RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/liz-truss-showed-joe-biden-united-nations/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_

British prime minister Liz Truss’s speech at the United Nations this week was spot-on. It was clear, concise and left no question that the UK would do everything in its power to lead in the defense of the West and its values.

President Biden’s address, by contrast, left you feeling overwhelmed and unsatisfied. That’s not to say he failed to speak about Ukraine — he spent a reasonable amount of time on it — but the substance just was not there. Truss made a clear commitment to continue to “sustain or increase… military support to Ukraine, for as long as it takes,” a concrete and actionable statement. Though Biden issued a ringing condemnation of Putin’s war, he only made a vague pledge to “stand in solidarity against Russia’s aggression.”

Proposed US actions were non-existent: there was no promise to bolster defense spending or maintain or increase direct military aid to Ukraine. We were left to assume that, given his touting of American and allied aid to Ukraine, Biden was implying it would continue, but in the context of his speech, that did not seem sufficient. Putin needs to know that he will not get a break, that his threats are not going to change the West’s calculus. Now, as Russia is escalating, explicit statements of strength, unwavering resolve and determined action are essential.

The US is the greatest military and economic power on earth, while the UK is in the midst of a devastating energy crisis and persistent high inflation. Britain should not have to be leading the charge against Russia.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18789/us-strategic-minerals

While China has been relentlessly pursuing self-reliance when it comes to raw materials — especially strategic ones such as titanium, tungsten and cobalt, which are used in the defense industry — the US for the past several decades has been selling off huge chunks of the strategic minerals stockpile to the extent that the National Defense Stockpile is reportedly reaching insolvency.

By comparison, China, as of 2020, was the world’s third-largest exporter of titanium, while the US was the number one destination for the Chinese titanium exports.

It is China’s growing influence in Africa, especially through its Belt and Road Initiative, the global infrastructure and economic development project that the Chinese Communist Party launched in 2013, that has helped China achieve such near monopolies when it comes to precious resources and raw materials.

The rare earths dependency on China stems in part from the fact that extracting rare earth minerals is an extremely polluting process that China has been willing to undertake, while most other countries have not, including the US, which ironically prides itself on having extremely strict environmental regulations in place.

The US, according to Reuters, has only one rare earths mine and no capability to process rare earth minerals. If China were to stop exporting them to the US, the country would fast run out of the basic building blocks required to produce the military hardware that the US needs, not to mention all the other items where rare earth minerals are needed.

At present, 40 out of Africa’s 54 countries participate in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

“Beijing has increased its control of African commodities through strategic direct investment in oil fields, mines, and production facilities, as well as through resource-backed loans that call for in-kind payments of commodities. This control threatens the ability of U.S. companies to access key supplies.” — U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 2020 Report to Congress.

“The PRC’s [Communist China’s] long-term goal,” the Pentagon wrote in 2020, “is to create an entirely self-reliant defense-industrial sector—fused with a strong civilian industrial and technology sector—that can meet the PLA’s needs for modern military capabilities.”

While China has been relentlessly pursuing self-reliance when it comes to raw materials — especially strategic ones such as titanium, tungsten and cobalt, which are used in the defense industry — the US for the past several decades has been selling off huge chunks of the strategic minerals stockpile to the extent that the National Defense Stockpile is reportedly reaching insolvency.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-missing-biden-foreign-policy/

What is Joe Biden’s foreign policy? It’s a trick question, because he has no actual policy, no plan, no careful set of chess moves a step ahead of his adversary. America suffers for it.

Biden’s foreign policy initially began and ended in Afghanistan with the disastrous withdrawal that left refugees strewn across the globe. There were years, then months, then weeks, then days to plan the NEO — the noncombatant evacuation order — and plenty of planning books for one sitting on desks in places like Seoul.

Still, the basic mistakes were made, including reducing the evacuation from several well-guarded sites (particularly American military bases being closed down) to a single semi-open civilian site at Kabul airport to allow the mobs and the enemy to concentrate, failing to negotiate an end strategy with the adversary (as was done in Vietnam and Iraq; basically let us evacuate peacefully and the place is yours a day later), having no system to prioritize boarding, and not pre-negotiating landing rights in neighbor countries that were to be used as staging areas.

