RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-11-30-biden-gets-ready-to-sell-out

The most important job of the President is to conduct the foreign policy of the United States, so as to protect the safety and security of the American people. That means dealing with a variety of geopolitical rivals and adversaries. There are quite a number of serious adversaries out there these days (Russia, Iran, and North Korea come to mind), but without doubt the most significant is China.

In recent years, China has become increasingly assertive on the world stage, as evidenced by a rapidly growing military, massive international intelligence and espionage efforts, and the forging of financial ties with many developing nations (e.g., the “Belt and Road Initiative”). Meanwhile, China’s population, at about 1.4 billion, is more than four times that of the U.S.; and its annual GDP, at about $13.5 trillion, is about two-thirds ours (which is around $21 trillion), while almost triple that of third-place Japan (~$5 trillion), and more than triple that of fourth-place Germany (~$4 trillion). It is possible that China’s gross economy could overtake ours within a decade or so (although remaining much lower on a per capita basis).

It would not be an exaggeration to say that figuring out how to deal with China should be the number one priority of the incoming President. Good luck with that if Joe Biden succeeds to the job. It’s not just that he’s not physically or mentally capable of engaging with such a clever and relentless adversary. Even more significant is that Biden has been completely willing to accept influence payments from China for his family. Could he really have thought that nothing was expected in return? At Newsweek today, Nigel Farage has a column with the headline “China Is Licking Its Chops at the Thought of President Joe Biden.” Indeed, that’s a great understatement.

In prior posts on Biden corruption (for example here and here) I have focused more on the dealings of Joe and his son Hunter with Ukraine, rather than China. That’s because the dealings with Ukraine were more definitively and obviously criminal in nature, given that they involved an immediate and admitted quid pro quo (the firing of a prosecutor who was investigating a company where Hunter was on the board). The dealings with China were more in the nature of general influence peddling. That doesn’t make these dealings any less corrupt.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/is-america-to-be-first-second-or-what/

A wise foreign policy over the next four years would build on Trump’s strategic gains for the U.S. and the West.

 D uring this strange “transition,” it has been common now to assert that “multilateralism” is back — and with a vengeance. Joe Biden’s envisioned team allegedly will jettison the unilateralist idea of “America alone” and supposed soft neo-isolationism.

Instead, the U.S. will resume its historic but neglected role as the leader of the enlightened world. It will supposedly recultivate allies estranged by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo. It will now fix broken international organizations. It will eagerly reassume burdens that were neglected or repudiated during the Neanderthal Trump administration.

The result, supposedly, will be a safer, more secure world. The administration will be staffed again by returning international experts from the Obama years. Their excellence is vouched for by their past government, corporate, military, and academic service and their branded education.

I think all that is a fair summation of the lengthy published critiques, the preliminary giddy statements from designated Biden-administration officials, and the foreign-policy daily op-ed commentariat.

But how accurate are these rosy assessments and stock diagnoses?

A Strange Sort of Isolationism

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16798/arms-control-new-start

Russia’s strategy with nuclear weapons, as outlined in official documents and many analyses, leans towards what General John Hyten, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has referred to as “escalate to win.”

Moreover, the absence of China as a party to any arms agreements, including New START, gives China a total “free ride” on nuclear issues in that there is no requirement for China to limit any of its nuclear weapons, even if the US could verify such an agreement.

Such calls for one-sided cuts to the US arsenal, particularly during a serious negotiation such as the current one with Moscow, simply undercut America’s negotiating leverage.

The fact is that no matter what the US does, both Moscow and Beijing will continue to build nuclear and other high-tech weapons, including space weapons and hypersonic-capable weapons…. If these adversaries cannot compete on the conventional level, they have no choice, given their ambitions, but to go nuclear to assert themselves against the interests and values of the US and its allies, and carry out their aggressive and hegemonic designs.

Moreover, as inherently imperial autocracies, they are driven from within to states of siege, if not war, with the US, as well as imperial probes across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

For these reasons, the Trump Administration has correctly focused on ending China’s “free riding” regarding arms control talks and on placing all of Russia’s nuclear programs on the table, coupled with far better verification. Many of those opposing such a strategy apparently have forgotten that the first reason a great power such as the US engages in arms control is not altruism. Rather, and as the fathers of deterrence theory understood, arms control is an action that states undertake primarily to advance their own interests and security and that of their allies.

Thus, from a US perspective, perpetuating the status quo would hardly be a satisfactory outcome for Washington and its allies.

