RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/biden-administration-determined-undo-trumps-most-hugh-fitzgerald/

The Biden Administration is determined to undo the most important achievement of the Trump administration, that is, its support for Israel’s rights under the Palestine Mandate and U.N. Resolution 242, and for the Abraham Accords, and its refusal to any longer tolerate the PPalestinian Authority’s Pay-For-Slay Program, or the antisemitism in its schoolbooks. “Internal Biden memo said to back 2-state solution along 1967 lines,” by Jacob Magid, Times of Israel, March 17, 2021:

…The US paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the PA’s creditors, such as the Israeli state utility companies from which the Palestinians purchase water and electricity. They paid for training for the PA’s security forces and numerous infrastructure projects.

What did the U.S. get for its hundreds of millions of dollars in annual aid to the PA? Did the PA agree to negotiate with Israel? No, it hasn’t done so for years. Did it cease its support for terrorism? Not at all. The PA continues to spend about $350 million each year for its “Pay-For-Slay” program. The Taylor Force Act prohibits any American aid from going to the PA as long as it continues to support the Pay-For-Slay program. How does the Biden Administration plan, in its insensate desire to again shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to the PA, to get around the Taylor Force Act?

Washington also gave hundreds of millions a year in funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency — known as UNRWA — which is in charge of administering the daily needs of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants across the Middle East.

The memo, which was passed along to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, highlights UNRWA in particular as one of the organizations the Biden administration plans to back in order to aid the Palestinians….

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/china-contempt-usglobal-hegemony-victor-davis-hanson

Two weeks ago in Anchorage, Alaska, Chinese diplomats dressed down Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Both seem stunned by the broadsides.  

Not since newly elected President John Kennedy was humiliated at the Vienna summit in June 1961 by USSR strongman Nikita Khrushchev have American diplomats been so roughly manhandled by a Communist government.   

China’s defiant provocations are not just verbal. Nor are they aimed only at our high officials. 

New York University students at a satellite campus in Shanghai were manhandled and jailed by Chinese authorities in two separate incidents earlier this month. Some U.S. diplomats in China were recently subjected to anal swab testing for COVID-19 – supposedly “in error.” 

These examples of humiliation and harassment could be multiplied. China has engaged in the insidious and systematic theft of U.S. patents and copyrights. It brazenly violates trade agreements, manipulates its currency, dumps products below cost on world markets, engages in cyberwarfare, expropriates Western technology, and stonewalls accurate information on the origins of COVID-19.  

If China gives out money, it believes it owns the recipient. In the last five years, New York University has received some $47 million in gifts from China. The U.S. Department of Education recently cited Stanford University for failing to report more than $64 million in donations from Chinese sources since 2010. It’s no surprise that China recently sent a visiting researcher to Stanford who turned out to be connected with the Chinese military.  

Hollywood claims that it is woke. But a recent study revealed that some directors had selected lighter-skinned actors, bowing to the preferences of Chinese movie-goers and the lucrative Chinese film market, slated to become the world’s largest in 2021.  

https://spectator.org/biden-israel-middle-east-obama/

In an article in Tablet in early March, Lee Smith showed how Barack Obama’s degrading of America’s alliance with Israel and his wooing of Iran were motivated essentially by a plan to transform the Democrat Party. To that end, foreign policy was subordinated. The party of Truman, the three Kennedy brothers, and Skip Jackson had consistently moved American policy towards a strong alliance with Israel out of a basic sympathy with its cause and with that of the Jewish people still suffering persecution around the world (think of Jackson’s powerful support of the cause of Soviet Jewry).

Truman’s choice to recognize immediately the newborn state of Israel was a decision that came from his deepest sense of right. He overrode not only his State Department functionaries, whom he dismissed as the “striped-pants boys,” but also the man he respected above all others in government — George Marshall.

Marshall was the architect of victory in World War II and the visionary savior of the freedom of western Europe after the war. His opposition to Jewish statehood was his anticipation that the fledgling Jewish state would not stand a chance against the combined forces of all the Arab states united against them. He foresaw the bloodbath and desolation that so many in the Arab world boasted would happen and did not want to see the Holocaust continued. He staked his career on this, for the best of reasons, saying to not follow his advice would lead to his resignation. Indeed it did, though Marshall waited to leave so as not to embarrass his boss or discredit the government of the country he served so well and so selflessly.

What was true for Truman became mainstream when, gradually, the magnitude of the evil of anti-Semitism was revealed in its utter horror as the Holocaust sank into civilization’s consciousness. It was not a question of left or right, but of basic moral sobriety and plain human decency, that the kind of ideology and government that thrives on such hatred must be opposed, whether it is Hitlerism, Stalinism, or Khomeinism.

