RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/24/the-breaking-the-moscow-beijing-axis-should-be-our-top-priority/

What a difference a half-century makes.

In February 1972, the People’s Republic of China hosted a history-making American delegation headed by President Richard M. Nixon, the Middle Kingdom’s most important Western visitor since Marco Polo.  In February 2022, no Western heads of state were in Beijing as the city played host to the Winter Olympics.

Those hoping the U.S.-led diplomatic boycott would cause red faces in Red China were disappointed when chief ChiCom Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin held their 38th meeting, just prior to the opening ceremonies.  From their conference emerged a 5,000-word joint declaration pledging cooperation on military and economic matters around the world and beyond (plans for a Sino-Russian moon base were announced last year).

Preventing such a combination, which Xi has described as something that “exceeds an alliance,” has been an objective of foreign policy strategists since the beginning of the last century. The failure to achieve that objective is nothing short of calamitous according to fin de siècle historian Henry Adams.

Having relieved Spain of the remnants of her empire via the Spanish-American War, America emerged as a new world power at the dawn of the 20th Century. At that time, Henry Adams emerged as a peak geopolitical prognosticator.  The scion of presidents and diplomats, Adams was famously perplexed by the modern world, but nonetheless possessed an unparalleled foresight into the future of foreign affairs.  He correctly predicted the decline of the British Empire, world war, the Bolshevik Revolution, NATO, and the atomic bomb.

But Adams’ most chilling insight came as his friend and neighbor Secretary of State John Hay was desperately trying to prevent Russian colonization of China through his “Open Door” policy of guaranteeing world powers equal access to Chinese markets.  Adams warned, “if Russia organizes China as an economical power, the little drama of history will end in the overthrow of our clumsy [W]estern civilization.”

https://asiatimes.com/2022/02/biden-throws-putin-into-xis-briar-patch/

This is the sort of move that gives “Pyrrhic victory” a bad name.

Washington has backed Putin into a corner, forcing him to take drastic measures to protect Russian minorities in Ukraine. That in turn forced Europe’s leaders into Washington’s camp, and within 48 hours, the European discourse has shifted away from economic cooperation with Russia to a possible boycott of Russian gas.

Putin will sell the gas to China, which last month proposed to construct a pipeline that would increase Russia’s deliveries tenfold. More importantly, Russia’s considerable scientific and engineering resources—by some measure on par with those of the United States—will be put in the service of China’s high-tech industry.

Washington maneuvered Russia into the crisis. Putin was willing to negotiate the status of the Russophone districts of Eastern Ukraine under the 2015 Minsk protocols brokered by the French and Germans, and signed by Ukraine, Germany, France, Russia and representatives of Luhansk and Donetsk, the rebel provinces.

The Ukraine government—with American instigation—abandoned an agreement that would have guaranteed the rights of the Russian minority within a sovereign Ukraine, as Steve Bryen reported in these pages on February 21.

Washington and London, Bryen emphasized, “think a Minsk-based deal would lead to the ‘Finlandization’ of Ukraine. Behind the scenes, it is quite clear, by omission and commission, that Washington has let the Ukrainians believe that Minsk II is off the table – although the US was never a party to Minsk II.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18238/biden-erdogan

In early January… in a bolder, less expected and potentially damaging geostrategic move that angered all four of Turkey’s Mediterranean rivals (Greece, Cyprus, Israel and Egypt), the Biden administration silently abandoned an eastern Mediterranean pipeline project (EastMed) that would carry Israeli gas through Cyprus to Europe.

“By undermining the project, the administration is undercutting three of our strongest allies in the region: Israel, Greece, and Cyprus, as well as the European Union’s hopes for energy independence and economic prosperity.” — Press release published on the congressional website of U.S. House Representative Gus Bilirakis, January 24, 2022.

“The Biden administration’s actions in this matter are particularly objectionable and hypocritical in light of its tacit approval of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline, which will only deepen Europe’s energy dependence on a volatile adversary.” — Rep. Gus Bilirakis, January 24, 2022,

A nosediving, cash-strapped economy, international isolation and plummeting popularity have put Erdoğan back on the defensive. Is Biden actually trying to destabilize this part of the world by provoking Erdoğan’s assertive aspirations just when they had been — possibly temporarily — buried?

