RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/biden-harris-foreign-misadventures-joseph-klein/

The Biden-Harris duo have embarked on their first foreign journeys as president and vice president of the United States. Vice President Kamala Harris’s two-day visit to Guatemala and Mexico to work on the “root causes” of the migration invasion into the United States was a complete disaster. She managed to garner sharp criticism of her performance from both sides of the aisle. President Joe Biden flew off to Europe to sign a new “Atlantic Charter” with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, attend both this year’s Group of 7 (G7) and NATO summit meetings, and meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva. Biden is demonstrating his eagerness to bury the America First priorities and be welcomed as a full-fledged member of the globalist “club.”

After Biden’s arrival in the United Kingdom and meeting with Prime Minister Johnson, the two leaders signed what they branded as “The New Atlantic Charter.”  It’s supposed to be an updating of the original Atlantic Charter signed 80 year ago by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which looked ahead at a world freed of “the Nazi tyranny.” The new charter steers clear of naming the leading tyrannies of today that threaten international peace and security – China and Russia. It mentioned terrorists only once, again declining to name the enemy – Islamist jihadists. The new charter declared that tackling the climate crisis, protecting biodiversity, and sustaining nature would be prioritized “in all our international action.”

FDR and Winston Churchill had valid reasons in the midst of World War II for laying out their broad vision of a future world freed of Nazi tyranny. The new Atlantic Charter is a publicity stunt meant to highlight Biden’s and Johnson’s commitment to a globalist philosophy.

During the G7 summit, Biden tried to enlist Western nations and Japan to counter China’s growing global influence. Biden wants to lavish developing nations with hundreds of billions of dollars in financing as an alternative to China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative. Spending boatloads of American taxpayers’ money is Biden’s way of solving every problem.

“Officials emerging from the session said there was a clear division of opinion about how to take on China,” the New York Times reported. Europe and Japan want to foster good relations with China for economic reasons. They are not on board with Biden’s professed confrontational approach to China, which Biden has yet to back up with strong concrete actions.

Biden made headway with his initiative for the G7 to back an agreement on a global minimum tax rate of at least 15 percent on multinational companies. But that may only end up hurting American businesses if other major countries outside of the G7, especially China and Russia, do not go along. Don’t hold your breath waiting for China to join in. “The days when global decisions were dictated by a small group of countries are long gone,” a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in London said in a statement.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/people/5183658-melanie-phillips

Israel isn’t the only country that’s having to cope with a US administration threatening to undermine its security.

President Joe Biden last week ordered a senior American diplomat to issue a severe formal rebuke to Britain for the way it is dealing with the European Union over Northern Ireland.

Accordingly, Yael Lempert, the acting head of the US mission to the United Kingdom, issued a diplomatic reprimand to Britain’s Brexit minister, Lord Frost, and delivered a veiled threat that America’s proposed trade deal with Britain depended upon Boris Johnson’s government acceding to Biden’s demands.

The noxiousness of this rebuke — more commonly issued to adversaries than to an ally— doesn’t just derive from America interfering in the policies of a sovereign country. It’s also because, just as with Israel, this interference is based on an ignorant and dangerously partisan view that, under the guise of advancing peace, is in fact a powerful incentive to further violence and aggression.

Lempert told Frost that Biden wanted the United Kingdom to settle its dispute with the EU even if that meant making “unpopular compromises.”

She suggested that in his robust negotiations with the EU, Frost was threatening to undermine the 1998 Northern Ireland “Good Friday” peace agreement.

The row centres on part of the Brexit deal with the EU known as the Northern Ireland Protocol, which resulted from the British government’s desperate attempt to untie a Gordian knot created by the Good Friday Agreement.

That agreement brought to an end years of terrorist violence between Northern Ireland’s majority Protestants and its Catholic minority, and against the British who had tried to keep the peace in this province of the United Kingdom.

