RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/10/america-needs-an-honest-debate-about-red-lines-in-defense-of-taiwan/

The greatest present challenge facing America and its allies is arguably a small democratic island off the coast of the biggest rising naval hegemon. Detached historians might see an amusing parallel from ancient Greek history, but history has rarely been kind to small islands caught in the middle of a great-power rivalry. The same argument has now reached Washington D.C., as China embarks on one of the fastest and largest naval build-ups in human history.

Charles Glaser writes for Foreign Affairs that China is geographically poised to take Taiwan if it so desires, yet defending Taiwan militarily is a fool’s errand — impossible to do without an uncomfortable, civilization-destroying cost. According to Glaser, the defense of Taiwan isn’t imperative to the balance of power in Asia, and unlike other allies — such as Japan and Australia — Taiwan is uncomfortably placed in a region where geography gives China an advantage.

That said, in a war the United States might be able to prevail, but the cost of that would be unbearable to generations who have no idea what a genuine great power war might look like. Therefore, Glaser argues that America shouldn’t tie its fate to Taiwan or promise to do something it cannot. Countering Glaser’s assessment in Foreign Policy, Blake Herzinger accuses Glaser of Chamberlain-esque appeasement, arguing that if the United States abandons Taiwan, all hope is lost.

Their debate frames the situation in simplistic Manichean terms, providing only two options: complete abandonment of Taiwan, or catastrophic war mounted in Taiwan’s defense. Yet such bifurcation is flawed, not least of which because it fails to mention a whole host of additional options, from deterrence by a vigorous arming of Taiwan, or by “bleeding” China by way of asymmetric escalation.

Yet the balance of power in place for the last three decades is, unfortunately, unlikely to hold. As scholarly literature suggests, the relative power difference between China and the United States has changed since the early 1990s. As such, any debate about Taiwan should start with these three questions.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/realignment-iran-bid

“Biden chose Iran, fracturing the U.S. alliance system and setting back the cause of peace. His choice also delivered a victory to China and Russia, who are working with Iran, each in its own way, toward America’s undoing. In a perverse effort to liberate itself from its allies, the United States is soiling its own nest.”

On Sunday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan phoned his Israeli counterpart and turned back the hands of time. According to the American readout of the conversation, Sullivan called “to express the United States’ serious concerns” about two things: the pending eviction, by court order, of a number of Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, and the weekend’s violent clashes on the Temple Mount between Israeli police and Palestinian rioters. The Biden administration, in other words, publicly asserted an American national interest in preventing the Sheikh Jarrah evictions, regardless of the dictates of Israeli law—just as Hamas was sending rockets and incendiary devices into Israel with the same message. This conscious effort to put “daylight” between the United States and Israel marked a clear return to the approach of President Barack Obama.

Sullivan’s call invites us to reopen an unresolved debate that began even before President Joe Biden took the oath of office. Is the new president forging his own path in the Middle East, or is he following in the footsteps of Obama? Until now, those who feared that his presidency might become the third term of Obama fixed their wary eyes on Robert Malley, the president’s choice as Iran envoy. When serving in the Obama White House, Malley helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, which sought accommodations with Tehran that came at the expense of America’s allies in the Middle East. In a revealing Foreign Affairs article, written in 2019, Malley expressed regret that Obama failed to arrive at more such accommodations. The direction of Obama’s policy was praiseworthy, Malley wrote, but his “moderation” was the enemy of his project. Being “a gradualist,” he presided over “an experiment that got suspended halfway through.”

Malley, the article leads one to assume, is now advising Biden to go all the way—and fast. But surely it is the president, not his Iran envoy, who determines the direction and pace of policy. Over the course of a career in Washington spanning nearly half a century, Biden has never cut a radical profile. Nor have Sullivan or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The presence of this pair at Biden’s side signaled to many that Malley would not drive Iran policy. Shortly after the election, a veteran Washington insider noted to a journalist that “Blinken and Sullivan are certainly from the more moderate wing of the party, and that is reassuring.”

At his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Blinken continued to reassure by expressing his intention to fix the defects of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the Iran nuclear deal is known. The following month, Foreign Policy reported that a split had opened up inside the government, with Sullivan and Blinken fulfilling the hopes placed on them. When Malley argued in favor of giving “inducements” to Iran to convince it to return quickly to the JCPOA, Sullivan and Blinken “dominated the discussion” by “toeing a harder line.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/bidens_secstate_brims_with_misplaced_optimism_on_china.html

On May 2, 2021, Sixty Minutes (CBS) interviewed U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken on the future of America’s competition with China.  Blinken expressed confidence because the Middle Kingdom “has an aging population,” whereas “we’re in a much better place to maximize … human potential than any country on Earth.”

However, the CIA Factbook reports a median age of 38.4 years for China’s 1.44 billion citizens (2020), but a slightly higher 38.5 for the 330 million Americans.  For the ca. 200 million “whites,” with a 2019 total fertility rate of 1.6 (children in a woman’s lifetime) against China’s 1.7, it is 44 years.  America’s white majority, thus, is aging faster than, for example, the Swiss (42.7) and hardly slower than Austrians (44.5) or Germans (45.7).

In terms of human capital development, these three Central European countries are well ahead of Blinken’s homeland.  In the 2018 PISA tests, published at the end of 2019, among 1,000 children (younger than 15), there is the following ranking for top achievers and failures: Switzerland (49/168), Germany (28/211), Austria (25/211), and the USA (15/271).  China, on the other hand, plays in a higher-skilled league, with 165 scholastic aces and only 24 failures.

