RUTHFULLY YOURS

In New York, the United Nations is still lumbering through its Sept. 28th – Oct. 3 general debate. But even with today’s declaration by aging potentate Mahmoud Abbas that the Palestinian Authority will no longer respect the Oslo Accords (did they ever?) the headlines are elsewhere. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin not only stole the UN show, but in Syria — and beyond — is stealing a march on President Obama that makes the current world scene look ever more like the disastrous penultimate year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. That 1979 run of debacles opened with Iran’s Islamic Revolution, and rolled on to the Soviet Union’s December invasion of Afghanistan — lighting the fuel under the cauldron whence sprang, in due course, a great many horrors, including the Sept. 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks on the United States.

Obama’s presidency still has more than a year to run (477 days, to be precise), and after more than six years of U.S. global retreat, as we toil through this fourth quarter of “interesting stuff,” trouble is spreading even faster than it did in the Carter era. The threats now rising like a tsunami on the horizon are, arguably, worse.

But let’s focus here on Russia. This week, President Putin has delivered not only a blitz in Syria, but a grand slam on the world stage. Call it a play in three acts.

Act I: Monday, Sept. 28th, at the UN General Assembly in New York. Obama delivers his annual speech, repeating the message of his first presidential address to the UN in 2009 — in which he effectively served notice that under his command, America was abdicating, to the international collective, its longtime leadership of the Free World. This year, arriving with the feckless UN-approved Iran nuclear deal in his pocket, and lamenting both the ills of dictatorship and the frustrations of democracy, Obama tells the assembled eminences at the UN that he believes in his core “that we, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion.” He adds, “We cannot look backwards.” (“Oh, yes we can,” editorializes The Wall Street Journal, noting that “even as he concedes the growing world disorder, Mr. Obama still won’t admit that his policy of American retreat has created a vacuum for rogues to fill.”)

From the Baltic to the Middle East the threats are rising, yet across the Anglosphere defence budgets are slashed and a blind eye turned to perils that range from Russian adventurism to Islamic aggression. Never have so many been protected by so few.
Many in the British defence establishment and private think-tanks were dismayed when David Cameron’s coalition government, despite international turbulence, cut Britain’s army from 100,000 to 82,000 men, its smallest size since before the Napoleonic wars. More recently, in the face of obvious international instability, Cameron has announced defence spending will be increased to the agreed Nato minimum of 2 per cent of GDP over the next few years. It appears to be a U-turn away from a policy of steady and increasingly dangerous defence cuts.

This will be welcome news, as far as it goes, to the many senior figures in the defence establishment and the many retired senior officers of all three services who have been warning with increasing urgency over the last few years about the parlous state of Britain’s armed forces. Further, a new Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) has been promised for this year.

However, the conservative Bow Group, a think-tank with some highly qualified members, has recently made the point that simply budgeting towards an arbitrary figure does not necessarily mean that the spending priorities will be right. It calls for an extended and less hasty review that takes full consideration of the range of inputs needed. It argues that the SDSR should be sufficiently resourced to give due consideration to the UK’s national objectives, operational sovereignty, and the views of industry and major allies. This could enhance the UK’s international standing and security. Otherwise the promised increase may not be as good as it looks.

This is a story that has the feel of a slightly implausible spy thriller. Unfortunately, it is all too real, and it suggests that hidden forces have indeed been at work shaping the narrative on the Benghazi attack that was so deftly manipulated in the lead-up to the 2012 re-election of Barack Obama. The complicated story (as much of it as we know at present) is laid out by Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard:

In March, an investigation by ProPublica and Gawker revealed that a “secret spy network” that was not on the State Department payroll, run by longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, was “funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State’s private account starting before the Benghazi attack.” Now the WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s clandestine service in Europe who was working directly with Blumenthal as a member of Clinton’s spy network, was concurrently working as a consultant to CBS News and its venerable news program 60 Minutes.

According to WEEKLY STANDARD sources, Drumheller was active in shaping the network’s Benghazi coverage. His role at the network raises questions about what went wrong with the retracted 60 Minutes report on Benghazi that aired in October 2013. Despite his former life as a high ranking CIA official, Drumheller was laden with political baggage, making him a curious choice to be consulting with a major news operation—especially so given that he was working directly with Sidney Blumenthal, whose primary occupation appears to be manipulating media coverage on behalf of the Clintons.