In just over one year in office, U.S. President Joe Biden has swung from a pledge to oust Turkey’s Islamist autocrat, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to occasionally appease him, first behind doors, and now publicly.

Appearing to detest Erdoğan’s suffocating regime, increasingly Islamist governance and pro-Russian aspirations, Biden, a year before he became president, had described Erdoğan as an autocrat and promised to empower Turkey’s opposition parties through democratic processes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/no-one-fears-this-pathetic-old-geezer/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

Long before our president invited a Ukrainian invasion by suggesting a ‘minor incursion’ would be fine, Vladimir Putin had his number.

L ast June, ahead of a Russia–U.S. meeting, Time magazine conjured up a piece of embarrassing cover-art propaganda featuring Joe Biden’s aviator glasses reflecting Vladimir Putin. At last, a U.S. president had Putin in his sights! Finally we’d get back to putting Russia in its place.

“How Biden Plans to Get Tough on Putin During Their Geneva Summit,” promised a breathless story by Brian Bennett. A senior administration official suggested Biden, despite the “chaos” that President Trump had supposedly unleashed in the world, would use a combination of unity talk — everyone in Europe was on the same page about Russia, supposedly — and thinly veiled threats about retaliatory cyberattacks to show Putin who’s boss. “The whole goal is to have [Putin] come away saying, ‘The Americans are onto us and have us encircled,’” the official told Bennett. The writer editorialized that, “Biden is qualified to lead the approach. He’s spent decades in debates on U.S.-Russian relations as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.” Whew, then.

So how’d everything work out? Well, according to Bennett himself, in a follow-up piece that sounded a bit less like a fangirl transcribing a press release and more like someone who had actually observed Biden up close, noted that Putin seemed somehow to have been the one who came out on top. “The stagecraft,” Bennett noted glumly, “played to Putin’s personal vanity and his long-standing desire for Russia to be taken seriously as a major rival to the U.S. . . . Putin seemed to relish the platform in Geneva” because it placed the two countries on an equal footing. Oh, and the “White House said it did not expect any deliverables to come out of the meeting,” despite Biden doing a very Joe Biden version of laying down the law: He handed Putin a list of 16 kinds of cyberattacks that he considered to be off limits. Did that mean all other kinds were okay? Putin may have been forgiven if he went back to his dacha and spent the following 24 hours giggling.

“What ever [sic] happens in Ukraine we shouldn’t underestimate the fact the United States has retaken the adult chair in the world,” claimed former Clinton White House spokesman Joe Lockhart on Twitter yesterday. “Biden has restored American leadership so damaged by Trump. The world needs us and we have a President who can and does lead.” The grownups are back in charge? Granted that Trump behaved, and behaves, like a toddler. But is a woke undergraduate a grownup?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/bidens-putin-appeasement-has-been-years-in-the-making/

As VP, he mocked Russia hawks, treated Putin as a partner, and helped Russia join the WTO. Then came his presidency.

O ne small thing to be thankful for is that DJT is not in the White House as the Ukraine crisis unfolds. He’d side with Russia,” tweeted Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man. The headline on Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post column reads, “With Biden standing firm, Putin must wonder: Where’s Trump when I need him?” You could find similar sentiment from foreign-policy experts strewn across social media.

Surely, even Trump’s most passionate antagonists must be slightly curious as to why Putin didn’t move on eastern Ukraine after successfully installing the orange man as an alleged infiltrator in the White House. What better time could there have been for an invasion or annexation? Why now, and not then?

Then again, the notion that Biden has shown firmness or deftness on foreign policy is at odds with not only recent events — most notably the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan — but also 50 years of his history. On the issue of Putin, Biden has been relentlessly wrong.