The New START Treaty will expire in February 2021. The next administration will therefore have only weeks to decide on how to proceed regarding arms control negotiations with Russia. Although some negotiations with Russia are already taking place, the complexities of the issues make it most unlikely that the current dialogue will lead to a new treaty by February.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/foreign-policy-empire-gets-ready-strike-back-bruce-thornton/

The alleged President-elect (for now) Joe Biden has started assembling his cabinet, and in foreign policy it looks like a return to the failed policies of the Obama years with picks like long-time establishment insiders Anthony Blinken (State, pictured above with Biden) and Jake Sullivan (national security advisor). If, as promised, Biden restores the stale nostrums of the transnational globalist received wisdom embodied in the foreign policy establishment, the advances of the Trump administration will be reversed, putting our security and interests at greater risk.

The most important tool of the “rules-based international order” is “diplomatic engagement” involving multinational institutions staffed by global foreign policy technocrats who presumably can transcend the parochial, zero-sum national interests that foment conflict and war. This bipartisan consensus was defined in 2005 by Oxford professor Kalypso Nicolaidis. It comprises “supranational constraints on unilateral policies and the progressive development of community norms,” and the creation of a “security community” that favors “civilian forms of influence and action” over the use of force, and the guiding principles of which will be “integration, prevention, mediation, and persuasion.”

These questionable assumptions––there’s no such thing as a global “community”–– have long defined the Democrat Party’s foreign policy philosophy, with its pacifist inclinations and distrust of the military. We saw it in the attacks on George W. Bush in the run-up to the second Gulf War in 2002, even though prominent Democrat senators like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry voted to approve the authorization for military force. Later, dissenting senators like Barack Obama became the voice of the new consensus, which was obvious when Clinton and Kerry disavowed their votes during the Democrat presidential primaries. Opposition now focused on Bush’s alleged “failure of diplomacy” even though he had spent months at the UN seeking in vain its approval for putting teeth into the 17 Security Council resolutions it passed against Saddam Hussein, all of which he violated.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/team-obamas-iran-illusions-11606678886?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

After last week’s assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist, it’s hard to tell who is more upset: Iran, or Barack Obama’s foreign-policy team. Tehran is blaming Israel and promising revenge, but consider the tweets by the men who gave the world the flawed 2015 nuclear deal.

Former national-security aide and media spinner Ben Rhodes: “This is an outrageous action aimed at undermining diplomacy between an incoming US administration and Iran. It’s time for the ceaseless escalation to stop.”

And this from former CIA director John Brennan, leading promoter of the false Russia collusion narrative: “This was a criminal act & highly reckless. It risks lethal retaliation & a new round of regional conflict. Iranian leaders would be wise to wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage & to resist the urge to respond against perceived culprits.”

This turns the Middle East upside down, as the Obama foreign policy also did. The 2015 deal was supposed to restrain Iran’s nuclear-weapons development and moderate its regional behavior. It has done neither. But now the architects of that deal blame not Iran for its behavior but whoever is trying to slow Iran’s nuclear progress.

https://thejewishvoice.com/2020/11/biden-teams-blind-spot-on-terror/

President-elect Joe Biden’s first major foreign policy appointments are being hailed as centrists and experts. None of them are known as radicals, ideologues or Israel-bashers. News outlets have made much of the fact that the stepson of a Holocaust survivor is one of the key appointments.

But a closer look at their backgrounds and associations raises disturbing questions about their views on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict.Secretary of State designate Antony Blinken, National Intelligence director designate Avril Haines, and UN Ambassador designate Linda Thomas-Greenfield have an interesting professional association in common: they are among the cadre of leaders of a little-known advocacy group in Washington, D.C. called Foreign Policy for America, which has a very disturbing perspective on Israel.

Foreign Policy for America (FPA), established in 2016, has two leadership bodies, both of which are quite small, indicating that their members are not just window dressing or names on a letterhead. The Board of Directors has just twelve members, one of whom is J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami. It also has an Advisory Board, with just twenty members. Blinken, Haines, and Thomas-Greenfield are among them. Ben-Ami’s J Street is also based in D.C. and is a Jewish pressure group that, judging by its actions, seems to have been created specifically, and almost exclusively, to lobby for an independent Palestinian state. The FPA’s executive director, Andrew Albertson, also has a long record of supporting J Street and he can be seen on YouTube as far back as 2011 heaping praise on the group.

