RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17228/biden-iran-secret-deals

“The Biden administration appears to be using loopholes when dealing with the Iranian regime. I am again asking direct, yes or no questions on the United States’ involvement in facilitating a South Korean ransom payment to Iran. If the Biden administration is involved in transferring funds to Iran, Congress and the American people must be informed. Biden administration officials continue to deflect and refuse to answer questions from members of Congress regarding this issue.” — Congressman Bryan Steil (R-WI), letter to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, March 25, 2021.

When President Biden was vice president during the Obama administration, the administration was all too eager to grant concessions to the Iranian regime and, it turns out, made multiple secret deals with the mullahs….. These secret deals meant that when sanctions against Iranian banks were lifted and permission given to the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to resume conducting business, there was no longer any mechanism to check or stop Iran’s illegal activities such as advancing its ballistic missile program.

The Obama administration also helped swiftly to lift all four rounds of UN sanctions against Iran — sanctions it had taken decades to put in place. Iran’s military sites also were exempted from inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency; other inspections were only to be at the times and places of Iran’s choosing — if ever.

Another concession, usually overlooked, is that Iran never even signed the JCPOA deal — what sort of deal, then, is that?

Appeasement policies, secret deals and generous concessions to predatory regimes do not work, as history has repeatedly shown. They only empower and embolden leaders whose record reveals that they have no intention of honoring whatever they agreed to in the first place, and for whom commitments have been mainly a means of buying time to accomplish the goals they really want.

The Biden administration is ratcheting up its appeasement policies towards the Iranian regime in an apparent effort to revive the 2015 nuclear deal — which by the way, Iran never signed.

US President Joe Biden made his intention to return to the nuclear deal public before he took office; after, he appointed as Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman — a key negotiator in the talks which led to the nuclear deal in 2015 during the Obama administration. Biden actually publicized Sherman’s professed accomplishment:

“She has successfully rallied the world to strengthen democracy and confront some of the biggest national security challenges of our time, including leading the U.S. negotiating team for the Iran Deal”.

The administration proceeded to revoke the designation of the Houthis, an Iran-backed terror group, as an officially-designated terrorist organization.

Republican foreign policy leaders in Congress are now requesting from the Secretary of State Antony Blinken answers to questions about the secret talks held with South Korea that resulted in South Korea giving the Iranian regime $1 billion in ransom money. The letter was “led” by Congressman Bryan Steil (WI), Congressman Greg Steube (FL) and Republican Study Committee (RSC) Chairman Jim Banks (IN). Steil pointed out:

“The Biden administration appears to be using loopholes when dealing with the Iranian regime. I am again asking direct, yes or no questions on the United States’ involvement in facilitating a South Korean ransom payment to Iran. If the Biden administration is involved in transferring funds to Iran, Congress and the American people must be informed. Biden administration officials continue to deflect and refuse to answer questions from members of Congress regarding this issue. I want answers. Congress must be informed of the administration’s actions”.

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.