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FOREIGN POLICY

Iran Still Hiding Key Parts of its Nuclear Programme, US Trying Bribery Again by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17214/iran-hiding-nuclear-program

The latest evidence that Iran is continuing to conceal vital elements of its nuclear programme from the outside world suggest that, even if there is a resumption of negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear programme, the regime has little genuine interest in complying with the terms of any future deal.

In another provocative move, Iran’s conservative-dominated parliament has ordered the government to start limiting some inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN-sponsored body responsible for monitoring Iran’s nuclear activities.

The move by the Iranian parliament comes after the IAEA published a report revealing that last summer inspectors found uranium particles at two Iranian nuclear sites that Iran tried to block access to.

The Biden Administration has also apparently been trying to sidestep legally-required congressional approval to funnel more money to Iran and other dictatorships through a new International Monetary Fund programme, “special drawing rights” (SDRs). Through them, Iran would receive an additional $4.5 billion, usable in other currencies. According to the Wall Street Journal, which referred to the program as “Special Dollars for Dictators”, Iran’s leadership will most likely use these newfound billions to strengthen domestic repression, to intensify regional adventurism — Iran’s proxy Houthi rebels in Yemen have already targeted a “large Saudi oil field” — and to escalate their nuclear programme still further.

With the Biden administration seemingly keen to recommence negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear programme, fresh evidence is emerging that Iran’s regime is up to its old tricks by attempting to conceal key elements of the programme from UN inspectors.

Iran has a long and undistinguished history of seeking to conceal the existence of key elements of its nuclear programme dating back to 2002, when a group of Iranian dissidents first revealed the existence of the Natanz nuclear enrichment site.

Enrichment is a crucial process in producing weapons-grade nuclear material, and the fact that Iran managed to build the massive underground facility about 100 miles to the south of Tehran in secret was the first major evidence that the regime was developing nuclear weapons.

Since then there have been many similar instances of Iran seeking to conceal the existence of key facilities from the outside world, such as the Fordow facility which was constructed during the late 2000s under a mountain to protect it from attack.

China shows it too can play rough in the Middle East China is asserting its interests in Iran, Israel and elsewhere as the Biden administration bumbles in its first approaches to the region. David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler-david-p-goldman/

American influence is fragile in several key Eurasian nodal points and China has the capacity to hurt the United States in retaliation for American efforts to build an alliance to contain it.

China’s rhetoric has been harsh in recent weeks and it appears ready to back up the rhetoric with tough actions.

On Saturday (March 28), China and Iran formally signed a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” agreement that promises to chart the two sides’ economic, political and trade relations over the next 25 years, Iranian state media reported.

“The document can elevate bilateral ties to a new strategic level,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said in a televised interview. The agreement, which had been in the works since 2016 and comes while both sides face US sanctions, will boost private sector ties including through China’s Belt and Road Initiative, he said.

When the proposed deal first was floated in August 2020, I wrote, “The prospect of a deal with Iran is a move on a global game board in response to American efforts to hinder China’s breakout as a technological superpower.”

A significant Sino-Iranian investment deal had long been rumored, and it is probably not a coincidence that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrived in Tehran to sign it a week after the acrimonious exchange at the Anchorage ministerial meeting between the US and China.

China has sent a clear signal to the Biden administration that its plans for reviving the Iran nuclear deal as well as its ability to put economic pressure on Iran depend on China’s cooperation.

Iran’s China Deal Changes Game For Biden Team By Benny Avni

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/irans-china-deal-changes-the-game-for-biden-team/

Should the Mideast fear the recent signing of a $400 billion, 25-year “strategic partnership” pact between Communist China and the Iranian ayatollahs?

“If you analyze China’s policy, you’ll not see a threat to anyone,” Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyanskiy, told reporters today.

The rhetoric of Russia and China, the international scene’s dynamic duo, increasingly sounds in sync. Both claim to defend the national sovereignty of all countries and respect the rights of all regimes to conduct their national affairs.

But no threat?

Ask Manila about Chinese vessels in the Whitsun Reef. Dispatching a flotilla of what Beijing calls “fishing boats” to the Spratly Islands certainly does threaten the Philippines and signals that China is intent on taking over. Beijing has long considered the entire South China Sea as its private lake, scoffing at competing claims by several governments.

During the Obama era, America advised the Philippines to turn to the International Court of Justice, where territorial disputes between Manila and Beijing could be calmly arbitrated. In the event, the court ruled for the Philippines. China then refused to abide and argued the court lacks jurisdiction.

