RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/29/what-now-ukraine/

It was supposed to be a clear-cut, unambiguous invasion. Vladimir Putin’s much larger, richer, and more bellicose Russia staged a shock-and-awe attack on a much smaller, poorer Ukraine. He intended to decapitate the government in Kyiv. Then he would annex the eastern half of the country, and quickly consolidate his easy wins in preparation to ratchet up pressure to force western Ukraine into the Russian Federation.

The rest is history. The Russian military proved ill-equipped and ill-supplied. It was poorly led, with a high percentage of low-morale, conscript troops. Russia had no viable strategic plan to capture, much less hold, the Ukrainian capital. Ukraine was Russia’s version of our Kabul—but tens of thousands of deaths added to the equation.

Russian strategists naïvely believed NATO would become paralyzed in mutual recriminations and fear and follow the usual German prompt of appeasement. In fact, NATO united precisely because of the dire worries over further Russian aggression, as the alliance pressured Germany to back off from its self-interested Russian romance.

Sanctions seldom have a good record of quickly stopping a war, and they have not so far in this instance, either.

But Russia’s naked use of force, its war crimes against civilians, and pathetic propaganda turned off most of the Western world and it, in turn, boycotted, sanctioned, and embargoed Moscow. These porous and slow-moving efforts nonetheless will eventually make it even more difficult for Russia to muster the economic and military wherewithal to sustain a stalled invasion.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/joe-biden-china-taiwan-gaffe-mistake-war

Joe Biden’s “gaffes” are a danger to Americans.

Once again, addressing a foreign audience without the benefit of his Teleprompter, President Biden wandered off-script, in this case promising that the U.S. would respond militarily if China were to invade Taiwan. Once again, the White House had to walk back his careless remarks.

It was just weeks ago that Biden made similarly reckless comments during a visit to Poland, when he appeared to call for the overthrow of Vladimir Putin, and suggested that U.S. GIs might soon enter Ukraine. 

In both cases, Biden gave enemies of the U.S. unparalleled propaganda opportunities; both Putin and President Xi can use video of the president’s remarks to justify heightened hostilities. This is not smart.

Casually dropping a military threat against China is not smart at any time. But especially now, as President Xi faces criticism for having mishandled the economy and COVID, he could grasp Biden’s injudicious promise like a life raft, using the implied threat as an excuse to ramp up military aggression, or even to invade Taiwan. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/biden-takes-blind-sheikhs-terror-group-terror-list-daniel-greenfield/

In 1993, the United States finally arrested Omar Abdel-Rahman, popularly known as the Blind Sheikh, the religious leader of the Egyptian Jihadist group Gamaat Islamiya after three years during which his followers bombed the World Trade Center and plotted to bomb the Statue of Liberty and a range of targets all across New York City.

The Biden administration has now announced that it’s taking Gamaat Islamiya off the terror list.

During the original Jihad in New York, an undercover informant described meetings to case potential targets in which a member of the terror cell told him, “Stand here, brother, let me take your picture with the Statue of Liberty because it will not exist anymore” and “Brother, let me take your picture with the World Trade Center because it will not be here anymore”.

“The Jews and Christians are the ones that are fighting every Muslim resurrection,” the imprisoned sheikh later urged, “Oh, Muslims everywhere! Cut the transportation of their countries, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land.”

Throughout the 90s, Gamaat Islamiya continued engaging in terrorist attacks. In 1997, the Islamic terrorist group carried out its ugliest atrocity in Luxor, Egypt, where European and Japanese terrorists were mutilated and disemboweled. Among the horrors, the marauders cut off the ears and noses of several of their victims. A note praising Islam was found inside one disemboweled body. Among the victims was 5-year-old Shaunnah Turner: a little British girl.

The massacre had been funded by Al Qaeda which was allied with Gamaat Islamiya.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-strange-help-for-havana-cuba-sanctions-russia-11652909478?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Whatever the humanitarian impulse behind the Biden Administration’s Monday announcement that it will lift some sanctions on Cuba, the timing couldn’t be worse. The dictatorship is under stress, and it remains Russia’s closest ally in the Western Hemisphere. Why would Team Biden take the pressure off Havana now?

Cuba’s regime may be in the most precarious state of its 63 years in power. The economy has collapsed, and hero worship of Fidel Castro is as dead as he is. The July 11 uprising last year, when tens of thousands went to the streets and shouted for freedom, exposed the contempt Cubans have for their government.

Thousands of peaceful protesters were rounded up last summer by paramilitary and secret police, and some 750 are still in jail. This week Havana declared a new law criminalizing basic liberties. Insulting a government official is now punishable with up to five years in prison. A Cuban who engages with an international aid group not authorized by the state is headed for years behind bars.

The Biden Administration’s new policy removes the cap on dollar remittances that Americans may send to Cuba, reopens air travel to cities across the island, and restores travel by so-called educational groups. The practical effect will be to supply the regime, which controls all commerce, with hard currency to keep its repression going.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18544/china-plan-destroy-america

China has been unabashed about making its intentions known. Already in 1999, two colonels in China’s People’s Liberation Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiansui, wrote, “Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America.” In it, the authors “suggest the significance of alternatives to direct military confrontation, including international policy, economic warfare, attacks on digital infrastructure and networks, and terrorism. Even a relatively insignificant state can incapacitate a far more powerful enemy by applying pressure to their economic and political systems.” Ideally, “one might not even know that one is the target.”

