RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/wrecking_nato.html

The Washington Post headline blared, “Trump is bent on wrecking NATO. Prepare for catastrophe.” The Post fears that President Trump’s diplomacy will benefit Vladimir Putin to the detriment of American and European interests. European Council president Donald Tusk sniped, “Dear America, appreciate your allies. After all, you don’t have that many.”

The NATO countries are, indeed, among America’s closest allies, but some of them appear more interested in oil, natural gas, and trade with Iran than in the Fulda Gap. Some of our “closest allies” have been working overtime to undermine America. If Mr. Trump is irritated with them, there is a reason.

Iran is preparing to take $300 million in cash out of German banks to get ahead of impending U.S. banking sanctions. While American intelligence officials are concerned that the money will finance terrorism, the German government says it has “no evidence” to that effect. According to the German newspaper Bild, “Iran … says that they need the money ‘to pass it on to Iranian individuals who, when travelling abroad, are dependent on euros in cash due to their lack of access to accepted credit cards.'” The German government appears to think that one million Iranian tourists might need $300 each – or perhaps 300 tourists might need $1 million each.

The plan to send dollars to Tehran is in line with European negotiations, led by Germany and France, to help Iran mitigate the economic fallout of the American withdrawal from the JCPOA – the Iran deal. The E.U. has also begun to update its “blocking statute,” the rule that will prevent European companies from complying with impending Iran sanctions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-trump-plans-to-change-the-world-1531177521

Eighteen months into Donald Trump’s presidency, the nature of his foreign policy continues to elude most observers. The problem is not, as some admirers claim, that he is playing an elaborate strategic game that his critics can’t grasp. Nor is it, as some detractors believe, that Mr. Trump is simply a creature of impulse with no fixed views. The president’s approach to foreign policy may well fail—indeed, there is a case it deserves to. But a Trump doctrine exists, and neither friends nor foes can afford to remain blind to it.

Mr. Trump is hard to understand not because he is deep but because he is different. American presidents since the 1940s have primarily sought to conserve the post-World War II order. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, is a revisionist who wants to alter the terms of the world system in America’s favor. From the president’s perspective, America’s superior military strength and its large trade deficit provide important advantages in international politics. Mr. Trump wants to boost America’s military edge while using military and economic tools to persuade other powers to accept his revisions to the world system.

Mr. Trump respects China as a serious long-term rival but believes that its economy depends more on Sino-American trade than the U.S. economy does. This is partly because China is much poorer than the U.S. on a per capita basis. Further, Mr. Trump believes that America’s bilateral trade deficit means that the current arrangement heavily favors China, and that China would be less able to withstand a disruption to that relationship.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/news-services/article214350249.html
The Human Rights Council’s recent vote to investigate Israel for its response to “protests” on its Gaza border highlights everything that’s wrong with this hypocritical body, and why the United States was right to leave it.

First, the vote reflects the council’s longstanding obsession with Israel, which has far more to do with its status as the world’s only Jewish state than with any serious council concerns about the world’s biggest human rights problems.

The United Nations created the council in 2006 to replace its Human Rights Commission, which by then had become an object of derision due to its anti-Israel bias.

In 2002, professor and dogged U.N. watcher Anne Bayefsky reported that over the previous 30 years, the commission spent 15 percent of its time on Israel and made it the subject of a third of its country-specific resolutions.

The commission’s successor, however, has only proved worse. The council has made Israel its only permanent agenda item, which means that it discusses the Jewish state at each of its three meetings a year but it doesn’t necessarily discuss such true humanitarian horrors as North Korea, Syria and Venezuela, nor such regular human rights abusers as China, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Cuba.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-nato-progress-1531088542

President Trump will attend a summit of North Atlantic Treaty Organization national leaders this week, and the stakes are unusually high for everyone. He plans to meet Vladimir Putin shortly afterward, and Mr. Trump will be at a disadvantage if he doesn’t set the right tone in Brussels.

That tone should be a united front between America and its allies, within a NATO committed to and capable of deterring new threats. This doesn’t mean Washington must always avoid raising uncomfortable truths within the alliance. It does mean Mr. Trump should recognize how NATO benefits America, and how it can help him avoid the diplomatic traps into which his predecessor fell.

