RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19322/islamists-east-africa

The most potent threat to East African stability remains Al-Shabaab, rooted in Somalia. Al-Qaeda helps to finance Al-Shabaab through its contacts across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen.

Al-Shabaab’s threat to the American homeland should not be discounted: the group has explored possible scenarios of launching a 9/11 style assault on the US. Shabaab is assessed by US intelligence as Al-Qaeda’s wealthiest and largest affiliate.

If Islamists succeed in establishing an Emirate in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s government could be rendered powerless to combat the spread of radical Islam throughout the country. Using Mozambique as a base of operations, jihadists potentially could export terrorist cells to Indian Ocean island countries such as the Comoros Islands, Madagascar, Mauritius and the Seychelles, and ultimately to southern African nations as well.

Jihadist terrorism poses an existential challenge to Africa’s nation-states. While North Africa has been Islamic for a millennium, the Sahel, that part of the continent south of the Sahara, remains under siege by affiliates of the global Islamist networks, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

France, after a ten-year effort, has abandoned its responsibility to safeguard the sovereignty of its former colonies. Consequently, the Sahel’s counterterrorist mission now rests upon the shoulders of a group of regional states called the “G5” : Burkina Faso, Chad. Mali. Mauritania, and Niger.

The most potent threat to East African stability remains Al-Shabaab, rooted in Somalia. Although Al-Shabaab pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda in 2009, it maintains autonomy for its terrorist operations. Al-Qaeda helps to finance Al-Shabaab through its contacts across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19320/ukraine-arms-package

In one of the more damning examples of his indecisive leadership, Biden has seemed to be more concerned about upsetting Russian President Vladimir Putin than confronting the Kremlin’s unprovoked act of aggression against its Ukrainian neighbour.

It could even be argued that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would not have happened in the first place had it not been for Biden’s catastrophic handling of the withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan in the summer of 2022. Biden’s decision to abandon the Afghan people to their fate… sent a clear message to autocrats like Putin, as well as China’s President Xi Jinping, that the Western powers… no longer had any interest in standing up to tyrannical regimes.

The West’s perceived weakness may also explain why Putin made a series of veiled threats about using nuclear weapons if the Western powers became too involved in the Ukraine conflict, which initially had the desired effect of persuading the Biden administration to keep its distance.

At a moment when Putin is giving serious consideration to a new spring offensive to make up for the disastrous losses he suffered last year, the US arms package could prove to be decisive in making sure the Ukrainians do not lose ground.

It is vital, therefore, that the US and its allies set aside their reservations about defeating Putin’s Russia, not least because all the indications are that Putin is currently losing his war, and Western support can make sure he suffers a catastrophic defeat.

It is vital therefore that, rather than constantly questioning the need to support the Ukrainian cause, American politicians, policymakers and the media comprehend that making sure that Russia suffers a devastating defeat is very much in America’s interest.

It would remove the threat Russia poses to global security for a generation, allowing the Western powers to concentrate their focus on the far greater threat posed to world peace by Communist China.

Neutralising Putin means the Western alliance can ensure it is fully-prepared to deal with any future aggression from Beijing, such as threatening the independence of Taiwan.

The most charitable thing that can be said about US President Joe Biden’s belated decision to supply Ukraine with armoured vehicles is that his administration is finally coming to understand what is required to ensure the Ukrainian forces achieve victory in the brutal war with Russia.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19318/eu-biden-rewarding-iran

The Obama-Biden administration had also kept the US Congress, the American people and US allies in the Middle East in the dark about what it was negotiating with the ruling mullahs of Iran. When Biden was vice president, the Obama administration made multiple secret deals with Iran’s mullahs.

“[T]he JCPOA was designed as an instrument to break pro-Israel Democrats, who represent what Obama saw as the most powerful of the internal constituencies that might oppose his reordering of the Democratic Party. That is, the real realignment [ostensibly with Iran] isn’t in the Middle East, which America is leaving anyway, but inside Obama’s own party.” — Lee Smith, Tablet, March 10, 2021.

While the Iranian regime has become more belligerent, the European Union and the Biden administration are still attempting to restore the nuclear deal that will lift economic sanctions on Iran, empower and embolden the regime, enhance its global legitimacy and pave the way for what the US State Department has called the “world’s worst sponsor of state terrorism” to legally become a nuclear-armed state.

The Biden administration claimed that the nuclear deal was “off the table,” but regrettably this statement appears merely an attempt by the administration to keep Congress and the public in the dark, to let their guard down, about the revival of the nuclear deal with Iran. A few days after President Joe Biden claimed that the nuclear deal was dead, Robert Malley, the U.S. special envoy to Iran, revealed in interview with RFE/RL’s Radio Farda on December 22 that the nuclear deal is in fact not dead.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/01/wokeism-goes-global-bidens-foreign-policy/

There are broadly two ways of conducting a foreign policy. The first is responding intelligently to events abroad as they occur, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brexit, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or as Harold Macmillan once said: “Events, dear boy, events.”

The second way, sometimes called a Grand Strategy, prescribes the general direction in which you want your country to go and the policies needed to get there. Thus, Brexit was intended to transform Britain from “a country at the heart of Europe” (John Major’s formulation) into Global Britain.

But since the policies needed to achieve Global Britain were never pursued or even devised because they were opposed by people in government and major British institutions, that grand strategy was stillborn. A successful grand strategy requires the government to know roughly how it wants each crisis to turn out without having to work out its responses from scratch.

President Biden has so far had a mixed record on responding to events: he did badly in Afghanistan but well over Ukraine, where his policy has rallied the Western alliance and frustrated Putin’s Russia. What explains his success in one case and failure in the other?

