RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nypost.com/2018/08/11/trumps-foreign-policy-is-actually-boosting-americas-standing/

A story is supposed to have  two sides, but there is only  one when it comes to President Trump’s foreign policy. Most American media treat his every effort as a savage assault on a harmonious world order.

Whether it’s the trade dispute with China, his pushing North Korea to scuttle its nukes or his demand that NATO members spend more on defense, the headlines sound the same shrieking note: “Trump inflames . . . Trump escalates . . . Trump doubles down . . . Trump risks . . .”

The parade of horribles continues to this day, but it will be hard to out-fear-monger a Time magazine headline from May: “By Violating Iran Deal, Trump Jeopardizes National Security.”

But since the world hasn’t ended and since we’re not dead yet, I humbly suggest it’s time to take a deep breath and consider the other side of the story.

We don’t have to look far. Numerous signs are popping up that the impact of Trump’s policies is far from the disastrous scenario the media predict. By wielding America’s power instead of apologizing for it, and by keeping his focus on jobs and national security, Trump is making progress in fixing the ruinous status quo he inherited.

America First, it turns out, is more than a slogan. It is a road map to reshaping America’s relationship with friend and foe alike.

Take China. Despite press accusations that Trump risks a global recession with tariffs on Chinese imports, recent reports from China say there is growing criticism there over how President Xi Jinping is handling Trump. One brave professor published an essay citing “rising anxiety” and “a degree of panic” about Xi’s combativeness on the issue and his autocratic ways.

http://thehill.com/opinion/international/399610-nato-needs-to-be-fully-financed-and-nimble-going-into-the-future

It has been said time and again that NATO is indispensable as a defense of the West. Even Trump accepts this assertion. What he doesn’t accept is the U.S. burden to sustain the treaty. A combative President Trump has made it clear member states must meet their obligation to spend at least two percent of gdp on defense. The U.S. presently spends 3.6 percent or about twice the average expenditure

Trump noted as well the irony of Germany’s reliance on a new $11 billion pipeline to import Russian natural gas into Western Europe when a significant portion of NATO’s defense budget is to buttress against Russian ambitions. How odd he notes to pay Russia and at the same time defend against Russia.

Chancellor Angela Merkle – who grew up in East Germany when it was controlled by Russia – speaks passionately of a united and free Republic of Germany today, a sound debater’s point but distraction from Germany’s defense spending. Although not always said explicitly, the allies hope that Trump will sign off on a summit deal to deter Russian aggression. It also appears as if Trump’s jaw-boning has had some effect since eight new nations are about to meet the two percent threshold. How this will unfold remains unclear. An alliance that is indispensable must be sustained. My guess is that NATO nations including Germany will be playing a more active defense role than has been the case heretofore. This will be a test of Merkle’s political skill with elections just over the horizon.

“The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over,” then-Secretary of State John Kerry told the Organization of American States in 2013. It was, like many foreign-policy declarations of the Obama years, gloriously optimistic and utterly wrong.

President James Monroe’s declaration in 1823 that the U.S. would not permit the establishment of hostile powers in the Western Hemisphere has become the most famous idea in American foreign policy. The so-called Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 adds that if other nations in the Western Hemisphere default on their international obligations or endanger their neighbors through misgovernance, the U.S. has a “police power” to intervene.
A 1912 painting of the birth of the Monroe Doctrine showing, left to right, John Quincy Adams, William Harris Crawford, William Wirt, President James Monroe, John Caldwell Calhoun, Daniel D. Tompkins and John McLean.
A 1912 painting of the birth of the Monroe Doctrine showing, left to right, John Quincy Adams, William Harris Crawford, William Wirt, President James Monroe, John Caldwell Calhoun, Daniel D. Tompkins and John McLean. Photo: Getty Images

Monroe’s original doctrine and Roosevelt’s extension have never been popular in Latin America, but U.S. presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Bill Clinton have taken an activist role in the region when they saw fit.

Latin America policy has set off one firestorm after another in U.S. politics, especially during the Cold War. Notable examples include the Eisenhower-backed coup in Guatemala; the Kennedy administration’s Bay of Pigs fiasco; President Lyndon Johnson’s deployment of troops to the Dominican Republic; the Nixon administration’s opposition to Chile’s Marxist government ahead of the 1973 coup; and President Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal.

Yet after the Cold War it seemed that U.S.-Latin American relations could relax. The fall of the Soviet Union reduced American concerns about Latin American leftism. Radical governments took power in countries like Ecuador, Bolivia and even Venezuela, but this didn’t prompt a vigorous American response.

Meanwhile, some Latin American nations—most notably the regional giants of Mexico and Brazil—seemed to be completing a swift transition to modern democracy and stable growth. When Mr. Kerry proclaimed the death of the Monroe Doctrine in 2013, he did so on the belief that the U.S. not only faced no great-power competition in the region, but that the leading Latin American states had achieved such stability and prosperity as to make “policing” concerns obsolete.

