RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-trump-breaking-with-israel/

Is Donald Trump really preparing to recognize a Palestinian state? The news hit like a thunderbolt on Saturday, amid an avalanche of stories claiming that Trump is angry with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is changing course from his previous wholehearted support of Israel’s defense against Hamas and the other jihadist entities that are determined to destroy it. As is so often the case in such matters, however, there was decidedly less to the story than there initially appeared to be.

The Jerusalem Post picked up the story Saturday from the American news agency The Media Line. The distancing from the claim began in the headline: “Gulf diplomatic source claims Trump will announce US recognition of Palestinian state.” As the story unfolded, the claim became even more tenuous.

The assertion that Trump would recognize a Palestinian state at the upcoming Gulf-US summit was attributed to “a Gulf diplomatic source, who declined to be named or disclose his position.” This anonymous individual claimed that “President Donald Trump will issue a declaration regarding the State of Palestine and American recognition of it, and that there will be the establishment of a Palestinian state without the presence of Hamas.”

Just three paragraphs later, however, The Media Line quoted a person who didn’t decline to be named, denying the whole thing: “Ahmed Al-Ibrahim, a former Gulf diplomat, told The Media Line, ‘I don’t expect it to be about Palestine. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and King Abdullah II of Jordan have not been invited. They are the two countries closest to Palestine, and it would be important for them to be present at any event like this.’”

So what we end up with is one anonymous source indulging in speculation about what Trump will do at the Gulf summit, and someone else denying that speculation. The pro-Israel activist known on X as Brian of London said of the story that it was “Completly [sic] irresponsible for @Jerusalem_Post to run it and especially with that headline. The internet will go crazy over this s**t quote to a 5th tier news wire which is even contradicted by a NAMED source a few paragraphs down.” And indeed, online Israel-haters immediately began celebrating.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21607/iran-lies-nuclear-weapons

Any deal that permits Iran to keep centrifuges spinning, continue uranium enrichment, or store nuclear material is a deal that guarantees a future nuclear-armed Iran. We cannot afford a disastrous “JCPOA, the Sequel.”

Now, after President Trump’s return, the world is watching to see whether the United States really has the backbone to compel Iran completely to dismantle its nuclear weapons infrastructure – or actually to deliver the alternative.

The Iranian regime is not to be trusted. Its so-called “civilian” nuclear program is a Trojan horse, a fraud designed to keep the West paralyzed. There have to be no more talks, no more half-measures, no more inspectors playing cat and mouse with a regime that lies to their faces with impunity. The only acceptable outcome is either full dismantlement — no centrifuges and enriched uranium for “civilian use”, no secret sites — or unfortunately, the less pretty “Plan B,” if Trump and his administration are to have any credibility.

For more than two decades, the Iranian regime has played a dangerous and calculated game of deception with the West by skillfully masking its nuclear ambitions under the pretense of “civilian use.” This is not a new tactic — it’s a time-tested playbook used by rogue regimes to buy time, mislead international watchdogs, and continue marching in the shadows toward nuclear weapons and the missiles to them.

Tehran has manipulated global diplomacy by leveraging Western naivety and its obsession with appeasement and the search for “peace” to keep all the core elements of its nuclear program intact.

While negotiations and deals were struck in the name of “peace,” Iran preserved and advanced the infrastructure necessary to build nuclear bombs. Preserving its nuclear programs by proliferating secret sites under the deceitful banner of civilian energy has allowed the regime to reap the benefits of economic deals while continuing to lie and manipulate.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/09/what-president-trump-needs-in-his-next-national-security-adviser/

President Trump’s decision to remove Michael Waltz as his National Security Adviser (NSA) came as no surprise to Trump administration watchers who knew a change was coming. The president’s decision to nominate Waltz as UN ambassador was a classy way of taking care of a loyal supporter and decorated Army veteran who didn’t work out in a critical administration post.

Waltz’s ouster reflects how Trump runs the presidency as a business: he will not hesitate to replace officials who are not performing to his satisfaction or have lost his confidence. I expect Trump to be ruthless in managing top staff in his second term, as he has little time to enact an extremely ambitious agenda to take back our country.

By contrast, Joe Biden did not fire or replace any senior official in his four years as president. Notably, Biden failed to fire anyone after the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history.

Trump added the acting NSA job to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s portfolio. This is reportedly a temporary arrangement that could last six months.

The decision to dual-hat Rubio in these top national security posts was a sign of Trump’s confidence and trust in the former Florida senator. (Rubio is actually “quad-hatted”—he also serves as acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration.) However, as much as I respect Rubio and his capabilities, this is not an ideal situation due to the pressing responsibilities the Secretary of State must perform as America’s chief diplomat and the duties of the National Security Advisor, who serves as the top national security aide to the president and must be available to him 24/7.

