RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19520/china-iran-alliance

The deal grants China significant rights over the Iran’s resources and help to Iran in increasing its oil and gas production. Leaked information revealed that one of the terms is that China will be investing nearly $400 billion in Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemicals industries. In return, China will get priority to bid on any new project in Iran that is linked to these sectors.

China will also be able to pay in any currency it chooses.

The Biden administration’s failure to lead is effectively handing the US over to China, Russia and Iran on a platter, actively creating a new world order with China at the top and the US potentially wherever China wants.

Where is our commitment to a “Manhattan Project” to strengthen our defense? Why is the requested defense budget for 2024 only 3.2% higher than the 2023 budget? This means in real terms, factoring in the current inflation of 6%, that the current defense budget is a cut. Worse, it comes in below the budget increases planned for the Environmental Protection Agency (19%), Department of the Interior (12%), and Department of Veterans Affairs (5.4%). In 2022, US defense spending as a percentage of GDP was 3.1%, compared to the 8% of GDP it was in 1970.

Thanks to the monumental serial ineptitude of the Biden Administration, China’s President Xi Jinping, backed by his troika of oil suppliers — Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran — doubtless feels on the verge of fulfilling his fondest dream: Displacing the US as the world’s leading superpower. The saddest part is that the reason is us: Why are we deliberately not protecting our Republic?

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/22/questions-without-answers-about-ukraine/

Ukrainians, and many Europeans and Americans, are defining an envisioned Ukrainian victory as the complete expulsion of all Russians from its 2013 borders. Or, as a Ukrainian national security chief put it, the war ends with Ukrainian tanks in Red Square.

But mysteries remain about such ambitious agendas.

What would that goal entail?

Giving Ukraine American F-16s to strike bases and depots in Mother Russia? The gifting of 1,000 M1 Abrams tanks? Using American Harpoon missiles to sink the Russian Black Sea Fleet?

A huge arsenal that would guarantee total victory rather than not losing?

Russia’s cruel strategy is to grind down Ukraine and turn its eastern regions into a Verdun-like deathscape.

So is a brave Ukraine really winning the war when it loses about 0.6 soldiers for every Russian it kills?

Russia plans to leverage its extra 100 million people, its 10-times larger economy, and its 30-times larger territory to pulverize Ukraine and tire its Western patrons—whatever the costs to Russia.

Yet why were only a few in past administrations calling for a joint Western effort to expel Putin’s forces from the borderlands and Crimea captured in 2014?

Why are Putin’s 2014 invasions now seen as urgent rectifiable crimes of aggression in 2022, but were not regarded as reparable during the prior eight years?

Is the United States economically capable or politically unified or socially stable enough to wage a huge proxy war on the frontiers of a nuclear Russia?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-response-to-russias-invasion-still-muddled/

Last week Florida governor Ron DeSantis kicked the foreign policy establishment hornets’ nest in his response to a questionnaire Tucker Carlson sent to potential 2024 Republican primary candidates. Asked about our Ukraine policy, DeSantis called the Russo-Ukrainian war a “territorial dispute,” which his critics claimed suggested a moral equivalence between the two sides. But such criticism and dudgeon still leave unaddressed DeSantis’ questions and caveats about our “vital national interests” being served by our open-ended, yet hesitant support of Ukraine.

Politics, of course, is a big reason for the attacks on DeSantis, as well as our muddled policies on Ukraine. You know politics is afoot when ad hominem attacks and distortions are deployed. Phrases used to smear DeSantis like “pro-Russia stance” and “sides with Russia against the West” are political dog-whistles for inciting attacks on a likely presidential candidate whose youth, political success, and anti-“woke” pushback scare the Dems and Republican Petainists.

This political weaponization of “Russia,” moreover, is a continuation of the 2016 campaign and the subsequent assaults on Donald Trump’s administration and person, fueled by the big lies of “Russia collusion” claims that Trump was under Putin’s thumb. Wasn’t that why Trump was “soft” on Putin?

