RUTHFULLY YOURS

Kim Jong Un tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile in the early hours of Wednesday, and the data suggest it could hit all of the continental United States. If North Korea is allowed to perfect its warhead technology, it will be able to hold the U.S. hostage to nuclear ransom. The Trump Administration is right that the U.S. can’t live with this threat, so what more should it do to prevent it?

Conventional wisdom says that Pyongyang already faces extreme economic and diplomatic pressure. But in reality the United Nations and U.S. only began to impose broad sanctions last year, and even U.S. allies such as Singapore and Thailand have been slow to enforce them. China and Russia continue to support the Kim regime—China through oil exports and other commerce, and Russia through payments for North Korean slave labor.

Shutting down those lifelines should be a top priority. After the North’s intermediate-range missile launch in September, the U.S. circulated a draft resolution at the United Nations Security Council to do just that. But Russia and China resisted and the U.S. caved; Resolution 2375 only capped oil exports and labor contracts. The Trump Administration portrayed the unanimous vote at the U.N. as a victory, but the resolution kept open many of Pyongyang’s cash lifelines.

The U.S. even rewarded Beijing for the vote by pausing the process of sanctioning Chinese companies that violate sanctions. That pause ended last week when the Treasury Department put four companies based in the Chinese city of Dandong on its financial blacklist. Treasury is playing catch-up with a June report on sanctions-busting firms by the private research group C4ADS. The U.S. government continues to hold back on other “secondary sanctions,” especially against Chinese banks, for fear of losing Beijing’s cooperation.

But China’s internal enforcement of sanctions is patchy. Chinese banks froze the accounts of some North Korean customers while continuing to finance Chinese companies that are breaking sanctions rules. Imports of coal from North Korea have continued in violation of a U.N. resolution in August that banned all trade in North Korean coal. The Trump Administration can make an example of these firms and expose Beijing’s failure to honor its sanctions promises.

The U.S. response to Wednesday’s missile tests should also include security measures. The redeployment of tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea is needed to deter a nuclear attack from the North. Showing Pyongyang that American forces would retaliate overwhelmingly to an attack on a U.S. ally, even at the risk of an ICBM attack on the U.S. mainland, would help prevent Kim miscalculating.

The deployment of more Thaad missile-defense radars and launchers to South Korea would send a strong signal to China that its support for Pyongyang has consequences. At the end of last month Beijing bullied South Korean President Moon Jae-in into freezing deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense system. But the U.S. should insist it needs new Thaad units to defend its own forces and deter attacks from the North.

The U.S. and South Korea can also expand their programs to encourage North Koreans to defect. The Kim regime’s former Deputy Ambassador to the U.K. Thae Yong-ho has good ideas on how to do this. Mr. Thae, who fled to freedom in the South last year, testified to Congress last month on human-rights messages that will resonate in the North.

The much discussed “Shiite Crescent” or an Iranian land corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean may be a reality. To make matters even more complicated, U.S. policy or the lack thereof may have contributed to Iran’s regional hegemony.

After President Trump assumed office, he indicated a primary policy of defeating ISIS. Uniting U.S. Special Forces with Iraqi troops and Qud Revolutionary soldiers, the caliphate was destroyed including the stronghold in Raqqa and its last foothold in Syria’s Dair Ezzor province. The problem in the aftermath of these battles is that a plan for the future has not been forthcoming. In fact, the Iranian role in the defeat of ISIS elevated its stature and influence.

If the U.S. is serious about countering Iranian aggression, steps must be taken across this regional battle space. Should the Trump administration do nothing – a likely response – the Iranian Revolutionary Forces will assert political and economic dominance over the entire northern tier of the Middle East.

The last remaining obstacle to the realization of Iranian goals is a coalition of Syrian Kurds and Arabs known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Kept apart at present by a U.S. Russian confliction channel, both sides are securing critical territory. The question that remains about Trump’s Syria policy is whether it was designed to defeat the Islamic state or whether it is informed by the larger strategic view of Iran’s regional dominance. If the latter, President Trump must decide how and when he will deploy American troops as a counterweight to the Iranian surge. United States air power and Special Forces remain at the center of a capable combat force. Using these assets effectively Washington can assure SDF partners that it will remain in Syria even after Islamic State is defeated.

Finally, the U.S. and allies in Europe and the Gulf hold tens of billions of dollars in international assistance that Syria will need to recover from the Civil War. The U.S. also contends Assad must go and the basic rights of minorities, especially the Kurds, must be guaranteed. In order for these aims to be achieved the Iranian and Shia proxies in Syria must be displaced.

