RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17488/biden-china-engagement

Call this another Biden debacle in the making.

China, it is evident, is now in no mood for substantive discussions, other than, of course, for the purpose of accepting America’s surrender.

American leaders, administration in and administration out, think it is important to meet face-to-face with adversaries, that they can somehow reason with them. That view is naïve, arrogant, and almost always incorrect. Chinese leaders of the communist variety often talk of “friendship” but are ruthlessly pragmatic, and often just ruthless. For them, personal feelings have no value in relations with other states.

Personal diplomacy with Beijing is counterproductive: Americans chase after the Chinese and the Chinese take advantage of this eagerness. The incessant pursuit of Beijing makes America, in the eyes of the Chinese regime, an easy mark.

If the reports about Dong are accurate, Biden should be now talking about imposing the most severe costs on China, not chasing after Xi Jinping to begin a conversation. America should, among other things, cut trade, end investment, prohibit technical cooperation, perhaps stop all travel altogether. Biden definitely should close China’s remaining four consulates in the U.S. and send virtually all Chinese embassy officials home. The President should announce it is the policy of the United States to end communist rule in China.

Chinese officials took Canadian hostages, known as “the two Michaels,” in December 2018 and have held them since because they knew Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would do nothing about it. The Chinese believed Trudeau would do nothing because he had spent his career desperately trying to court China. — Charles Burton of the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

So, President Biden, stop turning the other cheek and start performing your most fundamental constitutional duty: Protecting America from foreign enemies.

President Joe Biden, according to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, wants to begin a new round of “engaging” China.

Call this another Biden debacle in the making.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17470/biden-iran-policy-carrots

Secretary of State Antony Blinken… stated at his inauguration hearing that he had “deep concern about the designation” of the Houthis as a terrorist organization, in that “at least on its surface it seems to achieve nothing particularly practical in advancing the efforts against the Houthis and to bring them back to the negotiating table….” One wonders if the same thinking would apply to Al Qaeda or Islamic State.

In yet an additional form of appeasement, the Biden administration has been strenuously ignoring the Iranian regime’s aggression and destabilizing behavior….. now, [Iran] is sending a destroyer… and a support vessel… to Venezuela.

“If the boats [seven Iranian high-speed missile-attack craft] are delivered, they may form the core of an asymmetrical warfare force within Venezuela’s armed forces. This could be focused on disrupting shipping as a means of countering superior naval forces. Shipping routes to and from the Panama Canal are near the Venezuelan coast.” — H I Sutton and Sam LaGrone, USNI News, U.S. Naval Institute, June 1, 2021.

Tehran has not only been using Venezuela for military cooperation, but also, it seems, to advance its nuclear program…. Iran’s ruling mullahs, in fact, appear to have been using Venezuela as part of a larger agenda for increasing Iran’s influence and the presence of its proxies in Latin and North America.

Instead of confronting Iran’s predatory regime, the Biden administration, has been forging ahead with the failed 2015 “nuclear deal” — which permits Iran to become a legitimate, full-blown nuclear power in just a few years. The Biden administration is also turning a blind eye to the regime’s alarming and increasing human rights violations.

Since the Biden administration assumed office, it has been increasingly appeasing the Iranian regime, which in return, is further emboldening and empowering the mullahs.

The first appeasement came when the administration changed the previous administration’s policy of maximum pressure to a policy of appeasement toward the Iran’s proxy militia group, the Houthis. Even as evidence — including a report by the United Nations — showed that the Iranian regime is delivering sophisticated weapons to the Houthi militia group in Yemen, the Biden administration suspended some of the sanctions against terrorism that the previous administration imposed on the Houthis. The previous US administration had designated Iran’s proxies, the Houthis, a terrorist group.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/bidens-useless-summit-putin-joseph-klein/

President Joe Biden met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva on June 16th and came away empty-handed. They agreed to have their minions meet for future talks on cybersecurity and other contentious issues between the two countries.

“Earlier today, President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin finally met for their big summit in Geneva,” Jimmy Fallon said on Wednesday’s Tonight Show. “When Biden said ‘I’ll give you my email,’ Putin said, ‘I already have your email — and password and Venmo, don’t worry about it.'” That’s about as good a commentary as any on the insignificance of this summit.

At least prior to former President Donald Trump’s first summit with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator released three American hostages who had been held for months in North Korea’s inhuman labor camps. This time, Putin didn’t even release the two former U.S. Marines imprisoned in Russia, Trevor Reed and Paul Whelan, as a symbolic gesture to reciprocate for Biden’s waiver of the Nord Stream 2 sanctions. Russia’s release of the American hostages should have been Biden’s minimum condition for holding the summit in the first place.

