RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nypost.com/2021/02/21/biden-is-set-to-repeat-obamas-mideast-failures/

Every now and then, America mislays one of its Mideast allies. “Who lost Iran?” they asked in 1979, as the shah’s regime went sideways, the answer being Jimmy Carter and the State Department. “Who lost Egypt?” they asked in 2012, as the Muslim Brotherhood took power, the answer being Barack Obama and the State Department.

“Who lost Israel?” will soon be added to this perplexed ­refrain. The answer will be President Biden and the State Department.

But this time, America will be losing the region as a whole — to its historic rival, Russia. Iranian mischief will wax again, and Washington’s Arab and ­Israeli allies will move on without anyone losing much sleep over what the White House thinks about anything. This is a deliberate strategic choice, and it will lead to the collapse of American ­influence in western Asia.

Team Biden appears bent on reviving the Iran deal at all costs. The costs include completing the Democrats’ turn away from the Jewish state and thoroughly alienating America’s Sunni-Arab clients. In reviving the nuclear deal, moreover, Washington will repeat a failed experiment in the hope of different results.

The Iranian regime won’t ­accept a tougher deal than the 2015 accord, and the Biden ­administration is Obama 3.0: The same team looks to rehabilitate its reputation, not to secure the ­national interest. The Obama-Bidenites will accept any humiliation from Tehran and call it a diplomatic breakthrough.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17090/iran-biden-weak-president

The Arabs say they are worried because Iran sees Biden as a “weak” president, and that is why the mullahs in Tehran and their proxies in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon have increased their terrorist attacks in the Middle East.

Arabs are turning to the Biden administration with the frank plea: Your weak approach to the Iranian regime is already threatening whatever precarious stability exists in the Middle East. It is already emboldening terrorist groups. We are begging you: do not back down to Iranian threats.

Such messages show that many Arabs share Israel’s concern over US and European efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. It is, frankly, the last thing the Arabs want. It will only lead to war and set back the region more years than one would care to count.

It is only one month into his term in office, and US President Joe Biden is already facing criticism from Arabs over his administration’s soft policy toward Iran.

The Arabs say they are worried because Iran sees Biden as a “weak” president, and that is why the mullahs in Tehran and their proxies in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon have increased their terrorist attacks in the Middle East.

“In Tehran’s eyes, Biden is a pushover,” wrote Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, former editor-in-chief of the Saudi newspaper Ashraq Al-Awsat.

“It has only been eight weeks since President Joe Biden was sworn into office, but Iran has already tested him on several fronts. First, thousands of the Iran-backed Houthi militia rushed to threaten the densely populated city of Marib in Yemen. Afterwards, Iranian militias targeted Basra and Baghdad, and more recently, Erbil and Iraqi Kurdistan, with dozens of missiles, killing and wounding several individuals in a US facility. Then Lokman Slim, Iran’s most prominent and vocal opponent in Beirut, was murdered and his body was found on the sidewalk.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/21/is-the-biden-administration-stumbling-into-war/

What causes wars?

Innately aggressive cultures and governments, megalomania, the desire for power, resources, and empire prompt nations to bully or attack others. Less rational Thucydidean motives such as fear and honor and perceptions of self-interest are not to be discounted either. 

But what allows these preemptive or aggressive agendas to reify, to take shape, and to leave tens of thousands dead?

The less culpable target (and wars are rarely a matter of 50/50 culpability) also has a say in what causes wars. The invaded and assaulted sometimes overlooked or contextualized serial and mounting aggression. They displayed real military weakness or simple political ineptness that eroded deterrence. They failed to make defensive alliances with stronger nations or slashed defense investments that made the use of deterrent force impossible. 

In sum, without deterrence and the clear potential in extremis to do an aggressor damage, there can be no meaningful peace negotiations, no “conflict resolution”—unless one believes a Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Kim Il-sung can become a reasonable interlocutor across the peace table.

Weakness as Strength, Strength as Weakness

But there are also other more subtle follies that can turn tensions into outright fighting. And they are relevant in the current global landscape as we go not just from one president to the next, but from a realist and tragic view of foreign policy to an idealist and therapeutic one. 

One catalyst for war is a lack of transparency about the relative strengths and will of potential enemies. 

If, even unwittingly, President Biden projects the image that the Pentagon is more concerned about ferreting out wayward internal enemies than in seeking unity by deterring aggressors, then belligerents such as China, North Korea, and Iran and others will likely—even if falsely and unwisely—wager that the United States will not or cannot react to provocations, as it has done in the past. And accordingly, they will be emboldened to provoke their neighbors with less worry about consequences. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-beijing-loves-biden-and-paris-11613937344?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The U.S. officially rejoined the Paris climate accord on Friday to much media and European applause. Our guess is that China is the most pleased because it knows the accord will restrict American energy while Beijing gets a decade-long free ride.

Paris is a voluntary agreement, and nations submit their own commitments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The Obama Administration vowed to slash emissions 26% or more from 2005 levels by 2025, but the Trump Administration withdrew from the accord. President Biden has now pledged to reach “net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”

Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden is committing the U.S. without submitting the Paris agreement to the Senate as a treaty. They know it would never get a two-thirds vote for approval, and probably not even a simple majority. Yet the Administration will cite Paris to justify sweeping environmental regulations to raise the cost of fossil fuels and subsidize renewable energy and electric vehicles. It will bypass Congress for much of this.

