RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/joe-bidens-national-security-picks-are-great-news-for-china

President-elect Joe Biden has been quick to shape his national security team. Jake Sullivan will serve as national security adviser, Antony Blinken is to be nominated for Secretary of State, Avril Haines will be the director of national intelligence, and John Kerry will take on the role of a Cabinet-level climate czar.

These selections give us confidence (if that’s the right word) of three things. First, that Biden will desperately try to return America to the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. Second, that the European Union will be happy. Third, that Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, is feeling pretty good right now.

The contrast between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Kerry is one of night and day. Where Pompeo has prioritized retraining China’s aggressive tendencies worldwide and its undermining of American interests, Kerry’s record of standing up for our interests, especially against our rivals and enemies, is flaccid. He spent his time as secretary of state proclaiming the virtues of positive engagement with Beijing. And his willingness to give Iran everything it wanted in the 2015 nuclear deal should make China optimistic that he’ll be generous in the coming climate negotiations.

Climate change activists should share our concerns because China’s climate strategy is a disingenuous absurdity. It is building hundreds of new, heavily polluting coal plants each year, while simultaneously pledging to be carbon-neutral by 2060. It is highly unlikely that Kerry will force China to agree to having its promised emission cuts independently verified. (Remember that the inspection regime built into the Iran deal contained loopholes big enough to drive an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tank through.) He’s far more likely to commit America to economically damaging emission cuts without getting other nations to do the same.

Concerns about Kerry go considerably beyond how he’ll manage climate policy.

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2020/11/27/the-importance-of-the-quint-and-the

We’re rather familiar with “the Squad,” but what about “the Quint” and “the Quad”? For now, the latter two are more likely than the former to have importance to a potential Biden administration. With the announcement of Tony Blinken as Secretary of State and Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor, the anti-Israel far left is at bay for now – both men are known to be personally reasonably disposed toward Israel. (Reema Dodin is another matter.) But if the Quint has an impact on the administration’s Middle East policy, both regarding Israel and Iran, and the Squad joins in, the U.S. position in the region will suffer.

The Quad, on the other hand, offers the potential for a far-reaching and long-lasting alliance in the Indo-Pacific if a new administration is willing to take advantage of the groundwork laid by its predecessor.

First, the Quint. Announced by the British Foreign Ministry in October of last year, the Quint (the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France) is a response to the collapse of the anti-Israel coalition of the European Union (EU). EU Resolutions have to be unanimous, and Israel’s burgeoning relations and understandings with the Visegrad Countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia) as well as the Baltic States and parts of Southern Europe collapsed the wall.

 The first crack actually appeared in May 2018 when Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania blocked an EU denunciation of President Donald Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. France, the Netherlands, and Ireland, among others criticized the move individually, but the impact was not the same.  In February 2020, EU Foreign Policy Chief Josip Borrell tried to push through a resolution condemning the Trump Middle East peace plan after meetings with Iranian officials – but 6 of 27 members refused, including Italy, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic. In April, he posited: “The EU does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank. The EU reiterates that any annexation would constitute a serious violation of international law.” The resolution failed and an Israeli diplomat noted that the largest number of EU delegates to date had been opposed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-iran-and-the-bomb-11606519663?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Democratic establishment will soon be back in charge of U.S. foreign policy, and the question is how much they’ve learned in exile. One early test will be Iran, and whether Joe Biden will abandon the strategic gains that President Trump has made in the Middle East in a rush to return to the deeply flawed 2015 nuclear deal.

The apparent assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist near Tehran on Friday shows that Iran’s nuclear program remains a global security problem. No one took responsibility, but any number of countries have reason to act now in case the Biden Administration returns to a policy of appeasing Iran.

The U.S. left the nuclear accord in May 2018 and embarked on a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign. After restoring pre-deal sanctions, the Trump Administration has added new restrictions across the Iranian economy, which is rigged to enrich the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and elites in Tehran. The White House plans to announce more sanctions through Jan. 20.

The sanctions have succeeded in weakening the rogue regime. Today Tehran exports about a quarter of the 2.5 million barrels of oil a day it shipped when the U.S. was still in the deal. This deprives the government of $50 billion in annual revenue. The economy has shrunk, while the Iranian rial has lost 80% of its value against the dollar.

Iran has responded by increasing its violations of the nuclear deal. It now has 12 times the limit of enriched uranium allowed under the accord, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said this month. It also is enriching uranium to 4.5% purity, above the 3.67% allowed under the deal but far from the 90% concentration needed for a bomb.

https://www.newsweek.com/biden-faces-evolving-middle-east-opinion-1548377

The news that Bahrain’s foreign minister is meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel this week highlights the predicament that president elect Joe Biden faces in the Middle East: he wants to restore a U.S. approach to the region that relies on increasingly out-of-date assumptions.

For starters, Biden promises to rejoin the U.S.-led global nuclear agreement with Iran, under which Tehran agreed to temporary restrictions on its nuclear program in exchange for relief from crippling sanctions.

President Obama, for whom Biden served as vice president, considered the agreement his top global achievement. The Democratic foreign policy establishment has sharply criticized President Trump’s decision to leave it in 2018 and the administration’s attempts to force Iran to renegotiate the deal through a “maximum pressure” campaign.

Rejoining the agreement would be reassuring to U.S. allies in Europe, particularly France and Germany, which criticized Trump’s move and sought to convince Iran to abide by the agreement in exchange for European efforts to help Tehran evade Washington’s increasingly tight economic sanctions. But rejoining the agreement and picking up where they left off may be no simple matter.

In a confidential report this month, the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that Iran has secretly stockpiled at least 12 times the amount of enriched uranium that the agreement allows, a quantity that experts say is enough to build an atomic bomb in less than four months. Iran is also enriching uranium to a higher purity level—thus, closer to weapons-grade enrichment—than the agreement allows.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-alliance-trump-didnt-break-11604361129?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Joe Biden has hit Donald Trump, sometimes fairly, for alienating U.S. allies. But one example of a bilateral relationship that has strengthened on Mr. Trump’s watch is with India, as demonstrated by a military intelligence-sharing pact signed last week.

Under the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement, the U.S. will share maps and databases from the Defense Department’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). That could strengthen India’s defenses against its traditional rival, Pakistan. But more important to the U.S., it will help New Delhi balance Beijing’s bid to dominate Asia.

Indian leaders since the Cold War have been wary of strategic partnerships, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi has signed three military cooperation agreements with the U.S. since 2016. Chinese President Xi Jinping can’t be happy, but his actions are accelerating the trend. China has built up its naval presence in the Indian Ocean, defied maritime law in the South China Sea, and pressed territorial claims along India’s northern border, leading to a deadly clash in June.

U.S. satellite data, the best in the world, can identify Chinese troop movements and guide precision weapons. Many of India’s current weapons are Russian. But this agreement could encourage India to buy more interoperable American and allied systems, especially as Moscow moves closer to Beijing.