Or ask Japan about similar territorial disputes with Commnist China over islands Tokyo had long administered. Countries in the South China Sea and the North China Sea are frustrated as Beijing escalates military threats and forcefully seizes territory.

Even more threatening is the looming clash over Taiwan. Beijing has always claimed the democratic island as part of the Communist motherland. Now China’s People’s Liberation Army is upgrading preparations for invasion, and President Xi openly talks of forced “reunification.”

The Biden Administration is Determined to Undo Trump’s Most Important Achievement A disturbing glance at Biden’s boosting of Palestinian oppressive, jihadist institutions. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/biden-administration-determined-undo-trumps-most-hugh-fitzgerald/

The Biden Administration is determined to undo the most important achievement of the Trump administration, that is, its support for Israel’s rights under the Palestine Mandate and U.N. Resolution 242, and for the Abraham Accords, and its refusal to any longer tolerate the PPalestinian Authority’s Pay-For-Slay Program, or the antisemitism in its schoolbooks. “Internal Biden memo said to back 2-state solution along 1967 lines,” by Jacob Magid, Times of Israel, March 17, 2021:

…The US paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the PA’s creditors, such as the Israeli state utility companies from which the Palestinians purchase water and electricity. They paid for training for the PA’s security forces and numerous infrastructure projects.

What did the U.S. get for its hundreds of millions of dollars in annual aid to the PA? Did the PA agree to negotiate with Israel? No, it hasn’t done so for years. Did it cease its support for terrorism? Not at all. The PA continues to spend about $350 million each year for its “Pay-For-Slay” program. The Taylor Force Act prohibits any American aid from going to the PA as long as it continues to support the Pay-For-Slay program. How does the Biden Administration plan, in its insensate desire to again shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to the PA, to get around the Taylor Force Act?

Washington also gave hundreds of millions a year in funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency — known as UNRWA — which is in charge of administering the daily needs of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants across the Middle East.

The memo, which was passed along to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, highlights UNRWA in particular as one of the organizations the Biden administration plans to back in order to aid the Palestinians….

Victor Davis Hanson: China’s contempt for US – they seek global hegemony and this is how we’re helping them China’s defiant provocations are not just verbal

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/china-contempt-usglobal-hegemony-victor-davis-hanson

Two weeks ago in Anchorage, Alaska, Chinese diplomats dressed down Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Both seem stunned by the broadsides.  

Not since newly elected President John Kennedy was humiliated at the Vienna summit in June 1961 by USSR strongman Nikita Khrushchev have American diplomats been so roughly manhandled by a Communist government.   

China’s defiant provocations are not just verbal. Nor are they aimed only at our high officials. 

New York University students at a satellite campus in Shanghai were manhandled and jailed by Chinese authorities in two separate incidents earlier this month. Some U.S. diplomats in China were recently subjected to anal swab testing for COVID-19 – supposedly “in error.” 

These examples of humiliation and harassment could be multiplied. China has engaged in the insidious and systematic theft of U.S. patents and copyrights. It brazenly violates trade agreements, manipulates its currency, dumps products below cost on world markets, engages in cyberwarfare, expropriates Western technology, and stonewalls accurate information on the origins of COVID-19.  

If China gives out money, it believes it owns the recipient. In the last five years, New York University has received some $47 million in gifts from China. The U.S. Department of Education recently cited Stanford University for failing to report more than $64 million in donations from Chinese sources since 2010. It’s no surprise that China recently sent a visiting researcher to Stanford who turned out to be connected with the Chinese military.  

Hollywood claims that it is woke. But a recent study revealed that some directors had selected lighter-skinned actors, bowing to the preferences of Chinese movie-goers and the lucrative Chinese film market, slated to become the world’s largest in 2021.  

Biden Peddles Obama’s Sham Vision of the Middle East He continues a radical transformation of the Democrat Party’s views on Israel. by Shmuel Klatzkin

https://spectator.org/biden-israel-middle-east-obama/

In an article in Tablet in early March, Lee Smith showed how Barack Obama’s degrading of America’s alliance with Israel and his wooing of Iran were motivated essentially by a plan to transform the Democrat Party. To that end, foreign policy was subordinated. The party of Truman, the three Kennedy brothers, and Skip Jackson had consistently moved American policy towards a strong alliance with Israel out of a basic sympathy with its cause and with that of the Jewish people still suffering persecution around the world (think of Jackson’s powerful support of the cause of Soviet Jewry).

