RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/05/why-is-trump-surrendering-to-the-taliban/

President Trump may be the author of The Art of the Deal, but how can someone who knows so well that the Obama-Kerry agreement with terrorist Iran was a bad deal, and who understood the importance of annihilating ISIS (and who then did so) at the same time think the terrorist Taliban in Afghanistan will be restrained by a piece of paper backed up by no credible U.S. military pressure?

The administration has enlisted the diplomatic prowess of an admittedly impressive personage in Afghan-American former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (and, before that, to Afghanistan and to Iraq) Zalmay Khalizad, who held numerous foreign policy posts under Reagan and both Bushes.

But has there ever been a more impressive diplomat than Henry Kissinger? Yet the deal he negotiated with North Vietnam in 1973, for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize, was followed two years later by the Communist North’s conquest of South Vietnam. As the disaster materialized, South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu justifiably declared: “the United States did not keep its word … The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom.”

The Vietnam Syndrome must stop. There is simply no way to negotiate successfully with an anti-democratic aggressor without military force hanging close over that aggressor’s head. And yet President Trump has already announced that U.S. troops in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has been making territorial gains for years, will soon be reduced by more than a third, from 14,000 to 8,600. A deal would reportedly mean the withdrawal of most U.S. forces by November 2020.

It will soon be 18 years that our military has been in Afghanistan. Let’s scan the early history. “In late 2001, the CIA led a campaign to topple the Taliban with the support of the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s foe inside Afghanistan,” the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel wrote in 2009, noting that, “the results were spectacular and came quickly. By early 2002 the Taliban were routed, al-Qaida was on the run and the two were retreating into Pakistan.”

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

LAF soldiers on a foot patrol along the Blue Line in the vicinity of Meiss el Jabel.

American security assistance generally is predicated on the principle that a smaller or poorer country that has U.S. equipment and training will be better able to defend common interests than one that doesn’t. Sometimes it works that way. But sometimes it puts the U.S. in bed with people who want our weapons and training but do not share our bottom line — their enemy is not ours; their rules of engagement are not ours; their government, in fact, is not a friend of ours, but maybe if we reward it thoroughly enough it won’t actively oppose our interests.

In that latter category is Lebanon.

As Hezbollah announced it is preparing to attack Israel, we must consider the role of the United States in arming and training the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), the national army of Lebanon that technically is an arm of the Hezbollah-dominated government in Beirut.

Lebanon is not a functional country and there are those — the Assad family in Syria, for example — who don’t think it should be a country at all. Syria didn’t recognize the independence of Lebanon until 2008, after a 29-year occupation that ended in 2005. By law, power is shared among religious and ethnic groups — 19 in the current parliament.

Hezbollah, created, armed and run by Iran as a Shiite supremacist military force, has both the majority in the political cabinet in Beirut and a separate, private army complete with precision missiles and rule-making authority in the southern part of the country. Lebanon has little economy, but Hezbollah runs rackets — mostly arms and drugs, mostly in South America — and kills people in Europe, and Jews and Israelis around the world.

Hezbollah kills Americans, too. Until 2001, it had killed more Americans than any other terror organization — including 241 American service members in 1983 in their barracks in Beirut, the greatest loss of American Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/rouhani-is-not-at-trumps-level/

French president Emmanuel Macron made news by inviting Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif to the sidelines of the G-7 summit in Biarritz last weekend. Macron wants to renew European leadership on the global stage — as well as his standing at home — by jump-starting diplomacy between the United States and Iran. At a press conference yesterday, Macron said he’d given President Trump prior notice. “He was informed at each minute about the solution — the situation, sorry,” Macron said. “And the idea for me was, in case of structural move and — important move and important solutions — perhaps to have meeting between ministers, not at President Trump’s level, because President Trump’s level is President Rouhani.”

Pardonnez-moi, monsieur le président. Rouhani is not “Trump’s level.” Rouhani is prime minister of Iran. He plays an important role in Iranian politics. He is the public face of the regime. But he is neither head of state nor, in actuality, head of government.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14731/america-can-stop-china-from-dominating-artificial

The People’s Republic of China, nonetheless, is already an AI powerhouse, and for America to maintain its edge—and to prevent U.S. tech from being used for exceedingly disturbing purposes —Washington should force U.S. companies to end cooperative AI projects in China.

The West should be seriously concerned: whoever wins at AI will both dominate the global economy and field the most destructive conventional military force.

Unfortunately, American companies are helping China’s leaders in what many call—correctly—crimes against humanity. For instance, AI researchers from Microsoft, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Michigan State University gave keynote speeches at the Chinese Conference on Biometric Recognition in Xinjiang in August of last year on facial recognition, a social-control technology.

Some of Google’s research is in China. The company has three AI operations there: the Google AI China Center in Beijing, established in 2017, and partnerships with China’s two premier educational institutions, Peking University and Tsinghua University….If the labs remain open, the net flow of AI learning will be out of the U.S. into China.

Moreover, Chinese researchers, if they could not work for American companies in China, would not, as Vox suggests, necessarily find employment in their homeland. Some of those seeking research slots would follow other Chinese to the United States, and that would exacerbate one of Beijing’s big AI vulnerabilities. “China’s Path to AI Domination Has a Problem: Brain Drain,” is the title of an August 7 article posted by the MIT Technology Review. The U.S. can make that crucial problem even more severe.

