RUTHFULLY YOURS

Was the latest round of airstrikes in Syria a one-time hit to restore deterrence and stop the future use of chemical weapons, or was it part of a slippery slope of more interventions in the Middle East?

President Donald Trump was elected in part because he promised an end to optional wars, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the Libyan misadventure.

But Trump also guaranteed an end to perceived Obama-era appeasement. Trump said he would no longer put up with false red lines in Syria, or complacency about North Korea’s new generation of nuclear missiles.

He also claimed that he wanted to remind enemies that the penalties for attacking U.S. interests are not worth the risk of obtaining some sort of perceived transient advantage. And he inherited American overseas commitments symbolized by some 800 U.S. military facilities in 70 countries abroad.

Working Out “Principled Realism”
These paradoxes were supposedly resolved by his administration’s doctrine of Jacksonian “don’t tread on me” punitive retaliation. Trump might promise to “bomb the s–t out of” the Islamic State, but then not send a division of U.S. Marines into Syria to police the savage postwar landscape.

This middle ground was more or less codified by former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the recently published National Security Strategy. His team called threading the intervention needle “principled realism.” The Trump Administration would use military force to protect U.S interests, but only in a context of what was practicable, given the existing quagmires abroad.

Of the two extremes, avoiding nation-building is the easier. Clearly, no one wants another Libyan debacle during an era of $1 trillion annual budget deficits, or the expenditure of blood and treasure in long-term efforts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan into Westernized nations.

It’s really not that complicated.

But President Trump’s Syria strikes have reopened the debate over what defines his foreign policy. Is he an interventionist or an isolationist? Foreign policy experts claim that he’s making it up as he goes along.

But they’re not paying attention.

President Trump’s foreign policy has two consistent elements. From threatening Kim Jong-Un on Twitter to moving the embassy to Jerusalem to bombing Syria, he applies pressure and then he disengages.

Here’s how that works.

First, Trump pressures the most intransigent and hostile side in the conflict. Second, he divests the United States from the conflict leaving the relevant parties to find a way to work it out.

North Korea had spent decades using its nuclear program to bully its neighbors and the United States. Previous administrations had given the Communist dictatorship $1.3 billion in aid to keep it from developing its nuclear program. These bribes failed because they incentivized the nuclear program.

Nukes are the only thing keeping North Korea from being just another failed Communist dictatorship.

Instead, Trump called North Korea’s bluff. He ignored all the diplomatic advice and ridiculed its regime. He made it clear that the United States was not afraid of North Korean nukes. The experts shrieked. They warned that Kim Jong-Un wouldn’t take this Twitter abuse and we would be in for a nuclear war.

But the Norks folded.

Welcome to the White House, Mr. Bolton. Not since the 1940s has a national security adviser faced an array of challenges this urgent, this numerous and this perplexing.

Five distinct threats will compete for John Bolton’s attention as he settles into Henry Kissinger’s old digs: First, North Korea’s drive toward nuclear weapons that threaten the U.S. has reached a critical juncture. Second, China’s militarization of the South China Sea coincides with a crisis in U.S.-China trade relations. Third, Russia’s efforts to disrupt the Western alliance system and re-establish itself as a major power in the Middle East have progressed to the point that not even Donald Trump can ignore them. Fourth, Iran’s push to consolidate its gains in Syria and Lebanon has alarmed and provoked Israel and its once-hostile Arab neighbors. Fifth, Islamist terrorism continues to lurk in the shadows, threatening to emerge at any moment and force Western governments to respond.

As the White House considers these threats, its options are constrained. Seventeen years of indecisive war has left a polarized American public weary of global engagement. The midterm elections may yield a “blue wave” that forces the president into a defensive crouch to fend off investigations and perhaps even impeachment by a Democratic Congress. The press is deeply hostile to the Trump administration and unwilling to grant it the benefit of the doubt in foreign policy. Traditional alliances are strained: Europe and Asia worry that an “America First” administration is less valuable and reliable as a partner; Turkey, meanwhile, flirts with a revisionist confederation with Russia and Iran. CONTINUE AT SITE

The American Left has made it a full-time job to cover for the Obama administration’s mishandling of our national security. This is only possible with the creation of an alternative reality that defies not only the facts but any semblance of common sense.

Do you remember the July 2008 New Yorker cover that portrayed then-senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama dressed in Muslim garb fist-bumping his wife Michelle, who is wearing an outfit reminiscent of the Black Panthers, in the Oval Office with an American flag burning in the fireplace?

Editor David Remnick explained the cover was intended as satire. “The fact is, it’s not a satire about Obama—it’s a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama.” Always playing defense, Republicans immediately distanced themselves from any such “distortions.” Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) called the cover “totally inappropriate.” The erstwhile conservative blog Little Green Footballs joined in, actually taking up the Remnick line: “The cover is obviously a moonbat parody of what they think are right-wing ideas about their messiah.”

