RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/03/whats-next-after-the-north-korea-nuclear-summit-breakdown/
The Trump-Kim Hanoi Summit ended without any agreement, but that doesn’t mean it’s over.

Now that the Hanoi nuclear summit talks have ended in failure, the two crucial questions are (1) whether there will be a major escalation of tensions and (2) whether the North Koreans have made a fundamental decision to keep their nuclear program, despite the pressures.

Only Kim Jong-Un can answer the second question.

Pres. Trump himself clearly wants to avoid an escalation. His comments were firm but not harsh, giving Kim a chance to reconsider. He continued to stress the good personal relations between the two leaders, referred to his counterpart by his honorific title, “Chairman Kim,” and avoided diminutive nicknames like “Rocket Man.” That keeps the door open for negotiations, but Trump will not make any more goodwill payments like those that suckered his predecessors. Trump himself has already made one gesture by suspending joint US-South Korean military exercises. One important question now is whether Trump intends to resume those regular exercises.

For Kim, the main question is what it always was: Will he take costly, irreversible steps to begin dismantling his nuclear program? The summit failure shows he has not yet decided to do that, which is different from saying he has definitely decided to keep the weapons and rocket program. We already know North Korea is still building new facilities. We don’t know if the US will call them out on that, either publicly or through leaks.

To prevent an escalation, Kim must avoid any actions to show how “powerful” and independent he is, such as testing a missile. In making these decisions, Kim faces his usual problem: he cannot get good information about the risks and rewards because he is so isolated. Offer the Big Boss advice he doesn’t like and you die, as one of Kim’s aides did simply for falling asleep in a meeting.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/28/trump

When Donald J. Trump took office in January 2017, the outgoing Obama Administration national security team cautioned Trump’s transition team that North Korea was a significant nuclear threat. Obama White House officials explained how North Korea’s leaders had built up their nascent nuclear arsenal. Since at least 2013, the Obama Administration knew about the rising threat of a potentially nuclear-armed North Korea and did nothing.

It was not a matter of ignorance; it was a matter of indifference on the part of former President Barack Obama and his national security team. Obama—the man who the media claimed was the smartest of all of America’s presidents—likely had no idea how to mitigate the North Korean threat and therefore didn’t even try.

How’s that for leadership?

Tag, You’re It, Donald Trump!
Two years into Trump’s presidency, the world seemed poised for nuclear war in a way that it hadn’t since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yes, the combined forces of the United States, South Korea, Japan, and any other ally inevitably would have overcome North Korea’s military in combat. But, the cost would have been great—particularly to South Korea and the Americans stationed there.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/chinas-xi-was-watching-hanoi-summit-and-saw-a-president-willing-to-walk-away-expert-says

President Trump may have hit a roadblock when North Korea’s Kim Jong Un refused to meet his demands at Thursday’s Hanoi summit, but Trump’s decision to walk away could serve to rattle China’s Xi Jinping.

Gordon Chang, an expert on the region and author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” argued that what on the surface looked like a diplomatic stalemate could in fact be a diplomatic coup for Trump when it comes to North Korea’s neighbor.

“I think this is a moment of reassessment for China,” Chang said.

Trump announced overnight that there’d be no deal in Vietnam because Kim was “unprepared” to fully denuclearize in exchange for the full removal of U.S.-led sanctions. Trump held a press conference where he said, “Sometimes you have to walk.”

Chang told Fox News that Trump also showed Beijing that he is not afraid to walk away from a bad deal amid trade talks and, in doing so, put added pressure on Xi, whose popularity appears to be waning due to the country’s economic stagnation. Chang said Xi has found himself in a “no win” situation: either he agrees to abandon the country’s “selfish” model or he continues to watch the economy suffer.

Trump recently postponed increasing tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods that would have been effective March 2. He has not given a new date for higher tariffs if negotiations falter.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/establishment-adopts-trump-views-china-military-threat-trade/

A new consensus is emerging, and it sounds a lot like what the president has said all along.

Read recent essays on China. Visit think-tank public symposia. Hear out military analysts. Talk with academics and media pundits. Listen to Silicon Valley grandees. Watch Senate speeches and politicians interview on television.

The resulting new groupspeak is surreal. If one excises the word “Trump,” what follows is a seemingly revolutionary recalibration of attitudes toward China that more or less echo Trump’s voice in the wilderness and often crude and shrill warnings dating back from the campaign trail of 2015.

Trump’s second secretary of state, the skillful Mike Pompeo, has been institutionalizing the president’s pessimistic view of China. Insightful but heretofore underappreciated assessments from China scholars such as Miles Yu and Gordon Chang are now being taking seriously. Both have been warning us for years that the Chinese seek domination, not accommodation, and are replacing their erstwhile feigned respect for our strength with an emboldened contempt for our perceived growing weakness, whether real or psychological. Both have warned also that once China achieves military, economic, and cultural parity with the United States, the global order will be quite different from that of the last 75 years.

