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Ruth King

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How to Defuse the Crisis with North Korea By Herbert E. Meyer

By on May 2nd, 2017

The looming crisis with North Korea provides a perfect illustration of what’s gone wrong with the way Washington works. Everyone is so eager to propose a policy, no one can be bothered to articulate an objective. So policymakers start arguing about what to do, before deciding what they want to accomplish. That’s like arguing over what route to take, before deciding where you want to go. (Which, to point out the obvious, is why we keep ending up in the middle of nowhere, or upside down in a ditch.)

Here’s one possible objective that would defuse this crisis and perhaps even bring a few decades of stability: to turn North Korea into a modern version of East Germany.

For those of you too young to remember the Cold War, during those decades after World War II Germany was divided. West Germany was free, prosperous, and an American ally. East Germany was a miserable dictatorship, not very prosperous, and a Soviet satellite. (To get a feel for what life was like in East Germany, watch the great movie The Lives of Others, and the German television series Weissensee.) But during all these decades, East Germany was never a threat to West Germany, or to the U.S. Its communist regime wanted only to be left alone. And in return, the West Germans and the Americans made it absolutely clear they had no intention of unifying Germany by attacking or otherwise bringing down the East.

When the Korean war ended with an armistice in 1953, that country was divided. South Korea became free, prosperous, and an American ally. North Korea became a miserable dictatorship, not very prosperous, and a sort-of satellite of China. The difference between Germany and Korea is that while East Germany wanted only to be left alone, North Korea keeps threatening to conquer South Korea and reunify the country under its control, and to fire nuclear-armed missiles at the U.S. itself.

President Trump’s Got Their Attention

But now, for the first time in its history — and thanks entirely to President Trump — North Korea faces the real possibility of a massive military attack, certainly to destroy its nuclear facilities and perhaps even to obliterate the regime itself. And there’s nothing like the looming prospect of an attack by the United States to get a government’s attention.

Simply put, it may be possible to defuse the current crisis without a war by cutting a deal along these lines: If North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons and cease threatening South Korea and the U.S., the U.S. and South Korea will guarantee North Korea’s sovereignty.

Once again, there’s an historic parallel between Korea and Germany: Adolf Hitler was crazy; a foaming-at-the-mouth, chewing-the-carpet raving lunatic. He was also a brilliant, cunning politician who not only held onto power, but who kept within his grip the total loyalty of Germany’s military leaders. These generals weren’t crazy; they were hard, practical, highly intelligent men who had fought and lost World War I and then rebuilt Germany’s war machine. They knew in their bones that another world war would devastate their country. They understood that invading Russia would end in catastrophe.

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Every Senator Agrees the U.N. Must Change It’s past time for the U.S. to stop tolerating Turtle Bay’s pervasive anti-Israel bias.By Chris Coons and Marco Rubio

By on May 2nd, 2017

Mr. Coons, a Delaware Democrat, and Mr. Rubio, a Florida Republican, are U.S. senators.

It’s rare, especially these days, for all 100 U.S. Senators—from Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz, from Elizabeth Warren to Mitch McConnell —to agree on something. But the scourge of anti-Israel bias at the United Nations is such an issue. Last week, every senator signed our letter to Secretary-General António Guterres, urging him to improve the U.N.’s treatment of Israel and eliminate anti-Semitism in all its forms.

While the U.N. has achieved some important successes since its founding 70 years ago, too many of its member states and agencies use the world body as a vehicle for targeting Israel rather than as a forum committed to advancing peace and human rights. This encourages and supports the broader scourge of anti-Semitism, and distracts key U.N. entities from their original missions.

As both the U.N.’s principal founding member and its largest financial contributor, the U.S. must insist on real reforms. We in Congress have a responsibility to conduct rigorous oversight of U.S. engagement at the U.N. and its use of our citizens’ tax dollars. We commend Ambassador Nikki Haley for stating that “the U.N.’s anti-Israel bias . . . is long overdue for change.” In another hopeful sign, Mr. Guterres recently disavowed an anti-Israel report by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia and demanded that it be withdrawn.

