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Ruth King

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Obama’s Fire Sale Foreign Policy By Claudia Rosett

By on December 22nd, 2015

President Obama’s final stretch in office — filled, as he promised, with “interesting stuff” — has become an extravaganza of “historic” foreign-policy deals, most of them distinguished for making common cause with despotic regimes that are less than friendly toward the United States:

— The embrace of Cuba.

— The Iran nuclear deal.

— The Paris climate agreement.

— And, enshrined just this past Friday as United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254, a grand plan in which, under the United Nations umbrella, the U.S., Russia, Iran and sundry others will all come together to produce peace and democracy by June, 2017, in Syria.

On Friday. Obama congratulated himself for such feats, telling reporters at his end-of-year press conference: “we have shown what is possible when America leads.”

OK, but where is this going? What, precisely, does this brand of leadership make possible?

If we measure success by such UN standards as how many nations have agreed to these deals, Obama can congratulate himself (as he has been doing) on capping his tenure with a bonanza of foreign-policy achievements. Last December, scrapping decades of U.S. policy, he buddied up with Cuban dictator Raul Castro, which got him a historic handshake. This summer, via the long palaver of the P5+1 nuclear talks, he clinched the nuclear deal he had fervently sought with Iran; at U.S. behest this deal was adopted pronto — and unanimously — by the 15-member UN Security Council. On December 12, he got his long-pursued climate deal, the Paris Agreement passed unanimously by more than 190 states. And in the name of ending the havoc in Syria, last Friday he got a UN Security Council resolution which passed — you guessed it — unanimously, decreeing “free and fair elections” in Syria within the next 18 months.

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House Republicans Declare Independence By J. Robert Smith

By on December 22nd, 2015

On the cusp of a critical — perhaps historic — election year, House Republicans (the faction that rules) have declared independence — on behalf of the GOP establishment. The omnibus budget deal that Republicans cut with President Obama was surrender, but underlying that was a portentous statement: establishment Republicans affirmed their intention to break away from the party’s conservative grassroots.

Key provisions of the budget deal can be interpreted in no other way than a premeditated decision to dismiss conservatives on vital issues. The price might be the presidency in 2016, but it could well be a price the establishment is willing to pay for longer term realignment.

Much of the House Republicans’ eschewing touches on social issues, immigration, and refugees (Syrians this go-round). Their full funding of Planned Parenthood goes beyond crass political calculation to basely immoral. The Faustian deal with Democrats on illegals opens the way to vote-harvesting opportunities for Democrats in future elections, while giving establishment-aligned business interests the cheap labor they desire.

The budget deal is a dramatic departure for a party on the eve of a presidential election year. It represents a brazen effort to reposition the GOP. Boehner assuredly made his surrenders, but it’s the timing of this agreement that marks it as troubling.

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Letter from Bosnia: The Dayton Agreement at Twenty By:Srdja Trifkovic

By on December 22nd, 2015

The “General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina” was negotiated at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995. It ended the Bosnian war and provided for a decentralized state comprised of two entities of roughly equal size: the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska, RS). The General Framework Agreement, including 11 annexes, was formally signed in Paris on December 14, 1995. Annex 4 of the Agreement is still Bosnia and Herzegovina’s de facto constitution, the basis for its territorial-political divisions and its complex government structure.
For all its shortcomings, and in spite of many attempts to revise or reverse it, the Dayton Agreement has provided a platform for peace among close to four million Bosniaks (i.e. Muslims, 48%), Serbs (33%), and Croats (14%). Bosnia’s relative stability may soon be threatened by political forces in Washington intent on altering the delicate balance achieved at Dayton. Already during her 2009 confirmation hearings as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton declared she was committed to wrapping up what she called “the unfinished business in the Balkans,” and she still believes that the U.S. needs to revise Dayton in the direction of greater centralization of Bosnia at the expense of the autonomy of the two entities – which in reality would adversely affect only one of them, the Serb Republic. It is to be feared that the push for Bosnia’s “constitutional reform” will be relaunched if Mrs. Clinton becomes president. To her, “Bosnia” is an obsession which has generated outright lies over the years.

