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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16937/iran-nuclear-ambition

Even if the deal negotiated in 2015 by the Obama administration were worth the effort, it is impossible to imagine the Iranians willingly recommitting to enrichment levels they have long since blown past. No one believes in their professed “peaceful use” of nuclear energy. So why does a return to the deal make any sense?

The killing of top terror-funding IRGC official Qasem Soleimani by the US military and Iran’s relatively toothless retaliatory attack against two US bases in Iraq suggest that the regime fears what an escalation of tensions would mean to its own future more than it desires to stab at the “Great Satan.” The regime may finally be on the verge of collapse.

Those sanctions are the only leverage the U.S. really has against Iran, and they may finally succeed, much as the Reagan administration was able to do to the USSR in the 1980s. Now is not the time to reduce or remove them in exchange for paper promises born of a campaign slogan, from a regime whose movements suggest it fears its days are numbered.

Through covert operations, hidden diplomacy, an intense military buildup, and a series of actions designed to throw sand in the gears of the Soviet economy, American policy destroyed the USSR from its fingertips to its heart. Former Soviet leaders including Mikhail Gorbachev have admitted it with grudging admiration. The only ones who were wrong were those in the liberal foreign policy establishment who pretended it was all just a coincidence.

President-elect Joe Biden ran on a slogan to “restore the Iran nuclear deal.” For those voters desperate to undo every accomplishment of the Trump administration, which abandoned the deal and imposed sharp sanctions on Iran’s oil and financial sectors, it must have sounded attractive.

But now that Biden will be responsible for American security and not just criticizing Donald Trump, he would do well to slow down and consider alternatives.

https://www.newsweek.com/communist-china-preparing-eat-joe-bidens-lunch-opini

Communist China is betting on a return to the status quo ante of American acquiescence to, and support of, its hegemonic ambitions through comprehensive “engagement” and outright appeasement under a Biden administration.

That is the primary takeaway, if the recent remarks of Chinese State Councilor and Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi are any indication.

In the waning days of 2020, Wang delivered a speech at the Asia Society entitled, “Reorient and Steer Clear of Disruptions for a Smooth Sailing of China-U.S. Relations.” The title itself gives away the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) game: It seeks a reversion to the ostensibly pacific relations with the U.S. under which our ruling class aided, abetted and enabled its rise from trifling concern to our most formidable geopolitical adversary.

Wang would make this view even clearer in a subsequent interview published in CCP mouthpiece Xinhua, in which he said “China-U.S. relations have come to a new crossroads, and a new window of hope is opening.” As Xinhua summarized it, “The Chinese side hopes that the next U.S. administration will return to a sensible approach, resume dialogue with China, restore normalcy to the bilateral relations and restart cooperation.”

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Clearly, Beijing would only deliver such a message if it believed it had a willing partner. That partner would be Joe Biden, the vessel of America’s globalist ruling class who spent his career at the highest levels of government cheering on a vision much in line with China’s own.

What does China’s desired relationship look like?

https://asiatimes.com/2021/01/two-faced-us-trade-policy-erodes-atlantic-alliance/

EU’s new investment pact with China calls Trump’s bluff on a tech war that gives cover to US side deals with Chinese companies

The US is peeved about EU’s new investment pact with China.

European distrust of American motives was behind EU leaders’ signing last week of a Comprehensive Agreement on Investment with China over the urgent objections of the Donald Trump administration and Joe Biden’s transition team.

Washington’s restrictions on trade and investment with China, Europeans believe, provide pretexts for dodgy deals that favor US companies at the expense of competitors on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Trump administration of course has long been in a trade war with Beijing, and there have been numerous news reports that Biden’s advisers had let European officials know they hoped for a delay that would give the new administration time to chime in before finalization of the pact.

Matt Pottinger, deputy national security adviser to Trump, issued a statement saying, “Leaders in both US political parties and across the US government are perplexed and stunned that the EU is moving towards a new investment treaty right on the eve of a new US administration.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16904/global-alliance-democracies

Under a Biden administration, many will be mindful of the Obama-era sell-out of America’s Middle East allies while accommodating the hostile Iranian ayatollahs.

Despite the optimistic indulgences by foreign policy experts and politicians over decades, China will not reform to allow normal coexistence within the world order but must instead be contained.

A modern alliance to resist today’s “attempted subjugation and outside pressures” should focus not only on China and the immediate challenges of 5G technology and supply chains, but also on the other major strategic threats to democratic states…. The object should not be… to lecture governments such as Hungary, Poland and Romania… While [Biden] may find their internal policies unpalatable, they pose no threat to any other country.

An interests-based, rather than ideological, alliance of strategically like-minded democracies should be built, each with the economic power and will to counter the authoritarian entities that oppose the Free World…. The alliance should work to push back the authoritarians and radicals across the economic, cultural, political, cyber and technological realms and deny them access to critical infrastructure and technology as well as opportunities for cultural subversion. It should also act to deter their further advances.

An important function of the proposed alliance would be to encourage member states, and their allies against authoritarian and extremist entities, to both provide adequate defence resources and where necessary adapt and modernise forces to ensure credible deterrence.

If a country lacks the confidence to stick up for its own values at home, how is it to robustly defend its virtues against those who wish to undermine them? This weakness in Western democracies has already allowed great strides across the world by China, Russia and jihadism and has helped create the situation that a D10 alliance is now urgently needed to repair.