Still, the U.N. continues to fund and maintain many standing committees that serve no purpose other than to attack Israel and inspire the anti-Israel boycott, sanctions and divestment movement. These committees must be eliminated or reformed.

While the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization does important work on Holocaust education and preserving world heritage sites, some member states persist in pushing measures to target Israel and deny Jewish and Christian ties to Jerusalem. Unesco member states must understand that these actions only undermine the credibility of their organization.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East has faced troubling allegations of inciting violence against Israelis and aiding Hamas. If it does not cease these activities, it risks losing support of U.S. lawmakers.

Perhaps most troubling is the Human Rights Council. Charged with drawing the world’s attention to gross human-rights violations, its members include some of the world’s worst human-rights violators, who devote far too much time to baseless attacks against the Jewish state. The HRC even maintains a permanent item on its agenda targeting Israel—Agenda Item 7. No actual human-rights violator is targeted in this way.

Speaking recently before the HRC in Geneva, Erin Barclay, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, criticized the council’s anti-Israel focus as “unfair and unbalanced,” noting that its “obsession with Israel . . . is the largest threat to the council’s credibility” and “limits the good we can accomplish by making a mockery of this council.”

The HRC should be the premier international body addressing the many pressing human-rights challenges of our time in countries such as China, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Russia, South Sudan and Venezuela. We therefore urge specific reforms to end the HRC’s imbalanced focus on Israel, including the elimination of Agenda Item 7 and a competitive admission process in order to broaden and better balance membership on the council.

In his April 25, 1945, address to the United Nations, President Harry S. Truman challenged the authors of the U.N. Charter to create an organization rooted in lofty humanitarian principles, dedicated to the benefit of all mankind, and capable of achieving “a just and lasting peace.”

For too long the world body has fallen far short of those ideals. In order for it to be more effective in advancing peace and human rights around the world, America must remain vigilant. We stand ready to lead sustained bipartisan efforts in Congress and with our international partners to eliminate the U.N.’s anti-Israel bias, and to fight anti-Semitism in all its forms.

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Gorka is a casualty of a Jewish civil war : David Goldman

By on May 2nd, 2017

Jews are sadly accustomed to becoming collateral damage in disputes in other peoples’ civil wars. Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a senior White House official, is one of the few gentile victims of a Jewish civil war. Dr. Gorka, long a Fox News commentator on counter-terrorism, will speak at the Jerusalem Post’s annual New York conference in May and at this year’s Zionist Organization of America Gala. But a left-leaning Jewish website, the Forward, has published 39 articles alleging that Gorka has neo-Nazi ties in Hungary, the country of his parents’ birth where he was active in politics during the 2000s.

American media have been carrying unconfirmed reports that Gorka will leave the White House, where he works in the Strategic Initiatives Group, perhaps for another post in the government. It is not clear whether he will leave, much less whether his possible departure was motivated by the campaign against him. The bigger issue for the Jewish world, though, is whether we can contest our differences without resorting to mendacity and slander.

Gorka’s supporters in the Jewish world are playing whack-a-mole with the Forward, refuting each charge as it appears while the Forward staff devises new ones. The exchange reached a depth of absurdity when the Forward posted a heavily spliced and truncated video clip of a 2007 interview with Gorka on Hungarian television. The Forward claimed April 4 that Gorka endorsed the proposal of anti-Semitic political parties for a popular militia. The next morning, the Hungarian-speaking Jewish journalist David Reaboi posted an unedited version of the same video on the Redstate website, showing that Gorka had denounced the militia plan that the Forward claimed he had supported.

