RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18331/us-reestablish-deterrence

The complacency with which the Biden administration has come to view military threats, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as a thing of the past has led to a misguided prioritization of issues such as climate change as the biggest threat facing the US. This misguided focus has come at the expense of a realistic definition of what the US’s vital national interests are and should be in the face of actual national security threats.

Over the past two decades, US leadership has waned, especially as it has retreated from the Middle East and Europe — where its military presence has been reduced from 400,000 troops in the 1950s to just around 60,000 troops today. US credibility has been compromised, as its reputation for adhering to US commitments — failing to prevent the crossing of red lines in Syria and the Afghanistan debacle, to mention just two examples — has been wrecked.

Rebuilding deterrence will require a massive political and military recommitment to vital national interests. Those will require a policy reorientation that acknowledges that the US is the primary Western force in a world with global military threats from a variety of bad actors — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea primary among them.

“How many times do you have to make this point that if you don’t have more resources, you get political leadership that makes the case to the American people that we face threats on multiple fronts and if we want to defend our way of life as we know it and our interests around the world, protect our allies, not as acts of charity but because it benefits us, then you do it. And if you can’t do it, you can’t be a world power anymore…” — Former National Security Advisor, Ambassador John R. Bolton, Ronald Reagan Institute, February 24, 2022.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has proven, sadly, that US deterrence lies in tatters.

While Russia’s invasion represents an absolute low point thus far, US deterrence has been eroding for years. The cause is failed policies and ill-defined national interests, which bad actors such as Russia, China and Iran have clearly been noting.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/joe_bidens_crashandburn_foreign_policy_exposed.html

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the Hudson Institute’s Walter Russell Mead pronounces the Biden administration’s great power diplomacy an unmitigated failure.  Mead’s criticism cannot be dismissed as a partisan attack — he is a member in good standing of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.  Mead is also steeped in history and geopolitics — two subjects that appear to have eluded the stalwarts of President Biden’s foreign policy team.

“Most … of the ideas Team Biden brought to the White House,” Mead writes, “failed to work,” and most of the changes that U.S. foreign policy will require today and in the immediate future “will be toxic to much of the Democratic base.”  And while Mead suggests that Team Biden was right about NATO and “democratic values” as necessary elements of U.S. foreign policy, he understands that providing peace and stability in the world requires paying more attention to hard-headed and emotionally unsatisfying geopolitics.

And it is here — on the playing field of geopolitics — where Mead rightly claims that Biden’s approach to great power politics has “comprehensively failed.”

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/17/bidens-nuclear-deal-with-iran-is-set-to-be-even-more-disastrous-than-obamas/

Russia’s demand for a sanctions exemption is the only thing stopping the new, deeply flawed nuclear deal from going forward.

Under the Biden administration, the “worst deal ever” is getting even worse. When President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), he rightfully called it “the worst deal ever” because of its many serious flaws. But now, the Biden administration is close to announcing a new agreement to reinstate the JCPOA that is not only weaker but puts Russia in charge.

Making this worse, Russia is trying to exploit its prominent role in the new agreement by demanding that Russian trade with Iran — much of it weapons-related — be exempted from tough global sanctions imposed on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Monday claimed the Biden administration conceded on this issue.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/03/16/china_wins_a_little_loses_a_lot_from_russias_war_on_ukraine_147339.html

The unfolding mayhem unleashed on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin carries one major benefit for China and two much larger losses, plus a boatload of secondary effects. The main benefit is geostrategic: The United States must now keep more scarce military resources in Europe, instead diverting them to the Pacific, as it had been hoping.

That diversion would be costly for any president, but it is particularly costly for a Democrat, whose party habitually scales back military budgets to spend more on social programs. Biden’s budget, submitted before the war in Eastern Europe, certainly did. He proposed a 16% rise in social spending but only a 2% increase for defense, far less than the inflation rate. Those priorities are now imperiled.

Also endangered is any reorientation of America’s defense posture, to focus almost exclusively on China. That focus, shared by Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden, remains the country’s principal long-term challenge. But Putin’s aggression makes clear that the United States does not have the luxury of focusing on only one hostile (and nuclear-armed) power at a time. Russia’s war on Ukraine significantly raises the threat level in Europe and forces the Pentagon to avoid any drawdown there to fund increases in Asia. That’s true even though many of our NATO partners have finally agreed to spend 2% of their GDP on defense – a long-standing American demand. This renewed concern for Europe’s security is a potential gain for China.

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

War cannot happen in a vacuum. The tentacles of the hideous Russian invasion of Ukraine are reaching outward to involve not only the two parties in the conflict, but other countries and other policies.

Let’s start with the revived Iran nuclear deal meetings that have convened in Vienna. The U.S. administration has made no secret of the fact that it covets a deal and has been willing to provide benefits to Iran up front, including waiving sanctions on Iran’s “civilian” nuclear program. But Russia has been a major player in the negotiations; until now, Washington and Moscow had been coordinating their positions. As a historical competitor of Iran’s, Russia was not particularly interested in having Tehran produce nuclear weapons, so it was willing to push for certain U.S. points.

https://www.nysun.com/article/biden-resuming-role-of-dishonest-broker-in-middle-east?utm_content=The%20Evening%20Sun

The press is awash with negative comments about Israel’s policy on Ukraine. A rift is brewing between Washington and Jerusalem over the upcoming Iran nuclear deal. America’s ambassador in Jerusalem sharply attacks Israel’s policies. Is President Biden resuming a familiar role — that of a dishonest broker for Mideast peace?

It’s starting to look that way. This all stems from the prospect that American supporters of Israel are apt to become a political liability for Mr. Biden when he makes his concessions to Iran as part of a deal to renew the 2015 nuclear accord. The administration is beginning to distance itself from the Israeli government. 