The economic damage will be real. A 2017 analysis of the Obama Paris commitments, by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Council for Capital Formation, predicted a $250 billion reduction in GDP and some 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/02/18/tom-cotton-lays-out-a-strategy-to-fight-the-new-cold-war-against-china-n1426674

On Thursday, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) released a roadmap to counter the Chinese Communist Party and prevail in a new “Cold War” against this “Evil Empire.”

“This Evil Empire preys on—and spies on—Americans. It imprisons innocent people in concentration camps. It uses slave labor to fuel its factories. And it denies basic freedoms to all its 1.4 billion people,” Cotton declared in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Institute in Chicago. “We need to beat this Evil Empire—and consign the Chinese Communists, like the Bolsheviks, to the ash heap of history.”

He released a report entitled “Beat China: Targeted Decoupling and the Economic Long War” that laid out three central goals to combat China: decoupling, mitigating the effects of decoupling, and reorganizing the federal government to better respond to the CCP.

Cotton praised Reagan’s historic success at defeating the Soviet Union without firing a shot, but he warned that the “Cold War” against China “will be more complicated than the first. China is wealthier and more populous than any enemy America has ever faced. It’s also more entangled with us economically.”

Cotton acknowledged that America’s “deep dependence on China didn’t grow overnight.” Rather, Americans actively pursued a “strategic partnership” with the Chinese Communist Party on the grounds that open markets and open borders would make China rich and then lead China on the path to freedom. China indeed became rich, “but instead of reforming, the Communist Party began to exploit new connections between our free society and its totalitarian society.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pompeo-no-one-can-ever-again-deny-the-threat-irans-islamic-republic-presents-israel-gulf-nations_3702900.html

Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Feb. 18 said he is confident that no one will ever again be able to deny the threat that the Islamic Republic in Iran presents Israel, the Gulf nations, and the United States, following the “historic” achievements for the region made under the Trump administration.

Pompeo made the remarks while accepting a “Champion of International Human Rights” award at the ninth Annual Champions of Jewish Values International Awards Gala, held by the the World Values Network on Thursday in honor of Black history month. It is the first award of its kind.

He was referring to former President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords, a joint statement between Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the United States—and later, with Bahrain and other Arab countries. The agreement, which earned the former president Nobel Peace Prize nominations, serves to establish new cooperation and normalization between the Middle East nations.

The deals were first announced on Aug. 13 and Sept. 11, 2020.

“I am confident that people around the world now think about Iran differently than when our administration took office,” Pompeo said, addressing the event virtually.

“And while the next administration [Biden] may choose its own tactical plan, I don’t believe that’s the case that anyone will ever again deny the threat that the Islamic Republic presents to the United States, to Israel, to Arab nations in the Gulf.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/us/politics/biden-iran-nuclear.html?campaign

WASHINGTON — The United States made a major move on Thursday toward restoring the Iran nuclear deal that the Trump administration abandoned, offering to join European nations in what would be the first substantial diplomacy with Tehran in more than four years, Biden administration officials said.

In an effort to make good on one of President Biden’s most significant campaign promises, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke with European foreign ministers and agreed that the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran “was a key achievement of multilateral diplomacy,” and one worth pursuing again, according to a State Department statement.

Mr. Biden has said he would lift sanctions imposed by President Donald J. Trump if Iran returned to the sharp limits on nuclear production that it observed until 2019.

Iran has said the United States was the first to violate the terms of the 2015 nuclear accord, and that it would act only after the United States reversed course and allowed it to sell oil and conduct banking operations around the world. A senior Biden administration official said on Thursday evening that closing that gap would be a “painstaking” process.

The announcement will open what is likely to be a delicate set of diplomatic offerings.

The sparring over who moves first will be just the first of many hurdles. And with a presidential election only four months away in Iran, it was not clear if the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the nation’s political and military leadership would fully support re-engagement with the United States.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/17/why-you-should-be-skeptical-of-the-new-tough-on-china-joe-biden/

The Biden administration is stocking up with the same Democrat establishment cast that supported the project of China’s rise to global dominance.

The Biden administration and its corporate media cheerleaders are at pains to tell you that career-long China kowtower Joe Biden is “tough on China.” But toughness can only be proven by action. Contra the official narrative, however, President Biden’s initial policies and those tasked with implementing and building upon them do not indicate strength. Rather, to America’s detriment, they signal a reversion to the status quo ante of weakness.

The media has trumpeted Biden administration rhetoric on three key China-related issues: the administration’s affirmation — with caveats — of the Trump administration’s designation of the Chinese Communist Party’s atrocities in Xinjiang as constituting “genocide”; its pledge of a “rock-solid commitment” to Taiwan; and its promise to maintain a “free and open” Indo-Pacific — again, with caveats.

The media also celebrated the Biden administration’s most authoritative statements on U.S.-China policy yet, from a readout of the president’s first call with Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, and related statements by officials on the administration’s China strategy. Headlines about the call claimed Biden “confronted” Xi with “concerns” about contentious issues such as human rights, trade, and Taiwan. Chinese state media, of course, saw it quite differently — as an amiable and welcome reversal of Trump’s tough on China stance.

American corporate media also reported that Biden staffers embraced the idea America is in an “intense strategic competition with China,” and would be maintaining some of the Trump administration’s policies — a tacit admission of Trump’s relative toughness.