In 2009, Biden went to Munich and delivered the Obama administration’s first major foreign-policy speech, arguing that it was “time to press the reset button” after eight years of purported American antagonism toward Russia. The speech was framed as a return to diplomatic normalcy after the tumultuous Bush years. “The leaders of Germany and France as well as the deputy prime minister of Russia — all countries that clashed with Mr Bush — were all in the audience for Mr Biden’s speech,” reported The Financial Times. It was Biden who then spearheaded the effort to reward Moscow by giving Russia access to the World Trade Organization: He told nominal Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that Russia’s access to the WTO was “the most important item on our agenda.” At the time, a Reuters headline announced, “Biden backs Russia WTO bid, praises Medvedev.”

https://bit.ly/3hdmQ57

In 1979, US policy toward Iran crashed against the rocks of reality, when Ayatollah Khomeini assumed power with the help of the US, but – contrary to US expectations – transformed Iran, “The American policeman of the Gulf” into the world’s leading epicenter of anti-US subversion, terrorism and drug-trafficking.

In 2015, US policy toward Iran crashed, again, against the rocks of reality, when – contrary to US expectations – Iran’s Ayatollahs did not harness the mega-billion-dollar bonanza, yielded by the nuclear accord (JCPOA), to upgrade domestic standards of living. Instead – as expected – this bonanza bolstered Iran’s preoccupation with anti-US subversion, terrorism and the development, manufacturing and proliferation of non-conventional military systems.

In 2022, once again, US policy-makers seem to stick to the 1979 and 2015  practice of basing their Iran policy on assessments of the future behavior of Iran’s Ayatollahs, rather than on the Ayatollahs’ rogue, systematic track record since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
US policy-makers base their policy on the hope that a mega-generous Western gesture could induce Iran’s Ayatollahs to depart from their 1979-2022 systematic and rogue anti-US policy, which is driven by a 1,400-year-old religious, cultural, historical and imperialistic vision.

The hope (rather than reality)-driven policy toward Iran has led to a display of eagerness to conclude an agreement with Iran’s Ayatollahs, downplaying the Ayatollahs’ non-good-faith conduct, and waving the military option and the regime-change option.

However, on February 1, 2022, Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, the powerful Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, delivered a strident warning to President Biden on the Senate floor: “Hope is not a national security strategy!”

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

In one of his first official acts, President Joe Biden canceled the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which had been expected to carry upwards of 830,000 barrels of Canadian crude per day to the U.S. In the same month, Biden banned new oil and gas leases on public lands. One year later, the U.S. pulled support from a pipeline designed to bring natural gas from Israel and Cyprus across Greece to Italy and Bulgaria. Amos Hochstein, now Biden’s senior advisor for energy security, was reported by The Jerusalem Post to have previously said he would be “extremely uncomfortable with the U.S. supporting” EastMed. “Why would we build a fossil fuel pipeline between the EastMed and Europe when our entire policy is to support new technology…and new investments in going green and in going clean?”

Clean, green and more expensive, with security implications for European allies who will be increasingly reliant on unreliable Russian gas. But hey, it’s for the environment. Unless…

Hochstein was recently in Lebanon and Israel, trying to resolve a long-standing maritime border dispute to enable Lebanon to take part in the natural gas drilling and exploration revolution in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Yes, that would be the same Lebanon that is occupied by U.S.-designated terror organization and Iranian proxy Hezbollah, and which has built an enormous and increasingly powerful military force aimed expressly at Israel. Yes, that Lebanon.

In an interview with Lebanese media released by the U.S. State Department, Hochstein never mentions Hezbollah.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-weakness-chaos-us-world-liz-peek

How have so many things gone south so quickly? Is it fair to blame Joe Biden?

I believe it is.

Joe Biden ran for president as an enfeebled 78-year-old. There are plenty of vigorous and brilliant septuagenarians; Biden is not one of them.

Joe knew, his wife knew, our current White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain knew and the press must have known, that Biden was not up to the rigors of four years in the White House. And yet they pushed him forward, a candidate with few convictions and even fewer capabilities.

But here’s who also knew: China’s President Xi and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

The worlds’ despots saw what clear-eyed Americans saw: weakness. They saw a president whom they could bully, whose convictions were shallow. Now, in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is testing Joe Biden.

Biden assures us that Putin is about to invade its neighbor. Others speculate that Russia’s leader will simply annex Russian-leaning parts of Ukraine, and indeed it appears the Moscow is set to start that process imminently by declaring two regions as independent republics. In effect, Putin is grabbing what he wants, while we stand by and watch.