RUTHFULLY YOURS

Washington and Beijing appear to have stepped back from the brink of tech war, and a breakthrough in US-China relations now seems possible after four years of trade and military tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

Chinese official sources told journalists Tuesday that Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Xi Jinping’s foreign policy advisor Yang Jiechi might meet with their American counterparts in Anchorage, Alaska, to reopen high-level communications with the United States.

The proposed Anchorage meeting was first reported by the South China Morning Post. There was no formal confirmation, but neither was the report denied. Global Times editor Hu Xijin tweeted that he hoped the news was true.

The report of a prospective reset of Sino-American relations follows a week of worry over a possible tech war between the United States and China, after Microsoft accused Chinese hackers with ties to the government of infiltrating tens of thousands of US email servers.

The hacker group dubbed “Hafnium” by Microsoft is “assessed to be state-sponsored and operating out of China, based on observed victimology, tactics and procedures,” the software giant wrote in a blog post. The US National Security Council formed a task force under Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger to counter the threat.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17150/biden-taliban-afghanistan

There is at least one issue on which Biden would be wise to adopt the anti-Trump posture: Afghanistan.

Today, Biden could ditch Trump’s cut-and-run plan and re-commit the US to helping Afghans protect what they have achieved and move on to build more. By doing so, Biden would burnish his anti-Trump credentials and also please Obama nostalgics.

This week, Khalilzad offered the chasing wolves a much bigger morsel: a plan for a coalition government in which the terrorist outfit would secure a leading place.

It is worth remembering that, until the 9/11 attacks, Khalilzad and Karzai were lobbyists for Taliban in Washington…. By early August 2001, those interested in the issue already knew that Karzai was to be the first Taliban ambassador to Washington.

[T]he US has invested heavily, in blood and treasure, in making Afghanistan what it is today, a chunk of the world freed from one of the darkest forces mankind has seen for centuries.

Finally, it is clear to anyone familiar with Afghan realities that a scheme that may have worked 20 years ago has no chance of succeeding now. The Doha “peace deal” would be nothing more than a prelude to a new tragedy.

For the Taliban to enter government in Kabul they should give up their arms, accept the Afghan constitution, take part in elections and let the world see how much support they have.

President Joe Biden’s first foreign policy moves so far make at least one thing clear: he is looking for areas where he can distance himself from his predecessor without committing to dramatically different courses.

He has promised to return to the Paris climate accord that, requiring congressional approval, doesn’t imply doing anything in particular.

He has flattered European allies by talking about multilateralism, forgetting that even the most multilateral arrangement still needs leadership and a program, something he tries to avoid for fear of being accused of Trumpian arrogance.

https://spectator.us/topic/iran-already-beaten-biden-syria-strike/

The Biden administration is trying to set some rules in its negotiations about negotiations with Iran. But the first rule of the Middle East is that there are no rules. There are only balances of force and fear. And this is why Iran will defeat the US in Syria just as it has already defeated the US in Iraq.

Like a tourist in a foreign restaurant, the administration knows just enough of the local lingo to order the wrong thing. After years in the region, American strategists have absorbed the crude calculus of force: to be taken seriously, they reason, we have to respond to the rocket attack on an airbase in northern Iraq earlier this month, which killed a military contractor and wounded a US serviceman.

The US has also absorbed the calculus of fear. Much as America’s politicians and generals pretend otherwise, the US was defeated in Iraq years ago. The winner was Iran and its Shia allies.

Why didn’t the US retaliate for an attack on Americans in Iraq by hitting Iran’s proxies in Iraq? Because of fear. The US is afraid of further attacks on its remaining forces in Iraq. It’s afraid of losing what little influence it still has over the Iraqi government. And it’s afraid of returning Iraq to civil war.

The US is right to fear and avoid all these outcomes. The US would be even righter if it avoided Iraq entirely, instead of leaving 2,500 servicemen there as sitting ducks. But a tough guy like Joe Biden isn’t going to tell the American people that the US has been thoroughly defeated in Iraq by Iranian IEDs, Sunni self-detonators and its own imperial vanity.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/02/america-is-back-unfortunately/

Bragging about his restoration of the pre-Trump neoliberal foreign policy, Joe Biden proudly declared “America is back.” What this means in practice is that barely a month into Biden’s term, America is back to bombing Syria for alleged provocations by Iranian-backed militias. 