Based on my experience as the National Security Council Chief of Staff and discussions with people inside and outside the Trump administration, I have come up with the following recommendations on what the president should look for in his next NSA. (I have a few more suggestions that I will pass to the president’s team privately.)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21587/trump-nuclear-iran

If Iran can enrich a little uranium, it can at any time enrich a lot.

Iran’s latest diktat to the United States openly states that the regime has no interest in compromise, no intention of abandoning its nuclear weapons program, and no fear of impotent threats from a US president.

The Iranian regime at least deserves credit for honesty. The mullahs want to preserve its uranium enrichment program: it gives the regime a loaded gun pointed at the world.

This cat-and-mouse game has been Iran’s playbook for nearly 20 years. The regime pretends to comply with some dismissible Westerner, dial back enrichment slightly to satisfy desperate Western politicians who want to score short-term diplomatic victories, and in return, they extract billions of dollars in sanctions relief, economic benefits and especially political legitimacy.

One thing is certain: the minute it is clear that Iran has acquired nuclear weapons, every country in the Middle East, except for Israel, will submit to it rather than risk being bombed.

Mr. President, you have a choice. You can leave behind a legacy as the great, historic global leader who had the courage to save the entire free world from the Iranian nuclear threat. Or you can seek a meaningless political victory by signing a deal that will just paper over the crisis for twenty minutes. If you negotiate a weak agreement, history will remember you not as a success, but as a gigantic “loser” – and regard you with the same derision as Chamberlain. Chamberlain never got a Nobel Peace Prize and neither will you. But if you save the world from a nuclear Iran, you will go down in history as a second Winston Churchill.

Continuing to negotiate with an Iran that has bluntly stated that it will never give up its claimed “right to enrich uranium” is not diplomacy, it is surrender. Any agreement that allows even limited enrichment is a betrayal of everything the West stands for. We must not walk down that path again.

Mr. President, act now, decisively, and ensure that Iran’s nuclear ambitions are buried forever — and most of all that your legacy as the greatest leader of the 21st Century is enshrined forever.

Iran’s true intentions could not have been made any clearer: Last week, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi flatly declared the issue of uranium enrichment is “non-negotiable.”

Iran has called President Donald J. Trump’s bluff about bombing the country if the regime does not voluntarily dismantle its uranium enrichment centrifuges, ballistic missiles and the rest of its nuclear program. Trump immediately folded. Now the president seems to be backing down and trying to dodge: “I think we can make a deal without the attack.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/02/president-trump-must-reverse-john-kerrys-worst-concession-to-iran/

On May 8, 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from what he called “the worst deal ever”—the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, known as the JCPOA.

For many reasons, President Trump was exactly right. The most crucial reason was an unforgivable concession made to Iran by then-Senator John Kerry in 2011: conceding to Iran the “right” to enrich uranium.

The JCPOA was a bad deal for several reasons, including provisions that allowed Iran to do nuclear weapons-related work while the agreement was in effect, a weak inspection regime that Iran cheated on, and secret side deals that helped Iran evade IAEA inspections. The agreement also wasn’t permanent—it had “sunset provisions” that limited its duration.

In addition, the JCPOA gave Iran $150 billion in sanctions relief. This included $1.7 billion in “pallets of cash” that the U.S. secretly flew to Iran in small planes as ransom to release five innocent Americans being held hostage in Iranian prisons.

But the worst U.S. concession in the JCPOA was the Obama administration’s decision to concede to Iran the “right” to enrich uranium.

Uranium enrichment is the process of concentrating the rare uranium isotope uranium-235 (U-235) so it can be used for either nuclear reactor fuel (3 to 5% U-235) or nuclear weapons fuel (90% U-235).

Prior to the Obama administration, Republican and Democratic administrations were concerned that the spread of uranium enrichment would lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons because it is very easy for a nation to use uranium enrichment centrifuges initially constructed for peaceful purposes to produce nuclear bomb fuel.

The U.S. was also especially opposed before 2009 to letting Iran enrich uranium because of clear and convincing evidence it had engaged in a broad, covert program to produce nuclear weapons that violated Tehran’s treaty obligations.

John Kerry believed differently. As a senator, he argued in 2009 that he agreed with Iranian officials that because Iran had the right to peaceful nuclear technology under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, it had a right to enrich uranium. While he was still in the Senate in 2011, Kerry informed Iran (through Oman) on behalf of the Obama administration that the United States would acknowledge Iran’s right to enrich uranium at the start of new nuclear talks.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21583/iran-nuclear-stupid-intelligence

Trump argued that the JCPOA failed to address key issues such as Iran’s continued research into producing weapons-grade nuclear material, development of ballistic missiles and Tehran’s support for Islamist terror groups in the Middle East. Is he repeating their mistake?

