RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the closing minutes of the film Moscow on the Hudson, Vladimir Ivanoff, a Soviet defector, sits in a New York coffee shop trying to make sense of the country he has come to. It is a free country, but the nature of its freedom appears both bewildering and destructive. The America he lives in has freedom, but no purpose. It often appears to be open to all the wrong things and none of the right ones. A place free of religion, of morality and of meaning, that offers mercantilism and hedonism, that allows individuals to lose themselves in a system that echoes with a freedom that is so vast as to be inhuman.

People from around the world are drawn to America by the idea of freedom. It is not difficult to envision what freedom is when you live under a dictatorship. Freedom becomes the opposite of tyranny. But the more complex question is what is freedom without the constant of tyranny? What happens when freedom is cheapened and when the founding principles of a nation are forgotten?

Those are among the subjects that author Alexander Maistrovoy explores in his book, Agony of Hercules or a Farewell to Democracy (Notes of a Stranger). Alexander Maistrovoy is no stranger to tyranny. But he finds himself a stranger in a West which has turned its back on its values and appears to be nihilistically embracing its own destruction at the hands of Islam and the radical left.

The world that Alexander Maistrovoy discovers is descending into totalitarianism, gripped by a senseless madness it abandons its values, forgets its past and embraces a chaotic hedonism that can never be equal to the full measure of its unhappiness. It is a world where human rights means tyranny and the tyranny of Islamic law means freedom, where dictators are heroes and democracy is a shell game.

As Maistrovoy writes, “The words ‘democracy,’ human rights,’ ‘social justice,’ ‘liberal values,’ ‘humanism,’ ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ rain down from all sides… they are repeated like a spell, a magic mantra, a prayer.” But the magic spell means nothing. Those using the words do not understand their meanings. Instead the invocation of lost principles becomes a cargo cult ritual that licenses destructive impulses. There is no mantra or spell that will transform Islamic law or leftist tyranny into liberal democracy. Instead the rituals and word games mask the scale and steepness of the descent.

Congressman Dave Trott (R-MI) blasted the Obama administration during a hearing last week for not designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. Trott noted the group’s role in the targeting of Coptic Christians in Egypt, and how it continues to incite violence against minorities and U.S. allies.

Rep. Trott also expressed disbelief at the State Department’s excuses for continuing to meet with the group.

Both the House and the Senate are considering bills calling on the administration to designate the Muslim Brotherhood. Last November, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) introduced H.R. 3892, the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2015, which now has bipartisan support.

A Senate companion bill, S. 2230, was introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

On February 24 the House Judiciary Committee voted 17-10 to pass the bill and move the measure to the full House.

As a cosponsor of the House bill, Rep. Trott slammed the administration. He posted the video to his Facebook page:

Several U.S. allies in the Middle East have taken action against the Muslim Brotherhood, including U.A.E., Egypt, and Israel. Last week, Jordan closed the group’s headquarters in Amman:

The White House said President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin chatted on the phone today — but Obama did not bring up Russia’s too-close-for-comfort aerial actions near a U.S. ship and a reconnaissance plane.

U.S. European Command said Saturday that a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance plane over the Baltic Sea was barrel-rolled by a Russian Su-27 on Thursday.

“The unsafe and unprofessional actions of a single pilot have the potential to unnecessarily escalate tensions between countries,” Danny Hernandez, a spokesman for U.S. European Command, told CNN, noting that the plane “performed erratic and aggressive maneuvers” within 50 feet of the U.S. RC-135.

A week ago, two Russian SU-24 jets made “numerous close-range and low altitude passes” that led the U.S. ship to suspend flight operations until the Russian planes were gone. Last Tuesday, a Russian KA-27 Helix helicopter “conducted circles at low altitude around the ship, seven in total, at approximately 5 p.m. local.”

“The helicopter passes were also deemed unsafe and unprofessional by the ship’s commanding officer. About 40 minutes following the interaction with the Russian helicopter, two Russian SU-24 jets made numerous close-range and low altitude passes, 11 in total. The Russian aircraft flew in a simulated attack profile and failed to respond to repeated safety advisories in both English and Russian,” U.S. European Command said in a statement.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Obama had a conversation with Putin today about Ukraine and abiding by the Minsk talks.

“The United States continues to believe and President Obama continues to make a forceful case that Russia needs to abide by their commitments, and by doing so they can begin to relieve some of the isolation they have sustained as a result interfering in the sovereign activities of their neighbors in Ukraine,” Earnest said.

A New and Dangerous Great Game | London Center for Policy Research | National Security, Energy, and Risk Analysis

In 1904, after the long British struggle to control Afghanistan, and the Russian Empire’s efforts to expand into central Asia (and take control from the British), a British geographer, Halford MacKinder, published a paper suggesting that he who controlled the heartland of Asia would control Asia itself, and by extension, the world. In short, MacKinder explained why England and Russia had been vying for control of central Asia, what was known as ‘the Great Game.’ His theory, the Heartland Theory, was popular with the Russians (even before MacKinder gave it a name), and later with the Soviets, and has since been adopted by China.