Despite the fact that Obama’s middle name is “Hussein,” that he spent his formative years in a Muslim country with a Muslim stepfather, that his book “Dreams From My Father” is much about a man with the same Muslim name as his and who was a Muslim, the possibility that Obama might have Muslim sympathies was ruled out of bounds. By the time of the New Yorker cover, entertaining that possibility became akin to a hate crime.

And it has stayed that way ever since. By and large, people who criticize Obama’s foreign policy from the right have been careful to avoid stepping on the Muslim landmine in order to avoid the accusations of “racism” and “Islamophobia” sure to follow.

But the Obama Administration’s relationship to the Islamic world defined that presidency. The results were tragic for the region and for American interests. Donald Trump is trying to fix the mess Obama left him, but these things are not going to be fixed overnight. In the meantime, let’s see Obama for what he is.

We have been told again and again that the crowning achievement of Obama’s foreign policy was the Iran deal. So let’s begin by considering it.

The United States has legitimate complaints against Chinese trade and technology transfer practice, but the Trump Administration’s ineptitude threatens to turn what should be a tough negotiation into a trade war. An unclear chain of command and mixed signals about US policy demands have led to a breakdown in China’s efforts to negotiate a mutually acceptable deal with Washington through low-profile diplomacy, because the Chinese side can’t tell which Administration officials are authorized to speak for the Administration, according to Chinese sources familiar with the events.

Confusion about who’s in charge in Washington also plague the tri-partite negotiations over the NAFTA treaty with Mexico and Canada. US, as well as Mexican government officials, had expected that meetings in Washington on April 6 would lead to an agreement in principle before President Trump left for Latin America.

After hours of talks last Friday with US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, though, Mexico’s Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo and Canada’s Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland had nothing to report. Reuters reports that a lack of clarity over a US demand to raise the North American content of vehicles imported under NAFTA was a stumbling block.

The Trump team meanwhile has sent contradictory signals on an almost daily basis, with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Economic Advisor Larry Kudlow pointing to a negotiated settlement while the President threatens escalation of punitive trade measures. World stock markets whipsawed all week in response.

Confusion in the Trump team reflects a deeper confusion in US policy, which has two quite different goals. One is to constrain China to eliminate manifestly unfair trade practices, of which the most egregious is the forced transfer of technology by American companies seeking access to the Chinese market.

North Korea has told the U.S. that Kim Jong Un is prepared to discuss the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, clearing the way for a summit meeting between the North Korean leader and President Donald Trump, according to U.S. officials.

U.S. officials didn’t say when and how that assurance was delivered, but U.S. and North Korean officials have been in communication.

“The U.S. has confirmed that Kim Jong Un is willing to discuss the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” a Trump administration official said on Sunday.

Hopes for a breakthrough that might end more than six decades of animosity on the Korean Peninsula were raised last month when South Korean national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, told the White House that North Korea was prepared to engage in talks on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and would refrain from nuclear and missile tests.

For weeks, however, U.S. officials heard nothing from the North Koreans, raising concerns that the South Korean government, which is eager to reduce tensions on the peninsula, might have exaggerated Pyongyang’s willingness to put its nuclear arsenal on the negotiating table.

The North Korean assurance doesn’t mean that talks will necessarily succeed. Pyongyang has indicated that progress toward denuclearization should proceed in phases that are synchronized with diplomatic and economic concessions from the U.S. side.

It is possible that North Korea’s timetable for reducing and ultimately eliminating its arsenal might be far longer than the Trump administration would be prepared to accept. The North, for example, may define denuclearization as a long-term goal that would only be achieved if the U.S. eliminated the potential military threat to its regime by withdrawing forces from South Korea.

North Korea also might ask for more concessions than Washington is willing to provide. Working out verification arrangements to confirm that North Korea isn’t hiding weapons could be an additional stumbling block.

“Kim Jong Un being willing to discuss denuclearization is a good development given that in the past he has said that denuclearization was not possible,” said Joseph DeTrani, who served as the U.S. special envoy to the so-called Six Party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program from 2003 to 2006. The talks included the U.S., North Korea, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

“We now have to discuss whether his definition of denuclearization is similar to ours, which is complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of all of their nuclear weapons and weapons programs,” said Mr. DeTrani.

North Korea has previously committed itself to denuclearization. A September 2005 statement issued during the Six Party talks noted that Pyongyang was “committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” That statement also said that steps toward denuclearization would be taken “in a phased manner” and based on the reciprocal principle of ”action for action.” CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump said something this week that flew largely under the radar of a media obsessed with Stormy Daniels and whether it can get the scalp of “embattled” (by them) EPA boss, Scott Pruitt. It had to do with the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and what, if any, America’s long-term role should be in that sorry corner of the world. He said that our troops would be withdrawing “very soon” from Syria, no later than this autumn.

The reaction from the proponents of endless war was illustrative of why, going on 17 years after 9/11, America still finds itself embroiled in Muslim-bred conflicts in which it has no material interest other than strictly punitive. As the Washington Post reported:

President Trump’s pronouncement that he would be pulling troops out of Syria “very soon” has laid bare a major source of tension between the president and his generals. Trump has made winning on the battlefields of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan a central tenet of his foreign policy and tough-guy identity. But Trump and the military hold frequently opposing ideas about exactly what winning means.