All that Biden’s summit meeting with Putin accomplished was to give Putin a platform on the world stage where he appeared far more energetic and confident than Biden. It’s very troublesome — and embarrassing — when the leader of the free world takes fewer than half the questions from the press following the summit meeting than Putin took at his separate press conference. And Biden grew testy at his own solo press conference when the last questioner — from CNN, no less – asked Biden how his meeting with Putin could be characterized as constructive, given Putin’s past behavior and continued denials of any wrongdoing. “If you don’t understand that, you’re in the wrong business,” Biden barked at the reporter, for which he later apologized.

Putin and Biden had some nice words to say about the summit and about each other. However, Putin remained defiant in denying that any Russians were responsible for the cyberattacks launched against government and business sites in the United States. Thinking that the “best defense is a good offense,” Putin used his solo press conference to charge that the United States was responsible for far more malicious cyberattacks.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/16/at-nato-and-g7-biden-advances-an-america-last-foreign-policy/ 

President Biden’s first foreign trip wasn’t just an embarrassing disaster, it heralds the return of the disastrous foreign policy of the Obama-Biden era.

The most important takeaway from the recent G7 and NATO summits in Europe isn’t President Biden’s many embarrassing and unsettling mental lapses, long pauses, and rambling non sequiturs, but the clear message coming out of these meetings: the United States is returning to an Obama-Biden era “America Last” foreign policy that puts the interests of multilateral institutions and international partnerships above the interests of the American people.

That policy shift was perhaps best encapsulated in a quip from President Emmanuel Macron of France, who said of Biden, “It is great to have a U.S. president who’s part of the club and very willing to cooperate.” And of course it’s true. At the close of the G7 Summit, Biden boasted that America is “back at the table,” and described the summit as “extraordinarily collaborative.”

So what did this extraordinarily collaborative club manage to accomplish? One of the G7’s most pressing tasks heading into the summit was what, if anything, it would do about an aggressive and intransigent China. What the group settled on was doing almost nothing.

With each passing week it becomes more obvious that COVID-19 almost certainly originated in a lab in Wuhan, China. We can’t say for sure because the Chinese Communist Party has been blocking efforts to discover the origins of the virus ever since the outbreak began. But at this point, with zero evidence that the virus emerged naturally, the answer seems obvious enough.

Yet all the G7 could manage was a tepid call for a new World Health Organization-backed study on COVID’s origins, as if another investigation by the compromised WHO will yield something more. The G7 also cooked up a plan to dump $40 trillion into infrastructure (a bill likely to be footed largely by American taxpayers) for the developing world to compete with China’s Belt and Road initiative.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/president-joe-biden-platitudes-nato-summit/

President Joe Biden turned up almost three hours late to his NATO press conference tonight. He offered no apology, because, well, why should he? He then gave a short speech. It was adequate enough, albeit predictable and rigid — read as it was almost entirely from a teleprompter. It wouldn’t be Biden if he didn’t open with a gaffe, though. He managed to stumble early by saying ‘we’re still averaging in the last seven days the loss of 300 deaths per day.’

In answer to a press question about Putin, he said ‘I’ll be happy to discuss with you when it’s over, not before, about what the discussion will entail’. That didn’t make much sense. He successfully quoted Benjamin Disraeli and said ‘the proof will be in the pudding’ without jumbling the words. But it was another flat and deeply uninspiring performance from a president who looks bored and sounds listless on the world stage. ‘America is back,’ he keeps saying. ‘Diplomacy is back.’ But it isn’t very impressive. The G7 summit last weekend came and went, as it always does, with lots of big talk and no great breakthroughs.

It cost the British government more than $5 million to expand the runway tarmac at Newquay airport in Cornwall so that Biden could land at last week’s G7 summit. Who are we to criticize such largesse — diplomacy is infrastructure, too. In these spending days of magic-money make-believe, what’s another few million here or there? Still, cynical people might wonder what — beyond local economy stimulation — people gained from Biden and the other world leaders’ hellaciously expensive trip to the Cornish seaside. The total bill for the 2013 G8 meeting in Northern Ireland came to around $127 million, but at least the then Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama, was able to give one or two of those pretty speeches he did so well.

There’s nothing pretty about a Joe Biden address. We all know that he has a speech-impediment. It is to his great credit that, as a young man, through hard work and grit, he turned himself into a half-decent speaker. At times in his career he has given powerful and moving addresses. But he’s not young any more — and his public performances are less and less convincing. Nastier right-wingers like to call his speeches ‘CAR CRASH’ as they share clips of the most cringe-inducing moments. But the most disheartening thing about Biden’s speeches is not that they are ‘disastrous’ — just that they are mediocre, sad and flat. He mumbles and fumbles and rambles; he umms and errs, he seems lost in his own mind. He is the president of platitudes, delivered badly and without conviction. He sounds bored and he makes awkward errors.