RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amid-the-fog-trumps-real-agenda-in-iran-11558357519?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=contextual&cx_artPos=4#cxrecs_s

Whatever other assets and liabilities he brings to the table, President Trump certainly offers this: He is a master at sowing uncertainty, so neither friend nor foe really knows what he’s up to.

And so it is right now with Iran, where Mr. Trump and his aides have in the past two weeks alternately raised and lowered fears about armed conflict. American warships moved toward Iran amid intelligence reports on pending Iranian attacks on U.S. targets in the Middle East.

Then, Mr. Trump lowered the temperature, telling aides he didn’t want a fight and tweeting: “I’m sure that Iran will want to talk soon.”On Sunday, he ramped the heat back up, tweeting: “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran.” Then he backed it down again, saying in a Fox News interview: “No, I don’t want to fight.”

It’s confusing, which may be the goal. Yet the underlying question is simple: What is Mr. Trump really trying to accomplish?

Here’s a reasonable guess, based on conversations with officials and diplomats tracking the situation:Mr. Trump almost certainly doesn’t seek armed conflict with Iran. He’s gone out of his way to avoid or end clashes involving American forces in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea, and has done little to suggest a military move against Venezuela.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273816/showdown-arabian-gulf-ari-lieberman

During his presidential run, Donald Trump argued that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, colloquially known as the Iran deal, was among the worst deals ever negotiated by the United States with a foreign power and promised to withdraw from the JCPOA if elected. In May 2018, Trump kept his word but granted waivers to eight countries to continue purchasing Iranian oil. In May 2019 those waivers expired, further constricting Iran’s ability to export oil.

Sanctions instantly affected all aspects of the Iranian economy including its banking sector. The U.S. Treasury Department succeeded in disconnecting Iran’s banking industry from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). SWIFT enables banks to communicate with each other and facilitates international transactions. Even if rogue nations, like Turkey, attempted to skirt sanctions and purchase Iranian contraband, it would be nearly impossible for Iran to receive payment given its cutoff from SWIFT.

Iran’s economy is contracting and its currency is in freefall. It is estimated that the ban on oil exports alone is costing the regime some $35 billion a year and that’s before the expiration of the waivers. In April, the U.S. declared the IRGC a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and this past week, the U.S. Treasury Department slapped sanctions on Iran’s industrial metals industry.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/iran-deal-supporters-john-bolton/

The Iran echo chamber tries to save its nuclear deal.

Whatever the opposite of a rush to war is — a crawl to peace, maybe — America is in the middle of one. Since May 5, when John Bolton announced the accelerated deployment of the Abraham Lincoln carrier group to the Persian Gulf in response to intelligence of a possible Iranian attack, the press has been aflame with calls for America to show restraint, pursue diplomacy, and rein in the madman with the mustache before he starts a war.

Never mind that President Trump, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Patrick Shanahan, and Bolton have not said a single word about a preemptive strike, much less a full-scale war, against Iran. Never mind that the president’s reluctance for overseas intervention is well known. The antiwar cries are not about context, and they are certainly not about deterring Iran. Their goal is saving President Obama’s nuclear deal by manipulating Trump into firing Bolton and extending a lifeline to the regime.

It’s a storyline that originated in Iran. Toward the end of April, Zarif showed up in New York and gave an interview to Reuters where he said, “I don’t think [Trump] wants war,” but “that doesn’t exclude him basically being lured into one” by Bolton. On May 14, an adviser to Rouhani tweeted at Trump, “You wanted a better deal with Iran. Looks like you are going to get a war instead. That’s what happens when you listen to the mustache. Good luck in 2020!”

And now this regime talking point is everywhere. “It’s John Bolton’s world. Trump is just living in it,” write two former Obama officials in the Los Angeles Times. “John Bolton is Donald Trump’s war whisperer,” writes Peter Bergen on CNN.com. “Trump’s potential war with Iran is all John Bolton’s doing. But it might also be his undoing,” says the pro-Iran Trita Parsi on NBCNews.com. “Is Trump Yet Another U.S. President Provoking a War?” asks Robin Wright of The New Yorker. Guess her answer.

