RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-twilight-of-human-rights-diplomacy-11545090825

Pesident Trump’s abandonment of democracy promotion and human rights is among the most striking of his departures from the post-Cold War American foreign-policy consensus. To the despair and fury of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike, Mr. Trump often appears determined to conduct American diplomacy as if human rights abroad were not a concern.

But the human-rights recession in U.S. foreign policy was already under way when the president took office. It isn’t hard to see why: Efforts to base America’s foreign policy on human rights and democracy hadn’t been yielding their desired results for some time.

Think back to 2011, when President Obama knew where the arc of history was headed and planned to steer American policy accordingly. As the Arab Spring toppled Hosni Mubarak, Ben Rhodes told reporters the administration believed “there is not going to be a return to the way things were in Egypt.” The people had spoken, tyranny was broken, and Egyptian democracy was here to stay.

Those were heady times. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was creating an “Islamist democracy” in Turkey. Aung San Suu Kyi was being compared to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela for her reformist advocacy in Burma.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272206/obamas-war-upon-us-kenneth-r-timmerman

Donald Trump has a name for everything and everyone, from Crooked Hillary to Little Rocket Man, who for a time became his best friend. Will he call the next region-wide conflagration in the Middle East, when it breaks out, Obama’s War?

If he hasn’t thought of that already, he should start considering it now. Because the catastrophic policies of our former president have emboldened the Islamic state of Iran and enabled it to threaten the United States and our allies militarily in ways never before possible.

When Obama took office in January 2009, he inherited a strong U.S. military and diplomatic posture across the Middle East.

The U.S.-Israel strategic relationship was at its peak, with the Bush White House openly supporting Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s latest attempt to stop Hamas terror in Gaza.

The U.S. enjoyed a close relationship with a secular Turkey, that itself had strong ties to Israel.

Egypt was at peace, Qaddafi had come into the Western camp and abandoned terrorism and its nuclear weapons program, and the insurgency in Iraq had been crushed.

Al Qaeda truly was “on the run,” while Iran was beginning to feel the crunch of international sanctions over its previously covert nuclear weapons program.

Obama succeeded in reversing every one of these strong U.S. positions, treating Islamic Iran as a friend and Israel as an enemy while promoting the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and its terrorist spawn.

And while President Trump has taken great strides to reverse the enormous damage to our strategic posture Obama caused, fighting his way out of the spider’s web of Iran deal restrictions Obama enacted against the United States has taken nearly two years, time the Iranian regime has put to good use.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/unsavory-allies-from-stalin-to-the-saudis-1543966304

More recently, the Clinton administration’s most frequent foreign visitor was Yasser Arafat, a mass murderer and terrorist, and both Presidents Bush were obsequious to the tyrants of Saudi Arabia…and no one in Congress or the media got too exercised….rsk

The media, Democrats and even some Republicans have been full of moral indignation over the Trump administration’s failure to punish Saudi Arabia for killing writer Jamal Khashoggi.Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia says “the president’s failure to hold Saudi Arabia responsible in any meaningful way” is an “example of this White House’s retreat from America’s leadership on human rights and protecting the free press.”

President Trump has balked at all of this, noting that the Saudis are valuable allies against Iran. The “Death to America”-chanting fanatics who make up the Iranian regime are the world’s foremost sponsors of terrorism, and they are committed to building nuclear weapons that could reach not only Israel but also Europe and the U.S.

The president’s critics must be a bit short on American history. During World War II, the U.S. and President Franklin D. Roosevelt were in bed comfortably with one of the most murderous dictators in history. Joseph Stalin didn’t kill one citizen of the Soviet Union. He killed millions, before and during the war. He was quoted saying: “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.” Maybe, frighteningly, he was right.

Stalin played a double game with the Nazis until Hitler stabbed him in a the back by attacking the Soviet Union in June 1941. When the U.S. entered the war six months later, FDR sought out Stalin as an ally and provided the Soviets with an endless supply of military equipment—all interest-free under the Lend-Lease Act.

Hollywood papered over Soviet crimes. “Mission to Moscow,” a 1943 Warner Bros. movie, portrayed the Soviet people as happy and prosperous under Stalin’s benevolent rule. The purges and show trials were depicted as efforts to rid the country of German agents. The film’s producer called it “an expedient lie.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-china-trade-truce-1543790868

Donald Trump had one of the most productive foreign trips of his Presidency this weekend as he announced a tariff truce and new trade negotiations with China. Then he threatened to blow up his Presidency by terminating Nafta before Congress passes a replacement. More on the latter nearby, but at least his cease-fire with China is good news for the economy and American workers.