There seem to be so many policy decisions now that would appear to help America’s adversaries such as Russia and especially China, rather than what is best for America, that, on February 2, 2022, the Republican Leader of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy — despite a disagreement with former President Donald Trump and a subsequent “genuflection” by way of apology — after mentioning the current administration’s “self-created crises,” noted that “Almost every page,” of the Biden Administration’s 3000 page America Competes Act “has a provision that helps China but hurts America.” McCarthy cited, among other matters:

On page 1689, it provides a new, unlimited green card program for the Chinese Communist Party to exploit. It also allows research funds to freely flow to colleges and universities that host Confucius Institutes – which are essentially CCP propaganda centers that censor our campuses.

These policies would make our nation more vulnerable to Chinese espionage, which is already widespread.

In fact, the threat of Chinese spying in America is so widespread that the FBI has 2,000 active cases to counter it, and opens a new case every 12 hours. “

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/us-trade-deficit-communist-china-climbing-terence-p-jeffrey/

At the White House press briefing last Dec. 6, press secretary Jen Psaki made it clear that President Joe Biden wanted the People’s Republic of China to pay a price for its human rights abuses.

He would do so by declining to send any U.S. government officials to the Beijing Winter Olympics, which would be held in February.

“The Biden administration,” Psaki said, “will not send any diplomatic or official representation to the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games given the PRC’s ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses.”

“U.S. diplomatic or official representation would treat these games as business as usual in the face of the PRC’s egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang,” she said. “And we simply can’t do that.”

But business as usual with the PRC did continue in the business arena, if not the Olympic one.

In fact, in the days leading up to and through the Beijing Olympics, U.S. imports from China increased.

In January 2021, according to the Census Bureau, the United States imported $39,111,200,000 in goods from the PRC, while exporting only $12,860,900,000. The result was a bilateral monthly trade deficit of $26,250,200,000.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18540/biden-attempts-iran-deal

Mr Biden’s hopes of pressing ahead with the nuclear talks suffered a significant setback the other week when a bipartisan super-majority of US Senators voted to endorse a Republican-led measure insisting that any future agreement with Tehran must address Iran’s support for terrorism in the region, and that Washington should not lift sanctions against the IRGC. Tehran is unlikely to concede to either measure.

Iran’s refusal to clarify the true extent of its undeclared nuclear activities is entirely consistent with the uncooperative stance it has adopted in its dealing with the IAEA over many years.

In an indication of how desperate the Europeans are to revive the deal, Mr Borrell said the EU was giving serious consideration to the ludicrous proposition whereby the terrorist designation against the IRGC was lifted, but kept in place on other parts of the organisation, which has several arms across the security apparatus and a sprawling business empire.

The EU initiative is not dissimilar to other hare-brained options being considered by the Biden White House, with analysts recommending that one compromise option for the US is to lift the terrorist designation against the IRGC while keeping it on the Quds Force, the unit responsible for the IRGC’s foreign operations and which arms and backs militant groups throughout the Middle East.

The lengths to which some naive politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are prepared to go to revive the nuclear deal is nothing less than shameful, especially at a time when the world is struggling to deal with another tyrannical regime following Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Hopefully, the more Iran refuses to cooperate with international bodies such as the IAEA, the more it will become clear that any hopes of securing a new deal with Tehran would not only upend the region but the president’s legacy as well.

The utter futility of the Biden administration’s obsession with reviving the Iran nuclear deal has been laid bare by the latest damning assessment by the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-doctrine-of-american-unexceptionalism?token=

Russian leader Vladimir Putin was supposed to have used his Victory Day speech yesterday to reveal his intentions regarding the Ukraine war. Russia watchers expected him to define his aims, signaling a prolonged conflict or, possibly, a path to peace. As it turned out, Putin did neither. His war against Ukraine drags on.

But although this week failed to clarify the future of the war in Europe, there is still a small chance that it will offer us some clarity on another front: Iran’s ongoing efforts to build a nuclear arsenal. Enrique Mora, the European Union’s Iran nuclear talks coordinator, is visiting Tehran today, May 10, seeking to break the deadlock in the negotiations between Iran and the United States. His mission might teach us whether Tehran has decided to cut a deal with President Biden. Chances are, however, that we will end the week as much in the dark about Tehran’s intentions as we are about Putin’s.

To help us understand why, I turn to Michael Doran, the author of today’s essay. Doran sees a connection between the way the Biden administration has approached both the Ukraine war and the conflict with Iran. Namely: in both cases the White House has profoundly weakened America’s diplomatic hand by shying away from traditional deterrence.

Doran has never gone along with the crowd. He first came on my radar in 2005, after what we would now call “woke” professors mobilized against his bid for tenure at Princeton. I liked him immediately.

He has a knack for writing topical articles that age well. His 2002 Foreign Affairs article on Osama bin Laden, “Somebody Else’s Civil War,” remains one of the best things written on al-Qaeda and radical Islam. When his 2015 piece, “Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy,” first came out, Doran’s view about Obama’s eagerness to please Iran was controversial. It’s now common wisdom. And last year, when Biden took office, he co-authored a piece in Tablet Magazine, “The Realignment,” which predicted that President Biden would zealously follow Obama’s Middle East playbook.

Today’s essay tries to make sense of this administration’s baffling foreign policy strategy, which seems to offer succor toward our enemies, like Iran and China, while isolating allies in the Gulf and Israel. As Doran explains, this is not borne out of incompetence, but out of a deeply held ideology about the trajectory of America and the West. — BW