That canard is easily exploded. It wasn’t Trump who, through Dmitri Medvedev, promised Putin “flexibility” on missile defense systems for Poland and Czechoslovakia, and followed through by stopping their delivery. It wasn’t Trump’s administration that prioritized a solicitous “reset” of relations with Russia. It wasn’t Trump who scoffed at his presidential election opponent’s warnings about Putin’s malign intentions, by saying “The Eighties called and they want their foreign policy back,” or who met Putin’s 2014 adventurism in Crimea with carefully parsed diplo-rhetoric and flabby sanctions.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mexicos-president-insults-the-u-s-while-allowing-the-cartels-to-thrive/

Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador loves President Joe Biden. But Obrador, the left-wing progressive leader of his narco-state, regularly insults the United States, except when he is angling for amnesty to be granted to the millions of illegal immigrants already living in the U.S. 

“You are the first president of the United States in a very long time that has not built even one meter of wall,” Mexico’s President Obrador told President Biden at the North American Leaders’ Summit in Mexico City last January. “And we thank you for that, sir, although some might not like it, although the conservatives don’t like it.”  

At the same meeting President Obrador lobbied President Biden to insist that Congress “regularize migration situations” for “millions of Mexicans” already in the United States. “Regularize” is a euphemism for “amnesty.” President Obrador portrayed these illegal immigrants as contributors “to the development of that great nation, which is the United States of America.”  In reality, many illegal immigrants are draining public funds and resources, which undermines the quality of public services available to Americans.

Note Obrador’s sweet-talk about the United States when he wanted the U.S. government to do him the big favor of granting amnesty to “millions of Mexicans” living illegally in this country. Of course, President Biden does not need to be persuaded. He is already seeking to incorporate paths for legal status and ultimate U.S. citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants as part of his so-called immigration reform bill. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19491/combat-palestinian-terrorism

[T]he Biden Administration officials recently proposed a plan “to provide 5,000 Palestinians with commando training in Jordan” and then deploy them to areas under the control of the PA. The 5,000 officers will bring with them 5,000 rifles to Palestinian cities and towns — where almost every Palestinian already has a weapon.

Any time the US has funded, armed and trained Palestinian militias, the target has invariably ended up not terrorist groups but Israelis. Why is there any reason to think that this time will be different?

In addition, the plan would require Israel “to sharply curtail IDF counterterror operations.” The Biden administration, in other words, wants Israel to stop defending itself and rely on the Palestinian leadership and the new Palestinian “commandos” to go after the terrorists. Palestinian officials, meanwhile, are busy glorifying terrorism and paying visits to the families of terrorists.

This would leave the Israelis with the rights to neither self-defense nor hot-pursuit. Terrorists will be able strike inside Israel, then run back to the Palestinian areas where they will be “home free;” instead of being arrested, they will be celebrated.

The Biden plan also reportedly “foresees the deployment of foreign forces, including U.S. military forces, on the ground.”

Israel, roughly the size of New Jersey, would have on its border a Palestinian terrorist army, well-trained, well-funded, and “protected” by a superpower.

[The Israelis] would find themselves in the impossible position of risking harming the Europeans and Americans forces stationed there. These troops, mingled among the Palestinians, would essentially be “human shields,” deliberately placed in harm’s way to prevent Israel from taking any action.

What, then, is the Biden Administration really doing?

An international military presence to help the Palestinians in the West Bank would handcuff the Israelis. This appears to be the real plan.

Worse, if “foreign countries” were allowed into the West Bank to work with the new US-trained Palestinian militias, who would get to decide which foreign countries?

Or perhaps the US will try to persuade the Palestinians to reintegrate Gaza, run by Hamas, an Iranian proxy, into the West Bank, as the US Department of State’s new Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs, Hady Amr, recommended in his Brookings report?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19473/iran-nuclear-club

Ever since the Biden Administration shifted Washington’s Iran policy from maximum pressure to total appeasement, the ruling mullahs’ nuclear advances have been remarkable.

In the meantime, the Biden administration does not appear even slightly concerned that a regime which has frequently threatened to wipe two entire countries, America and Israel, off the map, is closer than ever to possessing nuclear weapons.

General Hossein Salami, the commander-in-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 announced on Iran’s state-controlled Channel 2 TV in 2019. Khamenei has also published a 416-page book, “Palestine,” about destroying Israel.

Thanks to the Biden Administration’s weakness, Iran’s anti-American, genocidal mullah regime, which is still calling for “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”, is about to join the “nuclear club.”

This — along with the surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan and the many green lights offered to the Chinese Communist Party — will be the disastrous legacy of the Biden Administration.