The good news is that Mr. Trump is doing better on this score than many of the pearl-clutchers among foreign-policy worthies will admit. He has taken a particularly aggressive stance on defense spending among NATO members, most recently in a series of testy letters reportedly sent to other national leaders. Allies have pledged to spend at least 2% of GDP, a promise they repeated at the 2014 Wales summit. Mr. Trump is continuing a long tradition of bipartisan frustration in Washington when they don’t meet that pledge.

But Mr. Trump should also give credit where it’s due, especially when he can claim part of the credit for success. Inflation-adjusted defense spending among non-U.S. NATO members has increased each year since 2014, and at an accelerating rate that likely will deliver the largest annual spending growth since the Cold War this year. More than half of NATO’s 29 members are on track to meet their 2% pledge by 2024, compared to four or five in a typical year before 2014. Mr. Trump’s win here is keeping up the pressure for more burden sharing as memories of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea fade.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/03/trumps-deplorable

Liberals see Donald Trump as the embodiment of toxic masculinity. Trump’s voters see a real man.

My husband jokes that in our family, if anything is dead, bites or is on fire, it’s his job. North Korea was beginning to approach the “bites” and “is on fire” category.

It took a year of intense economic and military and psychological pressure to bring Kim Jong-un to the negotiating table in Singapore. Trump’s critics tried to spin the initial meeting as a diplomatic disaster.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will arrive in Pyongyang this week to kick off the negotiations. Satellite images show that North Korea is expanding missile production, so the Washington Post is calling the entire diplomatic effort a “sham” before actual negotiations have begun.

Trump’s critics are going to fall on their faces with North Korea, as with their other predictions of doom. They underestimate Trump time and again because his strengths are invisible to them.

The United States does not have to blink at threats from a squirt like Kim Jong-un. Our experts don’t know this. Trump does.

When Kim tried some last-minute bluster before Singapore, Trump canceled the summit. Setting clear lines is not a setback, it is a key to success. Trump was defining the relationship. Kim cannot make threats. We can. Trump was his usual blunt self: “You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/north-korea-expands-key-missile-manufacturing-plant-1530486907?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

SEOUL—North Korea is completing a major expansion of a key missile-manufacturing plant, said researchers who have examined new satellite imagery of the site, the latest sign Pyongyang is pushing ahead with weapons programs even as the U.S. pressures it to abandon them.

The facility makes solid-fuel ballistic missiles—which would be able to strike U.S. military installations in Asia with a nuclear weapon with little warning—as well as re-entry vehicles for warheads that Pyongyang might use on longer-range missiles able to hit the continental U.S.

New images analyzed by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Calif., show that North Korea was finishing construction on the exterior of the plant at around the time North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met with U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore last month. The U.S. is pushing Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic-missile programs.

Last week, 38 North, another organization that monitors North Korea, published satellite images of the country’s main nuclear-research center in Yongbyon, showing that Pyongyang was rapidly upgrading its facilities there. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/north-korea-keeps-enriching-uranium-1530481136

New satellite photos show that Kim Jong Un is continuing to develop his nuclear weapons program, and U.S. intelligence sources say they believe North Korea has increased its production of nuclear fuel at multiple sites. This wasn’t supposed to happen after the Donald Trump-Kim summit last month in Singapore.

According to an analysis by experts at the Stimson Center in Washington, North Korea has improved the cooling system of its plutonium-producing reactor at Yongbyon. Activity also continues at a nearby building where plutonium is extracted from spent fuel, and staining on the roof of another building suggests the North is enriching weapons-grade uranium using centrifuges. U.S. intelligence sources essentially confirmed this news by telling news agencies last week that the North has been increasing its production of enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

After the June 12 summit with Kim, President Trump said that he trusts the young dictator and expects him to start fulfilling his promise to denuclearize immediately. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” Mr. Trump tweeted the next day.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7211/full

Three separate questions compose the topic of US foreign policy under Donald Trump: what the policy has been since he took office, what parts of that are due to Trump’s decisions, and what may be those decisions’ root. I will examine these components with regard to each aspect of US policy, rather than in any chronological order of events.First, we must understand how they interact with one another generically. This requires grasping why the American people’s dissatisfaction with foreign policy had reached a critical point by the 2016 election, and how Trump incorporated that dissatisfaction in his campaign.