Mr. Trump and President Xi Jinping stepped back from the brink of total trade war while giving themselves room to strike a deal over new trading and investment rules. Mr. Trump agreed to hold off on raising tariffs to 25% from 10% on $200 billion of Chinese goods in January. This would be a huge tax on American consumers, as well as businesses that have Chinese suppliers.

The White House says China will start buying U.S. farm goods immediately, which will be a relief in farm states where incomes are down. China will also buy an unspecified “but very substantial” amount of farm, energy, industrial and other products to reduce the bilateral trade deficit. More customers are better, though the overall U.S. trade deficit won’t fall much. The U.S. will run a trade deficit with the world as long as it also runs a capital surplus.

Far more important, the two countries will begin talks this month on China’s predatory behavior including forced technology transfer, intellectual property and cyber theft, and regulatory abuses against foreign companies. The parties have 90 days to agree or Mr. Trump will apply the 25% tariff—and presumably more on top of that.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-chinas-most-valuable-export-1543525958

Investors are still guessing whether and how the United States and China will settle their differences when President Trump sits down to dinner with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping this weekend. But even if Mr. Xi won’t agree to stop stealing U.S. technology, Mr. Trump can get Chinese help in enhancing American intellectual property.

A Reuters report today suggests that for now the White House is focused on playing defense:

The Trump administration is considering new background checks and other restrictions on Chinese students in the United States over growing espionage concerns, U.S. officials and congressional sources said.

In June, the U.S. State Department shortened the length of visas for Chinese graduate students studying aviation, robotics and advanced manufacturing to one year from five. U.S. officials said the goal was to curb the risk of spying and theft of intellectual property in areas vital to national security…

Every Chinese student who China sends here has to go through a party and government approval process,” one senior U.S. official told Reuters. “You may not be here for espionage purposes as traditionally defined, but no Chinese student who’s coming here is untethered from the state.”

Having practiced its surveillance techniques on associates of the Republican party in the U.S., perhaps America’s intelligence community can now gather important information about espionage directed by the Communist party in China.

But the U.S. can play offense, too, by untethering Chinese tech talent from the state. For Chinese students who don’t appear to pose any threat, the U.S. should seek to recruit more of them to study in the U.S. and ultimately to create new intellectual property here. Whether native or foreign-born, innovators are treated less well in China than they used to be.

The Chinese regime’s official publication People’s Daily says that billionaire Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma is a member of the Communist party. Li Yuan reports in the New York Times that for businesspeople in China calling themselves communists is “often a matter of expediency. Party membership provides a layer of protection in a country where private ownership protections are often haphazardly enforced or ignored entirely.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272071/trump-didnt-create-europes-resentment-bruce-thornton

Speaking in Paris at the centenary of the Armistice, French president Emmanuel Macron made some silly comments about nationalism. Recycling tired clichés about nationalism’s guilt for both World Wars, he called nationalism the “betrayal of patriotism” and warned about the “old demons coming back to wreak chaos and death.”

Apart from the ideological prejudices and historical ignorance on display from a globalist watching the “rules-based international order” tottering even as he speaks, Macron was also aiming his barbs at President Trump, who identifies himself as a proud nationalist. Macron punctuated his point by later calling for the creation of an “EU army” because “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America.”

For NeverTrump globalists from both parties, a scolding from a European, even one accompanied by preposterous threats, is the QED of their indictment of Trump’s numerous offenses. But contrary to such naïve admiration, long before Donald Trump, the European ruling elite, especially the French, have looked on the U.S. with resentment, contempt, and envy.

The history of just the last 27 years illustrates how little Trump has to do with European attitudes towards America. By the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Europe and its dreams of ever-closer integration into a larger transnational federation was a few years away. Suddenly there was geopolitical space for a new “superpower” freed from the old Cold War strictures. Though belonging to NATO and a committed ally of the U.S., increasingly by the early 90s the European elite often appeared to comprise a “non-aligned” movement committed to peace and global development. It also was open to transcending the old, Manichean communist-capitalist dichotomy that had long fretted European communists and socialists, not to mention more recent leftist parties like the Greens. Even before the collapse of the Soviets, “third way” alternatives were touted such as “Eurocommunism,” or frauds like “communism with a human face” were proposed and implemented. Of course, the Warsaw Pact peoples living under communism knew every human face had a boot eternally stamping it.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/27/what-is

It seems that Saudi Arabia’s rulers murdered an opponent. The U.S. media and political class is shocked, shocked, to find that murder is going on in such precincts. Who did they imagine the Muslim world’s leaders are?

