RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama administration and the media outlets which disseminated Ben Rhodes’ (admitted) propaganda on the Iran nuclear deal were wrong about everything.

The Republicans, President Donald Trump, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were right.

Here’s a collection of Ben Rhodes on Twitter — now as a likely member of the alliance pushing the comical narrative of a 2018 “#BlueWave” — getting everything wrong on Iran right up until the past few weeks:
Ben Rhodes
✔ @brhodes
It would not be “so easy” since there is a far-reaching inspections and verification regime to ensure that Iran is abiding by its commitments (which it is). Will Trump achieve a similar regime in North Korea? Does he even know how these agreements work?
Ben Rhodes
✔ @brhodes

The Iran Deal imposes strict, verified limitations on Iran’s centrifuges and stockpile to prevent them from obtaining a nuclear weapon. What Trump has talked about on NK – a vague, unverified commitment to denuclearization – is nowhere near as restrictive as the Iran Deal.

Newly confirmed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday said President Trump is “unlikely” to stay in the Iran nuclear deal unless he can get “substantial” fixes.

“There’s been no decision made, so the team is working, and I’m sure we’ll have lots of conversations to deliver what the president has made clear,” Pompeo told reporters during a trip to Brussels for a NATO foreign ministers meeting. “Absent a substantial fix, absent overcoming the shortcomings, the flaws of the deal, he is unlikely to stay in that deal past this May.”

Trump has set a May 12 deadline for European allies to agree to a supplemental deal to cover what he sees as gaps in the international accord or else he will essentially withdraw the United States from the agreement.

The Obama-era deal between the United States, Iran, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany and the European Union provided Tehran billions in sanctions relief in exchange for curbing its nuclear program.

Trump sees three main issues with the deal: several provisions sunset, inspectors can’t demand to see some military sites, and it does not address Iran’s other activities, including its ballistic missile program and support for terrorist organizations.

With more freedom to maneuver on foreign than domestic affairs, and with their eyes focused squarely on their legacies, all modern U.S. presidents have sought to craft the elusive deal that will solve a protracted global conflict. So, with dismal prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace, we shouldn’t be surprised that President Trump is now pursuing a deal to end North Korea’s nuclear program.

The coming summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un presents the riskiest of situations for the United States, however, for it pits the least knowledgeable modern-day president on foreign affairs against a shrewd young dictator who’s maintaining the family dynasty in the same iron-fisted way as his father and grandfather.

That raises the stakes immeasurably for the United States, which seeks a full rollback of North Korea’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief and a warming of relations between the two nations – and it has huge implications for U.S. relations with China and such American allies as South Korea and Japan.

Worse, Trump will square off against a leader whose predecessors cut multiple deals of a similar, though less ambitious, nature with Washington – a North Korean freeze or partial rollback of its nuclear program in exchange for U.S. aid – only to see Pyongyang renege and later resume its nuclear advancement.

French President Emanuel Macron’s three-day visit to Washington started on an awkward notewhen he kissed an obviously uncomfortable President Donald Trump. The scene was a symbolic reminder that the two leaders do not enjoy an “intense, close relationship” invented by the media. In reality Macron is, both ideologically and temperamentally, the polar opposite of Trump. The latter was admittedly impressed by the welcome he received for the Bastille Day celebration in Paris last year, and Macron has the distinction of being the first foreign leader to come for a state visit to Trump’s Washington, but there is less than meets the eye to their alleged “chemistry.”

To start with the basics, Trump and Macron are not “two alpha males,” and I have this sneaky suspicion that the leftist-liberal media machine is keen to award the French president Trump’s indubitable “alpha” status in order to neutralize suspicions about Macron’s sexual orientation. In reality, while Trump is a heterosexual who evidently likes pretty women younger than himself, Macron is most likely a bisexual who was fond of older women as a teenager—his wife is 24 years his senior—but now prefers handsome younger men, like the former Radio France president Mathieu Gallet.

Trump is an eccentric in many ways, to be sure, but for all his faults he is genuine and honest, a true albeit diminishing American type. Macron is the poster-boy of Europe’s postmodern transnational elite, a former international banker and fanatical Euro-integralist. He is also an Islamophile (“No religion is a problem in France today . . . What poses a problem is not Islam, but certain behaviors that are said to be religious and then imposed on persons who practice that religion”) and an open-borders enthusiast (by allowing over a million migrants in, “[Chancellor] Merkel and German society as a whole exemplified our common European values. They saved our collective dignity”). In February 2017 he lampooned Trump’s promise to protect America’s southern border by pledging never to build a wall of any kind.

The news from Korea is dramatic, but not quite historic. In the run-up to his proposed summit with Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un has floated a repackaged version of virtually every concession North Korea has ever proposed, from suspending its nuclear and missile tests to accepting the continuing presence of U.S. troops on the Korean Peninsula following a peace treaty between Seoul and Pyongyang.

Given that Messrs. Trump and Kim are two of the most unpredictable leaders in modern times, the frenzied pace of North Korean diplomacy has raised hopes for a breakthrough in the summit. But Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump are more likely to reframe the longstanding U.S.-North Korea standoff than to end it.