The merits of the Forward’s claims and Reaboi’s rebuttal can be verified by any reader who takes the time to watch the two clips. Riots instigated by supporters of the discredited Communist regime had stormed Hungary’s National Television Station in 2006, injuring 141 policeman in a pitched battle on the Budapest streets. In response the explicitly anti-Semitic Jobbik Party proposed to create a popular militia. Gorka, a leader of the New Democratic Coalition (UDK), was asked to respond. Choosing his words carefully, Gorka stated he had no objection to the principle of a popular militia, but that Jobbik sought to exploit fears of civil unrest, and the notionally respectable FIDESZ party (which has ruled Hungary since 2010) was using Jobbik for its own purposes.

The Forward’s heavily-edited segment cut Gorka off in mid-sentence, at the moment he said that he had no objection to militias in principle, and just before he denounced the specific proposal in question. The Forward left out what Gorka said next: “And the most important thing of all, and I stress, the most important thing of all is that this isn’t anything to do with the UDK [Gorka’s party], but with Jobbik and that FIDESZ is really behind them and supporting it from the sidelines.”

Some Jewish leaders, including Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein, repudiated the Forward’s charges as a smear. Writing in PJ Media April 4, I abhorred the Forward’s spliced video as the most transparent falsification I had seen in forty years of journalism.

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Pre-Existing Confusion Here’s how the House health reform will cover high-risk patients.

By on May 2nd, 2017

Insurance coverage for pre-existing health conditions can be confusing, as President Trump and a journalist showed in a television interview over the weekend. Allow us to explain how the GOP reform would work in practice and why pre-existing conditions have been exaggerated as a political problem.

Mr. Trump told CBS ’s John Dickerson that “I watch some of the news reports, which are so unfair, and they say we don’t cover pre-existing conditions, we cover it beautifully.” Mr. Dickerson seemed surprised: “Okay. Well, that’s a development, sir. So you’re saying it’s going to be pre-existing to everybody?” Mr. Trump said the House bill had “evolved” but as usual didn’t explain how.

House conservatives rebelled over the original version of the American Health Care Act, which only partially deregulated insurance markets. The bill maintained the rule known as guaranteed issue, which requires insurers to cover all applicants regardless of medical history. It also relaxed community rating, which limits how much premiums can vary among beneficiaries.

The media and the left thus claim that conservatives want to allow insurers to charge sick people more, and some conservatives agree, which spooks the moderates. But the latest compromise between conservatives and centrists doesn’t repeal guaranteed issue or community rating. It keeps these regulations as the default baseline, and states could apply for a federal waiver if they want to pursue other regulatory relief.

But the waivers aren’t a license to leave cancer survivors without insurance. States can only receive a waiver if they avail themselves of the bill’s $100 billion fund to set up high-risk pools. These state-based programs, which were run in 35 states until they were pre-empted by ObamaCare, subsidize coverage for older and sicker patients. This helps these individuals and keeps coverage cheaper for everyone else.

Why might a Governor prefer such an arrangement over the ObamaCare status quo? Well, the law’s price controls are a raw deal for most consumers, which leads to a cycle of rising premiums and falling enrollment. Average premiums rose by 40% or more in 11 states this year, and insurance markets in states like Tennessee, Kentucky and Minnesota are in crisis.

Community rating and guaranteed issue also punish the sick by degrading quality. When insurers can profit by being the best plan for, say, cancer or diabetes, they invest in such care. When both the healthy and sick pay the same rates, the incentive is to load up on healthier people and discourage people with expensive ailments or chronic conditions from enrolling by using higher copays, narrow provider networks or tiered prescription drug formularies.

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‘Nationalist’ Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word Trump will be successful if he puts U.S. interests first—while still helping to maintain global order.By Walter Russell Mead

By on May 2nd, 2017

If Donald Trump were a liberal Democrat, some of the media’s descriptions of “chaos” and “disarray” in the White House probably would be replaced with stories about “creative tension” among a “team of rivals.” As it is, the struggle between “nationalists” like Steve Bannon and “globalists” like Gary Cohn is characterized in near-apocalyptic terms. Yet as Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal last week, “I’m a nationalist and a globalist.” That is good news: Mr. Trump and the Republican Party should be weaving nationalist and globalist themes together rather than picking them apart.

