RUTHFULLY YOURS

The consensus in Israel is that the relationship between the Jewish state and the United States is going to improve in a Trump administration, says former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Zalman Shoval.

On a recent visit to Washington, D.C., Shoval told me that he believes Donald Trump and his cabinet picks so far have a more “realistic” view of the Middle East than President Obama, who from his first days in office, “perhaps before, believed it was his calling to fix once and for all, all matters between the U.S. and the Arab and Muslim worlds, as expressed in his Cairo speech. … This gives Trump in the hearts and minds of more than a few Israelis a head-start.”

Shoval said he believes the issue of a Palestinian state — the objective of U.S. foreign policy over several administrations — has become less concerning than the regional and international threat posed by a nuclear Iran. He likes recent statements by secretary of defense-designate Gen. James Mattis about the way forward in dealing with an unstable Iran, believing Mattis recognizes that as important as it is to defeat ISIS, the real threat in the Middle East is Iran.

It’s not only the nuclear deal that bothers Shoval, though he believes Iran will eventually have a bomb, unless it is stopped. It is also bothersome that Iran continues with its terrorist activities, subsidizing anti-American and anti-Israel groups around the world because radical mullahs think their god has ordered them to do so. That makes any kind of diplomatic agreement with nations Iran regards as “infidels” impossible.

Even when the battle for Mosul is over and victory has been declared over that ISIS stronghold, Shoval believes, “what it really will mean is that the Iranians and the Shia are going to be the real victors. They will continue their attempts to build a territorial corridor all the way to the Mediterranean along with Hezbollah, which is not only a threat to Israel, but also something the so-called moderate Arab states look at with a great deal of concern.”

In his rant at the Saban Forum denouncing Israel for the lack of peace, John Forbes Kerry claimed that the Islamic terrorists who run Fatah are pacifists. “We have a leader of a not-perfect entity, the Fatah, who is committed to nonviolence.”

Here’s a sample of Fatah’s commitment to non-violence courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch.

The Fatah song emphasizes that Fatah’s “oath” is to destroy Israel, saying “free the state from the hands of the Zionists,” and that this will be done through violence, terror and killing:

“Slice open the enemy’s chest, slice it”
“Shoot the Dashka (machine gun) and the cannon”
“The Fatah man… fires the mortar and the machine gun”
“Strike, mortar, strike!”

And just in case there’s any ambiguity…

“I have no love other than the love of the rifle.”
“The sound of the rifles gives us joy”
“Bullets! Sing for us”

That’s real commitment to non-violence. Maybe Kerry should be the one to be committed.

In his 2016 State of the Union address, President Obama summarized his achievements. That same night, the White House issued a press release touting Obama’s accomplishments.

Now that he will be leaving, how well did these initiatives listed in the press release actually work out?

“Securing the historic Paris climate agreement.”

The accord was never submitted to Congress as a treaty. It will be ignored by President-elect Trump.

“Achieving the Iran nuclear deal.”

That “deal” was another effort to circumvent the treaty-ratifying authority of Congress. It has green-lighted Iranian aggression, and it probably ensured nuclear proliferation. Iran’s violations will cause the new Trump administration to either scrap the accord or send it to Congress for certain rejection.

“Securing the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”

Even Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton came out against this failed initiative. It has little support in Congress or among the public. Opposition to the TTP helped fuel the Trump victory.

“Reopening Cuba.”

The recent Miami celebration of the death of Fidel Castro, and Trump’s victory in Florida, are testimonies to the one-sided deal’s unpopularity. The United States got little in return for the Castro brothers’ propaganda coup.

“Destroying ISIL” and “dismantling al Qaeda.”

We are at last making some progress against some of these “jayvee” teams, as Obama once described the Islamic State. Neither group has been dismantled or destroyed. Despite the death of Osama bin Laden, the widespread reach of radical Islam into Europe and the United States remains largely unchecked.

“Ending combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The Afghan war rages on. The precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. peacekeepers in 2011 from a quiet Iraq helped sow chaos in the rest of the Middle East. We are now sending more troops back into Iraq.

“Closing Guantanamo Bay.” The recent Miami celebration of the death of Fidel Castro, and Trump’s victory in Florida, are testimonies to the one-sided deal’s unpopularity. The United States got little in return for the Castro brothers’ propaganda coup.

