RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/america_must_go_beyond_wishful_thinking_about_china.html

America and the West’s policy of “constructive engagement” with Communist China make up the most egregious case of wishful thinking in history. For almost fifty years, the West has pumped trillions of dollars into the Chinese experiment and now has little to show for it except a much stronger China. Fortunately, many Americans are now waking up to the dangers of dealing with the Chinese dragon. It is not a moment too soon.  

Ever since President Richard Nixon’s infamous 1972 trip to China, the West has deceived itself into believing that being nice to Red China is a win-win proposition.  The policy’s underlying reasoning was that opening China up would expose the communist nation to freedom, which would induce its dictators to change and do what is best for the Chinese people. Alas, how wrong the West has been.

Several Myths

The wishful thinking revolved around several myths about China.

The first myth is that by introducing a free market system into the country, the leadership would gradually adopt a capitalist-like scheme that would be communist in name only. The West has long asserted that the Chinese have abandoned Marxist ideology and embraced world markets. 

However, the Chinese have never stopped insisting that they are genuinely communist. The more the West claims that China is not communist, the more the Chinese openly say they are. The recent hardline developments of the Xi dictatorship have dashed the hopes of Western optimists. Hong Kong and the persecution of the Catholic Church now offer bitter testimony that nothing has changed.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/backward-masking-biden-lloyd-billingsley/

“China has an overall goal, and I don’t criticize them for the goal, but they have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch because the United States are going to continue to grow and expand.”

That was Joe Biden in his March 25 press conference. The squad of compliant reporters failed to ask about gains China had already made on Biden’s watch, which began in 2012. That year, as The Atlantic reported, “Biden Gets China,” a move orchestrated by Thomas Donilon, once described by James Mann in Foreign Policy as “Obama’s Gray Man” and seldom mentioned in the press.

Donilon advised Biden in his 1988 run for the presidency and presided over a meltdown at the Federal National Mortgage Association. That prompted Robert Scheer of the Nation to brand Donilon a “top hustler” and wonder why President Obama would tap him for National Security Advisor.

On Biden’s watch as vice president, China ramped up internal repressions and became more aggressive, modernizing their military and creating island bases that put key American allies and interests at risk. In 2019, on the anniversary, of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Joe Biden called for “recommitting to the universal struggle for human dignity” but offered no direct criticism of China’s Communist regime. During the 2020 campaign, Bidcen described the regime as “not bad folks, folks.” With the PRC, that was Biden’s essential message from the start.

Sen. Joe Biden voted against strong sanctions on Communist China as a response to the Tiananmen massacre. In 1998, the United States again proposed sanctions on the PRC, including visa restrictions, and Biden was part of a group of ten senators opposed to the measures. In 2001, Sen. Biden, then head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, supported China’s entry to the World Trade Organization. As he explained, “the United States welcomes the emergence of a prosperous, integrated China on the global stage, because we expect this is going to be a China that plays by the rules.” That theme emerged in Biden’s White House press conference.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17250/biden-jobs-plan-china

For three principal reasons, his [Biden’s] jobs plan will create full employment in China. First, Biden will create substantially more demand for Chinese materials to go into America’s planned physical infrastructure improvements. Second, the large corporate tax increases he proposes will drive even more businesses out of the U.S. — and across the Pacific. Third, Biden’s “green energy” ideas will eliminate one of the crucial advantages American manufacturers now have: cheap energy.

“Unless we invest in the capacity to make the steel, cement, and the other materials that go into our roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, we will always be at the mercy of China’s Communist Party” — Jonathan Bass, CEO of Whom Home and onshoring advocate, in an interview with Gatestone Institute, April 2021.

“Domestic security, domestic economic security, is essential to international security. If we damage our economy… with all these tax hikes, including the corporate tax hikes, companies will be leaving, not coming here. We will lose jobs, not gain jobs. Our whole economy will suffer.” — Larry Kudlow, former director of the National Economic Council, Fox Business, March 30, 2021.

So, do we really need the federal government to do anything? After all, industry is moving in a “green energy” direction on its own.

“We can’t have a policy that sets us behind and still win a competition with China.” — Robert Lighthizer, U.S. Trade Representative 2017-2021, Fox Business, March 30, 2021.

“It’s the largest American jobs investment since World War II,” President Joe Biden said on March 31 in Pittsburgh, as he announced his $2.3 trillion infrastructure program. “It will create millions of jobs, good-paying jobs.”

He is correct. Biden will, in his American Jobs Plan as it’s formally called, create millions of good-paying jobs. Many of those jobs, however, will not be in America,. For three principal reasons, his jobs plan will create full employment in China.