The first thing to understand is that North Korea’s nuclear weapons are not going away. Pyongyang is willing to sit at a table where their removal is discussed, and perhaps even to sign pieces of paper stating that their removal is a goal. But talking is one thing; disarming is something else.

The North Korean leadership follows the news. It knows what happened to Ukraine, to Saddam Hussein and to Moammar Gadhafi without nuclear arms. No piece of paper offers a country the serene peace of mind that it gets from a few atom bombs in the missile silos.

But there’s something else. Nuclear weapons aren’t only the centerpiece of North Korean security policy. They are the centerpiece of its political and economic strategy as well. The Kim dynasty hasn’t chosen the Chinese or Vietnamese path for prosperity based on international integration. Instead they cling to the idea of “juche,” or self-reliance, and have one of the least open, least dynamic economies in the world.

The reason is fear. Compared with China, where many companies have a market value greater than North Korea’s total gross domestic product, North Korea is a minnow swimming next to a whale. And there are other whales in the sea. If North Korea opened up for trade and investment, Chinese, South Korean and Japanese investors and traders would swallow it whole. The Kims would rather be the absolute rulers of a poor country than the former rulers of a middle-income one. North Korea spends an estimated 22% of its GDP on the military; that expenditure makes the country poorer but keeps the regime in control.

Those nukes give the Kims clout and they bring in cash. Kim Jong Un can provoke an international crisis by test- launching a missile; few other leaders of small and poor countries have that ability. China, Japan, South Korea and even the U.S. have been willing to make economic and political concessions to keep Pyongyang sweet. North Korea won’t trade all that away for a treaty. That the U.S. is negotiating with North Korea rather than bombing it surely seems to the Kims like proof that their nuclear strategy has worked.

But if Mr. Kim doesn’t want to give up his nukes, the U.S. doesn’t want war. Besides the 28,500 troops, there are more than 200,000 American civilians in South Korea on any given day. The first day of hostilities in a new Korean War could see tens of thousands of U.S. civilian casualties with more to come. The total cost of such a war in treasure and in blood is both incalculable and unacceptable. CONTINUE AT SITE

In Jules Dassin’s 1960 comedy Never on Sunday Melina Mercouri’s Piraeus demimondaine weeps at the awful denouement of “Medea,” but cheers up when the actors take their curtain call. They didn’t die after all, Mercouri exclaims, adding, “And they all went to the seashore.” Former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has written a report, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom, on the tragic failure of democratic movements in the Middle East, Russia, and elsewhere, but with the sad bits left out. So convinced is she of democracy’s inevitable triumph that every story has a happy ending.

Iran’s regime “may for a time prevent the Iranian people from rising against their government, but it almost ensures that when they do, the landing will not be a soft one for the regime or the country.” Rice reports her “shock” when Hamas terrorists won the 2006 Palestinian elections urged by the State Department (so shocked, she says, that she called the State Department watch officer from her elliptical workout to confirm the news). She learned, she tells us, that “armed groups should not participate in the electoral process.” The remedy lies in “nurturing a diverse set of institutions…empowering entrepreneurs and businessmen, educating and empowering women, and encouraging social entrepreneurs and local civic organizations.” She praises former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who told her that the P.A.’s security services were “a bunch of gangsters,” but does not bother to mention that Fayyad was fired in 2013 after he failed to make a dent in the P.A.’s kleptocracy.

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Of Hosni Mubarak’s fall and the Egyptian military’s return to power she declares that “the Egyptian people were calling for [Mubarak’s] immediate ouster” in February 2011. By the people, she means the fraction of Egypt’s population that fit into Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Then the Muslim Brotherhood “won an impressive victory in peaceful elections.” Unfortunately, the Brotherhood’s president, Mohamed Morsi, had an “Islamic and autocratic tilt” and “was blamed, whether fairly or not, for attacks on religious minorities.” In July 2013 the military overthrew him, after “violent protests swept the country, with millions of Morsi supporters and millions of his critics facing off.”

President Trump’s decision to postpone new economic sanctions against Russia on Monday brought some clarity to the foreign policy fight in Washington. The issue isn’t whether UN Ambassador Nikki Haley gets confused, as she waspishly denied, but the fact that the president is fighting the swamp single-handed. Here’s the Financial Times’ snarky Edward Luce in a blast email this morning:

The explanation is simple. Everyone in the Trump administration is really hawkish on Russia. Except the president. On most days the train simply keeps running without him. People such as Haley talk to Jim Mattis, the defence secretary, John Bolton, the national security advisor, Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and so on, and agree on what ought to be done.

Under the headline “Trump, a reluctant hawk, has battled his top aides on Russia and lost,” The Washington Post reported April 15 that the White House national security bamboozled the president about last month’s expulsion of Russian diplomats. Trump was told that he had to expel 60 Russians to match what the Europeans were doing.

The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian officials — far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on…Trump insisted that his aides had misled him about the magnitude of the expulsions. “There were curse words,” the official said, “a lot of curse words.”

The incident reflects a tension at the core of the Trump administration’s increasingly hard-nosed stance on Russia: The president instinctually opposes many of the punitive measures pushed by his Cabinet that have crippled his ability to forge a close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.