Instead, Biden simply sat on his hands while troops on the ground did their best to ad hoc a strategy of evacuating those whom Darwin got over the fence line. Add in breaking the cardinal rule of all NEOs, leave no American citizens behind. Biden’s follow-up to the evacuation has been to pretend it never really happened and not talk about it. America’s reputation, meh.

That leaves the multidimensional mess in Ukraine, Biden’s other big foreign policy move. What is the Biden policy, what is it intended to achieve for US interests, and what is its end game? No one can really answer those questions beyond a childish “the other side goes home before we do.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18874/afghanistan-a-year

Other men… may prove even more harmful than Zawahiri. Before Zawahiri was chosen, for instance, Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian Special Forces officer, was appointed its provisional “caretaker.” His name is often cited as that of the probable next leader of al-Qaeda.

In addition to al-Qaeda’s having a new base in Afghanistan, the terrorist group also appears to have had, for years, a significant base in Iran.

By lifting many of these sanctions, the Biden administration has re-empowered the mullahs to finance the Islamic groups they have funded in the recent past. Al-Qaeda is clearly one of them.

After the death of Zawahiri, the Biden administration issued a press release blaming the Taliban for having allowed “Afghan territory to be used by terrorists to threaten the security of other countries”. Did members of the Biden administration actually expect anything else from the Taliban and the Haqqani network?

The Biden administration also blamed the Taliban for not respecting the Doha agreement , a peace deal between the US and the Taliban…. Did the Biden administration honestly expect ruthless terrorists to honor the agreement without the US showing at least a little determination to use force if necessary?

Over the past twelve months, the Biden administration has sent hundreds of millions of dollars to Afghanistan, supposedly for humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people. How, could one not know, however, that most of the funds were embezzled by the Taliban and used to finance the Taliban regime and its terrorist activities?

The Biden administration almost never talks about Iran’s financing Islamic terrorism and never mentions that the Biden administration’s lifting sanctions on the regime has contributed to financing the very terrorist organizations that the US claims to be fighting.

US Special Representative for Iran Robert Malley continues to negotiate with the Iranian regime. Worse: Malley is not even the one doing the negotiating. Negotiating with Iran on behalf of America is — Russia! The Americans are not even allowed in the room.

Moreover, all this is taking place while the US is half-heartedly helping Ukraine to defend itself against a ruthless Russian scorched earth onslaught. Malley nonetheless persists in separating the Biden administration’s desire to sign a new disastrous nuclear deal from the regime’s terrorist activities.

A year after the Biden administration abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban and the Haqqani network, Afghanistan is back to being a terrorist state. It hosts and supports al-Qaeda while giving it the opportunity to organize terrorist attacks from Afghan soil.

The US, for its part, not only ran from Afghanistan a year ago, it also ran from its last watchtower in Central-South Asia, and, by not even leaving a small residual force as strongly advised, abandoned countless people be slaughtered and enabled the country to be plunged into economic collapse, chaos and starvation.

Iran, on the other hand, has been significantly strengthened. It supports al-Qaeda and now serenely threatens the United States. On August 1, the mullahs sent a message saying that Iran is building nuclear warheads that could turn New York into “hellish ruins”.

July 31st 2022. Kabul, Afghanistan. Ayman al-Zawahiri is killed by an American drone strike. His death is described as a victory against Islamic terrorism and a success for the Biden administration. Zawahiri was an Islamic terrorist, head of al-Qaeda; his death was good news. America’s intelligence services showed they still could obtain precise intelligence in hostile countries and strike enemies of the United States wherever they are. Was the elimination of Zawahiri, however, really a victory against Islamic terrorism?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18875/iran-deal-war

In spite of the opposition from US allies in the Middle East as well as many US Congressman — both Democrats and Republicans — the Biden administration appeared determined to reward the ruling mullahs of Iran whose policies and ideology are anchored in “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”.

The Biden administration seemed to hope that if they could just “contain” Iran with a “deal” — put Iran “in a box” even for a few years — it would “free up” the US to deal other problems, such as China, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela and the Indo-Pacific, with one less distraction. If only.