China, writes Amy Webb in Inc., has been “building a global artificial intelligence empire, and seeding the tech ecosystem of the future.” It has been particularly successful, Webb, the founder of the Future Today Institute, believes. “China is poised to become its undisputed global leader, and that will affect every business,” she notes.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/14/bolton-

he British love their chips, but they’d best be careful not to let them get fishy. The most provocative thing U.S. national security adviser John Bolton said during his visit to No. 10 Downing Street this week was that the British don’t want their “telecommunications system in the 5G world to be compromised by the ‘Manchurian chip phenomenon’ any more than we do” — referring to the dangers posed by the Chinese 5G telecom pioneer Huawei.

I&I outlined the Huawai threat in some detail in May. Its hardware and future software upgrades could be used by Beijing for espionage, or even to attack the military and civilian computer resources of the countries using it.

Even liberal Democrats recognize the threat. “Allowing Huawei’s inclusion in our 5G infrastructure could seriously jeopardize our national security and put critical supply chains at risk,” Senate Intelligence Committee top Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia wrote in March. “Software reviews of existing Huawei products are not sufficient to preclude the possibility of a vendor pushing a malicious update that enables surveillance in the future. Any supposedly safe Chinese product is one firmware update away from being an insecure Chinese product.”

Bolton said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new government was “looking really from square one on the Huawei issue” — which some British officials claimed was an inaccurate account of Bolton’s meetings — and Bolton offered to arrange briefings on the U.S. findings on Huawei.

https://spectator.org/democrats-fiddle-while-iran-burns/

Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces seized the British oil tanker Stena Impero on July 19, an outrage that follows Iran’s June 13 attacks on two oil tankers and the June 20 downing of an American drone. Yet rather than focusing on an increasingly volatile Iran, congressional Democrats are more interested in political gamesmanship than national security when dealing with the defense budget.

Cornered by international sanctions, Iran is lashing out with escalating viciousness, as ongoing economic turmoil has truly made both people and government desperate. This has culminated in the regime’s mostrecent proclamation of capturing 17 “U.S. spies.” Likely untrue, this claim illustrates how Iran’s hunger for conflict threatens American national security.

Accordingly, President Donald Trump correctly announced July 22 that the United States is bracing for the “absolute worst” with Iran. He already came to the brink of an airstrike against Iran following Iran’s destruction of the American drone in international airspace. Concern over Iranian casualties caused him to abort the mission at the very last minute.

While Trump’s administration is wisely taking seriously the magnitude of Iran’s dangers, on July 12 House Democrats passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Department of Defense’s (DoD) annual budget, by strict party-line vote, with not one Republican among 220 congressional supporters. Unsurprisingly, the legislation is a transparently partisan piece of political theater.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mike-pompeo-us-withdrawal-inf-treaty/

And hits the Russians for their persistent noncompliance.

Bangkok — It’s official: The U.S. is out of the INF Treaty.

Here at the annual conference of ASEAN, the organization of Southeast Asian countries, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told National Review that the U.S. has triggered its formal withdrawal from the treaty. 

President Trump announced the imminent U.S. exit last October, starting the clock ticking toward the official date six months later, or today.

Signed in 1987, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was a key agreement in the late 1980s Reagan–Gorbachev diplomacy that proved the endgame of the Cold War.

After the Soviets deployed intermediate-range SS-20 missiles that could hit NATO countries from bases in the Soviet Union, the U.S. countered with its own intermediate-range missiles in Europe. President Ronald Reagan proposed the “zero option” to eliminate such U.S. and Soviet systems, and the INF Treaty did just that. 

The Russians have been flagrantly violating the treaty for years, and it doesn’t apply to China, which has massively built up its missile program, including intermediate-range systems. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14629/us-china-deal-huawei

This is the worst possible time in what is called the “cold tech war” to give relief to Huawei. Huawei is vulnerable to American measures for only a short period, so this is the time for the Trump administration to exert leverage.

[W]hen it comes to harm, we haven’t seen anything yet. Beijing will undoubtedly use Huawei to control the networks operating the devices of tomorrow, remotely manipulating everything hooked up to the Internet of Things — in other words, just about everything.

So far, the U.S. has had little success in persuading other countries not to buy low-cost (subsidized) Huawei equipment for their 5G networks (the fifth generation of wireless communication). The Philippines, a treaty partner of the United States, has decided to buy 5G Huawei gear, and Italy, another ally, is almost certainly going to make the same decision soon.

The Trump administration, by crippling Huawei, can make up for the failure to convince other countries to shun its equipment… Huawei cannot market its phones without Google’s Android operating system…. Outside China, Huawei’s phones would be commercially unmarketable because they would not be able to connect to the Google Play Store.

So, if the Trump administration is going to move against Huawei as a national security threat, it has to do so now. Beijing is now stalling, hoping to buy time for Huawei.

American and Chinese trade negotiators, meeting Tuesday and Wednesday in Shanghai, are cooking up an interim deal that is deeply injurious to U.S. national security.

There is growing pessimism that Washington and Beijing can reach a comprehensive agreement, given the fundamental differences over, among other things, industrial policy, intellectual property protection, and restrictions on foreign investment.