The situation looks less rosy now. The main problem isn’t Washington’s Cold War nightmare of a triumphant Latin left spreading communism in the Western Hemisphere. It’s precisely the opposite: The implosion of Venezuela’s leftist government is driving a regional crisis. As waves of refugees flee the socialist utopia, bad actors ranging from Vladimir Putin to Hezbollah are nosing around in the ruins of the Bolivarian republic. This weekend’s alleged assassination attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is a harbinger of more violence to come.

In better times, Venezuela’s oil wealth allowed it to lavish aid on its neighbors. Now that aid is drying up. Choices are narrowing for countries like Nicaragua, where near-civil-war conditions exist, and Cuba. Farther north in Guatemala, where some of the world’s highest homicide rates coincide with severe food shortages, asylum seekers stream toward the U.S. Washington can’t ignore so much instability so close to home.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/aug/1/islamic-triumphalism-or-jihad-can-be-finished-if-p/

Psychiatrists tell their patients they have to “name their fears.” A fear that cannot be named cannot be understood or faced. An unnamed threat cannot be defeated. This is particularly true of what is called the threat of “terrorism.”

A recent Washington Post commentary, “Terrorism won’t just go away,” exemplified the problem. By Joshua A. Geltzer and Nicholas J. Rasmussen, two well-placed former Obama administration officials, the column mentioned “terrorism” and “terrorist” 14 times. But “terrorism” is simply a tactic used by “terrorists” in pursuit of political, ideological, economic, religious or nationalist aims.

Something called the “global war on terrorism” might never end. But the struggle against the threat posed by what can be termed Islamic triumphalism or jihad might be finished if properly fought.

Not only must the threat be named, but also the ideology. And so must the practitioners — including the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, which The Post Op-Ed specified — and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Republic, Hezbollah, Hamas and other movements inspired by anti-Western, anti-Christian and anti-Jewish political Islam.

After Japan struck Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, killing 2,400 Americans, the United States did not declare war on surprise attacks, a technique. It went to war against Imperial Japan, which embodied military expansionism.

But following al-Qaeda’s destruction of New York City’s World Trade Center and devastation of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001, which killed more than 3,000 non-combatants, the United States insisted on fighting terrorism, not the aggressive ideology behind the technique.

As a result, although United States and allied forces have killed tens of thousands of ISIS, al-Qaeda and other terrorists in the greater Middle East and elsewhere, the end is not in sight. After expenses potentially totaling several trillion dollars, more than 7,000 American troops killed and tens of thousands wounded, the fight exhibits whack-a-mole characteristics.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jul/25/trump-russia-and-the-future/

Herbert London is President of the London Center for Policy Research: https://londoncenter.org/

In what can only be regarded as an ingenuous diplomatic assertion President Trump agreed that the Russians had not attempted to influence the 2016 election, despite Intelligence reports to the contrary. It appeared as if President Trump had more confidence in Putin’s strength and powerful denial, than the general belief in Washington on both sides of the aisle. To his critics, President Trump abased himself abjectly to a tyrant. Senator John McCain said, “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”

Recovering from this self-imposed injury won’t be easy, unless the president has a strategic vision that ultimately yields results for the United States. For example, if this modus vivendi leads to stabilization in the Middle East, it might have been worth the embarrassment at the Summit. Having been invited to cope with the Syrian poison gas question by President Obama, the Russian position continued to expand as an enforcer of Iranian imperial ambitions and Hezbollah defender. If the president can alter this arrangement by “peeling” Russia away from Iran, the threat of a Shia Crescent – an Iranian land mass from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea – will diminish, thereby giving Sunni states a reprieve from the tension of potential war.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-putin-and-the-montenegro-question-1532989476

Two weeks have passed since the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, but there is still no public account of what the two leaders said—other than their own self-congratulatory remarks. But the recent actions of the U.S. and Russian presidents suggest they may have discussed the role and ambitions of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, taking steps toward a rebalancing of power that should worry Europeans and Americans alike.

President Trump provided one clue in his statements about Montenegro, a tiny Eastern European country and the newest NATO member. During a July 18 conversation with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, he suggested that “aggressive” Montenegrins might start a global conflict. To be fair, Mr. Trump didn’t raise the subject; it was Mr. Carlson who suggested that honoring NATO’s mutual-defense obligation might entangle the U.S. in a fight Americans would rather sit out. But once the subject was raised, Mr. Trump pounced—conjuring the specter of Montenegro dragging the U.S. into World War III.

Where did that come from? There’s no evidence that Mr. Trump had any earlier concern about Montenegro, or even that he knew where it was. Though Montenegro joined NATO shortly after he took office, Mr. Trump’s only direct interaction with the country on record came during a photo session at last year’s NATO summit, when he shoved aside Montenegrin President Dusko Markovic to get a spot in the front row.