Nationalism—the sense that Americans are bound together into a single people with a common destiny—is a noble and necessary force without which American democracy would fail. A nationalist and patriotic elite produces leaders like George Washington, who aim to promote the well-being of the country they love. An unpatriotic and antinationalist elite produces people who feather their nests without regard to the common good.

Mr. Trump is president in large part because millions of Americans, rightly or wrongly, believed that large sections of their country’s elite were no longer nationalist. Flawed he may be, but the president bears an important message, and Trump-hating elites have only themselves to blame for his ascendancy. A cosmopolitan and technocratic political class that neither speaks the language nor feels the pull of nationalist solidarity cannot successfully lead a democratic society.

The president symbolized his nationalist commitment by hanging a portrait of Andrew Jackson in a place of honor in the Oval Office. Now Mr. Trump must stay true to that commitment or he will lose his political base and American politics will spin even further off balance. But life is rarely simple. Jacksonian means will not always achieve Jacksonian goals. Sometimes, they even get in the way.

Jackson learned this when his populist fight against the Second Bank of the United States ultimately led to a depression that turned the country over to his hated Whig rivals. As Mr. Trump comes to grips with the tough international economic reality, he is realizing that not everything the Jacksonians think they want will actually help them. The president has already discovered that ripping up the North American Free Trade Agreement won’t help the middle-class voters who put him in office.

Jacksonian voters don’t want North Korea to have the ability to threaten the U.S. with nuclear weapons. They also don’t want a second Korean War. Reaching the best outcome on Korea could mean giving China a better deal on trade than many Trump voters would desire. Populists like to rail against globalization and world order. Yet the security and prosperity of the American people depend on an intricate web of military, diplomatic, political and economic arrangements that an American president must manage and conserve.

Mr. Trump is learning that some of the core goals of his Jacksonian program can be realized only by judiciously employing the global military, diplomatic and economic statesmanship associated with Alexander Hamilton. Bringing those two visions into alignment isn’t easy. Up until the Civil War, the American party system revolved around the rivalry of the Jacksonian Democrats with the Hamiltonian Whigs. Abraham Lincoln fused Jacksonian unionism with Henry Clay’s Hamiltonian vision when he created the modern Republican Party. Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan revitalized the party of their times by returning to the Jacksonian-Hamiltonian coalition that made the old party grand. CONTINUE AT SITE

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“The Month That Was – April 2017” Sydney M. Williams

By on May 2nd, 2017

A few days ago, in a reply that showed a rare understanding of political realities, my 12-year-old grandson responded to a question from his 16-year-old brother: “Do you even know what Communism IS, George?” “Sure, I do. It’s when one man works two hours and another guy works fourteen hours and they both get paid the same!” George gets it! I wish more adults did as well.

………………………………………………………………………..

Global news dominated: Kim Jong-un continued to play chicken with the civilized world; Russian bombers, off Alaska, came within 30 miles of U.S. airspace; the U.S. dropped the “mother of all bombs” on ISIS holdouts in Nangarhar province in Afghanistan; in retaliation for a chemical attack by Assad forces, the U.S. fired cruise missiles onto a Syrian airbase; food riots broke out in Venezuela, as Socialism broke down. These events demonstrate how delicate is civilization’s balance. Keeping Humpty-Dumpty on the wall is the most important job of world leaders, especially the American President.