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Obama the Unilateral Climate Warrior The U.S. keeps soldiering on, but the toothless Paris deal will let EU nations end harmful carbon policies. By Benny Peiser

By on December 22nd, 2015

Amid the media’s elation over the United Nations climate deal reached in Paris on Dec. 12, one significant outcome has been overlooked. The European Union failed to achieve its main objective, namely that the agreement adopt carbon-dioxide mitigation commitments that are “legally binding on all parties.”

While this may appear to be a major setback, it liberates Europe from the restrictions of the Kyoto Protocol—which runs out in 2020—and opens the way for more flexible and less damaging policies.

During the Paris negotiations, European Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete warned that the EU “cannot make the mistake we made in Kyoto” where “all the big emitters were outside the legally binding agreement.” For Europe, the Kyoto Protocol has forced EU states to adopt unilateral, and disastrously costly, decarbonization policies. With their manufacturers rapidly losing ground to international competition, governments are increasingly concerned about the threat high energy prices pose to Europe’s industrial base.

The economic damage of unilateral climate policy is now widely acknowledged. In September 2014, then-EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger warned that “If there is no binding commitment from countries such as India, Russia, Brazil, the U.S., China, Japan and South Korea, whose governments are responsible for some 70% of global emissions,” it would be a mistake for EU states to bind only themselves. “If we are too ambitious and others do not follow us, we will have an export of production and more emissions outside the EU.”

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Let’s Elect Hillary Now We want a president we can loathe all of the time—not support some of the time. Bret Stephens

By on December 22nd, 2015

Dear fellow conservatives:

Let us now pledge to elect Hillary Clinton as the 45th president of the United States.

Let’s skip the petty dramas of primaries and caucuses, the debate histrionics, the sour spectacle of the convention in Cleveland. Let’s fast-forward past that sinking October feeling when we belatedly realize we’re going to lose—and lose badly.

Let’s move straight to that first Tuesday in November, when we grimly pull the lever for the candidate who has passed all the Conservative Purity Tests (CPTs), meaning we’ve upheld the honor of our politically hopeless cause. Let’s stop pretending we want to be governed by someone we agree with much of the time, when we can have the easy and total satisfaction of a president we can loathe and revile all the time.

Let’s do this because it’s what we want. Maybe secretly, maybe unconsciously, but desperately. We want four—and probably eight—more years of cable-news neuralgia. We want to drive ourselves to work as Mark Levin or Laura Ingraham scratch our ideological itches until they bleed a little. We want the refiner’s fire that is our righteous indignation at a country we claim no longer to recognize—ruled by impostors and overrun by foreigners.

We also want to turn the Republican Party into a gated community. So much nicer that way. If the lesson of Mitt Romney’s predictable loss in 2012 was that it’s bad politics to tell America’s fastest-growing ethnic group that some of their relatives should self-deport, or to castigate 47% of the country as a bunch of moochers—well, so what? Abraham Lincoln once said “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” What. Ever. Now the party of Lincoln has as its front-runner an insult machine whose political business is to tell Mexicans, Muslims, physically impaired journalists, astute Jewish negotiators and others who cross his sullen gaze that he has no use for them or their political correctness.

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The Risks of Inaction in the Face of Iranian Misbehavior By Michael Singh

By on December 22nd, 2015

The Obama administration has emphasized that the nuclear deal with Iran was narrowly focused and was not intended to address concerns such as Iran’s support for terrorism or its regional activities. Yet while the U.S. and its allies got a narrow deal, Iran effectively received a far more comprehensive one.

Iran’s actions have made clear that it can be expected, at most, to abide by the letter of the text. As Sen. Bob Corker has noted, since the agreement was signed in July, Iran has sentenced Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian–who has been in jail for more than a year–and imprisoned another Iranian-American. It has defied United Nations sanctions by exporting arms to Yemen and Syria; by dispatching Gen. Qasem Soleimani, chief of Iran’s elite military Qods Force, and other sanctioned officials to Russia, Iraq, and elsewhere; and by conducting two ballistic missile launches. Iranian hackers have reportedly engaged in cyber attacks on the State Department. Tehran also refused to fully cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency investigation into its nuclear weapons research.