Those differences have played out in heated Situation Room ­debates over virtually every spot on the globe where U.S. troops are engaged in combat, said senior administration officials. And they contributed to the dismissal last month of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster who as national security adviser had pressed the president against his instincts to support an ­open-ended commitment of U.S. forces to Afghanistan.

No wonder McMaster is gone. An “open-ended commitment” of U.S. forces to anywhere, much less the notional “country” of Afghanistan, is one of the worst ideas ever and runs counter to American policy since the days of George Washington. But the enthusiasm for it among the careerist military and the consensus-loving bureaucrats of the State Department remains unabated.

It’s apparently not enough that we’ve been fighting the same collection of goatherds with AK-47s since early in the first term of the George W. Bush Administration. It’s bad enough that we didn’t finish the job—which was to take Osama bin Laden at his word, and at his declaration of war upon us in the name of Islam—and deal the expansionist, triumphalist faith a blow from which it might never recover. The Saudis, in the form of the bin Laden family and most of the 9/11 hijackers, had given us a casus belli, as had the Iranians, dating all the way back to the hostage crisis of the Carter Administration, and for which they have never been properly disciplined. All right-thinking allies would have been behind us.

But of course, we didn’t. The war in Afghanistan was effectively over in a matter of a few months, although bin Laden escaped to next-door Pakistan, where the duplicitous Pakistanis—whose countrymen are currently visiting a rape epidemic upon poor, politically correct Britain—gave him shelter right under the noses of their military establishment. Then Bush chose to turn his attention to Poppy’s unfinished spat with Saddam Hussein. And here we are, nearly two decades later, still taking off our shoes to get on an airplane in our own country, and with troops scattered all across the Middle East for no purpose.

When Liu He, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s top economic adviser, came to Washington in late February, he was expected to make arrangements for restarting trade talks that President Donald Trump had put on ice.

But just as Liu arrived, the Trump administration announced global steel and aluminum tariffs aimed at punishing China for what Washington says is its overproduction of steel that hurts U.S. steel makers. The announcement came a day ahead of a meeting planned with Trump’s economic point men, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and then White House adviser Gary Cohn.

Pessimistic Trump officials had said the Liu meeting would probably go nowhere. “People expect that whatever the Chinese offer it will be insufficient,” a White House official told Reuters just hours ahead of the meeting.

The timing of the announcement, whether deliberately aimed at embarrassing Liu or not, was emblematic of the Trump administration’s more confrontational approach to what the United States has long viewed as China’s unfair trade practices.

It was the opening salvo in a pattern of escalation that continued this week as Trump slapped first $50 billion in tariffs on China and then said he would seek $100 billion more after Beijing struck back.

The rapid tit-for-tat escalation, which has brought the world’s two biggest economies to the edge of a trade war, is being driven by anti-China economist Peter Navarro and U.S trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer, who cut his teeth in trade deals with Japan in the 1980s.

The U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2016 sent $9 million in U.S. taxpayer funds to a Soros-backed group which used the money to fund far-left political activities in Albania, newly released documents show.
Judicial Watch
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Important Judicial Watch obtained docs revealing the Obama Admin sent U.S. taxpayer funds overseas to a group backed by billionaire George Soros – which used the money to fund left-wing political activities benefiting the socialist government in Albania.http://jwatch.us/aWfFnm
According to Judicial Watch, which obtained the 32 pages of records through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the American tax dollars were used to help the country’s socialist government push for highly controversial judicial “reform.” The records also provide insight into how the Soros operation “helped the State Department review grant applications from other groups for taxpayer funding. CONTINUE AT SITE

The proverbial knot of Gordium was impossible to untie. Anyone clever enough to untie it would supposedly become the king of Asia. Many princes tried; all failed.

When Alexander the Great arrived, he was challenged to unravel the impossible knot. Instead, he pulled out his sword and cut through it. Problem solved.

Donald Trump inherited an array of perennial crises when he was sworn in as president in 2017. He certainly did not possess the traditional diplomatic skills and temperament to deal with any of them.

In the last year of the Barack Obama Administration, a lunatic North Korean regime purportedly had gained the ability to send nuclear-tipped missiles to the U.S. West Coast.

China had not only been violating trade agreements but forcing U.S. companies to hand over their technological expertise as the price of doing business in China.

NATO may have been born to protect the European mainland, but a distant United States was paying an increasingly greater percentage of its budget to maintain NATO than were its direct beneficiaries.

Mexico keeps sending its impoverished citizens to the United States, and they usually enter illegally. That way, Mexico relieves its own social tensions, develops a pro-Mexico expatriate community in the U.S. and gains an estimated $30 billion a year from remittances that undocumented immigrants send back home, often on the premise that American social services can free up cash for them to do so.

In the past, traditional and accepted methods failed to deal with all of these challenges. Bill Clinton’s “Agreed Framework,” George W. Bush’s “six-party talks” and the “strategic patience” of the Obama administration essentially offered North Korea cash to denuclearize.