This was firmly established in the power structure of the Democrat Party, where so many Jews felt at home. And, Smith points out, this is what Obama came to transform radically.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/545215-us-must-prepare-for-cold-war-with-china

The United States and China show growing signs of entering a long-term cold war, strikingly similar to the U.S.-Soviet cold war of decades past and demanding the same dogged determination that Washington displayed during that earlier conflict to protect its interests and defend its allies.

Like the U.S.-Soviet conflict, the Sino-American one is rooted in competition between alternative political and economic systems — one free and democratic, the other unfree and authoritarian — for influence around the world, with enormous implications for the well-being of billions of people.

Also like the U.S.-Soviet conflict, Washington will need a comprehensive strategy to “contain” Beijing’s expansionist impulses. While (hopefully) avoiding a military confrontation with Beijing, Washington will need to maintain an unchallenged military capacity to protect its presence in Asia and other regions as China seeks to dislodge or overshadow it, and to use public diplomacy effectively as the two nations compete for the loyalty of grassroots populations around the world.

The signs of long-term U.S.-Sino conflict are unmistakable, and similarities to the cold war of yesteryear are uncanny.

During the cold war, Soviet leaders boldly predicted an inevitable victory, as the United States presided over what they considered a decaying capitalist structure. Speaking to the United Nations in late 1960, for instance, Nikita Khrushchev mused that “socialism is replacing capitalism” across the developing world.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/the-ccp-is-a-threat-why-wont-the-president-call-it-one/

What recent speeches by Biden and Blinken say about the administration’s wrongheaded emphasis on cooperation with China.

Top Biden administration officials have largely kept their promises to vigorously compete with China. Building on the Trump administration’s China policies, they’ve pressed Beijing on its horrific human-rights abuses, bolstered U.S. support for Taiwan using the previous administration’s framework, and built out the Quad of Pacific democracies. In addition to that, the Biden team’s own focus on multilateral action has started to yield some results: This week, they announced sanctions on Chinese officials, coordinated with the U.K, the EU, and Canada, to punish CCP officials for their role in the Uyghur genocide.

But this flurry of activity has been joined, puzzlingly, with a deliberate effort to leave room for meetings such as last week’s rancorous U.S.-China summit in Alaska and President Biden’s decision to invite the CCP’s general secretary to a global climate summit.

To hear Biden appraise the challenge posed by the CCP is to listen to a meandering description of his recent phone conversation with its general secretary Xi Jinping, as he did yesterday. “I made it clear to him again what I’ve told him in person on several occasions: that we’re not looking for confrontation, although we know there will be steep, steep competition.”

No one wants a military conflict, but if calling out an authoritarian regime’s human-rights abuses and international bullying is anything, it is confrontation. In other words, the policies and statements of the president’s own administration belie a need to call the situation what it is, and not a sugarcoated version of the truth.

The problem is not that officials have backed down from speaking out on the CCP’s transgressions. On a trip to Tokyo earlier this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Beijing of using “coercion and aggression to systematically erode autonomy in Hong Kong, undercut democracy in Taiwan, abuse human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet, and assert maritime claims in the South China Sea” in violation of international law. If that doesn’t put a fine enough point on matters, Blinken has accused the Party of genocide in Xinjiang and referred to Taiwan as a “country” (a notable use of the term for a top U.S. official) as the mainland continues its airborne harassment of the world’s only Chinese democracy. Blinken and Biden both have defined this contest as a fundamental battle between democracy and authoritarianism in the 21st century.

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/mocking-by-us-adversaries-shows-biden?token

‘America is back’ insofar as we’re reverting to the Obama-era policy of appeasing our enemies, confronting our friends, and putting globalism rather than America first.

America’s worst adversaries are mocking, trolling and rebuffing the Joe Biden administration.

In so doing, they would seem to be delivering a clear message: They neither fear nor respect America under President Joe Biden’s leadership.

Consider what has transpired over just the last week, barely two months into Biden’s tenure.

During the first day of a highly anticipated meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, with the world watching, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) brass responded to criticism of China’s human rights violations from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan by shoving anti-American agitprop back into the faces of the senior representatives of a Biden administration that has already embraced a similar “1619 Project”-style narrative about America’s purported enduring evils.

“On human rights, we hope that the United States will do better,” tsk-tsked top CCP diplomat Yang Jiechi. He added: “The challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated” and “they did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter.”

CCP officials similarly spewed invective in a bid to portray not China, but America, as a bullying and coercive hegemon-wannabe, seeking to impose its values on others.

On the eve of the meeting, Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai needled with the question, “Will the U.S. be a responsible stakeholder in global affairs?”—an allusion to the query leaders of the U.S. foreign policy establishment had been asking of China since at least 2005.

Nearly contemporaneous with the Anchorage debacle, and after being called a “killer” by President Joe Biden, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded that “it takes one to know one” and, without a hint of subtlety, challenged the president to a debate. Putin added, “I wish you [President Biden] health. I say that without any irony or joke.” The subtext was clear: Putin was questioning Biden’s mental acuity and fitness.