Blinken and Ben-Ami are both alumni of the Clinton Administration. A fact that Blinken pointed out when he addressed the J Street annual conference in March 2012. In his speech Blinken showered compliments on J Street for having “emerged as an influential and constructive voice.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/joe-bidens-national-security-picks-are-great-news-for-china

President-elect Joe Biden has been quick to shape his national security team. Jake Sullivan will serve as national security adviser, Antony Blinken is to be nominated for Secretary of State, Avril Haines will be the director of national intelligence, and John Kerry will take on the role of a Cabinet-level climate czar.

These selections give us confidence (if that’s the right word) of three things. First, that Biden will desperately try to return America to the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. Second, that the European Union will be happy. Third, that Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, is feeling pretty good right now.

The contrast between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Kerry is one of night and day. Where Pompeo has prioritized retraining China’s aggressive tendencies worldwide and its undermining of American interests, Kerry’s record of standing up for our interests, especially against our rivals and enemies, is flaccid. He spent his time as secretary of state proclaiming the virtues of positive engagement with Beijing. And his willingness to give Iran everything it wanted in the 2015 nuclear deal should make China optimistic that he’ll be generous in the coming climate negotiations.

Climate change activists should share our concerns because China’s climate strategy is a disingenuous absurdity. It is building hundreds of new, heavily polluting coal plants each year, while simultaneously pledging to be carbon-neutral by 2060. It is highly unlikely that Kerry will force China to agree to having its promised emission cuts independently verified. (Remember that the inspection regime built into the Iran deal contained loopholes big enough to drive an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tank through.) He’s far more likely to commit America to economically damaging emission cuts without getting other nations to do the same.

Concerns about Kerry go considerably beyond how he’ll manage climate policy.

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2020/11/27/the-importance-of-the-quint-and-the

We’re rather familiar with “the Squad,” but what about “the Quint” and “the Quad”? For now, the latter two are more likely than the former to have importance to a potential Biden administration. With the announcement of Tony Blinken as Secretary of State and Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor, the anti-Israel far left is at bay for now – both men are known to be personally reasonably disposed toward Israel. (Reema Dodin is another matter.) But if the Quint has an impact on the administration’s Middle East policy, both regarding Israel and Iran, and the Squad joins in, the U.S. position in the region will suffer.

The Quad, on the other hand, offers the potential for a far-reaching and long-lasting alliance in the Indo-Pacific if a new administration is willing to take advantage of the groundwork laid by its predecessor.

First, the Quint. Announced by the British Foreign Ministry in October of last year, the Quint (the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France) is a response to the collapse of the anti-Israel coalition of the European Union (EU). EU Resolutions have to be unanimous, and Israel’s burgeoning relations and understandings with the Visegrad Countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia) as well as the Baltic States and parts of Southern Europe collapsed the wall.

 The first crack actually appeared in May 2018 when Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania blocked an EU denunciation of President Donald Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. France, the Netherlands, and Ireland, among others criticized the move individually, but the impact was not the same.  In February 2020, EU Foreign Policy Chief Josip Borrell tried to push through a resolution condemning the Trump Middle East peace plan after meetings with Iranian officials – but 6 of 27 members refused, including Italy, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic. In April, he posited: “The EU does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank. The EU reiterates that any annexation would constitute a serious violation of international law.” The resolution failed and an Israeli diplomat noted that the largest number of EU delegates to date had been opposed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-iran-and-the-bomb-11606519663?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Democratic establishment will soon be back in charge of U.S. foreign policy, and the question is how much they’ve learned in exile. One early test will be Iran, and whether Joe Biden will abandon the strategic gains that President Trump has made in the Middle East in a rush to return to the deeply flawed 2015 nuclear deal.

The apparent assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist near Tehran on Friday shows that Iran’s nuclear program remains a global security problem. No one took responsibility, but any number of countries have reason to act now in case the Biden Administration returns to a policy of appeasing Iran.

The U.S. left the nuclear accord in May 2018 and embarked on a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign. After restoring pre-deal sanctions, the Trump Administration has added new restrictions across the Iranian economy, which is rigged to enrich the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and elites in Tehran. The White House plans to announce more sanctions through Jan. 20.

The sanctions have succeeded in weakening the rogue regime. Today Tehran exports about a quarter of the 2.5 million barrels of oil a day it shipped when the U.S. was still in the deal. This deprives the government of $50 billion in annual revenue. The economy has shrunk, while the Iranian rial has lost 80% of its value against the dollar.

Iran has responded by increasing its violations of the nuclear deal. It now has 12 times the limit of enriched uranium allowed under the accord, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said this month. It also is enriching uranium to 4.5% purity, above the 3.67% allowed under the deal but far from the 90% concentration needed for a bomb.