The most significant events during the month were rising tensions between North Korea and the civilized world. Kim Jong-un has nuclear weapons. He is developing missile programs, which threaten South Korea, Japan, the United States and dozens of other nations. President Trump spent time during the month with Kim’s sole patron, China’s President Xi Jinping. He may have had some effect. By month’s end, it was indicated that China had reduced coal purchases from North Korea. Two failed launches may be ascribed to North Korea’s ineptness, or to cyber interference on the part of the U.S. We don’t know. American Naval ships have been repositioned to the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan. Mr. Trump, in a rare move, summoned all 100 Senators to the White House to discuss the situation. Missile defense should be front and center. A few South Koreans were reported to be upset with Mr. Trump’s declaration that it would be “appropriate” for them to pay for the missile defense system. But, after all, it is their hide that is in most immediate danger. (Last Saturday, Defense Secretary James Mattis said the U.S. would pay for the system.) Reality, as most South Koreans know, is that the U.S. is the only counter-balance to China.

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What Germany’s Foreign Minister Should Have Done in Israel David Goldman

By on May 2nd, 2017

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rightly canceled a meeting with visiting German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel after Gabriel met with Breaking the Silence, an organization that accuses the Israeli government of war crimes. As the Times of Israel explained:

Few organizations are more despised on the Israeli right — and by many who are not on the right — than Breaking the Silence, which publishes anonymous testimonies documenting alleged human rights abuses by Israeli soldiers.

That’s the equivalent of meeting Wikileaks — denounced by CIA Director Mike Pompeo as a “hostile intelligence service” — right before a scheduled meeting with the U.S. president. Or the equivalent of a senior American official meeting with German ultra-rightists before a scheduled meeting with Chancellor Merkel. Visiting diplomats simply do not raise the profile and credibility of fringe groups that question the legitimacy of their host government.

Gabriel’s action was obnoxious in the extreme, and Israel’s prime minister had no choice but to snub him. More egregious than Gabriel’s sin of commission, though, was his sin of omission: Germany could explain the reality of their circumstances to the Palestinians more credibly than any other country, by reference to its own sad history.

Why the German foreign minister felt compelled to violate basic rules of diplomacy is another question. Germans dislike President Trump by a 3-to-1 margin, and showing disrespect to Israel is an indirect snub at the United States. As a leader of the Social-Democratic Party, moreover, Gabriel speaks to a left-wing constituency — many of whom equate Israelis with Nazis. As Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick observes:

As polls taken between 2011 and 2015 showed, between a third and half of Germans view Israel as the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany.

That is of minor consequence in the great scheme of things. The Germans will never forgive us for Auschwitz, as an Israeli psychiatrist quipped, and the memory of Nazi crimes is made easier to bear by believing that the Jews are just as bad. (I run into Germans who believe this from time to time, and tell them that the so-called Palestinians they see on television are actors — we exterminated all the real Palestinians, just like the Nazis).

Sigmar Gabriel should have explained to the Palestinians that they are beaten, and what it means to be beaten.

The conflict continues because the Arab side — after losing the 1947 War of Independence, the 1956 Sinai War, the 1967 Six Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and two pointless Intifadas — refuses to accept that it is beaten. That is a common occurrence in history. Most casualties in war occur well after hope of victory has vanished; that, as I wrote in a study for Asia Times last year, explains why many wars continue until there aren’t enough men left to fight.

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Admiral Harris: Be Very Afraid of North Korea Jed Babbin

By on May 2nd, 2017

Despite the fact that North Korea proclaimed that war with the United States is “imminent,” the world probably won’t explode next week. Then again, it might.

By all reports, Pacific Command commander Admiral Harry Harris is a cool-headed warrior, not someone given to shouting that the sky is falling. (A Japanese-American, his appointment as PACOM boss unsettled the Chinese.) A friend of mine who knew Harris very well during their days at the Naval Academy said he’s “as straight a shooter as you can get.”)

Testifying to Congress last week about North Korea’s ability to strike the United States with a nuclear-armed ballistic missile, Harris said, “The crisis on the Korean peninsula is real — the worst I’ve seen.… There is some doubt within the intelligence community whether Kim Jong Un has that capability today or whether he will soon, but I have to assume he has it, the capability is real, and that he’s moving towards it.” When a gent such as Harris says that it’s something we have to take seriously.

