RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/26/america-can-afford-to-stay-calm-with-iran/

President Trump recently ordered and then called off a retaliatory strike against Iran for destroying a U.S. surveillance drone. The U.S. asserts that the drone was operating in international space. Iran claims it was in Iranian airspace.

Antiwar critics of Trump’s Jacksonian rhetoric turned on a dime to blast him as a weak, vacillating leader afraid to call Iran to account.

Trump supporters countered that the president had shown Iran a final gesture of patience—and cleared the way for a stronger retaliation should Iran foolishly interpret his one-time forbearance as weakness to be exploited rather than as magnanimity to be reciprocated.

The charge of Trump being an appeaser was strange coming from leftist critics, especially given Trump’s past readiness to bomb Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons, his willingness to destroy ISIS through enhanced air strikes, and his liberation of American forces in Afghanistan from prior confining rules of engagement.

The truth is that Iran and the United States are now engaged in a great chess match. But the stakes are not those of intellectual gymnastics. The game is no game, but involves the lives, and possible deaths, of thousands.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/the-president-china-and-the-spooks/

“I’m an Always Trumper. I want the president to win another term. If I complain about tactics, it’s because I want him to succeed. The right thing to do now is to declare an armistice in the long-run economic war with China, and concentrate on building up American semiconductor and communications manufacturing to out-compete the Chinese.”

Why is it that every time Donald Trump gets together with Xi Jinping, someone gets busted on a sanctions violation? I’m not privy to the inner workings of our cops and spooks, so I’m just asking. While Trump and Xi sat down to dinner at the November 2018 Group of 20 meeting in Argentina, the chief financial officer of Huawei was arrested in a Vancouver airport transit lounge. Now that Trump and Xi are meeting again next week at the Osaka Group of 20 meeting, there are reports of a contempt-of-court order against Chinese banks for violation of North Korea sanctions. This has caused more than a flutter, as I report this morning at Asia Times.

President Trump’s relationship with the U.S. intelligence establishment is less than satisfactory. The spooks didn’t like it when Attorney General William Barr proposed to declassify documents relating to surveillance of his 2016 presidential campaign. Elements of spookdom evidently conspired with the FBI to sandbag the Trump campaign using alleged Russian contamination as a pretext. I have argued in this space that CIA set up Gen. Michael Flynn, the only senior intelligence official to call them out for incompetence and (probably) corruption.

During the past month, we’ve observed a president who steers away from unnecessary confrontation. He suppressed the advice of his National Security Adviser and chose to sanction and threaten Iran rather than start a firefight. In May, Trump overruled his advisers and declared that North Korea’s latest missile launch was not a violation of UN resolutions, contradicting then Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan. Shanahan since stepped down, reportedly for personal reasons. He chose to declare victory with Mexico and forbear from imposing tariffs over the immigration issue. And, unlike most of his administration and the Senate neo-cons (Romney, Rubio, et al.), he wants to fold the Huawei issue into the broader trade negotiations.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-iran-show-11561416216

President Trump’s Iran policy over the weekend was both erratic and masterful. Doves and isolationists, panicked by what they see as the administration’s inexorable drift toward war, rejoiced when Mr. Trump announced that a military strike had been called back. Hawks criticized him for an Obama-like climb-down, but the announcement of cyberattacks and tightening sanctions helped smooth ruffled feathers.

The result? Mr. Trump more than ever dominates U.S. Iran policy; contending political factions within the administration and outside it must jockey for his support. And the more he talks and tweets about Iran, the less clear anyone is about his ultimate intentions.

None of this should be surprising. Consistently inconsistent on issues from trade with China and immigration from Mexico to Venezuela and North Korea and now Iran, Mr. Trump has been by turns more hawkish than any of his predecessors and dovish enough to thrill Sen. Rand Paul.

This president is first and foremost a showman. From his early real-estate days in 1970s New York through his time in reality television and into his third career in politics, Mr. Trump has understood and shrewdly deployed the power of fame. He has turned American politics into the Donald Trump Show, with the country and the world fixated on his every move, speculating feverishly about what will come next. Whether threatening on Twitter to rain down destruction from the sky, reining in the dogs of war at the last minute, or stage-managing high-stakes summit meetings, he is producing episodes of the most compelling reality show the world has ever seen.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274101/trump-vs-mullahs-bruce-thornton

In any fight, keeping your opponent off balance is critical, and telegraphing your punches is dangerous. Feints and tactical retreats are ways to avoid becoming predictable. Even threats and bravado can be used to confuse the enemy, as boxing legend Muhammed Ali proved. But eventually, you have to punch your opponent in the face hard enough to knock him flat.