Interestingly, an American strategist, Alfred Thayer Mahan, had postulated in 1900 that Asia could be controlled from the sea. Mahan suggested that control of the Suez Canal and control of Singapore and the Strait of Malacca on one side of the South China Sea (SCS) would give a great power – one with a powerful navy – the ability to control trade into and out of Asia and therefore accomplish the same thing the Heartland Theory later suggested.

In the years following WWII the US Navy had an extensive presence in the SCS. However, the US slowly stopped paying attention to the SCS during the 1990s, following the break-up of the Soviet Union.

In 1947 the Republic of China published a map claiming ownership of most of the islands in the SCS. This map – the ‘9 Dash Line’ – was later taken by the People’s Republic of China as defining their claim in the SCS, and after some minor variations, they have used it to justify their current activities.

But until several years ago the Chinese claim mattered little. In the last several years, however, recognizing the extent of the power vacuum, China has been aggressively building on reefs and islands in the SCS. China intends to control the SCS. A new great game, between two nuclear powers, has started in the South China Sea.

Nations operate in what they perceive to be their self-interest. It’s not always a good thing. When the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939, it was under the policy of Lebensraum, the claimed need for food that those fertile lands offered. The people of Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Allies disagreed. When nations’ interests clash, differences must be decided diplomatically or war ensues, as happened in Europe in 1939. It has always been that way and, likely, always will.

But sometimes a nation’s interest serves the world’s. In the wake of World War II, America’s self-interest – guided by our values – benefitted not only ourselves and the nations who had allied with us, but the people of those countries we helped defeat. In a recent history, Harry & Arthur, Lawrence Haas, a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, tells of the remarkable working relationship between newly sworn-in President Harry Truman and Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, then the leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. According to Mr. Haas, a former member of Al Gore’s staff, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, NATO and the U.N. Charter would have been impossible without the collaborative efforts of the two men. This was bi-partisanship at its best, relying on fundamental American values – to help those in distress, by serving our own interests. The consequence: the west saw seven decades of economic growth, Germany and Japan became economic powerhouses and the world saw the most rapid eradication of poverty it had ever known.

Things have changed. We have abandoned our magnanimous perch. Our values are on trial. A belief in moral relativism has replaced a sense of national self-confidence that had been driven by moral certitude. Political extremism has meant that our nation’s self-interest has been subsumed within the wants of party hacks; and immediate self-gratification has replaced the values needed for moral leadership. Republicans: consider the effects of the war in Iraq? Democrats: think of the consequences of the attack on Libya, and the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria? Keep in mind, 9/11was an attack on western civilization by Islamic jihadists – a fact that has all but disappeared from our collective memories. Non-threatening euphemisms used to describe those terrorists (and others since) have undermined a focus on the awfulness of what they did, and what they are still capable of doing.

In an April 10 Fox News interview, President Obama identified what he believes is the worst mistake of his presidency. He said, “Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.”

It’s mighty tempting to deride that statement by going through the long litany of Mr. Obama’s mistakes in national security and foreign policy. But surrendering to that temptation would cause us to miss the important elements in what Mr. Obama said and why he said it. More difficult, and far more important, is an analysis to determine why Mr. Obama is incapable of learning from such mistakes.

Begin with the advice he received from his top defense advisers before going into Libya. According to “Duty,” the memoir of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Mr. Gates had determined that we had no vital national security interest in Libya and so advised the president. Again, according to Mr. Gates’ memoir, the final decision on intervention was made in a meeting between Mr. Gates and his team, including Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, and the State Department and White House teams led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and two of her staffers, Samantha Power (now U.N. ambassador) and Ben Rhodes.

Mr. Obama, saying it was a “close call,” came down on the side of intervention to prevent a humanitarian disaster.

Appearing with Mrs. Clinton on the Sunday talk shows to defend the intervention, Mr. Gates said repeatedly that we didn’t have a vital national interest in Libya, indicating that Mr. Obama’s action was unjustified.

Mr. Gates’ point is so fundamental to American defense and foreign policy that it beggars the imagination that we need to be reminded of it. Like several presidents before him Mr. Obama has misunderstood it, but the principle is precise and clear: the United States should never go to war unless a vital national security interest is at stake.

Arthur Vandenberg, the former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman who worked closely with President Truman to architect the free world in the late 1940s, died 65 years ago on Monday. His legacy offers two important lessons for us during our current time of turmoil at home and abroad.

First, we have benefited greatly from the global role that Truman and Vandenberg brought to fruition. We would be wise not to abandon it. Second, we can nourish more bipartisan support for a robust U.S. foreign policy, even when our two parties are fighting fiercely over domestic policy.

