RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/538409-iran-nuclear-program-presents-new-challenges

“If they want Iran to return to its commitments,” Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, declared this week about the 2015 global nuclear agreement, “the United States must lift all sanctions in practice.”

Hours later, President Biden told CBS News that he will not lift sanctions until Iran agrees to abide by the agreement’s restrictions on uranium enrichment, enriched stockpiles, and related activities.

To be sure, the dueling statements may overstate the clash between Washington and Tehran over the agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — from which President Trump withdrew in 2018 and which Tehran has begun to violate in increasingly brazen fashion.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif quickly walked back Khamenei’s absolutist demand, and U.S. officials are mulling whether to propose small concessions from each side to set the stage for new talks over Iran’s nuclear program.

Nevertheless, Iran’s nuclear progress of recent weeks — combined with the emerging political dynamics in and between Washington, Tehran, Jerusalem, and Europe — could leave the issue where it has lingered for years: with Tehran working both out front and clandestinely to build the architecture of a nuclear weapons program, and Washington and its allies desperate to find a peaceful way to stop it.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-in-focus-feb-11-bidens-first-phone-call-with-chinas-xi-jinping_3694187.html

President Joe Biden speaks with Chinese Communist Party head Xi Jinping for the first time. We take a look at what Biden did in his first three weeks for U.S.-China policy.

Mandatory vaccinations are required for citizens in one Chinese city. But authorities are keeping quiet about possible side effects.

British television station BBC is banned from airing in China in a new form of retaliation from Beijing.

And a Canadian visa application center in Beijing could be run by Chinese police—putting citizens’ personal information at risk.

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Follow Tiffany on Twitter: @tiffanymeier_

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/02/bidens-appeasement-of-iran-begins.php

Joe Biden is determined to appease Iran, and the appeasement has already commenced. Its public manifestation centers now on Yemen, and the Houthi rebels there.

The Houthis have long received considerable Iranian financial and military support, including in recent years cruise missiles and drones. They have used Iranian weaponry not just against the government of Yemen, but also against Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Iran’s arch enemies and allies of the U.S.

Thus, as John Bolton says, the Houthis are a threat to the oil-producing Gulf monarchies. As is Iran, of course.

Bolton explains:

In effect, Iran is trying to encircle its Arab enemies, chief among them Saudi Arabia, by installing a friendly regime in their backyard. Among the Arabian Peninsula states, Yemen is the poorest and most notably the only one without oil. Armed conflict and political hostility are the rule, not the exception, there.

The Trump administration recognized the threat posed by the Houthis, but didn’t do much about it. According to Bolton, direct U.S. involvement in the Yemen conflict ended with the 2018 suspension of in-flight refueling of Saudi air operations in Yemen. And Trump didn’t designate the Houthis as terrorists until his last day in office.

Team Biden may wish Trump had done more. That way, the new administration could more dramatically signal its willingness to back Iranian interests and sell out Saudi Arabia.

https://bit.ly/3qjQDMo

Experienced Counsel

President Biden is about to re embrace the Muslim Brotherhood – in the mold of the Obama/Biden Administration – in defiance of all pro-US Arab countries, which consider the Muslim Brotherhood a clear and present, existential terrorist threat.

President Biden may benefit from the following advice, provided by Sir John Jenkins, a top British specialist on the Muslim Brotherhood, political Islamism and the Middle East, and former Executive Director of the British International Institute for Strategic Studies – Middle East branch: “[The West] should resist the temptation to seek to understand the Muslim Brotherhood through our own cultural or epistemological [knowledge] categories…. [Jenkins cautions against] viewing the world through lenses ground by an exclusivist Western modernity, shaped in the distorting crucible of European nationalism….

“Islamism – to which the Muslim Brotherhood is central – like other totalizing, anti-rational and authoritarian ideologies is a profound ideological challenge to the modern Western conception of the rational state and its foundational principles….”

Engaging or Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood?

Will President Biden’s foreign policy and national security team – led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, CIA Director William Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines – heed Sir Jenkins’ counsel?

https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-bidens-dysfunctional-human-rights-policy/

The Biden administration has an awfully strange approach to human rights.