“Destroying ISIL” and “dismantling al Qaeda.”

We are at last making some progress against some of these “jayvee” teams, as Obama once described the Islamic State. Neither group has been dismantled or destroyed. Despite the death of Osama bin Laden, the widespread reach of radical Islam into Europe and the United States remains largely unchecked.

“Ending combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The Afghan war rages on. The precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. peacekeepers in 2011 from a quiet Iraq helped sow chaos in the rest of the Middle East. We are now sending more troops back into Iraq.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday defended his strategy for combating terrorism, despite the emergence on his watch of the Islamic State group and the expansion of the conflict in Syria.

Mr. Obama, in a national-security speech delivered just weeks before he leaves the White House, repeatedly drew a contrast between his ideas and those of Republican President-elect Donald Trump while making a case for why his successor should adhere to his approach, which was shaped by his early decision to scale back America’s military presence overseas. Mr. Obama also pointed to his administration’s ban on torture, including waterboarding, and to his longtime effort to close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“We have to take a long view of the terrorist threat, and we have to pursue a smart strategy that can be sustained,” Mr. Obama said at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. “We can get these terrorists and stay true to who we are.”

Mr. Obama said the clearest evidence his strategy has succeeded is that “no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland, and it’s not because they didn’t try.”

Attacks in Europe have rattled Americans, as have several apparently Islamic State-inspired shootings in the U.S. Mr. Trump campaigned on being tougher on Islamic State and suggested the vetting of Muslims in the country.

A Trump transition spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment on Mr. Obama’s speech.

While he didn’t mention Mr. Trump by name, Mr. Obama had a clear message for his successor on foreign policy. He argued for using diplomacy before military power, pointing to the deal with Iran to restrain its nuclear program, which Mr. Trump has said is deeply flawed.

He also said the U.S. doesn’t impose religious tests and that “protecting liberty” is something the U.S. does for all Americans, not just some. Mr. Trump has proposed curbs on immigration by Muslims.

On closing Guantanamo Bay, one of Mr. Obama’s earliest and unfulfilled promises, Mr. Obama said the “politics of fear” has kept the facility open and that until Congress changes course on its refusal to allow the transfer of detainees to U.S. prisons, “it will be judged by history.”

“And I will continue to do all I can to remove this blot on our national honor,” Mr. Obama said.

Matthew Levitt, who was deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis at the Treasury Department during the George W. Bush administration, said that beside Mr. Obama’s digs at Mr. Trump, “the speech was most interesting for what it left out: any real answer to the fact that terrorist threats are worse now than when he came to office, according to most intelligence officials.” CONTINUE AT SITE

According to the mainstream media, foreign policy experts and Democrats, President-elect Donald Trump made a serious error when he accepted a phone call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen congratulating him on winning the 2016 presidential election. Trump’s critics apparently believe Mr. Trump is not allowed to speak with the president of one of the world’s leading democracies and a close friend of the United Stats because the Chinese government forbids this.

Sorry, but China does not tell American officials who they can and cannot talk to. Despite the 1979 decision to open diplomatic relations with China and withdraw diplomatic relations with Taiwan, America and Taiwan remain close friends. We sell Taiwan billions of dollars in military hardware. America may have an unofficial relationship with Taiwan, but this does not mean our leaders should shun or insult Taiwan’s president.

Trump’s critics claim his decision to accept Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s congratulatory phone call indicates he does not understand foreign policy. I disagree. This was an act of leadership by a president-elect who plans to enact a new U.S. foreign policy that rejects President Obama’s failed foreign policy of retreat, appeasement and leading from behind.

The Donald Trump-Tsai Ing-wen phone call also could reflect an intention by the Trump administration to reevaluate America’s relationship with Taiwan and possibly upgrade relations. Such a move is long overdue. Taiwan is by any measure a thriving democracy and an independent state. Although the United States in 1979 recognized that China and Taiwan believe in a “one China” policy, the U.S. government has never officially endorsed this position. Instead of a U.S. embassy or consulate in Taipei, the United States maintains a nonprofit center known as the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), which operates as a barely unofficial embassy. Trump advisers are right in considering whether it is time to reevaluate U.S.-relations with Taiwan and the AIT. These advisers include China expert Peter Navarro, who contributed to the Center for Security Policy’s recent book on the growing threat from China, Warning Order: China Prepares for Conflict, and Why We Must Do the Same.