Moreover, our chattering class demands that President Trump do whatever it takes to make sure that they do nothing like that again. Do what? Does anyone really think that swapping sheik A for sheik B would improve their kind’s moral standards? Do they have any idea of what keeps A on top of B, what it would take to switch them, or what the repercussions would be in foreign policy? Are they naifs, idiots, or are they just playing with foreign policy to make life a little harder for Trump?

What follows is politically incorrect information on what Saudi Arabia is, what role it plays in American politics, and what it means for our foreign policy. Then, I will suggest how American foreign policy from the Founding to around 1910 would deal with today’s Middle East.

Saudi Arabia’s rulers are a subspecies of the desert rats endemic in the region. The ones on the cheese now are of the clan of seven sons out of old king Saud’s favorite wife, Suda, and hence are known as Sudaris. The previous ruler, Abdullah was the only son of another wife. When Abdullah’s birth-order turn came, in 2005, he took the throne thanks only to having mobilized the national guard of bedouins for war against the national army (and everything else) controlled by the Sudaris. Today, when you read about Mohammed bin Salman’s “anti-corruption reforms,” you should know that they target primarily Abdullah’s son and other relatives. In other words, what is going on, including murder, is a purely dynastic power play. But that is Saudi Arabia’s nice side.

The fundamental reality is that this is a slave society, (the Arabic word for black man is the word for slave) which considers work something that inferiors do for superiors, prizes idleness, and practices cruelty as a means of asserting superiority. Everyone knows that women, treated as property, end up disproportionately in the harems of the wealthy. But few stop to think that this custom dooms the majority of Saudi men to lives without legitimate sex, never mind families.

As for who gets what, that comes strictly either from birth or from connections with the powerful. Nor are the young clamoring for the kind of useful work that would lift them up. They compete, all right, but for favor. Saudi students in U.S colleges—and even in military training programs—just don’t do their work. A degree is a passport to a job which somebody else performs.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/trumps-saudi-gamble

“America First! The world is a very dangerous place!” President Donald J. Trump’s opening of his statement on “Standing with Saudi Arabia” (November 20) was eccentric; the ensuing 600-odd words—indubitably his own—appeared to give Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MbS”) an unqualified and outrageous carte blanche, seven weeks after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. There may be more than meets the eye, however.

A disclaimer first. With my decades long, sometimes passionate, amply documented record of loathing all things Saudi, I do not rejoice at what looks like the President telling a nasty man in charge of a nasty country that he is free to go on acting like a murderous thug that he is. What I sense, however, is that Trump-the-Transactionalist senses an opportunity to grab and hold MbS by his short and curlies, while telling an incredulous world that the Prince is still a good boy intent on reforms like women driving, Saudi Vision 2030, and all that.

The opening of Trump’s statement was replete with visceral Iranophobia:

“The country of Iran . . . is responsible for a bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen, trying to destabilize Iraq’s fragile attempt at democracy, supporting the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, propping up dictator Bashar Assad in Syria (who has killed millions of his own citizens), and much more . . . The Iranians have killed many Americans and other innocent people throughout the Middle East. Iran states openly, and with great force, ‘Death to America!’ and ‘Death to Israel!’ Iran is considered the world’s leading sponsor of terror.”

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-donald-j-trump-standing-saudi-arabia/

The world is a very dangerous place!

The country of Iran, as an example, is responsible for a bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen, trying to destabilize Iraq’s fragile attempt at democracy, supporting the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, propping up dictator Bashar Assad in Syria (who has killed millions of his own citizens), and much more. Likewise, the Iranians have killed many Americans and other innocent people throughout the Middle East. Iran states openly, and with great force, “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” Iran is considered “the world’s leading sponsor of terror.”

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia would gladly withdraw from Yemen if the Iranians would agree to leave. They would immediately provide desperately needed humanitarian assistance. Additionally, Saudi Arabia has agreed to spend billions of dollars in leading the fight against Radical Islamic Terrorism.

After my heavily negotiated trip to Saudi Arabia last year, the Kingdom agreed to spend and invest $450 billion in the United States. This is a record amount of money. It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development, and much additional wealth for the United States. Of the $450 billion, $110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great U.S. defense contractors. If we foolishly cancel these contracts, Russia and China would be the enormous beneficiaries – and very happy to acquire all of this newfound business. It would be a wonderful gift to them directly from the United States!

The crime against Jamal Khashoggi was a terrible one, and one that our country does not condone. Indeed, we have taken strong action against those already known to have participated in the murder. After great independent research, we now know many details of this horrible crime. We have already sanctioned 17 Saudis known to have been involved in the murder of Mr. Khashoggi, and the disposal of his body.

Representatives of Saudi Arabia say that Jamal Khashoggi was an “enemy of the state” and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but my decision is in no way based on that – this is an unacceptable and horrible crime. King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi. Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event – maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!