First, Biden will create substantially more demand for Chinese materials to go into America’s planned physical infrastructure improvements. Second, the large corporate tax increases he proposes will drive even more businesses out of the U.S. — and across the Pacific. Third, Biden’s “green energy” ideas will eliminate one of the crucial advantages American manufacturers now have: cheap energy.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-great-power-test-begins-11617748045?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The U.S. Navy announced Tuesday that the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group entered the South China Sea for “routine operations” amid a Chinese maritime militia standoff with the Philippines. China’s provocation comes as Russia has surged forces near Ukraine. The Biden Administration may be getting an early test of whether its model of liberal multilateralism can deter revisionist powers pushing against U.S. interests.

The Philippines began to sound the alarm last month over Chinese militia boats, at one point totaling 220, occupying the Whitsun Reef west of the archipelago. The naval equivalent of Russia’s “little green men,” China’s military-affiliated flotillas can masquerade as fishing fleets to give Beijing plausible deniability as it entrenches itself in disputed waters.

An analysis by two researchers from the U.S. Naval War College last week found “no evidence of fishing whatsoever during these laser-focused operations, but every indication of trolling for territorial claims.”

For more than a decade China has been moving aggressively to establish dominance in the waters surrounding the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan, building military installations and harassing other nations’ commercial vessels. In 2016 an international court said China was breaking the law in the South China Sea. The Trump Administration last summer sanctioned firms involved in the construction of illegal islands there.

https://bit.ly/3sSvn1O  Jordan’s domestic vulnerability

Jordan’s domestic upheaval involved some Arab countries, members of the royal Jordanian family and other prominent Bedouins, who were arrested and charged with an attempted regime change.

A regime-change in Jordan could transform the strategically-located country – between Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Israel – into another haven for Palestinian and Islamic terrorism. It would threaten the existence of the current regimes in Saudi Arabia, all other pro-US Gulf states and Egypt, advancing the interests of Iran’s Ayatollahs, Turkey’s Erdogan, the Muslim Brotherhood, China and Russia, while traumatizing regional stability and with dire Western and Israeli national security and economic consequences.  

Jordan’s inherent political and ideological vulnerability has been fueled by intra-Bedouin fragmentation and conflicts, dating back to 1921, when the Hashemite Bedouin family was imported to Jordan – from Hejaz in western Saudi Arabia – by the British Empire, and imposed upon the indigenous Bedouins of (mostly southern) Jordan.  Furthermore, Jordan’s Bedouins are deeply divided, geographically, tribally, culturally, ideologically and religiously, with some of the southern tribes considering the Hashemites “carpetbaggers” from the Arabian Peninsula, Westernized and straying away from Islam and pan-Arabism by concluding a peace treaty with the “infidel” Jewish State.

Moreover, 70% of Jordan’s population are Palestinians, while Palestinian leaders (e.g., the PLO, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas) view Jordan as an artificial entity, the eastern (78%) part of Palestine. Hence, Palestinian active involvement in subversion and terrorism in Jordan and occasional attempts to topple the Hashemite regime, such as the civil war in September 1970 and the 1989 wave of terrorism.

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/as-biden-readies-iran-talks-appeasement-is-in/91466/

As members of President Biden’s team are packing for a Vienna trip next week, eager to reinstate a 2015 deal that was the diplomatic crown jewel of the Obama era, three House members are raising questions about Washington’s involvement in a sanctions-busting deal funneling cash to Iran from South Korea.

President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, CIA director William Burns and Iran pointman Robert Malley put forth a rosy picture, publicly. These architects of the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action insist that before allowing further concessions they’d like to address some of the deal’s weak points.

Can they?

The Senate has yet to confirm as deputy state secretary the nomination of the original deal’s top negotiator, Wendy Sherman. Even now, though, the dynamics that allowed Tehran’s negotiators to dictate terms to her in 2015 are back. As then, the mullahs play hard to get while the administration tempts them with cash.

In late March, Washington reportedly authorized South Korea to release $1 billion in frozen oil funds that went, via Switzerland, into the mullahs’ coffers. Earlier Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps had seized a Korean ship, demanding a release of frozen funds in return for releasing it.

That’s the deal Representatives Bryan Steil, Gregory Steube, and Jim Banks address in a March 25 letter to Secretary Blinken. Will the State and the Treasury Departments allow such transactions “before Iran re-enters into compliance with the JCPOA?” they ask.

Right. Remember the much ballyhooed impasse so widely reported in the administration’s early days? Iran demanded an end to all Trump-era sanctions before negotiations could restart, while Mr. Biden’s negotiators insisted Iran first needs to reverse all its JCPOA violations.