Instead of piling on Donald Trump for taking a phone call from the leader of a U.S. ally, Trump critics should be focusing on how the lack of global leadership by Barack Obama created a power vacuum in the Asia-Pacific region that emboldened China to engage in belligerent actions to seize control of almost the entire South China Sea. This action is endangering the economies and security of America’s friend and allies in the region and also threatens freedom of navigation in a crucial sea area.

President Obama emphasized the absence of another 9/11-scale attack on the homeland during his two terms in office and argued that acting “like this is a war between the United States and Islam” would result in more American deaths and “the loss of the very principles we claim to defend.”

Speaking to service members at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa today, Obama highlighted policy moments during his tenure including the Iraq pullout and Afghanistan surge. He claimed that “by any measure, core al-Qaeda, the organization that hit us on 9/11, is a shadow of its former self.”

In the Middle East, he noted, “most dangerously, we saw the emergence of ISIL, the successor to al-Qaeda in Iraq, which fights as both a terrorist network and an insurgency.” He added that keeping U.S. forces in Iraq to help prevent the creation of the Islamic State “was not an option” since “Iraqis wanted our military presence to end.”

The president blamed factors including “the government in Baghdad that pursued a sectarian agenda, a brutal dictator in Syria who lost control of large parts of the country, social media that reached a global pool of recruits and a hollowing out of Iraq security forces, which were ultimately overrun in Mosul in 2014.”

Washington’s response to the fall of Mosul refused, Obama said, “to repeat some of the mistakes of the 2003 invasion that have helped to give rise to the organization that became ISIL in the first place.”

“The campaign against ISIL has been relentless, it has been sustainable, it has been multilateral, and it demonstrates a shift in how we’ve taken the fight to terrorists everywhere, from south Asia to the Sahel,” he said. “Instead of pushing all of the burden onto American ground troops, instead of trying to mount invasions wherever terrorists appear, we’ve built a network of partners.”

“No foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland,” Obama declared. “And it’s not because they didn’t try. Plots have been disrupted, terrorists have been taken off the battlefield.”

The president acknowledged attacks on the homeland “carried out by homegrown and largely isolated individuals who were radicalized online.””These deranged killers can’t inflict the sort of mass casualties that we saw on 9/11,” he said. “But the pain of those who lost loved ones in Boston and San Bernardino and Fort Hood and Orlando, that pain continues to this day. And in some cases, it has stirred fear in our populations and threatens to change how we think about ourselves and our lives.”

Obama began his misspent time in office lying about Islamic terrorism and he ends it in the same shameful way. From Afghanistan to Iraq and right back to Islamic terror at home, he has never stopped lying about the threat that we face.

The speech was bizarre. After two terms of insisting that we weren’t at war with the terrorists, he grandly boasts that, “I will become the first President of the United States to serve two full terms during a time of war.”

Considering that the war was largely caused by his refusal to fight it, it’s an odd form of self-glorification. It’s like a fire chief boasting that the building next door has been on fire for two weeks because he refuses to put out the flames.

Having crippled the military, he claims that he believes it “must remain, the strongest fighting force the world has ever known”.Then there’s the bizarre revisionism of his disastrous Afghan surge and Iraq withdrawal, which considering the rise of ISIS now seems more insane than ever, being replayed one more time.

“When I took office, the United States was focused overwhelmingly on Iraq, where nearly 150,000 American troops had spent years fighting an insurgency and helping to build a democratic government. Meanwhile, al Qaeda had regrouped in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was actively planning attacks against our homeland. So we brought nearly 150,000 troops home from Iraq, consistent with the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the previous administration, and we surged our efforts along with our allies in Afghanistan, which allowed us to focus on dismantling al Qaeda and give the Afghan government the opportunity to succeed.”

Except the CIA had pointed out that there 50 to 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.

As he justified sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $30 billion a year, President Barack Obama’s description Tuesday of the al Qaeda “cancer” in that country left out one key fact: U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country.