It’s tempting to say that Obama’s chickens have come to roost. However, this is more like the vampires have come home to do a lot more than roosting.

Reality always has the last word and the situation in Syria speaks for itself, as we see in news reports:

Russian warplanes began bombarding Syrian opposition targets in the war-torn nation’s north Wednesday, following a terse meeting at which a Russian general asked Pentagon officials to clear out of Syrian air space and was rebuffed, Fox News has learned.

A U.S. official said Russian airstrikes targeted fighters in the vicinity of Homs, located roughly 60 miles east of a Russian naval facility in Tartus, and were carried out by a “couple” of Russian bombers. The strikes hit targets in Homs and Hama, but there is no presence of ISIS in those areas, a senior U.S. defense official said. These planes are hitting areas where Free Syrian Army and other anti-Assad groups are located, the official said.

According to a U.S. senior official, Presidents Obama and Putin agreed on a process to “deconflict” military operations. The Russians on Wednesday “bypassed that process,” the official said.

“That’s not how responsible nations do business,” the official said.

The Fox News report that the Teamsters have decided not to endorse Hillary Clinton’s candidacy at this time, shortly after her pronouncement of her opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, does not surprise and shows the peril of trying to be all things to all constituencies.

On the one hand, there is a need to placate environmentalists and climate change true believers who oppose the pipeline from Canada. Among them is billionaire Tom Steyer, an eco-zealot who has pledged his fortune in support of Democratic candidates who want to repeal the Industrial Revolution who want us to rely on solar power even when the sun doesn’t shine and wind turbines when there’s nary a breeze.

On the other hand, there is a need for the support of unions who can provide the foot soldiers as well as money for a campaign for the White House. The Teamsters could be just hedging their bets in anticipation of a Joe Biden candidacy in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s slipping e-mail scandal-plagued campaign. But the need for union jobs Keystone XL that would create is also a compelling reason.

In announcing her opposition to Keystone XL, Hillary Clinton cited concerns over the pipeline’s impact on the environment and climate change:

“And I oppose it because I don’t think it’s in the best interest of what we need to do to combat climate change. I will be rolling out in a few days my plan for a North American approach to fighting climate change and clean energy. Because for me, we need to be transitioning from fossil fuels — I know it will take time — to clean renewable energy.”

It is sometimes said that in negotiations with foreigners, American leaders play checkers, while their wilier opponents play chess. There is perhaps some truth to this, as American leaders sometimes chase short-term political results, a consequence of democratic governance and constantly changing leadership. By contrast, despotic Persians are credited with inventing chess, and in modern times autocratic Russians have been its master, and so it is tempting to say of President Obama’s dealings with those two countries that the analogy holds.

But that is way too charitable. As Vladimir Putin skillfully reasserts Russian power and influence in the Middle East with Islamic Persian Iran as a willing partner, a more apt analogy might be that while the Russians and Iranians move their chessmen, isolating and threatening opposing pieces, Obama is not even at the table, but rather childishly looking on, as he pushes diplomatic dirt around the Middle East sandbox.

For over 150 years, a primary objective of Western diplomatic and military strategy was to keep the Russians out of the Middle East and Southwest Asia. In the 1850s, the British and French went to war in Crimea to protect the Ottomans from Russian predation and to preserve the balance of power. Later, the so-called “Great Game” centered on similar British efforts to frustrate Russian domination of Iran and Afghanistan. A century later, the United States took up the task, offsetting Russian influence in newly socialist Arab dictatorships by backing Israel and more traditional Arab monarchies in the Middle East, while openly and successfully opposing the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan.

Campuses pay commissions to build foreign enrollment but sometimes get phony applications, ghostwritten essays.

Like many U.S. colleges, Wichita State University wants more foreign students but isn’t a brand name abroad.So the school, whose mascot is a muscle-bound wheat bundle, in late 2013 started paying agents to recruit in places like China and India. The independent agents assemble candidates’ documents and urge them to apply to the Kansas school, which pays the agents $1,000 to $1,600 per enrolled student.

Overseas applications “shot up precipitously,” says Vince Altum, Wichita State’s executive director for international education.