How have the U.S. and its negotiating partners responded to Iran’s actions? Rote condemnation.

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Jews and Other Poles: By Ruth Wisse

By on December 22nd, 2015

Poland offered Jews some of the best conditions they ever experienced in exile—until it didn’t. How are Poles dealing with that history today?

Poland! It’s one of those words capable of causing a rift between otherwise perfectly compatible Jewish minds. When I mention an upcoming trip to Warsaw, a friend says: “How can you be going there?! I would never set foot in that place!” On my return, reporting on the country’s warming attitudes toward Jews to another friend who was born and spent her childhood there, she stops me: “I don’t want to hear any more.” I had forgotten for a moment that Polish neighbors had killed her father.

There is no way of simplifying or ironing out the relation of Jews to Poland, Poland to Jews, each to their common history. It is a fact that Poland offered Jews some of the best conditions they ever experienced in exile. Even if one discounts the saying, “Poland was heaven for the nobles, hell for the peasants, and paradise for the Jews,” it is plain that the last-named did enjoy unusual opportunities in the country—until they didn’t. A Failed Brotherhood is how the scholars Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal titled their book on Poles’and Jews’ perceptions of each other, leaving open the question of which of the two words deserves greater emphasis.

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EFFECTIVE INTERIOR ENFORCEMENT OF IMMIGRATION LAW VITAL TO NAT’L SECURITY MICHAEL CUTLER

By on December 22nd, 2015

For decades, discussions about the failures of the immigration system focused almost exclusively on securing our southwest border but ignored not only the legal entry system, but the solution to the failures of both the legal and illegal means by which aliens – including terrorists and transnational criminals – enter the United States: the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the U.S.

Let’s be blunt. There is no way to prevent all illegal entries of aliens. Our nation’s southwest border is 1,900 miles long, and the border that separates the U.S. from Canada is more than 5,000 miles long. Our coastline runs approximately 95,000 miles.
border

The vetting process conducted by consular officials who issue visas will always suffer failures. The Visa Waiver Program further erodes the ability to vet aliens who enter the U.S.

Finally, politicians and journalists now are acknowledging that failures of the immigration system are not limited to the millions of illegal aliens in the U.S. but that there is a threat posed by aliens who were admitted through the legal process, but not adequately vetted. In fact, the 9/11 Commission noted that the great majority of terrorists entered the U.S. through international airports.

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Catastrophic Failure: A Review, Part II Edward Cline

By on December 22nd, 2015

Rather than prosecute a genuine War on Terror, our leadership would rather wear a blindfold and play “Pin the tail on the donkey,” the donkey being anything but Islam.

“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…”
Page 7, Explanatory Memorandum, 1991, Muslim Brotherhood

I noted in Part I of this review that the “Islamophobia” of Americans is more the enemy recognized by our “defenders” than is the actual enemy, Islam, the enemy that cannot be named. Within that purgatory of purposeless analytical bean-counting and sand-sifting is a startling and craven ignorance of the actual enemy, enforced by post-modern, left-wing politically correct thought and speech, while the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) stymie any meaningful investigation and intelligence analysis by determining definitions and “red lines” and the language employed in the War on Terror.

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Why Belief and Foreign Policy Matter By Herbert London

By on December 22nd, 2015

In his magnificent book, The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk cites five cities which have given us our rich heritage and from which we have created an exceptional civilization: Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, London and Philadelphia. Kirk offers a philosophically panoramic view. From Jerusalem came the order of the soul and leading a purposeful life. From Athens emerged the order of mind and how one ought to live. From Rome came an understanding of personal virtue. From London, our concepts of common law, private property and constitutional order were formulated. And from Philadelphia emerged the protection of individual rights and the understanding of liberty within a framework of law.

Each of these spheres of understanding built on the previous era culminating in a culture called the West. Truths were not invented but discovered over the course of time. And if we are to flourish, we must tend to the roots of these powerful ideas and replenish them.

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