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FOREIGN POLICY

Tehran Seeks a ‘Better Deal’ By Shoshana Bryen

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/tehran_seeks_a_better_deal_.html

“Iran is prepared to reach a ‘good agreement’ quickly, with the goal of protecting the Iranian people’s rights and interests,” the Iranian foreign minister announced as Ali Bagheri Kani, the country’s chief negotiator, was arriving in Vienna for another round of nuclear negotiations. Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper posits that the Islamic Republic is coming to Vienna to reap economic and political benefits for its people.

Go with it for a moment. Accept that Tehran only wants to take care of its people and seeks a better deal than the one that imposed sanctions, limitations, and inspections.

But be careful.

Western media and politicians like to date Iranian cheating from the Trump administration pullout of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But Iran cheated on the terms of negotiations with both the IAEA and the P5+1 before, during and after the deal. No less an authority than President Barack Obama said after cheating on agreements with the IAEA over the Fordow site was exposed in 2009, “As the international community knows, this is not the first time that Iran has concealed information about its nuclear program.”

The JCPOA was intended to halt all enrichment at Fordow and make it an R&D facility. Now, Iran has acknowledged not only continuing enrichment, but at higher levels with advanced centrifuges barred by the JCPOA.

Foiling a Chinese Military Operation in the United Arab Emirates The Middle East becomes a battleground for U.S.-Chinese competition. Michael Ledeen

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/china-michael-ledeen/

China has long held a distinct advantage in the field of competitive intelligence, with its enormous edge in population.  This enables the People’s Republic to penetrate anywhere with a substantial ethnic Chinese population bloc with consummate ease, either by offering substantial amounts of money to potential allies or threatening to crack down on reluctant collaborators.

The Chinese have an ancient drive toward ethnic unity, and they do not accept the division of their people into tribes or clans. The current dictator, Xi, regards this unity in racial terms.  He believes that all Chinese share common characteristics, wherever they are born or raised.  Hence Xi believes that all Chinamen owe obeisance to the rule of China itself.  

It was no great surprise, then, when the United States discovered China at the heart of an espionage ring in the United Arab Emirates. The U.A.E. is one of the closest United States allies in the Middle East and has long manufactured American weapons and ammunition parts, but until recently there were only suspicions, not facts, to support the suspicions.  So far as Washington could tell, the U.A.E. was unaware of the military content of the Chinese project. So far as Washington could tell, the U.A.E. was unaware of the suspicions.  As the Wall Street Journal put the matter recently, the Middle East increasingly appears to be a primary ground for U.S.-Chinese competition.

The Chinese effort to penetrate the U.A.E. began like many of its previous espionage ventures, with considerable investment.  They apparently hoped to expand their outreach into directly manufacturing American equipment.  But their plot was discovered by American counter-espionage in time to prevent its fulfillment, and the plot was foiled.

Biden’s Two-Faced Agenda on Turkey by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17987/biden-agenda-turkey

Since the summer, everything on the Washington-Ankara axis seems to have gone wrong.

Is Biden the champion of human rights and universal democratic values that he claims he is? Or is he an unpleasant cheat with a disappointing fake democratic agenda?

U.S. President Joe Biden’s increasingly hypocritical policy on NATO’s increasingly difficult ally, Turkey, is badly zig-zagging between the U.S. leader’s self-declared advocacy for universal democratic values and Biden’s secret agenda, which he prefers dishonestly to hide: appeasing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan behind closed doors and condemning Turkey’s democratic deficit in public. In less than two years Biden has swung from a pledge to oust Turkey’s autocratic leader to appeasing him behind closed doors.

In a December 2019 interview, then-presidential candidate Biden said that Erdoğan should be ousted from power through a democratic process and that support for the opposition was crucial. Turkey’s human rights record has gone downhill from there. The Council of Europe has said that if Turkish courts keep ignoring rulings from the European Court of Human Rights, it would start infringement proceedings against Turkey at the end of November.