Truman’s choice to recognize immediately the newborn state of Israel was a decision that came from his deepest sense of right. He overrode not only his State Department functionaries, whom he dismissed as the “striped-pants boys,” but also the man he respected above all others in government — George Marshall.

Marshall was the architect of victory in World War II and the visionary savior of the freedom of western Europe after the war. His opposition to Jewish statehood was his anticipation that the fledgling Jewish state would not stand a chance against the combined forces of all the Arab states united against them. He foresaw the bloodbath and desolation that so many in the Arab world boasted would happen and did not want to see the Holocaust continued. He staked his career on this, for the best of reasons, saying to not follow his advice would lead to his resignation. Indeed it did, though Marshall waited to leave so as not to embarrass his boss or discredit the government of the country he served so well and so selflessly.

What was true for Truman became mainstream when, gradually, the magnitude of the evil of anti-Semitism was revealed in its utter horror as the Holocaust sank into civilization’s consciousness. It was not a question of left or right, but of basic moral sobriety and plain human decency, that the kind of ideology and government that thrives on such hatred must be opposed, whether it is Hitlerism, Stalinism, or Khomeinism.

This was firmly established in the power structure of the Democrat Party, where so many Jews felt at home. And, Smith points out, this is what Obama came to transform radically.

US must prepare for cold war with China By Lawrence J. Haas

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/545215-us-must-prepare-for-cold-war-with-china

The United States and China show growing signs of entering a long-term cold war, strikingly similar to the U.S.-Soviet cold war of decades past and demanding the same dogged determination that Washington displayed during that earlier conflict to protect its interests and defend its allies.

Like the U.S.-Soviet conflict, the Sino-American one is rooted in competition between alternative political and economic systems — one free and democratic, the other unfree and authoritarian — for influence around the world, with enormous implications for the well-being of billions of people.

Also like the U.S.-Soviet conflict, Washington will need a comprehensive strategy to “contain” Beijing’s expansionist impulses. While (hopefully) avoiding a military confrontation with Beijing, Washington will need to maintain an unchallenged military capacity to protect its presence in Asia and other regions as China seeks to dislodge or overshadow it, and to use public diplomacy effectively as the two nations compete for the loyalty of grassroots populations around the world.

The signs of long-term U.S.-Sino conflict are unmistakable, and similarities to the cold war of yesteryear are uncanny.

During the cold war, Soviet leaders boldly predicted an inevitable victory, as the United States presided over what they considered a decaying capitalist structure. Speaking to the United Nations in late 1960, for instance, Nikita Khrushchev mused that “socialism is replacing capitalism” across the developing world.

The CCP Is a Threat. Why Won’t the President Call It One? By Jimmy Quinn

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/the-ccp-is-a-threat-why-wont-the-president-call-it-one/

What recent speeches by Biden and Blinken say about the administration’s wrongheaded emphasis on cooperation with China.

Top Biden administration officials have largely kept their promises to vigorously compete with China. Building on the Trump administration’s China policies, they’ve pressed Beijing on its horrific human-rights abuses, bolstered U.S. support for Taiwan using the previous administration’s framework, and built out the Quad of Pacific democracies. In addition to that, the Biden team’s own focus on multilateral action has started to yield some results: This week, they announced sanctions on Chinese officials, coordinated with the U.K, the EU, and Canada, to punish CCP officials for their role in the Uyghur genocide.

But this flurry of activity has been joined, puzzlingly, with a deliberate effort to leave room for meetings such as last week’s rancorous U.S.-China summit in Alaska and President Biden’s decision to invite the CCP’s general secretary to a global climate summit.

To hear Biden appraise the challenge posed by the CCP is to listen to a meandering description of his recent phone conversation with its general secretary Xi Jinping, as he did yesterday. “I made it clear to him again what I’ve told him in person on several occasions: that we’re not looking for confrontation, although we know there will be steep, steep competition.”

No one wants a military conflict, but if calling out an authoritarian regime’s human-rights abuses and international bullying is anything, it is confrontation. In other words, the policies and statements of the president’s own administration belie a need to call the situation what it is, and not a sugarcoated version of the truth.