There is plenty of evidence, however, that Russia is worried about Montenegro’s accession to NATO. The Kremlin promised unspecified retaliation against NATO in 2015 when the alliance first formally offered membership to Montenegro. Senior Russian officials claim that, in adding the Balkan country to the alliance, NATO members violated their promise not to expand the alliance eastward—an assurance they had given Russia during the presidency of George H.W. Bush.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270800/we-are-behaving-silly-people-bruce-thornton

The hysterical reactions to Donald Trump’s comments in Helsinki show how we are becoming what David Lean’s T.E. Lawrence called the Arabs: “a little people, a silly people.” The difference is, we are the richest, most powerful, freest people in the history of the world, yet like children we are obsessing over words rather than paying attention to meaningful deeds.

Here from the Washington Post is one sample of the thousands of bipartisan complaints about Trump’s comments in Helsinki: “Trump was just compliant and submissive, nearly fawning over Putin. Without a doubt, Putin is more powerful now than he was before the summit and Trump is weaker.” Notice how the subjective adjectives in sentence one become objective facts in sentence two. In a world where language trumps reality, what you say is what you are, not what you do. This has been the central fallacy of most Trump criticism since he walked down that golden escalator.

Words have consequences, Trump’s critics warn. But they forget to add that words mean something when they are linked to deeds. Here’s an example: “This is my last election . . . After my election I have more flexibility,” especially on “missile defense.” In 2012 Barack Obama was caught asking Dimitri Medvedev to pass this message along to Putin in regard to missile installations planned for Poland and the Czech Republic. True to his word, Obama halted the programs, earning kudos from Medvedev, who called it a “responsible approach,” and Putin, who called it “correct and brave.”

And how was this appeasement of a geopolitical rival received? Very differently from Trump’s words. Republican John McCain said of Trump that he had “abased himself . . . abjectly before a tyrant,” and warned that “The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate.” Democrat Nancy Pelosi said of Trump that his “weakness in front of Putin was embarrassing, and proves that the Russians have something on the president, personally, financially or politically.” But Obama’s deeds that followed his abjectly appeasing words, from McCain earned a mild rebuke of “seriously misguided.” And Pelosi said Obama’s move that weakened our allies and strengthened our rival was “brilliant.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270830/trump-makes-clear-era-appeasement-over-joseph-klein

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warned on Sunday that “America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars.” Reacting to the prospect of U.S. actions aimed at cutting off all Iranian oil exports by this November, Rouhani said that Iran could respond by shutting down international oil shipments in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a threat the Iranian regime has made in the past. “We have always guaranteed the security of this strait,” Rouhani said. “Do not play with the lion’s tail; you will regret it forever.”

President Trump was not impressed. He tweeted what amounts to an ultimatum in all caps. Stop the threats against the United States or suffer severe consequences:

“To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”

President Trump’s tweet contained a none too subtle reference to the feckless Obama administration’s appeasement of the Iranian regime. There is now a different sheriff in charge who will brook no threats, lies or chicanery.

Former President Obama coddled the thugs running the Iranian regime to get his disastrous nuclear deal over the finish line, no matter what concessions he felt he had to make to secure his “legacy achievement.” Obama frontloaded relief from the onerous sanctions that had brought the Iranian regime to the negotiating table in the first place. And he threw in cash bonuses as well, including $1.7 billion in ransom payments to secure the release of five American hostages seized by the rogue regime even though several Americans are still detained and missing inside of Iran. In return, Obama got loophole-ridden temporary “commitments” from the Iranian regime to wind down its nuclear enrichment program. The final terms of the deal allowed Iran to claim its military sites off limits to international inspections and failed to bar Iran from developing and testing missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270829/trump-doctrine-vs-rouhani-kenneth-r-timmerman

Is the President of the United States a mere “twitter warrior?” Or is he really serious about Iran? Here is his early morning, all-caps statement that is making heads explode in the Twittersphere:

“To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”

The proximate cause for Trump’s tweet was a threat by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani the day before to close the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping traffic, where he warned Trump, “Do not play with the lion’s tail; you will regret it forever.”

Rouhani himself was responding to a momentous speech at the Reagan Library by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, where he outlined the new “Trump Doctrine” toward Iran.

“The mission set for our team is clear,” Pompeo said. “It’s to deny the Iranian leadership the resources, the wealth, the funds, the capacity to continue to foment terrorism around the world and to deny the people inside of Iran the freedoms that they so richly deserve.”

If you’re reading this page, you’ve probably already had your fill of the hysterics and bombast from the organized left in response to this latest Trump tweet, starting with Rachel Maddow, the Atlantic, and their fellow gutter-creatures.