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FOREIGN POLICY

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Biden Admin Will Have to Thread Needle as it Resumes Palestinian Aid Congress warns resumption in aid could violate American law Adam Kredo

By on January 28th, 2021

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/

The Biden administration will have to walk a fine line when it resumes U.S. aid to the Palestinians due to an American law that blocks funding until they end a policy known as “pay to slay,” in which Western aid money is used to care for imprisoned terrorists and their families.

Republican lawmakers say a resumption in U.S. aid to the Palestinians could violate the Taylor Force Act, which mandates the Palestinian government stop using Western aid dollars to pay terrorists and their families. Congressional leaders told the Washington Free Beacon they will be closely watching the administration to ensure it does not violate U.S. law. The State Department maintains any resumption in aid will be done in compliance with the law, which does include exemptions for humanitarian assistance.

The Biden administration’s decision sets up an early showdown between the State Department and Congress over the future of U.S. foreign policy regarding the Palestinians and their continued support for terrorism. The Free Beacon first reported in October that the Palestinian government has continued paying terrorists despite the passage three years ago of the Taylor Force Act, according to findings that were published in a non-public State Department report sent to Congress.

“The resumption of any U.S foreign assistance that indirectly funds the Palestinian Authority’s pay-for-slay terrorist program would violate U.S. law, betray our Israeli partners, and put Americans living in or visiting Israel in harm’s way,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) told the Free Beacon.

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Javad Zarif’s Chutzpah By Jimmy Quinn

By on January 27th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/javad-zarifs-chutzpah/

Desperate to win sanctions relief, Iran’s foreign minister pens a falsehood-riddled essay in an American magazine.

T he foreign minister of Iran has a message for President Joe Biden: If you lift all of your sanctions and shut up about Tehran’s support for terrorist groups and its development of ballistic-missile technology, we’ll let you back into the 2015 nuclear agreement . . . maybe.

Tehran’s cosmopolitan, English-speaking, sometimes openly anti-Semitic top diplomat Javad Zarif made this incredibly bold argument in a piece published by Foreign Affairs magazine last week. One wouldn’t be mistaken to think that he’s beginning the negotiations with a high asking price — and without much to justify it. Iran’s been battered by the Trump administration’s sanctions, so much so that its support for paramilitary groups across the Middle East seems to be constraining its ability to finance its response to the COVID crisis.

It’s not immediately clear whom the essay is intended to sway. If the target audience is U.S. officials, it’s hard to imagine these lofty demands playing a larger role than does the Biden administration’s already obvious intent to reenter the agreement. And amidst pressure from congressional Republicans, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Gulf, it’s just as difficult to believe that Zarif’s bluster alone would convince the new team to drop its inhibitions against doing exactly what the foreign minister demands — that is, reentering the agreement with absolutely no preconditions:

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The U.S. Government Shouldn’t Send Communist China Americans’ DNA And Health Info By Ben Weingarten

By on January 25th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/25/the-u-s-government-shouldnt-send-communis

The Biden administration must take serious steps to ensure China ceases its exploitation of the COVID-19 crisis in ways that threaten our national security.

Some two decades ahead of schedule, on Jan. 12, the Trump administration declassified its Indo-Pacific Strategic Framework, a document outlining its national security strategy regarding Asia. The document is critical, and the timing of its declassification was telling.

As National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien noted in a statement announcing its release, the framework “has provided overarching strategic guidance for implementing the 2017 National Security Strategy within the world’s most populous and economically dynamic region.”

By making the document public just before Inauguration Day — as with its other recent actions and revelations regarding Communist China — the outgoing Trump administration delivered a message to its would-be soft-on-China successor: Do not deviate from the course we have charted in countering our most formidable adversary. A return to appeasement becomes more difficult when the extent of the Chinese Communist Party’s malignant endeavors are laid bare, and the American people can see that there has been a robust plan for confronting it.

Progress Subverted by Bureaucracy

The Trump administration has taken yeoman efforts to implement this strategy, for which America has benefited immeasurably while effectuating a sea change across the federal government in thought and action concerning China. It appears, however, that pockets of resistance remain. Indeed, even the most determined of administrations with the best of strategies can find their plans at times subverted by an obstinate permanent bureaucracy.

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Biden’s First Signal on China: Fond Memories by Gordon G. Chang

By on January 25th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16986/biden-china-signal

In “Four Principles to Guide U.S. Policy Toward China,” the Atlantic Council’s Ali Wyne suggests a weakened America needs to accommodate the People’s Republic of China.

China also cannot get along with the United States, which maintained China-friendly policies for more than four decades. In fact, People’s Daily, the most authoritative publication in China, in May 2019 carried a piece that declared a “people’s war” on America.