Surely this will not be easy since it involves new risks and costs. But doing nothing is costly as well. President Trump should articulate a strategy that boldly announces the U.S. opposition to the Shia Crescent with a ground game that consciously works to block Iranian hegemony in Iraq and Syria. To do less is to invite a war between Israel and Hezbollah – a proxy of Iran – and to cede vast control of strategic positions to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Forget the tweets, the gaffes and the undiplomatic asides. The most trenchant criticism of President Trump’s foreign policy is that it risks forfeiting America’s hard-won position of global leadership.

It’s a compelling indictment: Mr. Trump is withdrawing from the Paris Accord, “restructuring” the State Department with a chain saw, dumping the Pacific trade deal, and abdicating on human rights while cozying up to authoritarians. The whole of the damage being done to America’s standing is greater than the sum of his tweets.

On the other hand, those hardy souls who defend the administration argue Mr. Trump is so smart that his critics can’t fathom the method to his apparent madness. The naysayers, as this theory has it, are playing checkers, while Mr. Trump is winning at chess.

The truth, as always, is more complicated. Mr. Trump is not the second coming of Bismarck, and his temperament, education and experience have not prepared him to steer American foreign policy at a difficult time. But there is a pattern if not a method to his moves. Moreover, Mr. Trump’s mix of ideas, instincts and impulses is not as ill-suited to the country’s needs as his most fervid detractors believe.

What gives Mr. Trump his opening is something many foreign-policy experts have yet to grasp: that America’s post-Cold War national strategy has run out of gas. During the period of confidence and giddy optimism that followed the Soviet Union’s fall, the list of “important” American foreign-policy goals expanded dramatically.

Promoting democracy in the Middle East; protecting the rights of religious and sexual minorities; building successful states from Niger to Ukraine; advancing global gender equality; fighting climate change: This is only a partial list of objectives recent administrations pursued, sometimes under pressure from congressional mandates. Foreign policy has become as complex and unwieldy as the tax code, even as public support for this vast, misshapen edifice has withered.

Change had to come, and the failure of Mr. Trump’s 2016 rivals—both Republican and Democratic—to offer a less disruptive alternative to gassy globalism helped put him in the White House. Although the president’s antiglobalist and mercantilist instincts blind him to some realities, they enable him to grasp three significant truths.

First, Mr. Trump knows that the post-Cold War policies can no longer be politically sustained. Second, he knows that China poses a new and dangerous challenge to American interests. Third, he sees that foreign policy must change in response. The old approach—on everything from trade and development, to military deployments and readiness, to religious freedom and women’s issues—must be reassessed in the light of today’s dangerous world.

For years foreign-policy thinking was dominated by the idea that the end of the Cold War meant the “end of history”—the inevitable triumph of the so-called liberal world order. This belief shaped a generation of intellectuals and practitioners.

But history isn’t over, and American foreign policy needs to come back to earth. The U.S. isn’t putting the finishing touches on a peaceful global system that is fated to endure for the ages. For the foreseeable future, foreign policy is going to be less about making dreams come true and more about keeping nightmares at bay. CONTINUE AT SITE

In the absence of American leadership, dangers gather in far-away lands and terrorist threats against our homeland grow. This became explicitly clear as the Obama administration wrapped up its second term, leaving behind a foreign policy legacy that included the establishment and explosion of the Islamic State, a reckless nuclear deal that enriched a terror-sponsoring regime in Iran, and an emboldened tyrant in North Korea committed to bullying, blackmailing, and possibly attacking the United States with nuclear weapons.

Our allies didn’t trust us and our enemies did not fear us.

However, because of efforts by the current administration and actions taken in the House of Representatives, we are no longer pushing the most pressing problems to the next generation. Instead, we are confronting them head-on.

Earlier this year our military began implementing a new strategy that has empowered our battlefield commanders to hunt terrorists more aggressively. This is in stark contrast to the Obama era, which saw American planes drop leaflets ahead of an attack, warning our enemies to flee. This approach has allowed American-backed forces to liberate key ISIS strongholds that include Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. We are finally on the verge of destroying the so-called caliphate.

After two years of implementation, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has turned out to be exactly what critics predicted — an extremely flawed accord that left key components of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in place. The JCPOA has not only strengthened the oppressive government in Tehran with planeloads of cash and sanctions relief, it has also failed to alter Iran’s destabilizing and anti-American behavior.