It could be argued that only four Chinese provinces with a population of less than 200 million took part in PISA, and that Beijing conducted an unfair selection process.  But even if one only applies South Korea’s scores (69 at the top and 150 at the bottom) to China, there are more than 17 million of its 249 million children (in 2019) who will be able to perform exceptionally well as adults.  Among some 61 million American children, there are only 915,000 who reach this level, many of them hailing from East Asia.  With the odds almost 19:1 in favor of the People’s Republic, one could wish the U.S. had better informed advisers for its most senior politicians.

As for Europe, even if we add the finest pupils, who are under the aegis of Berlin (320,000), Vienna (32,000) and Bern (64,000), things hardly look better for the core economic regions of the Western world.  The 455,000 talented young students among 50 million South Koreans alone surpass those three.

Even among the best, there seem to be differences in quality between East Asia and Europe or North America.  South Korea demonstrates this in the strictly screened PCT patent applications of 2020, when it clearly outpaced Germany with 20,060 to 18,643.  In 1994, the balance of patent applications was still 4,294 to 190 in favor of the Federal Republic.  That curious higher cognitive intensity is confirmed by the 2019 SAT tests, in which 37 percent of Asians but only 10 percent of whites scored at the top proficiency level.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/zarif-kerry-bromance-saga-continues-joseph-klein/

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif evidently had no idea that Israel had launched 200 airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria until John Kerry, now President Biden’s climate czar, told him, according to Washington Free Beacon reporter Adam Kredo.  Kredo managed to obtain the audio file of Zarif’s leaked phone interview in which Kerry’s disclosure was revealed and had it independently translated.

“Kerry told me that Israel had launched 200 airstrikes against you [Iran],” Zarif is heard saying. “You didn’t know?” asked his interviewer. “No, no,” Zarif replied.

If this information had already been made public in the press, there would be no reason for Zarif to use what was supposed to be a confidential interview to cite Kerry as his source. In any case, whether or not Kerry was simply passing on information already reported in the press, it begs the question of what else Kerry might have shared with Zarif from intelligence sources that Zarif chose not to mention during his interview.

Kerry should be required to testify under oath to Congress about Zarif’s claim. If it turns out that Kerry was sharing any classified information with Zarif to which he had access before, during or after his term as Secretary of State, he should not only lose his government job and security clearance. He should face possible prosecution.

“These are very serious allegations and knowing the position that he holds in government and position that he did hold, yes, it should be investigated. Knowing if these are true, I think it should go beyond him just resigning,” said Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the House Minority Leader.

Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that “Israel remains America’s staunchest and most loyal ally in the Middle East, and the idea that America’s former top diplomat would leak sensitive information about covert military operations to the world’s largest state sponsor of terror — putting Israeli lives at risk — is massively alarming.” Rep. Zeldin added that Kerry should “immediately testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to address these serious allegations, and if Kerry did actively undermine Israel, he must resign from the Biden administration immediately and have his security clearance revoked​.”

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/american-foreign-policy/

The ongoing crisis in American culture has brought two seemingly unrelated trends to the forefront: advocacy of technocratic expertise aimed at solving global issues, and condemnation of America’s allegedly irredeemable racism. American diplomacy exemplifies these trends through the figures of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Both trends are founded in Puritanical moralism, according to which salvation is difficult if not impossible and “crisis” is a tool for accumulating power.

Though American foreign policy has always vacillated, its actual practice has managed at least the appearance of consistency. But in a period when American society as a whole is undergoing a psychodrama regarding race, class, history, climate, and “whiteness,” it is not surprising that diplomatic practitioners have been affected.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield are telling examples of both intellectual trends among American elites and the institution of American diplomacy. For both, there are extraordinary crises that must be addressed immediately by the global community. But the contrasts between Blinken’s level presentation of globally oriented technocratic “expertise” and Thomas-Greenfield’s full-bore anti-Americanism cannot be more profound. In neither case do American interests come first. Can they been reconciled or explained?

Antony Blinken’s pedigree as a certified internationalist (and fluent French speaker) need not be recapitulated. His return to the State Department was heralded as the return of American probity and leadership. What are his priorities and methods? His remarks to the Virtual Leaders Summit on Climate are indicative. “What the United States can do at home can make a significant contribution toward keeping the Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” he stated, without elaboration. “But of course, no country can overcome this existential threat alone.”

Elsewhere, Blinken has depicted human-induced climate change as a veritable Frankstein’s monster causing “[m]ore frequent and more intense storms; longer dry spells; bigger floods; more extreme heat and more extreme cold; faster sea level rise; more people displaced; more pollution; more asthma,” as well as “Higher health costs; less predictable seasons for farmers. And all of that will hit low-income, black and brown communities the hardest.” Almost as bad, “Russia is exploiting this change to try to exert control over new spaces. It is modernizing its bases in the Arctic and building new ones, including one just 300 miles from Alaska. China is increasing its presence in the Arctic, too.”

To address these unfolding horrors, America will put “climate crisis at the center of our foreign policy and national security, as President Biden instructed us to do in his first week in office. That means taking into account how every bilateral and multilateral engagement—every policy decision—will impact our goal of putting the world on a safer, more sustainable path.” The US will then “mobilize resources, institutional know-how, technical expertise from across our government, the private sector, NGOs, and research universities” and “emphasize assisting the countries being hit hardest by climate change,” notably by “leveraging instruments like the financing provided by the Export-Import Bank to incentivize renewable energy exports; the proposed expansion of tax credits for clean energy generation and storage in the President’s American Jobs Plan; and the Administration’s ongoing efforts to level the global playing field for American-made products and services.”