RUTHFULLY YOURS

Putin’s Russia is determined to demilitarize NATO in Eastern Europe, end Western economic sanctions, allow the permanent amputation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity including the Crimea, secure Bashar Assad’s rule over all of Syria, and in general establish Moscow in world affairs on a plane of “equal status with Washington”.

This last goal is not going to be acceptable to any US president. It would give Russia a veto on U.S. activity abroad and a free hand in its self-proclaimed sphere of influence. Moreover, it would divide NATO, demoralize the EU, and almost certainly encourage further Russian aggression.

Energy policy is the key. A smart, aggressive, and self-interested energy policy makes America stronger and the world safer.

The US and Europe should agree to hold a major NATO summit in advance of a Trump-Putin sit-down. This move would demonstrate renewed NATO strength and resolve.

The proposed American conventional modernization must embrace the entire zone from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It must be coordinated by the U.S. with its allies. It is thus hoped that by doing so, the conventional modernization will help check Russia’s nuclear threats.

Realistically, the US-Russia rivalry will remain in place — but a “strong and nationalist United States,” writes Victor Davis Hanson, can be a diplomatic, military and economic “hinge” upon which U.S. efforts to “discourage” Putin from doing things unwise can succeed.

The rivalry between the United States and Russia is entering a new era with the election of Donald Trump. While Trump has made no secret of his desire for better relations between the two nations, he has also called for a more muscular and efficient US military.

The new President seeks to modernize the US nuclear deterrent, expand effective missile defenses, and significantly increase conventional military capability, while reforming and revitalizing NATO.

These plans will no doubt rub up against Mr. Putin’s objectives. Putin’s Russia is determined to demilitarize NATO in Eastern Europe, end Western economic sanctions, allow the permanent amputation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity including the Crimea, secure Bashar Assad’s rule over all of Syria, and in general establish Moscow in world affairs on a plane of “equal status with Washington”.

A job begun is half done, as the Romans used to say. Restoring our nation’s pride in its exceptionalism, and keeping our government’s obligation to put our country’s interests and security first, is job number one for the new president. After just one week in office, President Trump has made a good start at dismantling the internationalist order that for nearly a century has tried to weaken and subordinate national sovereignty and identity to globalist institutions. The hysterical response of the global elites and this country’s fellow-travelers tells us Trump is drawing blood.

Trump’s executive orders and comments on securing our southern border, renegotiating NAFTA, and banning refugees from jihadist-infested countries––from a list drawn up during the Obama administration by the way–– drew the usual blustering dudgeon. Mexico’s complaints about Trump’s comments were laughably hypocritical. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said, “Mexico does not believe in walls.” Of course they don’t believe in their northern border because Mexico uses illegal immigration into the U.S. to get rid of people for whom they have no jobs or opportunities, and from whom they secure $25 billion a year in remittances, more than the revenues from the sale of oil.

But the last border you want to try to cross illegally is Mexico’s southern border, notorious not for any wall, but for the brutality, including torture and rape, inflicted on those caught. Even Mexican-Indian citizens are apprehended and abused as suspected illegal aliens from Central America. This animus against immigrants is no surprise, given the harsh protections of citizenship enshrined in Mexico’s constitution, which makes illegal entry a felony. And there are numerous draconian restrictions on legal immigrants, such as prohibitions on owning property and serving in government or the military. Or consider Article 33, which states, “The Federal Executive shall have the exclusive power to compel any foreigner whose remaining he may deem inexpedient to abandon the national territory immediately and without the necessity of previous legal action.” Compare that with the extensive legal protections for even criminal illegal aliens in the U.S. The Mexican president is merely mouthing globalist pieties in order to serve his own country’s national interests.

The same hypocrisy is evident in the mainly European complaints about Trump’s moratorium on immigration from certain countries. Last week foreign immigrants from such places who had been detained at airports were blessed with restraining orders by two federal judges in Virginia and New York. The ACLU applauded this slap-down of Trump’s “unconstitutional Muslim ban,” a willful distortion of the plain text of the executive order. And as a globalist outfit congenitally hostile to its own country, the ACLU seems to think there is a Constitutional “civil liberty” for anybody from anywhere to enter the U.S.