Reports emerging from the Omani-mediated talks suggest that, rather than seeking the complete dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear programme, Trump is instead prepared to settle for a less demanding settlement, one that allows Tehran to continue with its nuclear activities so long as they are not linked to producing nuclear warheads. At this point, that is folly. If Iran is able to enrich any uranium at all, it can easily enrich it to a weapons-grade level of 90 percent within weeks.

Yet, despite compelling evidence that Iran has continued work on its clandestine programme to produce nuclear weapons, American intelligence chiefs such as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard continue to insist that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that Iran is actively attempting to build nuclear weapons.

This has led to calls for the administration to undertake an immediate reappraisal of Washington’s intelligence assessment regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons as a devastating matter of urgency, and for the Trump administration to undertake an urgent reappraisal of Gabbard.

Sadly, the Norwegian Nobel Committee will most likely never reward Trump with the Nobel Peace Prize, no matter how much peace he delivers. To them, a worthy recipient was Yasser Arafat, among other leaders now known more for their failures than for success.

Trump instead would do well to focus on becoming the greatest leader of the 21st Century, another Churchill, by ridding the world of Iran’s nuclear weapons threat for once and all, as well as its ballistic missile program and its ability, through its proxies, to keep exporting terrorism.

With the Trump administration seemingly intent on negotiating a new nuclear deal with Iran, it is vital that the White House first makes a realistic assessment of the current state of Iran’s nuclear programme, which most Western intelligence experts believe is aimed at producing nuclear weapons.

After US and Iranian officials met for a third round of talks in the Gulf state of Oman at the weekend, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi openly said that Iran remained extremely cautious about the success of the negotiations to resolve a decades-long standoff.

http://bit.ly/4jr2N1G

It has been maintained that Iran’s Ayatollah regime is Israel’s problem, does not pose a serious threat to the US and global stability, and is manageable via negotiation. However, this assumption is repudiated by the march of facts.

1. Irrespective of Israel, Iran’s Ayatollah regime is driven by a 1,400-year-old fanatical vision, that is underscored by Iran’s school curriculum, mosque sermons, official media and sustained policy. This fanatical vision mandates the toppling of all pro-US Sunni Arab regimes and bringing the “infidel” West to submission, primarily “The Great American Satan.” Since the February 1979 toppling of Iran’s Shah, the Ayatollah regime has emerged as the leading global epicenter of anti-US wars, terrorism, drug trafficking and the proliferation of advanced military systems. It considers Israel as “The Little Satan” – the vanguard of the US in the Middle East and its first line of defense.  Moreover, the Ayatollah regime has expanded its anti-US rogue operations beyond the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, into Africa and Latin America, which is the soft underbelly of the US. For example, since the early 1980s, Iran has established terrorist training camps and ballistic missiles testing grounds in Latin America, solidifying strategic cooperation with drug cartels in Mexico, Columbia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, as well as with all anti-US Latin American governments, while proliferating terrorist sleeper cells on US soil (according to the FBI).  

2. It is suggested that the Ayatollah regime is willing to talk, and therefore, supposedly, it is incumbent upon the US to expedite negotiations, attempting to clear up misconceptions. Supposedly, negotiation reduces the prospects of – and is preferable to – war.

However, as appealing as is the Iranian talk, the policy toward Iran must be based on the Iranian walk, which has been antithetical to its talk. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-most-remarkable-thing-about-the-trump-zelensky-sit-down-at-the-popes-funeral/

In their first tête-à-tête since the fireworks in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sat down for a remarkable fifteen-minute meeting at the Vatican Saturday, where both heads of state were attending the funeral of Pope Francis. The Saturday meeting was striking for several reasons, not least because it was just Trump and Zelensky talking things out alone. No aides or translators were present, and while photographers some terrific photos of the two leaders in intense discussion, reporters were not buzzing around performing their usual act of asking questions designed to show the world what an awful person Donald Trump is.

The privateness of the Trump-Zelensky confab is what makes it most remarkable. We just had four years of a president who not only couldn’t make the most insignificant of moves without a cheat sheet telling exactly what to do and when and how to do it. Now even Old Joe Biden’s top aides are admitting that the senescent corruptocrat simply wasn’t there, and that his dementia had advanced to the point that Old Joe knew nothing whatsoever about the policies his autopen was signing into law. What he appeared to know about the war in Ukraine, and everything else, was just an illusion created by his reading words off a teleprompter with reasonable competency.

Even before the misrule of Old Joe’s autopen, we have gotten used to seeing presidents surrounded by clouds of aides, and clearly those aides often did the real spadework in international diplomacy and other areas. Trump, however, is in this, as in so many ways, a sharp departure from what has become the norm for the chief executive. He is entirely capable of handling the negotiations with Zelensky (and others) without any input from aides, and even without their presence.

And on Saturday, amid all the pomp and bustle of the papal funeral, he did. White House communications director Steven Cheung later issued a terse announcement: “President Trump and President Zelenskyy met privately today and had a very productive discussion.”