Vandenberg worked with Truman in strong bipartisan fashion at a bitterly partisan time, helping to craft a revolutionary new foreign policy through which the United States seized global leadership for the first time on a sustained basis to protect our friends, confront our enemies and promote freedom. Under their leadership from 1945 to 1949, the United States spearheaded the effort to create the United Nations; pledged through the Truman Doctrine to defend freedom, first in Greece and Turkey and then broadly; lifted an economically prostrate Western Europe to its feet through the Marshall Plan; and committed to defend Western Europe through the NATO alliance.

Seven decades later, however, Vandenberg’s legacies – U.S. leadership abroad and bipartisan cooperation at home – are falling victim to a collective crisis of confidence in America, about both what we should do around the world and what our leaders can accomplish in Washington.

On the global front, President Barack Obama has worked to reduce America’s footprint around the world, share burdens with allies and even adversaries and focus on “nation building here at home.” To reduce U.S. burdens in the Middle East, for instance, he welcomed the rise of a hostile Iran, invited Russia’s return to the region and largely let Syria descend into a humanitarian nightmare.

The approval of former MI6 agent John le Carré has not guaranteed the authenticity of the BBC’s dramatisation of The Night Manager. Those who know about the Middle East could barely make it through the first episode.

My colleague Peter Beaumont, the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent, was in Tahrir Square during the revolution. He turned off The Night Manager when a murderous member of the Mubarak oligarchy ordered an improbably large assortment of weapons from a villainous English arms dealer. Mubarak had no shortage of weapons in 2011; he just could not persuade his forces to use them. The notion that his cronies would be trying to buy more rather than trying to persuade the army to fight comes from a definition of “realism” so capacious it includes Eurofighters on sale on the black market, and governments so unconcerned by weapons proliferation that they keep their inspectorates in cold, understaffed offices.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Le Carré’s post-Cold-War politics are best described as more Pilgerish than Pilger. Connoisseurs of his public statements can tick every space on the bingo card. Le Carré believes that corporations brainwash the bovine masses (check) on behalf of the imperial American hegemon (check) which is itself controlled by a conspiracy of right-wingers (check) who are pulling our puppet strings at the behest of — guess who? — the Jews (full house!). Or as le Carré explained, the neoconservatives are “appointing the state of Israel as the purpose of all Middle Eastern and practically all global policy”.

Then there is the self-pity, that most deplorable affectation of Western intellectuals, who have never once faced the smallest threat of persecution or punishment for their writing. At one point during the last decade, le Carré compared himself to the German-Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, who miraculously survived life under the Nazis. Liberals of a certain age remember that when the Ayatollah Khomeini’s assassins imitated the Nazis and threatened Salman Rushdie’s life the Klemperer de nos jours opined that Rushdie had brought death on himself by insulting the great religion of Islam.

We are looking at a permanent structural change in the American armed forces that will not only weaken the nation’s ability to defend itself, but endanger constitutional principles. A year ago in an article titled “Obama’s Generals,” I described an American military increasingly politicized under the current administration. The evidence at the time was already abundant: the military’s refusal to identify the Fort Hood shootings as terrorism, the coddling of Bowe Bergdahl, the relief or prosecution of politically unreliable generals, and unrealistically rosy appreciations of the campaign against ISIS being the major points. If anything, things have worsened since, most especially with the purely political decision to remove all restriction on women in combat, and as noted in a recent AT posts the mostly symbolic but still significant decisions by the Navy to issue “gender neutral” uniforms and to ignore regulations regarding naming ships to honor Democrat politicians and leftwing social activists. Add to this, ongoing and increasingly aggressive recruiting policies that mandate “diversity” and the situation becomes scary.

Arguably there has been some good news here and there, but even that must be taken with a large grain of salt. Last year Congress passed legislation allowing for the soldiers wounded at Fort Hood to receive Purple Hearts, and the Army belatedly acknowledged former Major Nidal Hassan’s terrorist ties, though has yet (to my knowledge) formally remove the “workplace violence” moniker it attached to the shooting, despite the fact that Obama late last year reluctantly acknowledged the Fort Hood shooting as a terror attack.

Similarly, in the Bergdahl case, also after incredibly long delays, the Army decided to try the soldier at a General Courts Martial. This is seen by some as the “old Army” reasserting itself in a case that reeks of liberal political influence. Perhaps this is so. However, the decision to try Bergdahl only came after he badly embarrassed the Army by going public with his account of his desertion and capture on NPR, practically forcing the hand of convening officer, General Robert B. Abrams. Moreover, though the decision to try Bergdahl was made last December (four days after the first NPR appearance), the trial will not take place until August, scarcely demonstrating a hard charging prosecution in a relatively simple case. Even assuming Bergdahl is convicted, his attorneys will argue that Bergdahl has successfully served on active duty for over two years since his release by the Taliban in May 2014, and thus deserving of leniency, undermining the contention he is a bad soldier. This might sound ridiculous to some, but the jury will have to consider it, and it is part of the reason why military prosecutions are usually expeditious, though the Army has not demonstrated any sense of urgency in the case.