All the same, on October 31, Biden and Erdoğan apparently had a 70-minute meeting in a “very positive atmosphere” on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Rome. They reportedly agreed to form a joint mechanism to improve ties. “During the meeting,” an Erdoğan aide told this author, “Biden’s lecture on human rights did not exceed two minutes.” It seems that a U.S. delegation will soon arrive in Ankara to work on that joint mechanism.

The sleepwalkers in the South China Sea David P. Goldman

https://www.weltwoche.ch/amp/2021-47/weltwoche-international/wi-taiwan-die-weltwoche-ausgabe-47-2021.html

Taiwan’s integration into the mainland is a raison d’état for the Chinese regime. The ghosts of 1914 haunt the Pacific.

With just 24 million people, Taiwan is smaller than several Chinese cities. It has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates—much lower than mainland China. Its population under the age of 60 will fall by half during the next 40 years, according to UN projections, and every 100 workers will support 85 pensioners. That is unsustainable. Migration from the mainland is inevitable, and with it the eventual reintegration of Taiwan into the People’s Republic of China—unless the US and China go to war over the island.

Taiwan might be the Sarajevo of the 21st century. In some ways the comparison seems absurd. Serbia’s rapidly population growth directed its land hunger towards neighboring Serbia, while Russia incited Serbia against the Dual Monarchy in its long rivalry with the German cultural sphere. Taiwan by contrast has a dwindling population and a shared culture with the Mainland. A million Taiwanese work in the mainland and Taiwanese companies have invested some $60 billion in mainland industries.

Nonetheless former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has compared the sharpening of US-Chinese rivalry to the months prior to August 1914, and Admiral James Stavridis, the former head of the US Pacific Command, earlier this year published a novel depicting a US-Chinese nuclear exchange after naval battles in which China sinks a US aircraft carrier. The US and China “will likely find themselves in a full-blown, Cold War-like status in the near future…could this lead the two nations to a hot war? Even a nuclear exchange? Unfortunately, the answer is yes,” Stavridis wrote March 9 in Time Magazine.

The danger lies in a deep asymmetry of perceived interests.

Don’t Let China Overshadow the Russia Threat BY Lawrence J. Haas

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/dont-let-china-overshadow-russia-threat-196596

Even at this extremely polarized time in Washington, a bipartisan consensus continues to grow that China now represents the biggest threat to the United States.

President Joe Biden is implementing a “pivot to Asia” that President Barack Obama first enunciated, inking a new U.S. alliance with Britain and Australia that will help the latter deploy nuclear-powered submarines in the Pacific. Meanwhile, as Biden and China’s Xi Jinping prepared to chat this week, the House Armed Services Committee’s top Republican, Mike Rogers, called China’s Communist Party “the greatest threat to our nation today.”

Currently, however, some of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints emanate not from China but from Russia. They remind us that—while we must address China’s multifaceted efforts to supplant America as the world’s leading power—we also need to retain our focus on Russia’s machinations under the leadership of its strongman president, Vladimir Putin.

Putin has sent nearly one hundred thousand Russian troops to its border with Ukraine, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, setting off alarm bells in Washington and Europe that he’s planning to invade.

The alarm bells are particularly loud for at least two reasons. First, Russia has attacked Ukraine before, most prominently in 2014 when it annexed the Crimean Peninsula, triggering sanctions against Russia by the United States, European Union (EU), other countries, and international organizations.

Second, Russia’s present troop surge dwarfs its surge to the border of last spring, which also alarmed Washington and Europe. Putin later sent some of those troops back to their bases, easing concerns at that time, but Washington is now worried that—in the words of Congressman Mike Turner, a Republican on the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees—“Russia has different intentions this time.”