Harris went on to say that “Kim Jong Un is making progress and all nations need to take this seriously because their missiles point in all directions,” Harris said. “If left unchecked, they will match the capability of his hostile rhetoric.”

Military leaders have to measure an enemy by its intentions and capabilities. North Korea’s capabilities are being developed as fast as its scientists — and those from other nations — can propel it.

Remember A.Q. Khan? He is the Pakistani scientist who may be the world’s worst proliferator. He helped start the North Korean nuclear weapons program that has now come to fruition. The Norks’ sixth nuclear weapons test is expected any day. They may or may not be close to miniaturizing their warheads to fit in a missile’s fairings. They also may or may not be at the point where one of their warhead designs can survive the stresses of launch.

Whether they have reached those points or not, Adm. Harris assures us they probably will soon. That determines capability. What about intentions?

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Trump eyes Afghanistan Although Obama declared the U.S. combat mission was over in 2014, the Taliban keeps fighting Jed Babbin

By on May 2nd, 2017

Over the past two weeks National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis have taken quiet trips to Afghanistan. They are the president’s eyes on the war our military has been fighting for almost 16 years.

Their trips come more than two months after Army Gen. John Nicholson, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that, “I believe we’re in a stalemate.” Gen. Nicholson said that while he has sufficient counter-terrorism forces he needs a few thousand more troops to continue training the Afghan military. U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan is now close to 10,000.

Gen. Nicholson described a stalemate that was created by former President Obama’s Afghanistan policy, which kicked the can down the road so that his successor would have to deal with it.

In early 2009, Mr. Obama said that our policy was to “secure” Afghanistan but that “victory” wasn’t our goal. Mr. Obama described Afghanistan as “the just war” in his speech accepting his aspirational Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. From then on he micromanaged the war and created the existing stalemate.

Later in 2009, Gen. Stanley McChrystal — then U.S. commander in Afghanistan — sent Mr. Obama a report that requested about 40,000 more troops and said that unless those reinforcements were received, we would reach the point where defeating the Taliban was no longer possible.

Mr. Obama fussed and fretted over the report for months. When he finally decided his policy, it was not what Gen. McChrystal wanted. Instead, Mr. Obama came up with a policy that amounted to “McChrystal lite.”

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Remaking World Affairs By Herbert London

By on May 2nd, 2017

With much fanfare President Trump welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to his Florida retreat for face-to-face meetings weeks ago. According to press accounts, Trump was eager to press Beijing to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and martial spirit.

But there was more there than meets the eye. For one thing, the Trump delegation arrived later than Xi, a breach of diplomatic protocol. Was the occupant of the White House sending a message? And second, sometime between salad and entrée, Trump let on that he is attacking Syria with 59 Tomahawks, the same Assad government China supports. It has not been reported whether Xi had indigestion.

The Trump team seemingly ushered in a new stance towards China. For decades, policy analysts in both parties contended that integrating China into the global economic, diplomatic and securities architecture would ultimately serve the interests of the West and yield stability across the globe. But this hypothesis has not been borne out by the evidence.

Since 2008 China has embraced protectionism in defiance of trade agreements. It has boosted state owned enterprises to the detriment of foreign owned firms. And it has extorted intellectual property for Chinese entities as the price for participation in Chinese markets.

On the foreign policy front, China has asserted its territorial and maritime claims with a unilaterally generated air perimeter zone, one that was drawn in a coercive and hostile manner. It has increased its support for North Korea and rejected United Nations actions against its dubious ally. Yet despite, these actions and many others, there persists the belief U.S. and China can establish a modus vivendi. Based on recent assertions and a Chinese willingness to assist in restraining the North Korean nuclear program, a new level of understanding may be emerging. Washington does have its skeptics.

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