“If the regime in Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, has proven anything, it’s that it can’t be trusted. The IRGC has directly, or through its proxies, including Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah (Houthis), Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and scores of Shiite militias in Iraq, killed hundreds of Americans, and attacked our bases and our allies in the region.” — Congressional bipartisan letter to US President Joe Biden, September 1, 2022.

It is estimated that the Biden administration’s new nuclear deal would have provided $1 trillion to the Iranian regime over a decade, making the IRGC and its militia and terror groups vastly wealthier and a far more savage threat to the national security of the Iranian people, the US, its allies, and American people everywhere.

It is also mind-boggling that the Biden administration was trusting Russia to be the sole country to oversee the compliance of the nuclear deal and to keep Iran’s highly enriched uranium — and able to return it to Iran if the mullahs requested it.

Fifty bipartisan US lawmakers had asked the Biden administration “not to permit Russia to be the recipient of Iran’s enriched uranium nor to have the right to conduct nuclear work with the Islamic Republic, including a $10 billion contract to expand Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. We should not let war criminal Vladimir Putin be the guarantor of the deal or the keeper of massive amounts of Iran’s enriched uranium.”

If the Biden administration believed that a deal with the Iranians would “free up” America to focus on China, and that the Middle East would just have sat quietly while Iran kept enriching uranium, they were living in a dreamworld. The Americans would instead have found themselves with hot wars on three fronts: Ukraine, China and the Middle East.

If the report is true, kudos to the Biden administration for a most wise decision.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18852/biden-administration-iran-nuclear-deal

The main beneficiaries of the increased revenues will most likely be the office of Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and more importantly the IRGC’s elite branch the Quds Force, which carries out extraterritorial operations to advance the revolutionary principles of the Islamic Republic abroad.

A considerable part of the economy and Iran’s financial systems are owned and controlled by the IRGC and the Office of the Supreme Leader…. This economic haven means that state and non-state actors, such as the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Shiite militias in Iraq and Bashar Assad’s Syria, will be the next major beneficiaries of Biden’s sanctions relief and new nuclear deal.

The Biden administration will more likely contribute to more tensions between Iran and other countries in the region, and lead to further regional insecurity, destabilization, humanitarian tragedies, and most likely a major war.

Biden’s new nuclear deal is the biggest gift that one could give to the world’s “top state sponsor of terrorism”: unlimited nuclear weapons, no inspections past present or future, the missiles to deliver them, enriched uranium to be held by Russia and returned to Iran or wherever they both decide, “$100 billion per year to spread terror around the globe” — in short, assured expansion of the “Revolution” not only throughout the Middle East but further, straight into America’s soft underbelly, Venezuela.

The Biden administration’s new nuclear deal with the ruling clerics will lift economic sanctions against the Iranian regime the moment the deal enters into effect.

At that moment, the Iranian regime will receive approximately $90 billion. The Biden administration will also instantly be lifting sanctions on the Iranian regime’s energy sector, which will also significantly boost the regime’s oil and gas revenues.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-tells-the-truth-about-inspections-ebrahim-raisi-nuclear-deal-biden-administration-11661799125?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Give Tehran credit for candor, of a sort. The Biden Administration and European allies are desperate to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran to replace the 2015 Obama-era pact, and the Iranian regime is being honest that it won’t abide by whatever inspections come with that deal.

The latest evidence comes from a rare press conference held Monday by President Ebrahim Raisi. Speaking about the prospects for a new deal and a meeting with President Biden, the Iranian said, “Without settlement of safeguard issues, speaking about an agreement has no meaning.” By “safeguard issues,” he means the International Atomic Energy Agency’s attempts to investigate likely breaches of Iran’s nuclear commitments dating to the early 2000s.

The IAEA is following up on traces of man-made uranium found in 2019 and 2020 at three sites that had not been declared to inspectors, and it has suspended its investigation of a fourth site. Tehran has yet to say what became of the equipment used to refine the uranium, let alone where the uranium itself has gone. This appears to be a violation of Iran’s obligations under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which long predated the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Mr. Raisi wants the U.S. and Europe to lean on the IAEA to stop investigating Iran’s violations of a decades-old nuclear treaty in order to entice Tehran to sign a new, and weaker, antinuclear agreement. Oh, and Tehran expects the West to pay for the privilege by lifting economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic.