RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21119/trump-challenges

The real question, therefore, is what could Trump II do to restore America’s prestige across the globe and reassert itself as the indispensable power that it still is? The answer is: plenty.

In fact, Trump, even if he doesn’t do anything, will repair some of the damage that the past three administrations shaped by Barack Obama have done to US standing and credibility as a world power.

In those 12 years of Obama and Biden, US leaders went around the world to apologize for imaginary injustices done by Americans to various segments of mankind, mused about “leading from behind” and presented the United States as a room service that doesn’t even ask you to sign the bill let alone offer a tip.

Under the three Obama administrations, with Trump I as a brief interlude, the US saw Russia attack and occupy parts of Georgia and annex Crimea and eventually invade Ukraine, and the US did nothing.

Obama drew a red line against the use of chemical weapons to kill Syrian people, but when Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia, did so, went into purdah.

To divert attention from the Middle East, Obama conjured the “pivot to Asia” slogan, while letting China grab a bigger chunk of the world, including US markets, in the name of free trade.

Also remember that regardless of what experts or even Trump himself say, the 47th president is likely to be as unpredictable as the 45th one, a feature that helped him in foreign policy last time and may do so again.

What will Donald Trump’s foreign policy look like in his second term?

This is the question currently making the buzz in the commentariat around the world.

Western European pundits claim that Trump will abandon the Ukrainian lamb to the Russian wolf or, at least, force the European shepherd to foot the bill for keeping it half alive.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21120/trump-iran-regime-change

The October 7, 2023 attacks carried out against Israel by Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists…. was the direct result of Tehran’s ability to fund the terrorist movement to the tune of $100 million a year, an operation that would not have been possible without Biden’s lenient attitude towards the ayatollahs.

Trump may come to see as well that, unfortunately, due to the deep-seated commitment of Iran’s regime in exporting its brand of Islam, as enshrined in its constitution, there can be no real long-term peace in the Middle East without regime change, especially if Iran has nuclear weapons — not to mention the global arms race that would follow such an event.

Not only would many of Iran’s neighbours be relieved, but its captive citizens could then be free to choose leaders better aligned with their aspirations. A liberated Iran might even join the Abraham Accords….

Now that Donald Trump has secured his remarkable victory in the US presidential election, supporting regime change in Iran could soon emerge as one of his new administration’s top priorities after he takes office in January.

Trump’s no-nonsense approach to confronting the ayatollahs’ malign influence in the region was one of the defining characteristics during his first term in the White House.

One of his more laudable foreign policy initiatives was to withdraw from the flawed nuclear deal with Iran agreed by former President Barack Obama in 2015.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21036/biden-hollow-warnings-to-china

The world’s two most dangerous states, Xi Jinping’s People’s Republic of China and Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation, have been growing closer in part, it seems, because they see there is no cost to ignoring the warnings of the Biden administration.

“Mr. Biden can either enforce his red line through sanctions or other means, or he can signal a collapse of American resolve by applying merely symbolic penalties. Beijing and its strategic partners in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, and Caracas would surely interpret half-hearted enforcement as a green light to deepen their campaign of global chaos. Mr. Xi sees a historic opportunity here to undermine the West.” – Matt Pottinger, wsj.com, April 30, 2024

Since then, the Biden administration has done little but impose meaningless sanctions on Chinese parties, such as the ones announced on October 17 on two companies.

The American inaction today brings to mind President Obama’s infamous red-line failure in Syria in 2013. We should not be surprised: Biden, then vice president, was Obama’s foreign policy advisor.

Britain and France [last century] issued a series of threatening words to Berlin. German leaders, from the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 to the eve of the invasion of Poland in late summer 1939, ignored them.

“Warnings were crafted in such a way so they could not be enforced and understood as not intended to be enforced.” — Arthur Waldron, retired Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, to Gatestone Institute, October 17, 2024.

China’s aggressive leader apparently believes he can with impunity do just about anything.

Hollow warnings lead to war.

“These are not dual-use capabilities,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told reporters in Brussels on September 10, describing China’s aid to Russia for use against Ukraine. “These are component pieces of a very substantial effort on the part of China to help sustain, build, and diversify various elements of the Russian war machine.”

The Beijing-Moscow cooperation, Campbell argued, is “not a tactical alliance.” It is, instead, “a fundamental alignment.” The Chinese-Russian hook-up was “orchestrated at the highest levels” in the two capitals, he said.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-harris-officials-leak-every-piece-of-info-they-have-about-israeli-attack-on-iran/

The Israelis informed the Biden-Harris admin about the Pagergeddon attack and the attack on Hezbollah’s leader once both were underway.

Why did they do that?

Here’s the latest in a series of anonymous leaked stories about Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran.

U.S. officials believe Israel has narrowed down what they will target in their response to Iran’s attack, which these officials describe as Iranian military and energy infrastructure.

There is no indication that Israel will target nuclear facilities or carry out assassinations, but U.S. officials stressed that the Israelis have not made a final decision about how and when to act.

The U.S. does not know when Israel’s response could come but officials said the Israeli military is poised and ready to go at any time once the order is given.

Israel has shared more information with the U.S. about the retaliation, the officials said, but they withheld many details out of operational security concerns.

What could those ‘concerns’ possibly be? Can’t imagine.

The same folks hounding Trump over classified documents leak constantly and they do so deliberately. The goal is to sabotage any Israeli operation much the way Obama’s people sabotaged a planned Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program by leaking the information.

Israeli operational security for taking out terrorists now involves hiding information from the White House.

We’ve become the weak link because the administration is stuffed with terrorist sympathizers.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/12/the-china-crisis/

It is largely axiomatic in the investment world that “to be early is to be wrong.” It doesn’t matter what you know, in other words, or how right you may be in understanding conditions or a developing situation. If the rest of the world isn’t ready to accept your case, if it isn’t “there” yet, then you won’t make any money. Indeed, you may lose quite a bit as you wait for everyone else to catch up to you.

Under this specific investment-driven definition, then, I have been wrong about China for the last 25 years or so—repeatedly and spectacularly wrong.

My boss and I once got ourselves into scalding hot water with our employer at a large financial services firm for questioning the sanity and propriety of the hottest investment deal on Wall Street, the initial public offering of PetroChina, the listed arm of the Chinese National Petroleum Company. I once left a job—at a different large financial service firm—in part because the firm’s investment bankers were censoring what we could and could not say about the Chinese government. For some reason, they found it difficult to cut deals with the Butchers of Beijing when their own firm’s analysts were back stateside, calling their partners “the Butchers of Beijing.” Funny how that works.

In a real, fundamental, political, and moral sense, I was right about China. I was right that the CCP cannot be trusted, that it is a brutal, neo-fascist regime. I was right that the defenders of the “global order” had it backward, that allowing China to play in the free world’s sandbox would not make its government freer and more amenable to classical economics and politics. All it would do would befoul the sandbox, make it grotesque and largely unusable. I was right that the CCP would lie, cheat, and steal to advance its agenda and achieve its goals. In short, I was right about everything—everything that is, except the short-term investment possibilities.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/11/how-the-biden-harris-admin-helped-iran-get-to-the-brink-of-a-nuclear-bomb/

Iran has made enormous progress in its nuclear weapons program during the Biden/Harris administration and reportedly can now enrich enough weapons-grade uranium to fuel nine nuclear bombs in one month. Although Iran may be nine months to a year away from having an operational nuclear weapon, recent attacks by Iran and Israel against each other’s territory have raised concerns that Iran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program could lead to a nuclear war in the Middle East.

Biden/Harris administration officials have tried to blame President Trump for the advances in Iran’s nuclear program because he withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the JCPOA. Democratic Governor Tim Walz made this claim during the October 1 vice presidential debate when he said, “There had been a coalition of nations that had boxed Iran’s nuclear program in . . . Donald Trump pulled that program and put nothing else in its place.”

This is absolutely false. The huge advances in Iran’s nuclear weapons program are the result of major flaws in the JCPOA and a series of terrible national security policy decisions, including repeated attempts to appease Iran, by the Obama and Biden administrations.

The first of these bad policy decisions was when the Obama administration conceded to Iran the “right” to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, such as nuclear medicine and nuclear reactor fuel.

This decision reversed the positions of prior Republican and Democratic administrations who believed Iran could not be trusted to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes because of covert Iranian efforts to establish a nuclear weapons program and because it is easy to reconfigure uranium centrifuges supposedly constructed for peaceful purposes to produce weapons-grade nuclear fuel.

Allowing Iran to enrich its own uranium for peaceful purposes has never made economic sense due to a glut of reactor fuel and nuclear medicine on the world market. Iran also does not need nuclear power due to its vast oil and natural gas reserves.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained this to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell in an October 2014 interview when he said Iran’s centrifuges “are only good for one thing: to make bomb-grade material.”

The JCPOA Was a Dangerous Fraud