RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-three-stages-of-trumps-foreign-policy-1542672995

President Trump’s foreign policy has passed through two stages—one restrained and one more turbulent. The third and most decisive is now beginning to take shape.

Through most of his first year in office, Mr. Trump moved cautiously on the international stage and tended to defer to mainstream advisers. Starting last spring with the departures of H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, Mr. Trump has been taking more radical steps, ramping up tariff wars around the world while jettisoning the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Universal Postal Union.

For Mr. Trump’s critics, this second stage has been catastrophic. American power, they argue, depends on the institutions Mr. Trump is weakening and the allies he is alienating; the president is sawing off the branch on which he sits. His defenders say he is placing American power on a sounder footing, clearing away the deadwood of the past, forcing others to pay their fair share and ensuring the U.S. benefits more from international trade.

The case against Mr. Trump’s international disruption isn’t as strong as most in the foreign-policy establishment believe. There are certainly dangers in the president’s impulsive approach—some of them grave—but Mr. Trump has one big point in his favor. The liberal-internationalist vision, which holds that the world is a kind of greater European Union, moving inexorably toward its own kind of “ever closer union” via a strengthening network of international institutions, seems to be running out of steam.

As countries like Turkey, India, China, Brazil and Nigeria develop, they are striving more to strengthen their sovereignty than to pool it. By shifting America’s stance away from the losing defense of legacy liberal internationalism that characterized the John Kerry years, the Trump disruption might, might point the way toward a more sustainable U.S. diplomatic approach.

But for Mr. Trump to be remembered as something other than a diplomatic wrecking ball, his administration will have to rapidly shift gears. Destruction ceases to be creative when it doesn’t lead to the construction of something better. After the cautious first stage and the dramatic second stage, a third stage of strategy and leadership must follow.

In the Middle East, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen seem to be forcing the administration to review its strategic options. Simply outsourcing U.S. regional policy to Riyadh and Jerusalem won’t do. Washington needs a vision and a policy that both reassures our local allies and disciplines some of their wilder instincts. Walking away from the Iran deal was easy; implementing a new regional strategy will be hard. Like his predecessors, Mr. Trump will be judged not by his intentions but by his results.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13296/nuclear-inf-treaty-withdrawal

Russia has violated not only the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), but, according to former senior White House nuclear arms official Frank Miller, every major arms-control agreement it has signed with the United States.

The same kind of deception has been characteristic of China.

The truth is that there is no INF arms-control regime to be saved. It is senseless to pine for a treaty that only one power — the United States — observes. Self-abnegation here only enables others to shoot first and make threats that the US cannot answer.

The US renunciation of the 1987 United States-Soviet Union Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) has generated much skepticism in the arms-control community — particularly in much of Europe, and from Japan.

These countries hoped not only to keep Russia and the United States in the 1987 treaty (despite Russia’s major violations of the INF treaty), but persuade China to become a party to the treaty and thus be forced to eliminate the hundreds of INF-range missiles China has deployed in Asia and ranged against US and its allied interests.

Critics have presented the following five main arguments against the US move:

It enables Russia to build as many INF missiles as it likes, while simultaneously allowing Moscow to blame Washington for reneging on the treaty.

It imperils the entire structure of arms control, including the possible 2021 extension of the United States-Russia 2010 New START Treaty.

It would require extensive consultation with Europe or risk undermining allied cohesion and offering Moscow new targets in its campaign of political warfare against the NATO alliance.

It is unnecessary — despite Russian violations — because the US has adequate conventional air-launched and sea-launched cruise missiles to keep Russia at risk and defend Europe, and presumably America’s Pacific allies, against China.

It concedes a strategic advantage to Russia, since no INF-equivalent missile is in production by the United States to match Russian INF missile deployments.

These arguments, however, do not hold up to scrutiny.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/authors/dan_caldwell/

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, millions of Americans were deployed overseas to combat zones in nearly a dozen countries. They joined the honored ranks of millions of other American veterans alive today who fought bravely in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, not to mention those who served during the Cold War or participated in 1990s conflicts such as the Persian Gulf War.

The veterans of our most recent wars distinguished themselves in challenging situations time and again. When we consider martial valor and individual sacrifice, we shouldn’t only think about our troops on the beaches of Normandy or Iwo Jima. We should also remember those who fought in dusty places like Fallujah, Baghdad, and Kandahar, displaying heroism to rival that of previous generations. Thus, we rightly honor their service today.

However, the tactical successes and individual bravery of American fighting men and women over the past 17 years cannot mask the broader failures of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11. Nor should they be used as justification to continue endless wars disconnected from U.S. security in places like Afghanistan.

