RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16866/biden-trump-middle-east

It is worth remembering that, when President Trump took office, the region was still reeling from the dire consequences of former US President Barack Obama’s inept and naive handling of the region.

By early January 2017, when Mr Trump took office, Iran was squandering the tens of billions of dollars it received for signing the nuclear deal, which Mr Obama had helped broker in 2015, on expanding its malign influence across the landscape of the Middle East.

Mr Trump’s Middle East legacy… completely redefined the landscape of the region from the chaos and conflict that prevailed when Mr Obama left office. Nowadays, the momentum in the region is moving towards peace, not conflict….

[T]he challenge for the incoming Biden administration now will be to see how it can pursue a different foreign policy agenda without jeopardising the very significant achievements that have been accomplished during Mr Trump’s tenure.

Certainly, if the incoming Biden administration makes any serious attempt to undermine Mr Trump’s legacy in the Middle East, it will do so at its peril.

The incoming Biden administration has indicated that one of its top priorities will be to adopt a new approach in Washington’s dealings with the Middle East. In particular it wants to revive the flawed nuclear deal with Iran as well as re-establish a dialogue with the Palestinian leadership, which imposed a three-year boycott on the Trump administration.

Yet, while the new Biden team, the majority of whom are relics from the Obama administration, are keen to assert a new policy agenda for the region, they also need to take care that, in so doing, they do not squander the impressive legacy US President Donald Trump has built up in the region.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijing-tests-joe-biden-11608334532?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

No one should mistake what the jailing of Jimmy Lai and other Hong Kong champions of democracy signals: China is testing Joe Biden.

Mr. Lai is the founder of one of Hong Kong’s most popular newspapers, Apple Daily. Now he’s in jail facing several charges, including one from a new national security law that China bullied through. We know China was enraged when Mr. Lai met with American politicians on trips to Washington in 2019, including Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the basis of the national security charge is that he’s encouraged foreign governments to impose sanctions on Hong Kong and Beijing.

Mr. Lai has been denied bail and publicly exhibited in shackles. Ta Kung Pao, the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece in Hong Kong, says he should be extradited to the mainland for trial. Friends worry that would be a death sentence for the 72-year-old publisher.

President Xi Jinping is hoping to intimidate Hong Kongers into silence and testing whether Mr. Biden and his aides will look the other way at these and other abuses. So far Mr. Xi must be pleased at the lack of response.

One of the Trump Administration’s achievements was to recognize that China has become America’s primary adversary. It steals U.S. technology, monitors and intimidates critics on American university campuses, engages in massive spying, claims new territory in the South China Sea, and threatens U.S. allies in Taiwan and Australia. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has pushed back, from condemning China’s incarceration of the Uighurs to sanctioning officials responsible for the crackdown in Hong Kong.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/12/09/america_surrenders_to_china_144805.html

The United States is mired in a succession crisis. There is much loose talk about another civil war erupting between supporters of President-elect Joe Biden and President Donald Trump. As this occurs, America’s enemies act boldly against U.S. interests. Each precious moment wasted on deciding which septuagenarian won the White House in November is another moment that the Chinese Communist Party continues its long march to global dominance. 

China’s dominance will not come at first in the form of military conquest. Beijing is very much a 21st century power, and its program for displacing the United States will look far different from what the Soviet Union tried during the Cold War. Chinese dominance will be brought on by superior trade, industrial, and technological development practices. 

Beijing recently signed a revolutionary free trade alliance with several Asian powers—including Australia—meant to increase China’s influence over the Indo-Pacific and diminish Washington’s hard-won influence there. China announced it had achieved quantum supremacy—a lodestar for whichever country or company seeks to pioneer quantum computing. Many technologists, like Scott Amyx, have previously argued that quantum computing could be as disruptive to the world economy as the cotton gin or automobile were. Whoever dominates this new industry will write humanity’s future. 

And then there’s the new space race between the United States and China. Private launch companies, including SpaceX, have revolutionized America’s overall space sector. But the lack of political vision or leadership means that real gains for America in space will be slowly realized, if ever. President Trump was the only American leader in decades who seemed to understand the promises and challenges of space. Yet, the rest of the government never fully embraced Trump’s robust space program. Now, it may be too late. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trial-lawyers-vs-arab-israeli-peace-11607294549?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

When the White House announced in October that Sudan planned to normalize relations with Israel, it showed that the peace movement could extend beyond the Persian Gulf. The northeast African country is changing for the better, but a pair of self-interested Senators could derail this progress.

Sudan had been a geopolitical nightmare for most of dictator Omar al-Bashir’s 30 years in power. He fell last year, and Abdalla Hamdok, an economist and reformer, became Prime Minister. A quarter-century after the country hosted Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, the transitional government is opening up civil society and promising democratic elections in 2022.