From the military, one hears more frequently now that we were at a tipping point by late 2016: The Obama Asian pivot had failed — publicly provocative, but in reality without substance, giving the lethal impression of real weakness masked by empty rhetoric. The Chinese militarization of the Spratley Islands was conceded as the inevitable future of the South China Sea. Chinese military and weapons doctrine was aimed at destroying the offensive capability of the U.S. fleet in the Pacific as a way of breaking off allies from America, and then Finlanding them.

https://theweek.com/articles/825598/love-hate-trump-right-about-north-korea

President Trump is doing the right thing in pursuing peace with North Korea.

It feels odd to type those words, and you probably will not hear them repeated by members of America’s foreign policy establishment over the next few days, as Trump meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam. A lot of smart people — including Trump’s own aides — fear the president will do anything to proclaim the summit a success, even if it means trumpeting an agreement that somehow lets Kim keep his tiny nuclear arsenal largely intact.

They are right: That is a likely outcome — it is what happened, in fact, the first time Trump met Kim. But that’s OK. Because not going to war with North Korea is better than going to war with North Korea. And Trump’s strategy with regards to Kim, whatever its faults, makes war with that country less likely.

For more than a generation, American policy toward North Korea has been aimed mostly at keeping that country from obtaining or keeping a nuclear arsenal. That mission failed in 2006, and American presidents have been scrambling ever since to obtain denuclearization. That goal has never been achieved, and there is no reason to believe it ever will be.

No, it is not good that Kim has nuclear weapons at his disposal: The more such weapons that exist in the world, the more likely it is that one will be used — and that would be a disaster. But it is unlikely the United States can ever convince Kim to give up his weapons because he has one very important incentive to keep them: his personal and political survival. (As if to emphasize the point, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio this weekend posted a picture of a bloodied Muammar Gaddafi to Twitter — a warning to Venezuela’s leaders during that country’s crisis, but no doubt also a reminder to Kim that giving up a nuclear program can make a leader more vulnerable to his rivals, internal or external.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/ilhan-omars-big-lie/The Left distorts what happened in El Salvador in the 1980s.

In a viral exchange at a congressional hearing last week, the new congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, who is quickly establishing herself as the most reprehensible member of the House Democratic freshman class despite stiff competition, launched into Elliott Abrams. She accused the former Reagan official and Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela of being complicit in war crimes.

“Yes or no,” she demanded, “would you support an armed faction within Venezuela that engages in war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, if you believe they were serving U.S. interest, as you did in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua?”

Omar was cribbing from the Left’s notes on U.S. Latin American policy, and doing it badly. She made much of the 1981 El Motoze massacre in El Salvador. The idea that Abrams is somehow directly implicated in this bloodcurdlingly awful event is completely absurd. He was assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Reagan administration, then became assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs on December 10, 1981. The massacre occurred the next day. Unless we are to believe the El Salvadoran military unit took his change of jobs as a green light to indiscriminately kill villagers (which unfortunately was not a new practice), Abrams obviously had nothing to do with the massacre.

Nonetheless, the Omar attack is an opportunity to examine the premises of the Left’s narrative on Reagan’s policy in El Salvador, which supports the persistent attacks on Abrams as a “war criminal.” To paraphrase the famous Mary McCarthy line about Lillian Hellman, every word in this narrative is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

In what follows, I rely throughout on Russell Crandall’s book The Salvador Option: The United States in El Salvador, 1977–1992, a fair-minded, factual account that’s a marked contrast to the tendentiously left-wing material that dominates online.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-honor-of-elliott-abrams/

Three weeks ago, Elliott Abrams returned to government. This was very good news for U.S. foreign policy. He is the State Department’s special representative for Venezuela. And his presence on the public stage has reignited passions about the Reagan administration’s record in Latin America.

Abrams was the assistant secretary of state for Latin America in Reagan’s second term. During the first, he had been assistant secretary for international organizations, and then for human rights. (Abrams joined the administration when he was in his early 30s.)

Like many others he was caught up in the Iran-Contra affair, and he pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress. (Two misdemeanor counts.) He was pardoned by the first President Bush. There is a story to be told about all this, which we will not get into here. Abrams told it in a book, Undue Process: A Story of How Political Differences Are Turned into Crimes.

The second President Bush made Abrams part of his national-security team, first in the area of democracy and human rights. Then he gave Abrams a Middle East portfolio. Later, Abrams wrote a memoir, Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. In recent years, he has been a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In short, Elliott Abrams is one of the wisest, most experienced foreign-policy heads in this country. He is also a steadfast advocate of freedom, democracy, and human rights, or American values, if you like.