Group Biden Removed From Terror List Storms U.S. Embassy in Yemen, Takes Hostages The high cost of Biden’s appeasement policy. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/group-biden-removed-terror-list-storms-us-embassy-robert-spencer/

Isn’t great that America is back and the adults are back in charge? America is back, all right: all the way back to 1979, the last time we had a president so weak that enemies of the United States stormed one of our embassies and took hostages. On Thursday, the Yemeni media outlet Al-Masdar Online reported that Houthi jihadis in Yemen, which are backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, stormed our embassy in Sana’a, seizing “large quantities of equipment and materials.” Just days before that, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), they “kidnapped three Yemeni nationals affiliated with the U.S. Embassy.” Biden’s team promised America would be back, but didn’t say anything about Jimmy Carter coming around again as well.

A State Department spokesman confirmed the Yemeni report, saying: “The United States has been unceasing in its diplomatic efforts to secure their release. The majority of the detained have been released, but the Houthis continue to detain additional Yemeni employees of the embassy.” They are being “detained without explanation and we call for their immediate release.” The U.S., the spokesman continued, is “concerned about the breach of the compound” and is calling “on the Houthis to immediately vacate it and return all seized property.”

Yeah, I’ll bet the Houthis are shaking with fear now. Because Biden’s handlers are really going all out on this one: deploying the Navy? Sending in the Marines? Immediately imposing crippling sanctions? Come on, man! The Biden team, said the State wonk, “will continue its diplomatic efforts to secure the release of our staff and the vacating of our compound, including through our international partners.” That’ll show ‘em.

Iran – the anti-US ripple effect Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/3wQd3ZO

The ripple effect theory

An underlying assumption behind any US agreement with Iran’s Ayatollahs is that the Ayatollahs would utilize the resulting financial and diplomatic bonanza for butter rather than guns.

Moreover, it is assumed that Iran’s Ayatollahs are amenable to good-faith negotiation and peaceful-coexistence.  

These assumptions have been quashed by the systematic, rogue, non-compliant and anti-US track record of the Ayatollahs since their violent ascension to power in 1978/79, and especially by their use of the $150bn bonanza showered upon them by the 2015 JCPOA (nuclear accord): intensified regional and global subversion, terrorism, wars, drug trafficking, and the development, manufacturing and proliferation of ballistic technologies.

In fact, the Ayatollahs’ Constitution requires “the uninterrupted process of the revolution of Islam.”

Furthermore, the assumption that the threats posed by the rogue regime in Teheran is limited to the Persian Gulf and the larger Middle East ignores the ripple effect reality.
Thus, just as a single pebble thrown into a puddle creates a series of ripples throughout the puddle, the eruption of a single local conflict in the Middle East – especially when driven by a 1,400-year-old fanatic, imperialistic, Islamic vision – triggers a series of violent ripples throughout the global puddle. Moreover, a limited-size wave of violence, driven by a megalomaniacal vision – which is accommodated and negotiated rather than crushed – is bound to spark a series of violent waves, evolving into a mega-size lethal wave, which may sweep many regions of the world.

The Iran-driven ripple effects are well-documented in the Persian Gulf, Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin and North America. Ignoring the Iranian ripple effects is bound to undermine the US homeland and national security.

Peace-processing Like it’s 1993 Note to Dennis Ross: The world has changed since the signing of the Oslo Accords. Shoshana Bryen

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

In a meeting in May with then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined the Biden administration priority “to continue to rebuild our relationship with the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority.” Now, after announcing it wants to open a U.S. consulate in Jerusalem for the Palestinians, come reports that the administration is working on a plan for a Palestinian “unity government” of Hamas and Fatah to negotiate the “two-state solution” with Israel.

