RUTHFULLY YOURS

U.S. President Donald Trump is to be praised for his withdrawal from an agreement that would pave the way for Iranian nuclear power within 15 years, and his imposition of sanctions, writes Howard Rotberg.

In 1943 to 1945, Hitler’s costly obsession with killing every last Jew in Europe took precedence over military and economic basic needs in wartime. There came a point in the course of the war, when the resources used in rounding up and murdering European Jewry could have been used to strengthen a failing military.

And now we see another evil empire, Iran, prioritizing aid to its terrorist proxies, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and others to kill civilians in Israel, when the economy is in such straits that protesters are hitting the streets. The Iranian people see huge sums of money leaving the country to assist these terrorist groups in genocide of the Jews when American sanctions over the Iranian nuclear program have caused shortages of gas and oil and even rationing.

People also must question the cost of Iran propping up Syrian leader and war-criminal Bashar al-Assad, and its mischief in Yemen.

This past week, many Iranians showed they have had enough. Gas rationing and price increases may have been the instigation of these protests, however, as we see in Hong Kong, once the people take the first steps to challenge authority, a revolution may start if the people have lost their loyalty to the state.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/473200-us-should-back-irans-protesters

More than half a century ago, President John F. Kennedy re-wrote U.S. policy for the developing world with one goal in mind: to put America on the side of revolutionary forces that were seeking progressive change.

His predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had subjected U.S. policy in the developing world to the wishes of America’s European allies that maintained colonies across the world and often ruled harshly.

JFK, however, knew that change was coming in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where hundreds of millions of people were growing increasingly frustrated over political oppression and stunted living standards. He also knew that the next generation of leaders on those continents would remember whether or not Washington had lent its support to their efforts. That would determine whether, in the aftermath of change, the United States found itself with new allies or new adversaries.

Washington faces that same question today in Iran, which is now home to what could be the most sustained protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. When the regime falls, as it surely will (whether in a month, a year, or a decade), will its successors look kindly on the support they received from Washington?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/strategic-questions-for-eu-leaders-on-natos-70th-birthday/

Now is the time for Trump to press Macron, Merkel, and others on the security risks posed by China.

L eaders of North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries are gathering in London this week to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance. It’s the perfect opportunity for President Trump to declare a big halftime lead in his campaign to persuade other members to meet their financial obligations to the alliance. It’s also an opportunity to meet one-on-one with European leaders and assess their readiness to confront the growing threats that China’s geopolitical expansion poses to alliance members.

France
Trump should take French president Emmanuel Macron’s call for a new EU army as a sign of interest in defending France, NATO members, and the West from new security challenges. But a few questions could help channel Macron’s vigor into efforts against more-immediate threats.

For example: Does France have any plan to evaluate the cybersurveillance risks posed by the Chinese undersea fiber-optic cable soon coming ashore in Marseille? Ironically named the PEACE cable, the fiber link will add a major new connection between the EU and China through interchanges serving Pakistan and Djibouti. The PEACE cable involved Huawei Marine Networks until U.S. attention on Huawei forced it to sell its subsea subsidiary. The buyer, Hengtong Optic-Electric Co. Ltd. is a Chinese conglomerate of more than 50 companies in telecommunications, cable systems, and electrical power. Hengtong became involved in the PEACE cable last October, when it set up a venture company for the project in cooperation with Hong Kong-based PCCW Limited, and appointed Huawei Marine to perform the undersea work. For its part, PCCW is partly owned by China Unicom Group, a Chinese state-owned telecommunications company. PCCW runs the electronic passport and identity card systems for the Hong Kong government, as well as the securities clearing system for the Hong Kong Exchange.

Such complexity is par for the course with Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). But it should not confuse Macron, himself an investment banker trained in unraveling opaque corporate structures to get to the real decision-makers. The bottom line is that a Chinese technology SOE will soon have what French telecom operator Orange called a “gateway” into the EU data network, through the new digital window that Orange is building for the Chinese in Marseille.

Indeed, Marseille has become a major site of Chinese strategic expansion. The ancient port city is home to CMA CGM, a shipping and port operator that is the main partner in the Ocean Alliance with China’s COSCO Shipping — which now dominates global container shipping, port operations, and logistics services. Despite capital infusions from Chinese state lenders over the past several years, CMA recently announced it was selling its stake in 10 port terminals to China Merchants Port Holdings Co. Ltd., which already owns about half of CMA’s terminal business. The French line also sold two container ships to Shanghai Pudong Development Bank for an undisclosed price, and leased them back. The cash will help CMA finance its $1.7 billion purchase of CEVA Logistics, which operates one of the largest logistics businesses in the U.S. The stress on CMA’s financial resources prompted one rating agency to downgrade CMA’s debt, but more importantly, the bailout meant that Chinese operators had taken over the hard assets of a Western company in a strategically important sector.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/time-support-iranian-protestors-bruce-thornton/

While we continue to waste our attention on the carnival attraction known as the impeachment hearings, protests against the mullahcracy have engulfed major cities in Iran. Rather than repeat Barack Obama’s appeasing silence in 2009, and his ignoring explicit calls for support from the beacon of liberty, we need to be bold in our support for the protestors, and even bolder in actions that will back up our words.