Prior to running for President, Trump viewed international affairs with the not-so attentive, ordinary patriotism of ordinary Americans. That view has been at odds with official US policy for most of the past 100 years. During the past quarter-century, all of the foreign policy establishment’s constituent parts have become increasingly unpopular — each for its own reasons — so that, by 2016, US foreign policy had no constituency outside the establishment.

Ordinary Americans’ approach to foreign affairs has remained remarkably steady since the country’s founding: America and its way of life are uniquely precious. The oceans to the east and west, as well as non-threatening neighbours north and south, offer Americans the chance to live peacefully and productively in what Benjamin Franklin called “the land of labour”. The Declaration of Independence aimed to secure neither more nor less than a “separate and equal station” among the powers of the earth. To that end, American diplomats are to give no offence and to suffer none, while the US armed forces — the Navy foremost — are to keep danger far away. America has interests all over the world, which coincide with those of others occasionally. But they are never identical. Hence, America is to mind its own business, aggressively, while steering clear of others’ business. As John Quincy Adams said, America “enters the lists in no cause but its own”. Bothering no one, Americans will make short, brutal work of whomever bothers them. As General Douglas MacArthur put it: “In war there is no substitute for victory.” But like him, the few major figures who have championed this point of view in the past hundred years — Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert Taft, Jr., and Barry Goldwater — have been damned at once as isolationists and warmongers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pompeo-on-what-trump-wants-1529966363

Is the Trump administration out to wreck the liberal world order? No, insisted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in an interview at his office in Foggy Bottom last week: The administration’s aim is to align that world order with 21st-century realities.

Many of the economic and diplomatic structures Mr. Trump stands accused of undermining, Mr. Pompeo argues, were developed in the aftermath of World War II. Back then, he tells me, they “made sense for America.” But in the post-Cold War era, amid a resurgence of geopolitical competition, “I think President Trump has properly identified a need for a reset.”

Mr. Trump is suspicious of global institutions and alliances, many of which he believes are no longer paying dividends for the U.S. “When I watch President Trump give guidance to our team,” Mr. Pompeo says, “his question is always, ‘How does that structure impact America?’ ” The president isn’t interested in how a given rule “may have impacted America in the ’60s or the ’80s, or even the early 2000s,” but rather how it will enhance American power “in 2018 and beyond.”

Mr. Trump’s critics have charged that his “America First” strategy reflects a retreat from global leadership. “I see it fundamentally differently,” Mr. Pompeo says. He believes Mr. Trump “recognizes the importance of American leadership” but also of “American sovereignty.” That means Mr. Trump is “prepared to be disruptive” when the U.S. finds itself constrained by “arrangements that put America, and American workers, at a disadvantage.” Mr. Pompeo sees his task as trying to reform rules “that no longer are fair and equitable” while maintaining “the important historical relationships with Europe and the countries in Asia that are truly our partners.”

The U.S. relationship with Germany has come under particular strain. Mr. Pompeo cites two reasons. “It is important that they demonstrate a commitment to securing their own people,” he says, in reference to Germany’s low defense spending. “When they do so, we’re prepared to do the right thing and support them.” And then there’s trade. The Germans, he says, need to “create tariff systems and nontariff-barrier systems that are equitable, reciprocal.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/haley-russia-will-ultimately-bear-responsibility-for-any-further-escalations-in-%e2%80%8esyria/

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said the pressure is on Russia to stop ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from violating the ceasefire brokered by Jordan, Russia, and the United States.

Syrian regime forces were dropping barrel bombs on opposition-held areas in the southwest part of the country Friday, the first such assault bordering Jordan and the Golan Heights since the U.S. and Russia agreed on the “de-escalation zone” last year.

Abu Bakr al-Hassan, spokesman for the rebel group Jaish al-Thawra, which fights under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, told Reuters that he believes Assad is using the bombardment) to test two things: “the steadfastness of the FSA fighters and the degree of U.S. commitment to the de-escalation agreement in the south.”

Russia’s ambassador to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin, speaking in the pro-Hezbollah newspaper al-Akhbar, warned Israel — which doesn’t want the Assad-aligned Iranian militias on their border — against intervening, saying the Jewish state has “no justification to carry out any action.”

In a statement today, Haley criticized Assad’s “intensified military operations” including “airstrikes, artillery, barrel bombs, and rocket attacks” which “unambiguously violates ‎the southwest de-escalation arrangement and risks broadening the conflict and exacerbating civilian displacement.” CONTINUE AT SITE