While ordinary Americans on both the Left and Right are wary of dreams of empire and want to focus instead on pressing domestic challenges, Biden’s paeans to America’s pre-Trump foreign policy—including its disastrous run in the Middle East—suggest someone unwilling and unable to learn from events. 

A Dubious Return to Regime Change in Syria

For example, this recent attack supposedly was a response to an Iranian-backed militia, but this prompts the question: Why are our troops still in Syria and Iraq? On what authority and for what purpose does this mission continue? Biden’s recent approval of a limited bombing did almost nothing to justify the decision to the American people, nor did he attempt to justify the continued presence of U.S. troops in a danger zone. Instead, the White House sent a pro forma statement to Congress, and that’s about it. 

The United States has been involved in Syria since 2011. First, we set out under Barack Obama to remove Bashar al-Assad by arming the so-called Free Syrian Army. Then, having armed the anti-Assad rebels, many of them became unmanageable and joined ISIS, wreaking havoc in Syria, in Europe, and here at home. President Trump then proceeded to devise policies to destroy ISIS, which the military largely achieved.

But now what? Does Biden still mean to remove Assad? And, if so, why are we so sure that what comes next won’t resemble ISIS? 

Trump faced a lot of criticism for ordering our troops out of Syria after the ISIS mission was complete. He was then persuaded into keeping some forces there—ostensibly to guard both critical oil resources and our Kurdish allies. Key government officials, including his Syrian envoy, lied to him about the numbers and status of American forces. 

https://www.theepochtimes.com/crocodile-tears-for-khashoggi-betray-info-op-to-promote-his-fellow-islamists_3717242.html

With the Biden administration releasing an intelligence assessment claiming de facto Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) approved the grisly 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the political-media class is once again shedding crocodile tears over his death. Its purpose is more than performative. It is signaling the dawn of the rebooted Obama-Biden administration project to Make the Middle East Great for Islamists Again, aided by the Iran Deal–Muslim Brotherhood echo chamber that is reassembling in real-time to amplify such stories.

We know the outrage over Khashoggi’s murder, which the Biden administration has re-stoked, is disingenuous on account of two things: First, the political-media class has always been at pains to lionize Khashoggi as a highly sympathetic, muckraking, dissident journalist, while airbrushing out the more unsavory details of his life. Such details include his Muslim Brotherhood support and mourning of Osama bin Laden’s death, apparent anti-Semitism, the backing of his Saudi-critical work by rival Qatar, and past service as a Saudi government mouthpiece. Second, the political-media class has, by contrast, ignored the fates of the scores of journalists who fit the idealized Khashoggi profile, from China, to Turkey, to Iran.

To mention these omissions of Khashoggi’s views and associations is not to diminish his murder. But it is to call into question the circumstances surrounding it, which matter if there are to be consequences for our national security and foreign policy—as our political-media class has long demanded.

The facts suggest that contra the Official Narrative of Khashoggi as a freedom-fighting regime critic-in-exile, it might be more accurate to describe him as an Islamist political operative who was participating in a high-stakes geopolitical game involving dangerous players—among them competing factions of the House of Saud, Qatar, and Turkey.

 https://www.newsweek.com/this-hand-that-hand-biden-administration-iran-opinion

The media is full of news about American airstrikes on Iranian-supported militias in Syria. Yes—it is a big deal and an appropriate measure—but if that’s the left hand of the Biden administration, watch out for the right. This is becoming a theme.

In early January, though little remarked upon in the Western press, Iran seized the South Korean oil tanker MT Hankuk Chemi in international waters in the Persian Gulf. Coincidentally (Tehran says), Iran demanded the release of funds frozen by the South Korean government under the U.S.-led sanctions regime. Most of the crew was released in February, but the ship and its captain remain in Iranian waters. South Korea has now agreed to release $1 billion out of an estimated $7–9 billion held by Seoul. According to a Korean Foreign Ministry source, “The actual unfreezing of the assets will be carried out through consultations with related countries, including the United States.”

South Korea, an American ally, wanted its ship and captain back while not breaking sanctions. It appears that the Biden administration offered Seoul a bit of a sleight of hand, suggesting that some of the funds either go directly to pay Iran’s dues in arrears to the UN or go toward humanitarian activity controlled by outside organizations. The Iranian government says Tehran will determine where the money is spent.

If the money ends up in Iranian banks, you will know how that negotiation went.