But there is a down side: Wichita State rejected several Chinese applications this year from an agency it suspected of falsifying transcripts, Mr. Altum says, adding that it terminates ties with agencies found to violate its code of conduct by faking documents.

Paying agents a per-student commission is illegal under U.S. law when recruiting students eligible for federal aid—that is, most domestic applicants. But paying commissioned agents isn’t illegal when recruiting foreigners who can’t get federal aid.

So more schools like Wichita State are relying on such agents, saying the intermediaries are the most practical way to woo overseas youths without the cost of sending staff around the world. No one officially counts how many U.S. campuses pay such agents, most of whom operate abroad, but experts estimate at least a quarter do so.

Mr. Graff is professor of English and history at Ohio State University.

Universities have always engaged in relentless self-promotion. But the relationship between rhetoric and reality has become ever more tenuous, and the line separating honest aspiration from fabrication fainter.

The Ohio State University, where I teach, is a particularly dramatic example of this devolution. Not that it is alone—since its claims to uniqueness are based on imitating others.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the university’s slogan, “Do Something Big,” morphed into “Do Something Great.” The urging of the former was deemed too ambiguous.

“Vision 2020: Access, affordability and excellence” is the tagline of the new president, Michael Drake. (He is an ophthalmologist.) This translates into freezing in-state tuition, increasing efforts to privatize major assets, offering small grants to undergraduates, and creating “economies and efficiencies.” Those most often mentioned are purchasing toilet paper from one vendor and doing color-copying double-sided. Not mentioned are substantial staffing reductions, nor the overabundant and overpaid administrators whose reduction is promised but not realized. Staff and faculty salary increases continue at lower than national and peer-institution averages.

Mr. Meyers writes on photography for the Journal. His photo book “Outer Boroughs: New York Beyond Manhattan” was published earlier this year by Damiani.

An exhibition about Soviet photography and film showcases astounding artistic accomplishments that served a vile end.

‘The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film” at the Jewish Museum has several rooms of stunning photography from the 1920s and ’30s, and if you do not know the history of Russia in the 20th century, you will leave the exhibition at the Jewish Museum buoyed. If you do know the history of the “Evil Empire” you can only weep that such artistic accomplishment served such a vile end.
Nowhere is this dichotomy more intense than in Soviets, the room devoted to portraiture. Georgy Zelma’s “Three Generations in Yakutsk” (1929), Max Penson’s “Untitled (Turkmen in Telpeks)” (late 1930s) and Georgy Petrusov’s “Asiatic Sailor” (c. 1935-36) are arresting pictures of ethnic minorities—and also agitprop disseminated to remind Russians of the peoples they dominated and to show the captives’ gratitude. “The Poet Anna Akhmatova” (1924) was taken by Moisei Nappelbaum, the dean of Russian portraitists. She is shown in profile like a patrician in a Renaissance painting, with her aquiline nose and her soulful expression offset by her stylish headgear and her left hand clutching at her beads. It is a fabulous image and, like most of the works in the exhibition, a wonderful print, but who can look at it without thinking of Akhmatova, the greatest Russian lyric poet since Pushkin, decades later standing with other women outside a St. Petersburg prison in the snow and cold, hoping for glimpses of their loved ones? Akhmatova’s son, a hero of World War II, was arrested because Stalin feared heroes were most likely to challenge him. Her first husband had been executed in 1921.

The oddest moment in the second GOP debate was when the first thing Donald Trump did was to launch an assault on Sen. Rand Paul, who was standing about three miles away at the end of the podiums: “Well, first of all, Rand Paul shouldn’t even be on this stage. He’s number 11, he’s got 1% in the polls, and how he got up here, there’s far too many people anyway.” Ummm, what was that all about?

Since that Sept. 16 debate, as measured by the RealClearPolitics polling average, Mr. Trump has lost about a quarter of his support, down to 23% from 30% on the eve of the debate. In this week’s Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, he is at 21%.

It’s not going to get better. The Trump numbers are going to drift sideways, or fall.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Trump tweeted that getting his business out of Atlantic City before the casinos collapsed was “great timing.” The moment has come for the timing master to recognize it’s Atlantic City all over again. For his phenomenal presidential campaign, it’s time to go.