The precipitating event that has intensified long-running protests has been a 50% increase in fuel prices. This blow to everyday people’s budgets comes a year after President Trump withdrew the US from the Iran deal, and imposed tougher sanctions on the regime, reducing revenues from the sale of oil. But it’s the actions of the mullahs that are to blame. They took Obama’s bribes to sign the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and have squandered them on developing missiles, spinning centrifuges, and financing jihadists in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq under the noses of American troops.

For Iran, this geopolitical jihadist adventurism is nothing new. Indeed, for 40 years it has been at the heart of Iranian foreign policy. The architect of the revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini, proclaimed, “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle,” i.e. jihad.  His successors have been true to that goal, one dismissed by our foreign policy savants who blame Israel or the sins of colonialism instead of recognizing this 14-century-long religious motive documented in Islamic law, doctrine, and long record of invasion, conquest, colonizing, slaving, raiding, and occupation. True to Khomeini’s words, for forty years the mullahs have shed the blood of Americans with impunity.

The JCPOA that opened the road to Iranian nukes has been a disaster, an appeasement whose consequences still may, if Iran obtains nuclear weapons, rival that of the French and British at the Munich conference in 1938. Trump’s withdrawal from that malign agreement was an important first step. But NATO allies like France and Germany, whom the devotees of the “rules-based international order” ritually praise, have been sluggish, if not obstructive, in participating fully in our efforts to rein in the regime.

For example, they have tried to create financial work-arounds to lessen the effectiveness of the sanctions. Just this July, our Treasury Department had to warn the Europeans to stop developing Instex, “designed to avoid using international financial institutions that could be vulnerable to U.S. sanctions. Instead, it avoids sending money to Iran by using a virtual ledger to match imports and exports. Thus, a European company wanting to import Iranian oil would pay a second European company exporting a product to Iran, such that dollars need never be sent to Tehran,” according to the Washington Examiner. Even more despicable, France has talked about giving Iran a “$15 billion line of credit to allow Iran to sell its oil abroad despite US sanctions,” the AP has reported.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/293996/malley-in-wonderlandLast month, Robert Malley, the former senior White House official who served as point man for President Barack Obama’s realignment strategy, published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “The Unwanted Wars: Why the Middle East Is More Combustible Than Ever,” in which he laid out what he sees as the future of Obama’s foreign policy legacy. The piece came out in the aftermath of Iran’s attack on Saudi oil facilities, and not long after the Iranians shot down a U.S. drone—two highly aggressive events that went without any visible military response from the Trump administration. Yet the main conceit of Malley’s essay is a warning against “war with Iran.” The only alternative to “war with Iran” is presented as diplomatic engagement, the apex of which is Obama’s Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). By unwinding the deal that Obama struck with the Iranian mullahs, the piece contends, the Trump administration’s regional posture sets the U.S. on an inexorable course toward war—whether the U.S. itself takes any kind of military action or not. 

“As long as its regional posture remains as it is,” Malley wrote, “the United States will be just one poorly-timed or dangerously-aimed Houthi drone strike, or one particularly effective Israeli operation against a Shiite militia, away from its next costly regional entanglement.” 

What America should, and must, do when confronted with such a tinderbox is obvious: backpedal away, fast, while kicking our former allies in the region to the curb, hard. The sentence warning of the dangers of Houthi drone strikes and effective Israeli operations encapsulates an attitude perhaps best captured in former Vice President Joseph Biden’s famous line: “Our biggest problem was our allies.” 

America’s allies are a problem, Malley, Biden, and other Obama administration policy kingpins–starting with Obama himself—have publicly stated, because of their capacity to involve the U.S. in a costly regional entanglement with Iran. In other words, America’s allies are actually our enemies. In particular, Saudi Arabia, with its reckless war in Yemen, and Israel, with its aggression against Iranian assets in Syria, Iraq, and  throughout the region, represent the “war” side of the equation—while Iran, the enemy of our allies, represents “peace.” The U.S. has a set of choices for how to engage the region: “diplomatically or militarily, by exacerbating divides or mitigating them, and by aligning itself fully with one side or seeking to achieve a sort of balance.” 