The problem is not that officials have backed down from speaking out on the CCP’s transgressions. On a trip to Tokyo earlier this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Beijing of using “coercion and aggression to systematically erode autonomy in Hong Kong, undercut democracy in Taiwan, abuse human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet, and assert maritime claims in the South China Sea” in violation of international law. If that doesn’t put a fine enough point on matters, Blinken has accused the Party of genocide in Xinjiang and referred to Taiwan as a “country” (a notable use of the term for a top U.S. official) as the mainland continues its airborne harassment of the world’s only Chinese democracy. Blinken and Biden both have defined this contest as a fundamental battle between democracy and authoritarianism in the 21st century.

Biden Sends $15 Million in COVID Aid to “Palestinians” Who Have Half Of US Fatality Rate Fri Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/03/biden-sends-15-million-covid-aid-palestinians-who-daniel-greenfield/

Last spring, Senate Democrats were obsessed with saving Hamas from the coronavirus.

Eight Senate Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, dispatched a four-page letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, demanding to know what America was doing about the coronavirus.

Not in America. In Gaza.

According to the Senate letter, “as of March 24, the first two cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in the Gaza Strip.”

That’s two cases. Two. The United States has over 200,000 as of now.

The letter quotes an article claiming that in Gaza, “health ministry officials” whined “that just one person infected with the deadly virus would end in ‘complete disaster’”

Fast forward to this year and some 500 Gazan residents in Hamas territory have died of the virus. That’s not exactly a major crisis.

So the Biden administration is directing $15 million in aid.

The United States said Thursday it is giving $15 million to vulnerable Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic, a sharp reversal from the Trump administration which cut off almost all aid to the Palestinians.

Thomas-Greenfield said the $15 million in aid is “consistent with our interests and our values, and it aligns with our efforts to stamp our the pandemic and food insecurity worldwide.”

Food insecurity? Because we’re also funding food aid programs. Food isn’t a bomb, but as a practical matter foreign aid is fungible and non-profits on the ground in areas controlled by terrorists tend to either use local contractors associated with the terrorist leadership or make payoffs to them.

US: The Urgency of Keeping a Credible Deterrence by Peter Huessy

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17205/credible-nuclear-deterrence

The current consensus position is pretty straightforward. Modernize the three aging elements of the land, sea, and air Triad — strategic bombers and related cruise missiles, land-based missiles, and submarines and related sea-launched ballistic missiles — and build a new nuclear command-and-control system to protect the US from cyber threats, while also refurbishing the nuclear warhead laboratories and facilities.

Some critics, however, want to take down nuclear systems across the board, including: (1) low-yield nuclear weapons on US submarines; (2) the Navy cruise missile, just starting research; (3) the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) and (4) the bomber cruise missile or long-range strike option (LRSO). Critics even want to stop the US from being able to build from 20-80 nuclear warheads annually.

There are also those who want the US to adopt a “no first use” policy. The US deterrent, however, extended over NATO and America’s Western Pacific allies, has historically included the threat of responding to a major conventional attack from Russia, North Korea or China, for example, with the first use of nuclear weapons. Many US allies might legitimately be worried if that option were “undone” by explicit US policy.

Given then the survivability of the current US nuclear forces, the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR, p.67) determined that, should the US get rid of its ICBM force, the likelihood of a Russian attack on the US nuclear forces would only be increased. But with the entire Triad of US forces modernized, any chance of an attack on the American ICBM force would be “vanishingly small” — a conclusion reached recently by a number of analysts at the Federation of American Scientists.

As the current commander of US Strategic Command Admiral Charles Richard explained, if the US chooses not to modernize, it is choosing to go out of the nuclear business. The old legacy forces simply cannot be sustained much beyond this decade, when the replacements need to be delivered.

Various elements in the US Congress are saying that they want US nuclear policy to go in a decidedly new and different direction. This conflict between views on nuclear deterrence may place in jeopardy the hard-fought bi-partisan consensus created over the past ten years, in which the country agreed to fully modernize the aging US deterrent while also implementing arms control with its adversaries.

The current consensus position is pretty straightforward. Modernize the three aging elements of the land, sea, and air Triad — strategic bombers and related cruise missiles, land-based missiles, and submarines and related sea-launched ballistic missiles — and build a new nuclear command-and-control system to protect the US from cyber threats, while also refurbishing the nuclear warhead laboratories and facilities.

Some critics, however, want to take down nuclear systems across the board, including: (1) low-yield nuclear weapons on US submarines; (2) the Navy cruise missile, just starting research; (3) the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) and (4) the bomber cruise missile or long-range strike option (LRSO). Critics even want to stop the US from being able to build from 20-80 nuclear warheads annually.