China’s “unrestricted warfare” on the United States has taken a toll. Recently, Chinese leaders deliberately spread the coronavirus beyond their borders, making deaths in America mass murder as well as “genocide,” as that term is defined by Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Moreover, in late January of last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in the International Falls Port of Entry in Minnesota seized 900,000 counterfeit $1 bills, made in China…. Nobody, in China’s near-total surveillance state, can counterfeit American currency without authorities knowing about it. [C]ounterfeiting another country’s currency is considered an act of war.

Leaders of democracies, despite all the good will in the world, will find they cannot cooperate with thugs.

“I was asked a long time ago when I was with Xi Jinping,” said President Joe Biden in his first hours in office, as he swore in officials, “and I was on the Tibetan plateau with him, and he asked me in a private dinner he and I and we each had an interpreter he said can you define America for me, and I said yes and I meant it. I said I can do it in one word, one word: possibilities. We believe anything is possible if we set our mind to it, unlike any other country in the world.”

In Beijing, Communist Party leaders must be ecstatic. For one thing, during the 10-minute ceremony Biden mentioned no other country.

Moreover, ruler Xi Jinping will think the Tibetan plateau reference significant. Biden’s words, after all, came one day after then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a determination that China was committing crimes against humanity, including genocide, against minorities. Pompeo’s declaration presumably includes the minority Tibetans. Beijing is suppressing them in many of the same ways as it is liquidating Uyghurs, the focus of his historic statement.

Xi and other Chinese leaders will doubtless take Biden’s fond recollection as a sign the new president is not serious about China’s atrocities against minority peoples.

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Biden’s return to the Paris accord is a gift to China

By on January 24th, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/bidens-return-to-the-paris-accord-is-a-gift-to-china

President Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris climate accord immediately delivered on a campaign promise, fulfilled a top priority of the Left, and delighted our European allies. But most of all, it was a gift to China.

Federal action to reduce the world growth of carbon emissions, particularly action as ineffective as that embodied in the Paris accord, should not be taken at the expense of U.S. citizens in relation to foreigners. Yet that is exactly what an immediate return to the Paris accord means. It commits the United States to reductions that will entangle American businesses and jobs in new lengths of red tape, and will also probably increase electricity prices.

Supporters of the Paris climate accord underplay or ignore these concerns. But it is a simple fact that renewable energy mandates have driven up household energy bills in states where they have been introduced. Democrats like to boast that they are lifting up struggling families, but this first step in their energy policies does nothing of the kind. Republicans should scrutinize Biden’s energy policies closely.

America has already reduced its carbon emissions significantly since the Paris accord was signed and has outstripped the achievements of its closest allies, which, on carbon emissions, mostly preach but do not practice. No international climate accord can work unless it considers seriously the emissions of the rapidly growing East. The Paris accord does nothing of the sort.

India emits roughly half as much carbon each year as the U.S. but will become a far worse polluter as its economy grows. China, which emits twice as much carbon each year as we do, has given the rest of the world nothing by empty promises and has been allowed to continue emitting greenhouse gases unabated.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping says China will be carbon neutral by 2060. He is willing to discuss doing more in furtherance of what China calls “win-win” cooperation with the world. Yet there is a great divergence between Xi’s sweet words and what China’s communist-run government is actually doing — that is, bringing online hundreds of new and very dirty coal plants.

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Beware of President Biden’s Call for a Return to America’s Role in the World Stage By Ojel L. Rodriguez

By on January 22nd, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/beware_of_president_bidens_call_for_a_return_to_americas_role_in_the_world_stage.html

This week saw the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joseph R. Biden, and the return of the Democrat party to the White House and full control of Congress. Inevitably, most of the coverage by the media has been positive about the new President and the change coming to the White House. Chris Wallace called Biden’s inauguration speech, “the best inaugural address, I ever heard” while throughout social media; many are fawning about the speech, that emphasize the need for unity in America.

However, much of the focus has been with the domestic side of the speech, the speech directed to the world and especially to America’s allies called for a return to America’s role as a leader in the world stage. The new president declared:

“We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again. Not to meet yesterday’s challenges, but today’s and tomorrow’s challenges”

Given, President Biden history in foreign affairs, we need to be beware of calls for a return to the American leadership role in the world stage. As Obama-Biden Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted, Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” 

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Will Israel Be Able To Withstand Biden Administration’s Pressure? A new administration’s unbridled hostility towards Israel. Caroline Glick

By on January 21st, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/will-israel-be-able-withstand-biden-caroline-glick/

In an interview with The New York Times last month, President-elect Joe Biden restated his intention to return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Israel opposes this plan because the 2015 deal ensures Iran will become a nuclear-armed state.