By all means, let’s have a debate about the dangers of American presidents and their administrations purveying “alternative facts.” But could the members of the media most ostentatiously seething over President Trump — and now busy presenting their own alternative facts — please spare us the pretense that the White House is suddenly in danger of losing its credibility. What’s left to lose? We’ve just had eight years of the Obama administration beaming out alternative facts “narratives” to the mascot-media echo chamber, on the theory that saying something makes it so (“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”; Iran’s “exclusively peaceful” nuclear program; the Benghazi “video”; etc.).

It is Trump’s job to reverse this rot, not to adapt Obama’s fiction techniques to suit himself. But if anyone’s curious about the kind of fakery that Trump and his team should strive to avoid — in the interest of integrity and good policy — Obama’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, has just given us a showcase example. In her farewell speech as UN ambassador, delivered Jan. 17 to the Atlantic Council, Power conjured an entire alternate universe, less by way of presenting alternative facts than by omitting a number of vital facts altogether. The result was to erase from the picture some of the most disastrous failures of the Obama administration, while insinuating that Trump is already complicit in the resulting mess.

Let me stipulate that Power did issue a warning that is valid, important, and urgent. Her topic, as she explained at the start of her speech, was “a major threat facing our great nation: Russia.”

Yep, no question about that. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a growing threat, as some of us have been arguing for more than a decade.

But it was on Obama’s watch that Russia became a mushrooming threat to a degree that even Obama and his team could not in the end ignore — welcoming Edward Snowden, snatching Crimea from Ukraine, moving back into the Middle East, backing the Assad regime and bombing in Syria, hacking hither and yon, and frustrating Power at the UN with its veto on the Security Council.

It was Obama himself, with his policy of “engagement,” who helped lay the groundwork for this rising threat — deferring to dictators, betraying allies, downsizing the U.S. military, and sneering at those who warned there would be hell to pay. Putin drew the logical conclusions, read this U.S. retreat as an invitation, and made his moves. One might have supposed that after years of Obama apologizing for America, Samantha Power in her swan-song lecture could have summoned the strength of character to apologize for Obama, and for her own role, as one of his top envoys. (Don’t hold your breath).

For Putin, Obama offered the opportunity of a lifetime — to roll right over that old “rules-based order,” which always depended on American leadership, and which Power now warns us is threatened by Russia. Obama began with the 2009 “reset,” including the gift to Putin of yanking missile defense plans for Eastern Europe. Obama went on to promise Putin “more flexibility” after his 2012 reelection. In the 2012 presidential campaign debates, Obama mocked Mitt Romney’s warnings about Russia, scoffing that “the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Congresswoman Kay Granger (R-Texas), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, is very upset with President Obama’s last-Friday-in-office decision to send the Palestinian Authority $221 million, because Granger had placed a hold on it, because the PA had broken its commitment to the US and sought membership in international organizations, according to an early Wednesday PA report. Those Congressional holds are not legally binding, but they are part of the ongoing business between the Administration and the branch of the legislator which holds the purse strings. Like disgruntled office workers on their last day at work, Obama and Kerry broke that trust because they no longer had any business with this body.

So now President Trump’s State Department says it plans to review the rule-breaking decision to send $221 million to a Palestinian Authority that also breaks the rules, AP reports. On Tuesday, the department said it would make adjustments to in this unruly payment, to make sure it complies with its new priorities.

Dr. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Business Insider that “Congress had been looking at various behaviors from Palestine — unilateral attempts at statehood, corruption, incitement of violence, and paying salaries to people in jail for terrorism — and that’s why the hold has been there.”

An earlier AP story reported that the Obama administration had been pressing Congress to release the money for a while, saying it was needed for humanitarian aid, political and security reforms, and “rule of law.”

Granger said in a statement Tuesday: “I worked to make sure that no American taxpayer dollars would fund the Palestinian Authority unless very strict conditions were met. While none of these funds will go to the Palestinian Authority because of those conditions, they will go to programs in the Palestinian territories that were still under review by Congress. The Obama Administration’s decision to release these funds was inappropriate.”

The Palestinian Authority pays out an estimated $140 million a year to the families of suicide bombers and salaries to imprisoned terrorists, which is around 10% of their annual budget.