Every time a member of the Obama administration makes a statement about domestic or foreign affairs, one is reminded why Donald Trump was elected president last month. Many of those who voted for him despite concerns about his unconventionally brash persona did so in the hope that his picks for top jobs would compensate for his own lack of experience in Beltway politics.

So far, it appears, this was more than a smart gamble. But one of the highest positions, which has yet to be determined, is that of chief diplomat. The list of Trump’s possible candidates now includes former Gov. Mitt Romney, former CIA Director David Petraeus, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and retired Navy Adm. James Stavridis.

But let’s face it: Even Bozo the Clown would be better than Secretary of State John Kerry.

To be fair to Kerry, he was following the foreign policy spelled out by Obama four years earlier: that America was about to embark on a new path, reaching out to enemies who would suddenly transform into friends when faced with a more gentle and multicultural America — one that “leads from behind.”

Nevertheless, it was Kerry who did most of the shuttling, predominantly to the Middle East, alternating between his many trips to Europe to grovel before his Iranian counterpart, and visits to Israel, where he expressed severe displeasure with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not behaving similarly with the Palestinian Authority.

In what was hopefully one of his last public appearances in his role this week — at the 13th Annual Saban Forum in Washington, D.C., where he delivered the keynote address — Kerry highlighted the disaster that constituted his tenure, without an iota of remorse — other than in his failure to force Israel to create a Palestinian state.

While establishmentarian heads continue to explode over President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial phone call with the president of Taiwan last week, one of his potential candidates for secretary of State says it’s much ado about nothing. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who met with Trump on Friday to discuss the vital cabinet position, said on Fox Business Monday that taking the congratulatory phone call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen was “exactly the right thing to do.”

“I think the President of the United States should talk to any foreign leader he thinks its in the interest of the United States to talk to,” Bolton told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs.

“Tsai Ing-wen is a democratically elected president of a representative government in Taiwan — a free government, a free press, a free economy … the whole bit,” he said.

Bolton pointed out that the Taiwanese people have been friends with the United States for decades, even after “we treated them shabbily, time and time again.”

“From what happened with the loss to China in the UN when they were replaced by Beijing, to the derecognition during the Carter administration — over and over again,” he noted. “And they have stood with us — it’s a remarkable record.”

Dobbs said he was “heartened” to see the president step up and talk to whomever he pleases.

Relax. Breathe.

Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan wasn’t a blunder by an inexperienced president-elect unschooled in the niceties of cross-straits diplomacy.

It was a deliberate move — and a brilliant one at that.

The phone call with President Tsai Ing-wen was reportedly carefully planned, and Trump was fully briefed before the call, according to The Washington Post. It’s not that Trump was unfamiliar with the “Three Communiques” or unaware of the fiction that there is “One China.” Trump knew precisely what he was doing in taking the call. He was serving notice on Beijing that it is dealing with a different kind of president — an outsider who will not be encumbered by the same Lilliputian diplomatic threads that tied down previous administrations. The message, as John Bolton correctly put it, was that “the president of the United States [will] talk to whomever he wants if he thinks it’s in the interest of the United States, and nobody in Beijing gets to dictate who we talk to.”

Amen to that.

And if that message was lost on Beijing, Trump underscored it on Sunday, tweeting: “Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!” He does not need Beijing’s permission to speak to anyone. No more kowtowing in a Trump administration.

Trump promised during the campaign that he would take a tougher stand with China, and supporting Taiwan has always been part of his get-tough approach to Beijing. As far back as 2011, Trump tweeted: “Why is @BarackObama delaying the sale of F-16 aircraft to Taiwan? Wrong message to send to China. #TimeToGetTough.” Indeed, the very idea that Trump could not speak to Taiwan’s president because it would anger Beijing is precisely the kind of weak-kneed subservience that Trump promised to eliminate as president.

Trump’s call with the Taiwanese president sent a message not only to Beijing, but also to the striped-pants foreign-policy establishment in Washington. It is telling how so many in that establishment immediately assumed Trump had committed an unintended gaffe. “Bottomless pig-ignorance” is how one liberal foreign-policy commentator described Trump’s decision to speak with Tsai.

Trump just shocked the world by winning the presidential election, yet they still underestimate him. The irony is that the hyperventilation in Washington has far outpaced the measured response from Beijing. When American foreign-policy elites are more upset than China, perhaps it’s time for some introspection.