The answer lies in part in the unusual reality that US progressive Left—which currently dominates the Biden administration—sees America as a racist, sexist, homophobic and white supremacist country. That makes it ambivalent about America’s national interest. Even if it sees the necessity for some purposeful action in a crisis, it can’t want the outcome to benefit the US. At the very least that mindset must weaken and confuse the US even when it follows a prudent course.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19259/us-china-failing-deterrence

In just two years since 2020, when the Pentagon wrongly estimated that it would take China a decade to double its nuclear stockpile at the time of approximately 200 nuclear warheads, China has already doubled its stockpile.

“As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking, It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are. As those curves keep going, it isn’t going to matter how good our [operating plan] is or how good our commanders are, or how good our forces are – we’re not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem.” — Admiral Charles Richard, defense.gov, November 3, 2022.

Unfortunately, the US is facing China with a lot of outdated military hardware.

Instead of doing all in its power to counter those adversaries, however, the Department of Defense has been focusing precious time on extremism, diversity, equity and inclusion, and climate change within the military….

In July, the Senate Armed Services Committee called on the Pentagon to stop its programs to prevent and root out extremism within the military, most notably Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s “stand-down” directive, which the military spent 5.4 million hours on implementing, at a cost of more than $500,000.

Overall, since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, at a time when every effort should have been geared towards countering top military threats, the Department of Defense spent nearly six million hours on extremism, diversity, equity and inclusion training, and climate change.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin gave a stern warning about US competition with China earlier this month at the Reagan National Defense Forum:

“These next few years will set the terms of our competition with the People’s Republic of China. And they will determine whether our children and grandchildren inherit an open world of rules and rights — or whether they face emboldened autocrats who seek to dominate by force and fear…

“The PRC is the only country with both the will and, increasingly, the power to reshape its region and the international order to suit its authoritarian preferences.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/mustsee_video_tucker_carlson_takes_on_the_zelenskyy_money_grab.html

Last night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy showed up in Congress to demand money. As one, the entire body of American politicians swooned before the man. One person who did not swoon was Fox pundit Tucker Carlson, who pointed out some uncomfortable truths and asked the all-important question about our politicians joyously pushing us towards a hot war with a nuclear Russia. Who benefits?

Russia may be nuclear, and it may have a very nasty, cruel man at its head, but it’s important to note that Russia, despite its natural resources, is a nothing of a country. Unlike the former Soviet Union, which had tentacles, satellites, colonies, and interests around the globe, not to mention all sorts of unwilling neighboring countries swept into its net to make up that Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Russia is a smaller country with no serious interests abroad.

Yes, Putin meddles in Syria and Turkey, but he’s no Xi Jinping. Other than natural gas, which Europe needs, Russia has not coopted all of America’s manufacturing, from our clothes to our appliances to our medicines. Mostly, Russia does not affect us.

Indeed, there’s only one reason Russia is perceived as a threat, and that’s because leftists have come to believe their own Russia hoax accusation that Putin put Trump in the White House. He didn’t but, because Democrats and NeverTrumpers (i.e., the Republican establishment that hates Trump as much as the Democrats do) believe that, Putin must be destroyed.

What none of these fanatics have thought through is what happens if they are able to get rid of Putin. Who comes next? Xi? A megalomaniac with dreams that go beyond Russia’s current borders? Biden, who needs help putting on his pants in the morning so that the zipper faces forward, has no answers.

The insistence that Ukraine is a beleaguered democracy is nonsense, too. Ukraine is and has long been an utterly corrupt country to which Western politicians go to launder taxpayer money.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19252/china-saudi-arabia-alliance

Nothing better illustrates the utter ineptitude of the Biden administration’s dealings with the Middle East than Saudi Arabia’s decision to forge a strategic alliance with China.

Biden set the tone for his strained relationship with the Saudi royal family during the 2020 presidential election contest when he denounced the kingdom as a “pariah” state over its involvement in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, although there has never any audible distress from the Biden administration over Iran’s 2007 abduction and presumed death of ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson.

By any standard, the deepening military cooperation between Russia and Iran should serve as a wake-up call to the Biden administration to redouble its efforts to reaffirm its commitment to key allies in the region such as the Saudis, who are committed to resisting any attempt by Tehran to expand its malign influence in the region.

That Riyadh is now moving away from its traditional alliance with the US and strengthening its ties with Beijing is a strategic disaster of epic proportions, and serves as a damning indictment of the Biden administration’s careless treatment of the Saudis, for which the president is personally to blame.

Nothing better illustrates the utter ineptitude of the Biden administration’s dealings with the Middle East than Saudi Arabia’s decision to forge a strategic alliance with China.

This is a time when Washington should be working overtime to strengthen its ties with long-standing allies like the Saudis to combat the mounting threat Iran poses to the region’s security.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/millions-in-hundred-dollar-bills-flown-to-the-taliban-for-humanitarian-aid/

As the Taliban were taking over Afghanistan, I predicted that Biden would fund the Taliban using “humanitarian aid” as a pretext. Since then, Biden has provided $1.1 billion in Afghan aid.

Despite assurances that the money would not go to the terrorists, the Biden administration issued global licenses authorizing financial transactions with the Taliban and the Al Qaeda allied Haqqani Network that include the “delivery and provision of humanitarian aid”.

Biden looted $3.5 billion from money awarded to the families of 9/11 victims in a lawsuit against the Taliban and put in a “trust fund” to provide “humanitarian aid”. His DOJ then went to court arguing that the judgment for the victims was too large and that it interfered with the Biden administration’s foreign policy in Afghanistan.

Now an Australian Broadcasting Corporation report has revealed massive stacks of hundred dollar bills sitting on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport. ABC noted that “the picture is just one of several images of United States $100 notes boxed, bagged, or bound in plastic, posted on Twitter by the Taliban-controlled central bank of Afghanistan in recent weeks.”