RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-must-choose-between-two-different-paths-iran-165971

“I’m under no illusions about the Iranian regime, which has engaged in destabilizing behavior across the Middle East, brutally cracked down on protesters at home, and unjustly detained Americans,” Joe Biden wrote this past spring for Foreign Affairs. “But there is a smart way to counter the threat that Iran poses to our interests and a self-defeating way – and Trump has chosen the latter.”

On no major global challenge has Washington acted so inconsistently in recent years as the Islamic Republic, though that challenge has not changed in any fundamental way since the 1979 revolution brought a radical theocracy to power in Tehran. The Iranian regime, which is fueled by an expansionist ideology, continues to threaten the United States and its allies, seeks to acquire nuclear weaponry, is developing increasingly sophisticated ballistic missiles, sponsors terrorism, works directly and through proxies to destabilize regional governments, and brutally suppresses its own people.

Through every presidency since the tenure of Jimmy Carter, America’s strategic goal vis-à-vis Iran has been the same: to convince the regime to change course, mend its ways, and become a member in good standing of the rules-based global order. The question that has vexed every president has been whether to try and achieve that objective through pressure (in the form of sanctions and political opprobrium) or persuasion (through collaboration and aid).

Though Washington – across presidencies and even within some of them – has alternated between pressure and persuasion, the starkest change in direction came when Trump succeeded Obama, withdrew from the 2015 global nuclear agreement that Obama had engineered, and abandoned hopes of fostering warmer U.S.-Iranian ties through economic aid and a less hostile U.S. posture. Instead, over the past two years, Trump has imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign of heightened sanctions intended to force the regime to abandon its nuclear pursuits, regional mischief, and human-rights abuses.

https://spectator.us/trump-right-china-years-uighurs/

Back in the summer of 2015, all the cleverest people made fun of Donald Trump for obsessing about China. One of them even made a video compilation of the candidate saying ‘China’ over and over again on the hustings. Ha ha ha.

It seems distinctly less funny now. There is a reason that the novel coronavirus is popularly denominated the Wuhan flu or CCP virus. As Bill Gertz observed in How China’s Communist Party Made the World Sick, ‘the world does not need to prove that the communist regime in Beijing was responsible for the escape of the coronavirus from a lab’ in order to cast a jaundiced eye upon its many malefactions. ‘It is now clear,’ he writes, ‘that decades of international engagement and cooperation with communist China was a mistake that seriously undermined fundamental American values of freedom, democracy, openness, honesty, and free markets.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. In the 1970s, under Richard Nixon, America embarked on a program of ‘constructive engagement’ with communist China. The hope was that by pursuing closer ties with China, America would mount a more effective challenge to the Soviet threat. The secondary hope was that by engaging with China, we would lure the backwards communist behemoth into the modern world. That turned out to be a fond hope. China entered the modern world all right. But instead of softening its penchant for top-down totalitarian rule, economic and military modernization made its despotism more cunning.

Consider, for example, the 370,000 Chinese nationals who have come to the United States for college. They typically pay full-freight, which makes them an important economic boon to the colleges and universities they attend. And it is still not widely appreciated that all are subject to Article 7 of the 2017 National Intelligence Law of 2017, which requires that ‘any citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with the state intelligence work’. In other words, as Brian Kennedy notes in Communist China’s War Inside America, ‘It is quite literally the law that all Chinese students in American universities are agents, or potential agents, of the Chinese Communist party and the intelligence apparatus of the P.RC.’

https://www.newsweek.com/us-needs-broad-response-china-iran-moves-opinion-1518160
A new China-Iran economic and military agreement and this fall’s expiration of the global arms embargo on Iran could dramatically upend international relations by expanding China’s global reach, empowering Iran to threaten America’s regional allies, undercutting U.S. efforts to pressure both nations and further destabilizing the Middle East.

From their agreement-which both nations plan to finalize and ratify in the coming months-China will get a greater foothold in the Middle East, threatening traditional U.S. big-power supremacy there. Iran, meanwhile, will receive an important economic lifeline through Chinese investments and oil purchases, and added security from a tighter military relationship with Beijing.

From the arms embargo’s expiration, Iran will get unimpeded global access to sophisticated weaponry-weaponry that it can use to continue building its own threatening arsenal, as well as to arm its allies like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and terrorist proxies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere.

These converging developments demand a thoughtful response from the West. The United States and its allies now need to develop a broad strategy to contain Beijing and Tehran and thwart their ambitions.

“Two ancient Asian cultures,” Beijing and Tehran declared in the opening sentence of their draft agreement, “two partners in the sectors of trade, economy, politics, culture and security with a similar outlook and many mutual bilateral and multilateral interests will consider one another strategic partners.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sends-two-aircraft-carriers-to-south-china-sea-for-exercises-as-china-holds-drills-nearby-11593816043?mod=hp_lead_pos1

The U.S. is sending two aircraft carriers into one of Asia’s hottest spots to deliver a pointed message to China that it doesn’t appreciate Beijing’s military ramp-up in the region.

The USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz are set to hold some of the U.S. Navy’s largest exercises in recent years in the South China Sea from Saturday—at the same time that China is holding drills in the area.

With tensions rising between the two over trade, the coronavirus pandemic and China’s crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong, U.S. officials said they wanted to challenge what they called Beijing’s unlawful territorial claims.

“The purpose is to show an unambiguous signal to our partners and allies that we are committed to regional security and stability,” said Rear Adm. George M. Wikoff, commander of the strike group led by the USS Ronald Reagan, in an interview.