Ever since the Biden Administration shifted Washington’s Iran policy from maximum pressure to total appeasement, the ruling mullahs’ nuclear advances have been remarkable.

The Iranian regime is rapidly forging ahead with uranium enrichment. Inspectors from the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), recently found uranium particles in Iran that were enriched up to 83.7%, just shy of the 90% needed for nuclear weapons. The enrichment has been taking place in Iran’s underground Fordo nuclear site. Before the Biden Administration, the regime was enriching uranium at 3.5%. This is a remarkable nuclear escalation in just two years.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19439/realism-on-china

What is clear is that, intentionally or not, China has shown America’s need to get serious about the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its expansionist global aims.

As the latest provocation by the CCP plays out, it gets more disturbing. The media, and even US President Joe Biden, describe the CCP as a “competitor” and downplay any possible conflict. When the CCP flies spy balloons across the continent, opens police stations in our cities, infiltrates our universities, poisons more than 100,000 Americans with hard drugs each year, and announces its plans to replace the United States, it is hard to argue we are in anything but a “Cold War” with the CCP.

It is time for the U.S. government and our allies to definitively outline the clear challenge and danger the CCP poses to the West. The behavior demonstrated by the CCP spy balloon is not an aberration; it is part of a dangerous pattern. This includes the CCP’s longtime intellectual property theft; breaches of cybersecurity; its increasing global military presence; expanding and modernizing its military, and its purchases of farmland near US military sites. Given that this is the reality, the Biden Administration must act more forcefully in response to the CCP’s aggressive behavior or, through passivity, it will invite an even greater challenge from China.

Given the CCP’s clear efforts against America, why does there continue to be such a muted response from the Biden Administration? While they haven’t explicitly said it, one reason might be climate change.

Other reports, however, strongly contradict the Annual Threat Assessment. These assert 1) that “apocalyptic claims about climate change are wrong” and that climate change is “a fraud”; 2) that China has less than no interest in cutting emissions; 3) that green energy actually consists of a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich to “destroy capitalism” and punish the West for having “pulled millions out of poverty and shaped the modern world”; 4) that cutting back on fossil fuels hurts the poor , it hits them worst ; and 5) that climate change is basically caused by sun flares and there is not a blessed thing you can do about them. Vested interests can offer grants for “scientific papers” to promote their businesses; sun-flares cannot offer grants.

No matter where one falls on climate change, the CCP’s brazen spy balloon flight has left little doubt about the threat the Chinese Communist regime poses. It is past time for all Americans to recognize and respond to this threat.

It was impossible to miss — a giant white balloon with a massive solar array and a yet-to-be-publicly-disclosed sensor package flying over some of America’s most sensitive military sites. In the time since China’s spy balloon traversed Alaska, Canada and the continental United States, details surrounding the surveillance overflight are murky at best as the Biden Administration has provided confused, conflicted and muddled statements to Americans and even Congress.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ukraine-and-our-confused-foreign-policy/

“It’s time to accept that our vacation from history was over 20 years ago, and we need to get back to work strengthening our country’s security.”

The first anniversary of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine has come and gone, and the uncertainty about how that conflict will be resolved remains, despite the West’s cheerleading and photo-ops with Zelensky, and billions in cash and materiel sent to Ukraine. Meanwhile, China is  “strongly considering” supporting Russia with arms and ammo, Iran keeps sending Russia drones, and American support for aid to Ukraine is starting to dwindle.

The way out of this stalemate, moreover, requires choices none of which are politically palatable or possible. So here we are again, with our idealistic foreign policy reach exceeding our political will and materiel grasp.

The origins of this predicament in part lie in the still uncertain justifications for spending billions of dollars and depleting our own stockpiles of materiel. The Asia Times’s David Goldman recently posed the still unanswered questions about our reasons and intentions:

“In furtherance of what strategic interests has the United States acted in Ukraine? Is Ukraine’s NATO membership an American raison d’état? Did American strategists really believe that sanctions would shut down Russia’s economy? Did they imagine that the trading patterns of the Asian continent would shift to flow around the sanctions? Did they consider the materiel requirements of a long war that is exhausting American stockpiles? Did they consider what tripwires might elicit the use of nuclear weapons? Or did they sleepwalk into the conflict, as the European powers did in 1914?”