Around the entire Middle East, Iran has been fomenting chaos through the formation of a “Shia Crescent” by supporting Houthi rebels in Yemen, Shi’ite militias in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Last month, after careful evaluation, the president rightly chose not to recertify the disastrous nuclear deal and sanctioned the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

I am told that on that this day in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Despite Walter Duranty’s protestations to the contrary in The New York Times, that was while Stalin was systematically starving millions—yes, millions—of his own people. He went so far as to seal the windows of trains running through the areas he wished to devastate so that passengers could not throw out food to the starving multitudes. FDR knew this. So: was his diplomatic action a good thing or a bad thing?

On this day in 1985, Ronald Reagan travelled to Geneva to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev. The Cold War was still raging. So: was Reagan’s action a good thing or a bad thing?

Fun archival project: go back to the 1980s and read what The New York Times (and kindred outlets) had to say about Ronald Reagan. He was a moron. He was a war monger. He was being played by Gorbachev.

Fast forward to today. Andrew Rosenthal, writing in The New York Times, wants us to know how “grown-ups” deal with Vladimir Putin. His proffered adult is Prime Minister Theresa May, who, in her address at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, gave a tart (and accurate) assessment of Putin’s hostile actions, from his annexation of Crimea to his propaganda war and “weaponization” of information technology. Spot on, Mrs. May!

Andrew Rosenthal contrasts May’s blast against Putin with Donald Trump’s diplomatic efforts.

Let’s leave aside the hypocrisy of a reporter for The New York Times stepping onto his high horse to deliver anti-Russian salvos. Shameless: he even invokes Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech in Berlin. Go back and read what the Times had to say about that phrase at the time.

You do not have to convince me that Vladimir Putin is a nasty piece of work. Indeed (commercial break), I am just about to publish Putin on the March, Douglas Schoen’s brilliant book on that subject.

The world is full of bad guys. But if you are president of the United States, you should understand that the interests of peace and the interests of prosperity demand that you get along with other nations, if at all possible, especially powerful nations. Donald Trump was quite right when he tweeted a few days ago that “having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. . . . I want to solve North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, terrorism, and Russia can greatly help!”

It is “a good thing, not a bad thing” to have a good relationship with Russia. Ditto on China, Vietnam, South Korea, and the Philippines.

Yesterday, just back from his 12-day, 20,000-mile whirlwind trip through Asia, the president gave what posterity will regard as a turning-point speech. The master word of this speech was “confidence.” “When we are confident in ourselves,” the president said, confident in

our strength, our flag, our history, our values—other nations are confident in us. And when we treat our citizens with the respect they deserve, other countries treat America with the respect that our country so richly deserves.
During our travels, this is exactly what the world saw: a strong, proud, and confident America.

Donald Trump displayed, in a way we have not seen since the heyday of Ronald Reagan, what foreign-policy leadership looks like. We have serious differences with Russia and China. We also have areas of agreement and potential agreement. To address the former a canny leader endeavors to exploit the latter. This Donald Trump is doing.

An underreported theme of President Trump’s Asia tour was his attention to a regional flashpoint overshadowed by North Korea: the South China Sea. While Mr. Trump avoided public statements on the issue in China, he laid down important markers in Vietnam and the Philippines.

For five years China has escalated tensions by building military bases on artificial islands. Last year a United Nations tribunal found that China’s claim to territorial waters violated international law, but Beijing dismissed the judgment. Chinese vessels continue to harass the ships of the other six nations that claim territory and economic rights in the area.

In his Nov. 10 speech to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Danang, Mr. Trump cited territorial expansion as a threat to regional stability. “We must uphold principles that have benefitted all of us, like respect for the rule of law, individual rights, and freedom of navigation and overflight, including open shipping lanes. These principles create stability and build trust, security, and prosperity among like-minded nations,” he said.

The remarks are a direct challenge to China, which warns away ships and planes that pass near the land features it controls. Beijing reacted with outrage after the U.S. Navy conducted four “freedom of navigation operations” this year to assert the right to use waters claimed by China. An estimated $4.5 trillion in trade transits the South China Sea annually.

U.S.-Vietnam relations continue to warm as a result of China’s pressure. In July Vietnam abandoned oil exploration in its exclusive economic zone after threats from Beijing. Mr. Trump urged the Vietnamese to buy Patriot missiles, and the relationship could deepen into a strategic partnership.

In Manila, Mr. Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte issued a joint statement that stressed “the importance of peacefully resolving disputes in the South China Sea, in accordance with international law, as reflected in the Law of the Sea Convention.” Last year’s tribunal decision was based on the convention.

This is significant because Mr. Duterte previously offered to put the verdict aside and sought to cooperate with Beijing on oil-and-gas exploration. But China’s aggressive behavior is creating political pressure on Mr. Duterte to defend Philippine claims.