In other words, if our allies are strong, then America should seek to weaken them until “balance” is achieved, which will help bring about more “peace.” If Iran were stronger, and Israel and Saudi Arabia were weaker, then peace would therefore be more likely. American policy, in the present moment at least, should therefore be to strengthen Iran at the expense of Israel and the Saudis. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/why-the-u-s-is-right-to-recognize-west-bank-settlements-as-legal/

Final-status negotiations between Israel and Palestinians will be predicated on the reality of disputed land.

Say what you will about Donald Trump’s mercurial foreign policy, his support for Israel has been resolute in ways that no other president can match.

It was Trump who finally followed the law and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. Every president since 1995 — the year the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which funds the relocation of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizes the city as the “undivided” capital of Israel, was passed overwhelmingly in both the House and Senate — had promised to move the embassy. None did.

It is probably Trump’s uniquely defiant disposition toward group-thinking State Department types that made the move possible. It’s difficult to imagine any of the other 2016 presidential hopefuls braving the massive internal opposition such a decision would provoke. But Jerusalem proper was never going to be the Palestinian capital, and it was about time everyone involved dealt with reality.

It was also the Trump administration that finally recognized Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights, a strategically vital strip of land from which Syria and her proxies have launched numerous wars, bombings, and terror operations against Israeli civilians over the past 70 years. Many of the same experts who claimed to be utterly disgusted by the idea of the U.S. ceding land in northern Syria were also grousing about how counterproductive it was for the United States to unilaterally affirm that Israel would control the Golan Heights. Well, Israel was never going to hand back this land to the Assad regime, or negotiate with it, and it was about time everyone accepted this reality.

And yesterday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that United States would no longer take the position that Israeli civilian “settlements” in the West Bank are “inconsistent with international law.” (Or, as our German ambassador Richard Grenell aptly put it, the United States would “no longer meddle in local Israeli zoning and building-permits issues.”) Many of those “settlements” — cities, really, some of them in existence for decades — are part of a de facto border, and they are never going to be bulldozed. That’s also reality.

It has always been a mistake for the United States to treat disputed territories in the West Bank as occupied. For one thing, it was impossible for Israel to “occupy” Palestinian territories because no such nation has ever existed. Israel spilled much blood taking the West Bank in self-defense from Jordan after that nation joined Egypt and Syria in the attempted destruction of Israel in 1967. Even then, Jordan had no legal claim to the territory. Israel offered 98 percent of the West Bank back right after the 1967 war, and on numerous occasions afterward. It was always refused.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/americans-need-to-stop-funding-the-chinese-g

The Chinese have for decades banked on the world, and in particular its richest nation, prioritizing money over all else, including evidently its long-term national interest.

One can learn a lot about how a nation will treat others by how it treats its own. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) oppressive treatment of its people then should send a chilling message to the rest of the world, considering the regime’s global ambitions, and its aggressive effort to achieve them with our cooperation.

While Hong Kong continues hurtling towards a potential modern Tiananmen Square massacre, recently a claimed member of the Chinese political establishment leaked a trove of purported documents to The New York Times regarding the CCP’s establishment of modern-day gulags in Xinjiang province’s “re-education camps.”

Among the major revelations of the 403 pages described by the Times, encompassing speeches from CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping and other officials, are:

In the wake of several Uighur terror attacks, Xi led the effort to exert totalitarian control over China’s Uighur population, commanding the state to employ “organs of dictatorship” and show “absolutely no mercy” in removing “the toxicity of religious extremism”—manifesting itself in not a targeted counterjihadist campaign but the apparently widespread, indiscriminate, and totalitarian concentration camp-building effort of the last several years;
Xi believed repression of the Xinjiang population was essential as a broader signal to other potentially problematic cohorts, or otherwise “social stability will suffer shocks, the general unity of people of every ethnicity will be damaged, and the broad outlook for reform, development and stability will be affected”—that is, unrest would threaten the CCP’s objectives, chief among them the perpetuation of its own rule;
Consistent with this view, under CCP leader of Xinjiang Chen Quanguo, authorities developed propaganda scripts for officials encountering returning students to Xinjiang whose family members had been taken to the camps that downplayed the authoritarian nature of the detentions while threatening the students should they protest;
Interestingly, perhaps demonstrating a weakness in the CCP system that its foes might exploit, documents indicate a level of resistance among officials tasked with implementing the party’s policies. Thus the party unleashed investigators who conducted more than 12,000 probes into party members alleged to be insufficiently dedicated to the “fight against separatism,” making a public example of one of the most prominent of the resisters. To the extent the leaker’s desires were genuine, and the documents are true, the leak itself might also reflect broader fractures in the system.