Whether by design or instinct, Donald Trump’s foreign policy so far has followed this age-old strategy. He has abandoned the West’s predictable foreign-policy narrative that conflicts can be resolved with “diplomatic engagement,” “international summits,” “UN Resolutions,” “multilateral agreements,” and all the other verbal rituals for avoiding risky action while the enemy uses the time for working more mischief. His direct, blunt, sometimes wild public pronouncements blow through the understated, vapid, stylized diplo-speak of “grave concern” and “deeply troubling” that are mere verbal place-holders, ways of providing the press copy without saying anything significant. And he has dropped the pretense that thugs and fanatics deserve to be treated with the “mutual respect” due to legitimate leaders of free nations.

But two years of Trump’s using this strategy with Iran may be becoming predictable, at least to the mullahs. In the last few months, attacks on six commercial vessels in the Gulf, and now the destruction of one of our drones flying over international waters, suggest Iran believes that for all his tough talk, Trump is a typical Western leader who will not back his words with action.

Take the drone incident. Conflicting reports say that the president ordered a strike on three of Iran’s military sites, then called it off after the jets were already in the air, though the president disputes the claim that the strike was “cancelled,” but rather is “on hold.” More baffling are Trump’s reasons for holding back. He speculated that a rogue Iranian officer was “loose” and did “something stupid” not approved by the regime. That’s not likely with a military tightly controlled by the ayatollahs, who have demonstrated in the past the brutal wages of acting without their approval.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-for-restraint-in-the-gulf-11560813331

The latest crisis with Iran illustrates an important but widely neglected point about world politics: Amid all the talk about American decline, American power in the international system has actually grown. Even five years ago the U.S. could not force Iran out of world oil markets without causing a devastating spike in oil and gas prices that would destabilize the world economy. Today, world energy markets are so robust that Brent crude prices have fallen since the first set of attacks on oil tankers in May.

Simultaneously, the U.S. has developed the ability to globalize unilateral sanctions. Washington doesn’t need the support of its allies to isolate Tehran economically, because “secondary sanctions” can effectively compel other countries to comply with the U.S. effort. That the administration has accomplished this while also engaged in trade battles with nearly every important American trading partner underscores the magnitude of U.S. economic power and the administration’s determination to bring it fully to bear on Iran.

As the shades of Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy can testify, however, great power does not automatically confer wisdom. Having demonstrated an impressive ability to squeeze Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, the Trump administration now needs to translate raw power into policy success. This goal remains elusive with all three countries so far, and the path forward is anything but clear.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-arent-ready-for-cold-war-ii-11560207604

A series of conversations with Trump administration officials at every level as well as leading Democrats points to two clear and disturbing conclusions. First, the U.S. is increasingly committed to a historic turn in its relations with China as opinion hardens on both sides of the aisle. Second, we aren’t ready for what is coming.

In some ways the situation is comparable to the mid-1940s, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union moved quickly from wartime alliance to Cold War. President Truman and a handful of State Department and War Department officials saw the clash coming early, but public opinion was slower to move. Winston Churchill’s now-famous “Iron Curtain” speech in March 1946 was widely criticized as too hawkish; Truman, who sat through the speech and applauded it, had to distance himself from Churchill’s hard line. It took the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the start of the Berlin Airlift in June, and the reinstitution of the draft in July to bring the reality of the Cold War home to the American public.

Today both Washington and Beijing are maneuvering themselves for some kind of long-term competition—but just as few observers in 1946 could imagine a four-decade global standoff, neither we nor the Chinese can predict the scale, scope or consequences of the emerging rivalry. It is likely both to echo the Cold War in some ways and to diverge radically from it in others.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/447235-more-us-talks-with-iran-are-doomed-to-fail

The latest U.S. offer of negotiations with Iran prompts the same question with which every administration of recent decades has grappled: Is behavioral change in Tehran possible without regime change?

We Americans want to think so, but the evidence of four decades suggests otherwise. Consequently, President Donald Trump and his team may be headed toward another fruitless U.S. effort to create a better Iran.

With the president concerned that growing tensions between Washington and Tehran were setting the stage for war, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this week that the administration is ready to talk with “no preconditions.”

That came days after the president himself sought to ease tensions by deriding National Security Advisor John Bolton’s enthusiasm for regime change. Of the Islamic Republic, Trump told reporters in Tokyo, “It has a chance to be a great country with the same leadership. We’re not looking for regime change. I just want to make that clear. We’re looking for no nuclear weapons.”

The new U.S. offer of talks marked a dramatic change of direction for an administration that, as Pompeo announced a year ago, said it wouldn’t talk to Tehran until the regime satisfied a list of sweeping demands that included an end to its ballistic missile tests and its support of militants in Syria and Yemen.