Washington and Khartoum have negotiated a broad deal to improve ties. On top of the agreement with Jerusalem, Sudan has put $335 million in an escrow account to pay victims of al Qaeda’s 1998 U.S. embassy bombings. In exchange the U.S. would lift its state sponsor of terrorism designation and restore Sudan’s sovereign immunity. The deal would open the country to foreign investment, which its shrinking economy desperately needs. But Congress needs to approve.

Mr. Hamdok leads a fragile government and has survived an assassination attempt. Many Islamists are unhappy with his turn to the West, and some problematic officials from the Bashir era remain influential. It could be tough for the reformer to keep pushing change—or even remain in office—if the agreement falls through and his legitimacy becomes questionable. Israeli-Sudanese normalization would be off the table, and Sudan’s currently poor ties with Iran would likely warm up.

If there was any doubt that a return to ill-fated “Iran Deal” would spark almost immediate conflict in the Middle East, it was extinguished last week.

Accounts vary as to how Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the godfather of the Iranian bomb, was assassinated. One Iranian account claimed that he was killed by a remote controlled pick-up truck armed with a gatling gun. Others suggest it was conducted by as many as sixty highly trained operatives.

One thing, though, is for certain. This was a state-conducted assassination that only a handful of countries could have executed.

It is no surprise that responsibility for the attack was swiftly ascribed to Israel’s Mossad. It had what criminologists call the categorical trinity: motive, means, and opportunity.

In a sense, it would be hardly surprising for Israel — if confronted with an opportunity — to launch such an attack.

Fakhrizadeh was central to Iran’s nuclear strategy — a plan to build a bomb with one target in mind: Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu called him out by name in a press conference two years ago. Removing Fakhrizadeh constitutes a major disruption for the Ayatollahs nuclear strategy and the existential danger it poses for the world’s only Jewish state, and one painfully aware that threats of genocide can become reality.

Israel recognises what the Iranian bomb is — a singular threat to its continued survival. It would not take more than a few such bombs to entirely eradicate its people. Iran’s pathological, feverish, dogmatic hatred of Israel means no eventuality can be excluded.

For Israel then, eliminating Fakhrizadeh was not then a matter of mere geostrategy but survival.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-11-30-biden-gets-ready-to-sell-out

The most important job of the President is to conduct the foreign policy of the United States, so as to protect the safety and security of the American people. That means dealing with a variety of geopolitical rivals and adversaries. There are quite a number of serious adversaries out there these days (Russia, Iran, and North Korea come to mind), but without doubt the most significant is China.

In recent years, China has become increasingly assertive on the world stage, as evidenced by a rapidly growing military, massive international intelligence and espionage efforts, and the forging of financial ties with many developing nations (e.g., the “Belt and Road Initiative”). Meanwhile, China’s population, at about 1.4 billion, is more than four times that of the U.S.; and its annual GDP, at about $13.5 trillion, is about two-thirds ours (which is around $21 trillion), while almost triple that of third-place Japan (~$5 trillion), and more than triple that of fourth-place Germany (~$4 trillion). It is possible that China’s gross economy could overtake ours within a decade or so (although remaining much lower on a per capita basis).

It would not be an exaggeration to say that figuring out how to deal with China should be the number one priority of the incoming President. Good luck with that if Joe Biden succeeds to the job. It’s not just that he’s not physically or mentally capable of engaging with such a clever and relentless adversary. Even more significant is that Biden has been completely willing to accept influence payments from China for his family. Could he really have thought that nothing was expected in return? At Newsweek today, Nigel Farage has a column with the headline “China Is Licking Its Chops at the Thought of President Joe Biden.” Indeed, that’s a great understatement.

In prior posts on Biden corruption (for example here and here) I have focused more on the dealings of Joe and his son Hunter with Ukraine, rather than China. That’s because the dealings with Ukraine were more definitively and obviously criminal in nature, given that they involved an immediate and admitted quid pro quo (the firing of a prosecutor who was investigating a company where Hunter was on the board). The dealings with China were more in the nature of general influence peddling. That doesn’t make these dealings any less corrupt.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/is-america-to-be-first-second-or-what/

A wise foreign policy over the next four years would build on Trump’s strategic gains for the U.S. and the West.

 D uring this strange “transition,” it has been common now to assert that “multilateralism” is back — and with a vengeance. Joe Biden’s envisioned team allegedly will jettison the unilateralist idea of “America alone” and supposed soft neo-isolationism.

Instead, the U.S. will resume its historic but neglected role as the leader of the enlightened world. It will supposedly recultivate allies estranged by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo. It will now fix broken international organizations. It will eagerly reassume burdens that were neglected or repudiated during the Neanderthal Trump administration.

The result, supposedly, will be a safer, more secure world. The administration will be staffed again by returning international experts from the Obama years. Their excellence is vouched for by their past government, corporate, military, and academic service and their branded education.

I think all that is a fair summation of the lengthy published critiques, the preliminary giddy statements from designated Biden-administration officials, and the foreign-policy daily op-ed commentariat.

But how accurate are these rosy assessments and stock diagnoses?

A Strange Sort of Isolationism