Veteran “peace processor” Dennis Ross wrote the long rationale, including his belief that Israel has to bow in the direction of the anti-Israel progressive “Squad” and “woke” on Capitol Hill:

“Israel cannot ignore the Palestinian issue for its own reasons—the Palestinians aren’t going anywhere. But with an evolving political landscape in the U.S., Israel needs to show it is not deepening occupation and is not acting in a way that makes a two-state outcome impossible, even as an option. Drifting toward a one-state outcome in which Palestinians will demand one person, one vote is certain to extend the influence of progressives far beyond where it stands today … . Israel must also deal with the reality that how it approaches the Palestinians will affect how it is seen in the U.S.”  Dennis Ross

Ross also notes that the Palestinians are “divided and show neither the inclination nor capability to adjust any of their positions.” He doesn’t elaborate, and that is his mistake. Hamas and Fatah have been fighting a bloody civil war since 2007—Hamas’s rocket war in May was aimed as much as establishing itself as the more powerful Palestinian faction as it was at Israel. Constructive engagement between Hamas and Fatah is a fantasy.

Biden administration letting America’s nuclear superiority slip through our fingers By Francis P. Sempa

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/biden_administration_letting_americas_nuclear_superiority_slip_through_our_fingers.html

The Pentagon’s annual report on China’s military included a section on the PLA’s nuclear buildup.  The report states that the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) “is developing new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that will significantly improve its nuclear-capable missile forces.”  Nuclear warhead production has increased.  At least three new ICBM silo fields are being constructed, “which will cumulatively contain hundreds of new ICBM silos.”  The PLARF’s road-mobile DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBMs) force is growing.

China plans to “modernize, diversify, and expand its nuclear forces,” including land, sea, and air-based platforms (the triad), according to the report.  The Pentagon estimates that by 2027, the PLARF will have at least 700 deliverable nuclear warheads and at least 1,000 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2030.  China’s ICBM force consists of CSS-10 Mod 2 missiles with a range of 11,200 kilometers, DF-41 missiles that can strike targets 12,000 kilometers away, and CSS-4 Mod 2 and Mod 3 missiles with a maximum range of 13,000 kilometers.  With these three missile types, China can deliver nuclear warheads to the entire continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii.  Some of these missiles have MIRV capability, meaning they can deliver multiple warheads to multiple targets.

China’s nuclear weapons expansion has been characterized by the head of U.S. Strategic Command as “breathtaking,” a “strategic breakout” designed to give China a “coercive capability” to deter the U.S. from defending its allies against Chinese aggression.  Meanwhile, Russia is engaged in its own nuclear buildup, and it may eventually outnumber the U.S. in warheads by ten to one.  And China and Russia have gradually become strategic allies as both seek to undermine America’s role as the organizer of the liberal world order.

China claims Biden denounced ‘Taiwan independence,’ but warns US is ‘playing with fire’ Interpretation differences on one-China policy could mean more trouble in South China Sea :Caitlin McFall

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/china-biden-denounced-taiwan-independence-warns-us-playing-fire

China claimed Tuesday that President Biden denounced Taiwanese independence from the communist nation, but warned the U.S. is “playing with fire” in the South China Sea.

The new round of threats arose following an hours-long virtual summit between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping that marked the most extensive talks the world leaders have engaged in since Biden took office.

In a read-out following the talks, Chinese officials said Biden reiterated U.S. support for the one-China policy and claimed the U.S. president “does not support ‘Taiwan independence’.”

Taiwan and China have shared a complex history since the government of the Republic of China (ROC) relocated to the island in the western Pacific in 1949 amid conflict with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 

Taiwan identifies as a sovereign nation, but it is officially recognized by China, the United Nations and the U.S. as part of the one-China policy. 

China made it clear Tuesday that it has every intention of bringing the island under “complete reunification” with mainland China and threatened action if forces attempt to stop this.

“Should the separatist forces for ‘Taiwan independence’ provoke us, force our hands or even cross the red line, we will be compelled to take resolute measures,” the readout said. “On this question bearing on China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, there is no room for compromise.”

The U.S. and its western allies have backed the security of Taiwan and reports have shown the U.S. is working to shore up defenses in the Indo-Pacific as Chinese aggression in the region escalates. 

The White House did not contradict China’s claim that the U.S. continues to acknowledge the one-China principle, but the tone was far less placatory.