Since the Vienna talks to renew the 2015 Iran deal resumed in the fall, Tehran has insisted that its terrorist arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, be removed from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. As diplomats close in on an agreement, America is reportedly prepared to make that concession. 

“Iran poses a threat to our allies, to our partners, in some cases to the United States,” the State Department spokesman, Ned Price, acknowledged Wednesday. Yet “the most urgent challenge we would face is a nuclear-armed Iran,” which, he suggests, is the reason diplomats prompted the deal in the first place.

Iranian missiles last week targeted an area near the American consulate at Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan. Rather than walk away from the Vienna talks, Washington officials leaked secondhand rumors that the Iranians hit an Israeli Mossad target. What in the world justifies that kind of blame-shifting?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18333/iran-bad-deal

Having conspicuously failed in its efforts to prevent Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration looks set to add to its global reputation for weakness by agreeing yet another flawed nuclear deal with Iran.

Russia has been fully involved in the latest talks to revive the deal, as the negotiator for the US. Western negotiators have claimed that Moscow was effectively supporting Iran to withstand pressure from the US to make concessions.

Initially, Washington said it had no intention of offering Russia sanctions relief. But Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, speaking during a visit to Tehran this week, insisted that Moscow had received written guarantees from Washington that Western sanctions on Russia over Ukraine. The remark suggests Russia can continue trading with Iran in spite of US sanctions.

If true, the fact that Russia has assurances from Washington that sanctions will not affect its dealings with Iran is further evidence of the Biden administration’s desperation to reach a new agreement with Tehran….

[I]ntelligence experts believe Iran’s space programme [Iran just launched its second satellite into space] is being used to develop missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

“Iran’s nuclear programme has never before been this advanced, and is exposing the international community to unprecedented levels of risk.” — Corinne Kitsell, UK Permanent Representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, March 8, 2022.

The problem for Mr Biden is that, by failing to address the very real threat posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he will simply be presiding over a further erosion in America’s standing as a global power.

Having conspicuously failed in its efforts to prevent Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration looks set to add to its global reputation for weakness by agreeing yet another flawed nuclear deal with Iran.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/16/10-realities-of-ukraine/

One. Reassuring an enemy what one will not do ensures that the enemy will do just that and more. Unpredictability and occasional enigmatic silence bolster deterrence. But Joe Biden’s predictable reassurance to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he will show restraint means Putin likely will not. 

Two. No-fly zones don’t work in a big-power, symmetrical standoff. In a cost-benefit analysis, they are not worth the risk of shooting down the planes of a nuclear power. They usually do little to stop planes outside of such zones shooting missiles into them. Sending long-range, high-altitude anti-aircraft batteries to Ukraine to deny Russian air superiority is a far better way of regaining air parity.

Three. Europe, NATO members, and Germany in particular have de facto admitted that their past decades of shutting down nuclear plants, coal mines, and oil and gas fields have left Europe at the mercy of Russia. They are promising to rearm and meet their promised military contributions. By their actions, they are admitting that their critics, the United States in particular, were right, and they were dangerously wrong in empowering Putin.

Four. China is now pro-Russian. Beijing wants Russian natural resources at a discount. Russia will pay for overpriced access to Chinese finance, commerce, and markets. Yet if Russia loses the Ukraine war, goes broke, and as an international pariah is ostracized, then China will likely cut the smelly Russian albatross from its neck—in fear of new Western financial, cultural, and commercial clout.

Five. Americans are finally digesting just how destructive the humiliating flight from Afghanistan was. The catastrophe signaled to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran that Western deterrence had died. 

No surprise that Russia sent missiles into a Ukrainian base near the Polish-NATO border. North Korea in January launched more missiles than in any month in its history. Iran sent missiles into Kurdistan. China daily announces it is just a matter of time until it absorbs Taiwan. The tens of billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry sent to Ukraine by the West are still far less than what the U.S. military handed over to the terrorist Taliban.

Six. The Ukraine war did not cause inflation and record gas prices. Both were already spiking by early February 2022.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18332/arabs-warning-biden

In a message directed at the Biden administration and the other Western powers involved in the Vienna negotiations, the Arab countries said that Iran and its terrorist militias are continuing to create chaos and instability, especially in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon.

The Arabs, including the Arab League, are telling the Biden administration that, in their view, it is not only Iran that threatens their security, but also its terrorist proxies, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

The Arabs are clearly worried about the financial and military aid that Iran is providing to the terrorist groups.

Any deal with Iran will further strengthen these groups and encourage them to step up their terrorist attacks.

The Arabs are also worried that when Iran obtains nuclear weapons, they will sooner or later find their way into the hands of its terrorist proxies and other terrorist groups, including Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda.

“This president [Biden] is deaf. He cannot be trusted.” – Ali Al-Sarraf, Iraqi political analyst, Al-Arab, March 12, 2022.

If the Biden administration and its friends reach a new deal with Iran’s mullahs, we are likely to see more Arabs come out against the US.

“We have made it very clear that if Iran acquires a nuclear capability we will do everything we can to do the same.” — Adel al-Jubeir, then Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs, to CNN, May 9, 2018.

The Arabs consider Iran a lethal threat to their national security and the stability of the entire Middle East and other parts of the world. If the Biden administration is going to align itself with the mullahs, it will lose the support of its Arab and Muslim allies, who feel bitterly betrayed and fear that nuclear weapons will end up in the hands of these very mullahs and their terrorist groups.

In what appears to be an eleventh hour and desperate warning to the Biden administration against striking a deal with the Iranian regime, four Arab countries have expressed deep concern over Iran’s ballistic missile program and ongoing support for terrorism.