in Moscow after their 40th in-person chat. “And we are driving this change together.”

The Biden administration is even moving in the wrong direction. “The Chinese Communist Party spent the past 30 years digging their talons into America’s flesh, and a return to engagement will make getting rid of Beijing’s influence even more painful,” said Fanell, also a former U.S. Navy captain who served as Director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Once again, Western democracies are not recognizing threats and acting with the speed and determination required.

China has completely intimidated the Biden administration. Americans — and others around the world — must worry what happens next.

The State Department delayed imposing sanctions, export controls, and other measures on China after the Chinese military brazenly flew its large spy balloon over Alaska, Canada and the lower 48 states in late January and early February.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19643/green-light-to-iran

“It is unacceptable that a U.S. government program, which makes the United States and its allies safer, provides funds to remediate the victims of terrorism, and generates income for the United States in a cost-effective manner has been allowed to languish. United States sanctions should be enforced to the fullest extent of the law. As Iranian oil sales continue to rise, and the IRGC continues to target U.S. citizens and servicemembers, including inside the U.S., it is imperative that we use all available government assets to limit the activities of the Iranian regime.” — Senator Joe Manchin and 11 other Senators, in a letter to President Joe Biden, April 27, 2023.

Under the Biden Administration, however, which suspended new oil and gas leases on US public lands and waters, Iran is now producing more oil and selling it at levels close to the pre-sanctions era to countries such as China…

Iran reportedly is exporting more than 1.5 million bpd — approximately 80% of the oil they used to export before the sanctions.

Iran is also shipping considerable amounts of oil to Venezuela without either country fearing repercussions from the Biden Administration.

The Biden Administration’s appeasement policies towards Iran is contributing to the regime’s increased revenue, the major beneficiaries of which are the IRGC, terrorist and militia groups — and of course the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons program.

Under the Biden Administration, sanctions against the ruling mullahs of Iran have simply become superficial and cosmetic. The Administration appears to be turning a blind eye when Iran’s violates the sanctions, thereby allowing the regime vastly to increase its revenues. Most of these usually assist the regime’s powerful militia and terror group, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), designated as a terrorist organization by the US Department of State.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/05/15/the-cost-of-obamas-foreign-policy/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

His worldview conduced to American decline

As the GOP primary season gets under way, the foreign-policy conversation in Washington has dwelt on how long Republicans will support Ukraine’s attempts to defend itself against Russian aggression. But there are too many hot spots for Ukraine to continue to dominate the news — and lawmakers’ attention — for long: China’s ongoing military buildup threatens to upset the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. It is also making inroads in the Middle East, where Iran has nearly attained weapons-grade uranium and its terrorist allies are stepping up their rocket attacks on Israel. The United States faces the prospect of simultaneous major conflicts in several strategically important theaters.

The brewing crisis for the American-led international order is readily apparent, but its roots are more obscure. Fifteen years ago, the prospects of a major war in Europe and of the U.S. military’s losing control of the Western Pacific were remote; today, one has materialized, and the other may be close at hand. How did a country as dominant as the United States let events slip out of its control so quickly?

Much of the blame must lie with the Obama administration for initiating a series of disastrous policies and the Biden administration for continuing them. Toward the end of his presidency, Barack Obama articulated many of his foreign-policy views to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic. Reexamining them now, one is struck by the many ways in which he was wrong, with great consequence.

As Obama saw it, the United States had been obsessed with the wrong issues. Unlike ISIS, which was “not an existential threat to the United States” but had nonetheless fixed the country’s attention, “climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.” And Obama feared that by focusing on terrorism instead of on the plights and aspirations of young people in the developing world, the United States was “missing the boat.” At a time when rival powers were on the prowl, the White House focused on nebulous issues such as the climate and global development.

Obama partly acknowledged great-power challenges, of course. He thought “the relationship between the United States and China” was “going to be the most critical” in the ensuing years. Former defense secretary Ash Carter said Obama believed that Asia was “the part of the world of greatest consequence to the American future,” and that “no president can take his eye off of this.” Hence the signature foreign-policy slogan of Obama’s first term, the “pivot to Asia.”

This did not make him a hawk by any means. Rather, he said we had “more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China.” China, Obama repeated, was “on a peaceful rise.” In Beijing, Washington could find “a partner that is growing in capability and sharing with us the burdens and responsibilities of maintaining an international order.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/us_weakness_invites_iranian_attacks_on_shipping_in_the_gulf.html

On Wednesday we learned that the Iranian regime has seized a second oil tanker recently in the Persian Gulf, forcing it to dock at an Iranian port under orders from the regime’s “judiciary.”