The best way to honor the sacrifices of our post-9/11 veterans and their families is to make sure we pursue a foreign policy that only calls on our troops to fight when absolutely necessary for our safety, prosperity, and way of life. We shouldn’t ask people to risk everything for their country when what they are fighting for has little to do with U.S. interests or can only be connected to them indirectly via distorted or idealistic theories of the world. We dishonor veterans when we continue to pursue failed policies that can’t be clearly linked to why so many of them joined in the first place: to defend America and our freedom here at home.

It isn’t surprising when we hear so often about the need to “stay the course” in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan in order to honor our fallen and the veterans who served in those conflicts. We understand the psychology of not wanting our heroes’ sacrifices to have been in vain. However, when we can’t connect continued fighting to a plausible strategy for victory, it doesn’t honor anyone. Would those who have given the ultimate sacrifice want us to continue pursuing the same failed strategies that lead to the same disappointing results while also ensuring that more service members will serve and die in those places?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/trump_versus_the_euroswamp.html

This guy Donald Trump has amazing physical staying power. Right after his end-sprint in the Midterms, which ended pretty well, and only pausing for a White House presser to deliver a kick to Jim Acosta, Donald Trump is in Europe, where the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day is being memorialized on Sunday.

In case you forgot, Armistice Day is the day the guns stopped firing in the trenches in World War I, after the United States sent in our first huge expeditionary force to tilt the balance against the Central Powers, including the German Empire, as Bismarck had rebranded Prussia in1848, and the other German Empire of the time, called the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

During that bloody trench war the German General Staff also sent Vladimir Lenin in a closed train across to Moscow, to stir up revolution against the Romanoff Czars.

Lenin and his Bolsheviks killed the Romanoffs, all of them — men, women and children, and after a civil war that the Bolsheviks won. The rest, as they say, is history. Lenin pulled Russia out of World War I, which was the German aim in smuggling Lenin over there.

So we have another German Empire to thank for the Soviet Union, though we should not blame living people for the sins of the past. But history has a crazy way of repeating, and today we have the makings of a new European Kaisertum, called the European Union.

http://www.atimes.com/article/trump-all-but-announces-trade-deal-with-china/

In a press conference at the White House this afternoon, following better-than-expected results for his party in midterm elections, President Trump all but declared that he had concluded a trade deal with China.

“They got rid of ‘China 25,’” the president said in response to a reporter’s question, in an apparent reference to China’s Made in China 2025 program to eliminate dependence on imports in several key high-tech industries by the year 2025.

“China would have superseded us in two years as an economic power. Now they’re not even close. China got rid of their ‘China 25’ because I found it very insulting. I told that to them. That means in 2025 they’re going to take over – economically – the world,” Trump told reporters.

Significantly, Trump used the past tense, as if referring to a deal that was already well on its way to completion.

He went on to tout progress that he has made in pressuring Beijing, adding: “we’re going to try to make a deal with China because I want to have a great relationship with President Xi – as I do – and also with China.”

I reported from Beijing last month that China was willing to back away from the “Made in China 2025” program in the context of a trade deal with the United States:

By backing off from the 2025 target, Chinese officials believe, Beijing can placate the US Administration, and give President Trump a coup in public relations while keeping its own industrial program intact. The government is exploring a number of ways to present such a deal.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-administration-to-reimpose-last-of-sanctions-lifted-by-iran-deal/

The Trump administration will reimpose the rest of the sanctions lifted under the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with early next week, officials announced Friday.

“This part of the campaign about which we’re speaking today is simple: It is aimed at depriving the regime of the revenues that it uses to spread death and destruction around the world,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a call with reporters.

The 2015 nuclear deal, which was also signed by the U.K., France, Germany, China, and Russia, gave Tehran billions of dollars in relief from sanctions in exchange for a promise to curb its nuclear program. President Trump pulled out of the deal in May, and allowed two periods of 9o and 180 days to let companies phase out their business with Iran.

After the first period, which ended in August, the U.S. reimposed sanctions affecting transactions with U.S. dollar banknotes and trade in gold and precious metals, graphite, and cars. On Monday, the administration will reimpose the more hefty batch of sanctions, affecting the energy, shipping, shipbuilding, and financial sectors.

Eight countries will be granted a waiver from oil and gas sanctions and will still be able to import Iranian oil temporarily, Pompeo said. A list of those countries will be published Monday.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271711/foreign-policy-moral-preening-bruce-thornton

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi regime insider and columnist, in Istanbul continues to dominate the news cycle as the president and Congress consider their response. Despite the dog-bites-man nature of the story–– autocrats and tyrants across the globe regularly eliminate political enemies without such intense outrage from the West–– our media and politicians have conducted an orgy of moral preening, thunderous denunciations, and various proposed punishments of Saudi heir to the throne Mohammed bin Salman.

Once again, the cheap idealism and hypocrisy of the self-righteous West illustrates the dangers that come from a foreign policy based on illusion rather than on the tragic reality of human nature and action.