“We cannot repeat the days before the Iraq war when even many of our most reliable news outlets repeated and amplified what was, in fact, a flimsy case for war,” Wendy Sherman writes in the New York Times. She would rather our most reliable news outlets repeat and amplify anti-Bolton talking points instead. Sure, America suspects Iran was involved when “four commercial tankers were reportedly sabotaged off the coast of the United Arab Emirates,” and “Saudi Arabia also reported that drones sent by Iranian-supported Houthis attacked Saudi oil facilities.” But, look, “Iran has denied this.” What more do you need to know?

This is the Iran echo chamber at work. Recall former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes’s admission to the New York Times Magazine in 2016, when he said, “We created an echo chamber” to attack the Iran deal’s opponents through leaks and tips to the D.C. press. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” And: “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project, and whomever else. So we know the tactics that worked.” They worked because “the average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/17/bolton-pompeo-trump-iran-1329833

Rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran are also magnifying strains among President Donald Trump’s top foreign policy advisers: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton.Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against the mullahs in Tehran has exacerbated fissures between the two men over the tight control Bolton has tried to exert over the national security decision-making process — and introduced new ones over the direction of U.S. policy.

Pompeo and his special representative for Iran, Brian Hook, have indicated that the administration’s goal in squeezing Iran is renewed negotiations with Iranian regime, according to two sources familiar with their thinking — something Trump has expressed a desire to do. But Bolton is a deep skeptic of the value of negotiating with adversaries who, before joining the White House, called publicly for regime change in Tehran.

While Pompeo has worked to carry out the president’s foreign policy directives, Bolton has done more to try to shape them — at times contradicting the president, as when he walked back Trump’s call for a rapid U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/17/the_hard_politics_of_us-china_trade_talks_140352.html

Since neither side benefits from a trade war, why are both sides threatening one?The answer is straightforward. Although both sides could benefit from a deal, one side could benefit more — a lot more — depending on the final terms.Two key issues dominate the current stalemate. The first is how many of China’s mercantilist practices will be rolled back. These include tariffs on imports from America, required partnerships with Chinese firms, forced transfers of intellectual property, and sometimes outright theft of trade secrets. The second is whether the terms are precise, enforceable, and undertaken as formal commitments by China’s highest-level institutions.China’s problem is that its economy depends on these unfair practices, and communist leaders benefit from them, politically and financially. Some, like widespread theft of Western intellectual property, help lots of local companies. Others, like the coercion of foreign firms to accept local partners, help the party most because it picks the winners. As with any patronage system, the winners are politically connected firms that share the largess with their benefactors. (Economists call this “rent-extraction” politics.)Chinese political leaders are understandably reluctant to alter these sweet arrangements. They wouldn’t change them at all without significant outside pressure, which is exactly what the U.S. is exerting. Since Beijing has to make some kind of deal, it would prefer informal commitments, the vaguer the better. Later, China could edge away from them, hoping the U.S. would not retaliate.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273761/time-iran-face-reckoning-bruce-thornton

While the media obsess over chimeras like the president’s obstruction of justice for nonexistent crimes, and AG Barr’s impeachment for obeying the law, a collision between the U.S. and Iran is brewing in the Middle East. The question now is whether Iran will finally face the reckoning it has invited and deserved for 42 years, or the latest crisis will peter out into U.S. saber-rattling and empty threats.

Donald Trump has made a good start at ending our nearly half-century appeasement of a regime that has declared war on the U.S. and backed it up by murdering Americans and working to create nuclear weapons that would make even more difficult, or even prohibitive, the price of punishing them for their aggression.