Crucially, it involved an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/how-to-make-china-pay/

Engage Taiwan, boycott the 2022 Olympics, and impose a carbon tariff.

The debate over the origins of the coronavirus — did it come from a wet market in Wuhan or from the virology lab nearby — has exposed the bias of media and technology companies and the potential danger of so-called gain-of-function research. But it also has led to something of an intellectual cul-de-sac. Barring a high-level defection from the Chinese Communist Party, we are unlikely ever to learn the answer. And even if we did have conclusive evidence one way or another, we still would have to decide what to do about it. The real question isn’t whether the pandemic is China’s fault. It’s whether China will pay a price for the catastrophic damage it caused the world.

Wherever the virus came from, we know that the Chinese government lied about it for weeks. Dr. Ai Fen shared information about a novel coronavirus with her colleagues on December 30, 2019. The next day, as Lawrence Wright recounts in The Plague Year, China removed social-media posts that mentioned “unknown Wuhan pneumonia” or “Wuhan Seafood Market.” Dr. Li Wenliang, who warned the public that the virus could be transmitted from human to human, was arrested and forced to deliver a televised confession. He died of COVID-19 on February 6, 2020.

Beijing prevaricated for a month while the deadly pandemic spread. China did not allow the World Health Organization to visit Wuhan until January 20, 2020. The same day, one of China’s top doctors finally admitted the obvious: COVID-19 is a communicable disease. By the time the Communist leadership took action, it was too late. On January 21, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control confirmed the first case of coronavirus in America. China did not quarantine Wuhan until January 22. “By that time,” according to Wright, “nearly half the population of Wuhan had already left the city for Chinese New Year.”

The dishonesty and incompetence of the Chinese Communist Party turned a national crisis into a global one. A March 2020 study estimated that cases might have been reduced by anywhere from 66 percent to 95 percent if Chinese authorities had acted earlier. Why was Beijing slow to move? Because bureaucratic collectivist societies such as Communist China are especially prone to delays and coverups as underlings attempt to avoid punishment from above. The same powers of draconian coercion that China used to lock down its population inspired fear among the mid-level and regional officials who allowed the virus to leave China in the first place. The problem wasn’t scientific. It was political. And punishment is deserved.

What to do? Writing in the Washington Post, Mike Pompeo and Scooter Libby call on the “leading democracies” to “act together,” leveraging “their great economic power” to “persuade China to curb its dangerous viral research activities, cooperate with the investigation of the coronavirus’s origins, and, over time, pay some measure of the pandemic’s damages to other nations.” It’s a worthy strategy with a potentially fatal flaw: The other democracies might put economics ahead of accountability.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/558023-biden-tries-to-erase-trumps-america-first-on-world-stage

President Biden is seeking to erase former President Trump’s America First agenda from the international stage during his inaugural trip abroad for the Group of Seven (G-7) summit in England this week.

In words and deeds, Biden is sending the signal that America is back on the world stage and that it wants to work in partnership with Western allies on issues ranging from the rise of China and Russia to climate change and the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Biden’s taking a much less isolationist approach [that] will spur that good will and he needs to keep doing that,” said John Hudak, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution.

“This summit is the first big step in showing the world that America is back to the position it once held,” Hudak added.

Instead of demanding that other countries step up their defense spending and NATO commitments and warning that the United States is ready to go it alone, Biden’s first formal action of the trip was to announce an update to the Atlantic Charter with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The charter is a World War II-era document laying out shared commitments from the U.S. and United Kingdom, and the message was America Together, not America First.

“Our revitalized Atlantic Charter, building on the commitments and aspirations set out eighty years ago, affirms our ongoing commitment to sustaining our enduring values and defending them against new and old challenges,” the new joint document states. “We commit to working closely with all partners who share our democratic values and to encountering the efforts of those who seek to undermine our alliances and institutions.”

The new charter is a good example of the kind of change Biden wants to make from Trump, who in most ways is the opposite of his successor.