President Joe Biden has taken a peculiar approach to human rights. Where he can’t make a difference, he talks big. When he can make a difference, he acts wrongly.

Biden could make a difference with the Palestinians by exacting a price for their misdeeds. Rather than follow Trump’s lead, which would mean continuing to hold back aid until they change their terror-loving ways, Biden’s first move was to announce he’s reinstating it.

In a rhetorical slight of hand, Biden separates the Palestinian leadership from the Palestinian people. U.S. Ambassador Richard Mills in his Jan. 26 speech to the UN Security Council said, “We do not view these steps as a favor to the Palestinian leadership. U.S. assistance benefits millions of ordinary Palestinians…”

Yes, OK, and what’s the delivery address for that aid? Try sending a shipment of aid to “Care of: The Palestinians” and see where it ends up.

Setting aside its support for terror against Jews, (a quick survey of Biden’s team would suggest it’s not going to be of great concern to them) the Palestinian leadership is a human rights horror show against its own people, with torture, arbitrary arrests and the hounding of reporters being the order of the day.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-malley-test

Martin Peretz was Editor-in-Chief of The New Republic for 36 years and taught social theory at Harvard University for nearly half a century.

What does progressive foreign policy actually accomplish on the ground?

In the rhetoric of restoration-era Washington, D.C., reality is reclaiming a place. The post-insurrection hoopla was always going to deflate into the realpolitik of competing ideologies—and, in foreign policy, it already has. Robert Malley’s appointment as special envoy to Iran points to a deepening fissure within the Democratic Party: It is being hailed as a victory for those who reject the postwar liberal promotion of American capitalism and democracy and instead identify with the credo of institutional progressivism. This is an ideology increasingly endorsed by powerful American structures, in which correcting the West’s historical marginalization of people of color, people with different sexual identities, women, people from developing nations, and others is understood to be the determining goal of politics.

Malley is a policy expert and operative—he is a doer, not an active ideologue. But the policies he has promoted and facilitated over 20 years are consistently in the service of rapprochement with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hamas, and Iran, which are held up by institutional progressives as the marquee victims of Western interventionism in the Middle East. To be fair, Biden’s entire foreign policy team, starting with Biden himself, supported and implemented the Iran deal, which was the cornerstone of Barack Obama’s second-term foreign policy and would now appear to be heading into its third term—with Malley, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Wendy Sherman, and Samantha Power all serving in nearly the same roles they occupied while ensuring the Iran deal’s implementation and passage. What’s new is the liberal Democratic establishment’s use of the new, harder progressive logic, which holds that any opposition to its policies is psychologically rooted in inherited racism, sexism, or trauma.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/05/mush-from-the-wimp-2021-the-dangerous-thin-gruel-of-joe-bidens-foreign-policy/

Forty-one years ago next month, the Boston Globe editorial page infamously allowed a joke headline for an editorial about a speech by President Jimmy Carter to slip through to the newspaper’s official print run. Some 161,000 copies of Beantown’s liberal newspaper giant sported the title “Mush from the Wimp” above a typically silly Globe exhortation to readers to follow the instructions of the nation’s clueless chief executive and “impose upon themselves the kind of economic self-discipline that President Carter urged …”

In 2021, mush has made a comeback in presidential rhetoric.

What’s more, to quote President Barack Obama as he taunted 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s focus on Russia, “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”

According to President Joe Biden in what was touted as the first major foreign policy address of his presidency on Thursday, America is faced with a “new moment of advancing authoritarianism,” namely Communist China and “the determination of Russia to damage and disrupt our democracy.”

Apparently, the reason we give the Pentagon $700 billion every year is to defend against the grave threat of Russian trolls setting up phony Facebook accounts to mislead American voters.

And how is the Arsenal of Democracy going to fight this mortal threat? Diplomacy! “We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again,” the president assured us. The “accelerating global challenges, from the pandemic to the climate crisis to nuclear proliferation … will only to be solved by nations working together and in common. We can’t do it alone,” the new president said barely two weeks into his administration.