Much of this outrage results from the fact that Khashoggi worked as a columnist for the Washington Post and possessed a green card. Ignoring the distinction between journalists who supposedly report facts, and an editorial page columnist who gives opinions, both progressive and conservative media have turned Khashoggi into a martyr of the Fourth Estate, an intrepid seeker of facts and watchdog of the public weal.

Only a few commentators have reported on the real nature of Khashoggi’s “analyses.” Khashoggi was an Islamist press agent for Osama bin Laden and the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother-ship of modern jihadism, and a critic of the Saudi regime not for its human rights offenses, but for bin Salman’s war against the Iranian supported jihadists in Yemen, his hostility to the Muslim Brotherhood, his break with Qatar for supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, and his desire for closer ties with the U.S. Khashoggi was a “dissident” alright, but one who opposed the reformist policies of the regime that align with the interests of the U.S., and who wooed gullible Westerners with sweet-talk of Islamists “reform.”

The media’s elevation of Khashoggi, of course, also serves their anti-Trump agenda, ever on the watch for anything that can be turned against the president. Having created the caricature of Trump as an “autocrat” in the making who has a soft spot for fellow autocrats, the media have elevated the killing of Khashoggi, and the ongoing investigation of its circumstances, into 24/7 flogging the president and parsing his every word for signs of indulgence of bin Salman’s actions, or asserting dark conspiracies about “hit lists” coming from the White House.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/11/12/transacting-with-riyadh/

We do not share values with the Saudi regime

‘We’ve defeated ISIS.” So said President Trump in a recent Associated Press interview. Not for the first time was the president’s exuberance overstated. Military officials quickly added the qualification that the Islamic State’s end appears to be near but it is not yet vanquished.

Welcome news all the same. News that would naturally lead one to ask: Does the dismantling of the jihadist network mean, finally, an end to the brutal enforcement of sharia? Can we close the book on savage beheadings intended to terrorize and to inculcate compliance with a literalist, scripturally based construction of Muslim law, set in stone — or is it stoning? — a millennium ago?

Not a chance. If you are, say, a homosexual, an unmarried woman innocently commingling with non-related men, a Christian who has apostatized from Islam, or even a believing Muslim who questions the ancient consensus on some aspect of Islamic doctrine, you know the peril of decapitation has never been limited to precincts of Syria and Iraq where the Islamic State imposed its caliphate. Beheadings are still routinely conducted in Saudi Arabia, by the governing regime. In fact, for particularly heinous offenses, the regime directs that decapitation be followed by display of the corpse, hung from a horizontal pole along with the severed head in a plastic bag, a practice publicly referred to as “crucifixion.”

And yes, the regime we are speaking of is the same Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that the United States government has long deemed a valuable ally.

The Trump administration so values the Saudis, as both a strategic partner and a lucrative client for military arms, that it has made the alliance the plinth of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Not only was Riyadh the site chosen for President Trump’s first foreign visit; in a major speech there in May 2017, the president maintained that “principled realism” — his coinage for the administration’s professed America-first approach to international affairs — is rooted in the “common values” said to be held by the U.S. and the House of Saud.

Close monitors of radical Islam worry that principled realism is not very realistic. Not for nothing did 15 of the 19 mass-murdering 9/11 hijackers hail from Saudi Arabia. There are reasons al-Qaeda so readily drew on the kingdom for moral and financial sustenance.

What is variously called “radical Islam,” Islamism, “political Islam,” or “Islamic extremism” (and don’t you dare ask what it is that they’re so extreme about) is better diagnosed as sharia supremacism. It is an ideology aimed at imposing the tenets of Islamic civilization and law, the necessary precondition for establishing Islamic societies.

Sharia is not merely a legal code. It is a comprehensive political and social framework that systematically discriminates against women and non-Muslims. Notice, for example, that President Trump gave his ballyhooed speech in Riyadh rather than Mecca or Medina. That is because, as a non-Muslim, the president of the United States is deemed unfit, under sharia strictures derived from Koranic verse, to step foot in Islam’s two sacralized cities.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/news-services/article220595940.html

WASHINGTON – Let’s be clear: the Saudi murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was a despicable act by a regime that, even after enacting modest reforms recently, still tolerates virtually no domestic dissent.

We should all be outraged, we should demand the truth, and we should look for ways to condemn such action in the clearest terms, such as by sanctioning the regime and the individuals involved.

But let’s be clear about something else: The world can be, as Thomas Hobbes said of the natural state of humanity, “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Though, particularly in the post-World War II period, the United States has promoted freedom and democracy, it also has made its necessary “deals with devils” in the interests of arms control, regional stability and other short-term demands.

Washington’s relationship with Riyadh is one such deal, and our urgent needs across the Middle East do not allow us the luxury of making the morally pure decision of severing all ties with the kingdom.