It was seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Go-fast boats in the Strait of Hormuz. This remains the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint, according to the US Energy Information Administration, where roughly 20% of the world’s oil transits every day.

Seized tanker Niovi (YouTube screengrab, cropped)

The Pentagon subsequently informed us that these two incidents were just the latest of fifteen cases since Biden came to the White House where Iran has threatened or attacked international shipping in the Persian Gulf region.

These kind of attacks are unacceptable. The Iranians know that, and I guarantee you our enemies and adversaries know that. And yet the Iranians act with impunity. Why?

For starters, they know the current U.S. President and what he stands for. Biden has been taking money and supporting pro-Tehran regime lobbyists since at least 2002, when a group of Tehran-supporters threw a fund-raiser for him in California that brought in $30,000.

From then on, Biden became a reliable vote (along with Senator Chuck Hagel) when it came to opposing sanctions on Iran. He railed against President George W. Bush and his “axis of evil” because it included the Iranian regime.

Since becoming president, he has tried hard to re-invigorate the bad Iran nuclear deal, a deal that not only gave Iran a date certain to become a nuclear weapons state with impunity, but lifted all sanctions on the regime’s ballistic missile programs as well.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/south-korea-knows-the-korean-war-isnt-over/

A lesson in so-called forever war is deep background for this week’s celebration of the seven-decade-long U.S.-South Korea bilateral alliance.As U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol meet in Washington their nations have cause to celebrate. Ranking economies by GDP, the U.S. (population 330 million) is No. 1 and South Korea (52 million) is No. 12 (possibly 10).

But behind the photo-ops aides are discussing North Korea’s nuclear threats and communist China’s regional and global threats.

Difficult fact: The Korean War remains unfinished business. When media claim Afghanistan was America’s longest war, they ignore the frozen war on the Korean peninsula and the American troops still there, pulling guard duty.

The July 27, 1953, Korean Armistice Agreement established a ceasefire. Seventy years later there is no peace treaty.

Around 2.6 million human beings died during the war’s most intense combat (June 1950-July 1953). One million South Korean civilians died (estimated). North Korea lost a million soldiers and civilians. The U.S. military lost 37,000 killed in action.

In November 1950, the Chinese Communist Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) invaded North Korea and attacked American units. By July 1953 the PLA had suffered an estimated 600,000 dead.

So, here’s a fact relevant to 2023 and the Biden-Yoon meeting: At its height the Korean War was a war between the U.S. and communist China.

The PLA withdrew after the armistice. The U.S., however, didn’t cut and run. The war didn’t end. North Korea, backed by communist China and Russia, waged “gray zone war” — terror, firefights and infiltration in 1990s Pyongyang added threats of nuclear war.

We’ve a relic Cold War stand-off. Behind North Korea is an imperialist and expansionist communist China. The U.S. still stands with South Korea.

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

A bizarre series of new and/or deepened relationships around the world — often including countries that had long been at odds or at war — has emerged in the past twelve months. Take a deep breath and look around: China-Saudi Arabia, China-Iran, Israel-China, Tesla-China, China-Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Brazil/Venezuela/Cuba-China. Saudi Arabia-Syria, Saudi Arabia-Israel, Iran-Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia-Palestinian Authority, Iran-Iraq, Russia-Iran, Iran-Venezuela/Cuba/Nicaragua, Russia-Israel, Japan-South Korea, Japan-Russia.

Every single one and the consequences they produce are the result of the clear withdrawal of the United States as the lynchpin of relations and alliances on the world stage (with the exception of pouring billions of dollars’ worth of weapons into Ukraine). The Biden administration has created a vacuum in the Middle East, South America and Africa. Into every vacuum pours … well … nothing good.

Side Story: Israel’s experience with territorial vacuums can be seen clearly in Lebanon. Withdrawing from southern Lebanon to the UN line in 2000 was supposed to lead to more peaceful bilateral relations since Israel no longer controlled Lebanese territory. However, the Christian forces of the South Lebanese Army (SLA) weren’t enough to hold the space, and Iranian proxy Hezbollah filled the vacuum. Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 removed the IDF. With no IDF and no Israeli citizens in the Strip, Iranian proxy Hamas filled the vacuum. Israel remains in Judea and Samaria by right but also because it is clear that the PA cannot hold the territory in the absence of the hand of the IDF.

The US plays on a bigger stage.