Since Jimmy Carter’s timid, feckless response to the 1979 American embassy hostage crisis, we have signaled to the mullahs that we will not exact a cost for their aggression. And this failure has been a bipartisan effort. When in 1983 Iranian proxies murdered 241 of our military personnel in Beirut, the Reagan administration pulled out even as the French and the Israelis strafed and bombed “Little Tehran,” the terrorist camps set up in the Beqaa Valley by Tehran, which nurtured the attackers. Since then Iran has been implicated in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and periodically taken hostage American citizens and sailors. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran’s Quds Force, the regime’s shock troops of global terror, have facilitated and participated in the murder of our soldiers. And it has continued to train and financially support terrorist gangs like Hezbollah and Hamas.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273775/china-trade-war-national-security-line-michael-cutler Add the trade war with China to a long list of crises driven by greed and globalism that President Trump inherited from a series of prior administrations, from both political parties

Since President Trump declared that, unlike previous U.S. Presidents, he would no longer permit China to ride roughshod over the United States, Wall Street whined about how a trade war with China would be costly to America and Americans by causing products from China to cost more; and likely diminish American exports to China as China retaliated by increasing tariffs on those U.S. goods.

For Wall Street, the bottom line is the bottom line. This is a very short-sighted and dangerous example of myopia, focusing on profits while ignoring threats to U.S. national security.

First and foremost, China is ruled by a totalitarian communist regime that is guilty of reprehensible human rights violations against its own citizens and is clearly working rapidly to expand its reach around the world by building its military capabilities.

Earlier this year I wrote about Chinese Aggression Against The U.S.A. As President Trump has noted, China has not only taken economic advantage against the United States but has engaged in widespread intellectual property theft (also known as industrial espionage). Indeed, China has also engaged in committing widespread espionage where our military technology is concerned and, incomprehensibly, the United States has admitted hundreds of thousands of Chinese STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) students and provided them with world-class education at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels. Such students then become eligible to apply for Optional Practical Training that enables them to be gainfully employed by U.S. companies, including companies that develop technology of our military.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/orbn_at_the_white_house.html

“Hungarians, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians, Czechs, and others correctly think of themselves as twice occupied — once by Hitler and once by the USSR.  Now they are free to be Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian, etc.  This has, for many of us, both positive and negative ramifications — none of which is equivalent to the Iranian practice of hanging homosexuals or stoning adulterers.”

Despite the fact that the Trump administration has spent two years communicating its concerns with Hungary regarding academic freedom, anti-Semitism, and other illiberal positions of the Hungarian government, the visit of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to the White House for a meeting with President Donald Trump has set off alarm bells — primarily among those already inclined to disapprove of the president’s guest list.

A former Obama staffer summed up the concern, saying, “It still remains rightly shocking to see Trump cozy up to authoritarian leaders. The American President should be supporting democratic allies with shared values rather than autocrats who are actively undermining U.S. interests.” (This from an administration that believed that the Islamic Republic of Iran should be legitimized and concluded diplomatic, trade, and travel agreements with Raúl Castro’s Cuba.)

Hungary and other Central European countries are complicated, and shunning them is likely to create more problems. These are NATO members, former Warsaw Pact members, E.U. members, bound to the West in ways that make their future a key interest of the United States and the rest of Europe. And, on the other side, Russia.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/acting-out-in-tehran-11557961728

When the U.S. withdraws its diplomats from a foreign country amid a security threat, the domestic reaction in a previous age would have been to show solidarity against an adversary. But this is Washington in 2019, so the loyal opposition is reacting to the threat from Iran by blaming—President Trump.

“Either the Trump administration is trying to goad Iran into war or a war could come by accident because of the administration’s reckless policies,” declared former Obama official Wendy Sherman Wednesday, after the State Department withdrew personnel from Iraq.

Ms. Sherman is sore that Mr. Trump withdrew from the failed nuclear deal that she helped negotiate with Iran, but even she must realize that Shiite militias in Iraq often act as proxies for Iran. Does she want another Benghazi? Yet she blames Mr. Trump for a “march to war with Iran” and wants Congress, Europe and business leaders to “stand in [national security adviser] John Bolton’s way.” Senator Bernie Sanders says he’s also worried about “provocations on the part of the United States against Iran.”
***

Who does Ms. Sherman want to stand in the way of Gen. Qassem Soleimani? He’s the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), that used the windfall from Ms. Sherman’s nuclear deal to finance terror and instability throughout the Middle East.