Media reports over the past few weeks have detailed some of Israel’s plans to convince the incoming administration to reconsider its position. Among other things, the government intends to use documents from Iran’s nuclear archive, that Mossad agents spirited out of Tehran in 2018, to show Biden and his advisers that the 2015 deal was based on the incorrect assumption that Iran’s nuclear program was defensive and civilian.

The archive proves incontrovertibly that Iran’s nuclear program was conceived with the aim of and has always been about making nuclear bombs, not medical isotopes, and that the purpose of that nuclear arsenal is not to defend against its enemies, but to obliterate them.

Although Israel’s case is rock solid, it is unlikely to convince the Biden team to change course. Even without the benefit of the archive, there was massive evidence five years ago that Iran’s actions and intentions in relation to its illicit nuclear program were aggressive.

Israel shared that evidence with the Obama administration, and Barack Obama and his advisers didn’t care. They drove forward and demonized Israeli leaders and their American supporters as warmongers.

The same people who dismissed Israel’s evidence then are now leading Biden’s national security team.

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Report: Anti-Israel Malley Joining Biden As Special Iran Envoy Jeff Dunetz

By on January 21st, 2021

https://lidblog.com/robert-malley-iran/

Per Jewish Insider, President Biden is considering adding another Israel hater to his team. Robert Malley, who shared his anti-Israel views as part of the Clinton and Obama administrations, an adviser to Bernie Sanders, and grew up with a socialist dad who was a close friend of terrorist Yasser Arafat. According to the report, Malley will be joining the re-Obama administration as Biden’s special envoy to Iran. 

The potential appointment of Malley comes as members of the Biden transition team have begun to lay out the president-elect’s vision for diplomacy with Iran following the Trump administration’s 2018 withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement.

The Biden transition team declined to comment and noted that they do not presently have any personnel announcements.

A source familiar with the Biden team’s approach on Iran told JI, “The president-elect has said that if Iran resumes strict compliance with the JCPOA, the United States would return to the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations. But Iran is a long way from returning to compliance, and there are many steps in the process to getting there that we will need to evaluate once in office. Our first order of business will be consulting with Congress and our allies on the path forward.”

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From Pompeo’s Twitter Account, an Understated Policy Statement By Jimmy Quinn

By on January 19th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/from-pompeos-twitter-account-an-understated-policy-statement/

Mike Pompeo’s Twitter account has apparently tucked a notable policy statement into an otherwise unremarkable legacy-burnishing tweetstorm — and it has significant implications for U.S. support of Israel at the U.N.

The tweet was just one of the dozens that the secretary of state’s account has fired off every day since the start of 2021 to note his foreign-policy accomplishments as he nears the end of his tenure. It’s generally unremarkable stuff — some old pictures and graphics with snappy, occasionally stilted sloganeering (though more than a few Pompeo critics have seized on it as an opportunity to go after the top Trump official).

But Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, noticed a decision that has otherwise gone unremarked upon: When @SecPompeo shared the 2018 press release announcing the U.S. decision to halt funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the post stated that “it’s estimated <200,000 Arabs diplaced in 1948 are still alive and most others are not refugees by any rational criteria.” UNRWA serves Palestinian refugees exclusively — it says that there are 5.8 million of them in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine — and it’s the only organization within the U.N. system that focuses on a specific set of refugees. (All other refugee groups are handled by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.) It’s a testament to the U.N.’s single-minded obsession with criticizing Israel, holding the Jewish state to a different standard.

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Nuclear Extortion: Mullahs Want More Concessions from Biden by Majid Rafizadeh

By on January 19th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16975/iran-nuclear-extortion

Iran… rejoined the global financial system with full legitimacy — plus billions of dollars flowing into the treasury of the IRGC and its expanding militias across the Middle East. You would think, then, that the regime would be delighted to return to the same nuclear deal, right? Wrong. The mullahs want an even sweeter deal.

Biden already showed his cards by stating that he wants the deal. The regime now knows that Biden seems desperate for a deal, and doubtless sees this as a delectable weakness.

The ruling mullahs also most likely assume that they can extort even more concessions from a Democrat administration, particularly Biden’s, because they successfully did so in the past….

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif… told a forum… that he wants a new deal. “A sign of good faith is not to try to renegotiate what has already been negotiated,” he said, adding in the same speech that the US must “Compensate us for our losses.” Iran’s top judicial body had already demanded that the US pay $130 billion in “damages.”

The regime, in addition, is playing another dangerous game, as it did with the Obama administration, to program to extort greater concessions from the Biden administration: It is ratcheting up nuclear threats.

The Iranian regime received a dangerous and unprecedented level of concessions from the Obama administration for Iran’s 2015 “nuclear deal,” known as the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) — which, by the way, Tehran never signed. The major concession was that the deal paved the way for Iran legally to become a full-blown nuclear state.

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