RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/17/bolton-pompeo-trump-iran-1329833

Rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran are also magnifying strains among President Donald Trump’s top foreign policy advisers: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton.Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against the mullahs in Tehran has exacerbated fissures between the two men over the tight control Bolton has tried to exert over the national security decision-making process — and introduced new ones over the direction of U.S. policy.

Pompeo and his special representative for Iran, Brian Hook, have indicated that the administration’s goal in squeezing Iran is renewed negotiations with Iranian regime, according to two sources familiar with their thinking — something Trump has expressed a desire to do. But Bolton is a deep skeptic of the value of negotiating with adversaries who, before joining the White House, called publicly for regime change in Tehran.

While Pompeo has worked to carry out the president’s foreign policy directives, Bolton has done more to try to shape them — at times contradicting the president, as when he walked back Trump’s call for a rapid U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/17/the_hard_politics_of_us-china_trade_talks_140352.html

Since neither side benefits from a trade war, why are both sides threatening one?The answer is straightforward. Although both sides could benefit from a deal, one side could benefit more — a lot more — depending on the final terms.Two key issues dominate the current stalemate. The first is how many of China’s mercantilist practices will be rolled back. These include tariffs on imports from America, required partnerships with Chinese firms, forced transfers of intellectual property, and sometimes outright theft of trade secrets. The second is whether the terms are precise, enforceable, and undertaken as formal commitments by China’s highest-level institutions.China’s problem is that its economy depends on these unfair practices, and communist leaders benefit from them, politically and financially. Some, like widespread theft of Western intellectual property, help lots of local companies. Others, like the coercion of foreign firms to accept local partners, help the party most because it picks the winners. As with any patronage system, the winners are politically connected firms that share the largess with their benefactors. (Economists call this “rent-extraction” politics.)Chinese political leaders are understandably reluctant to alter these sweet arrangements. They wouldn’t change them at all without significant outside pressure, which is exactly what the U.S. is exerting. Since Beijing has to make some kind of deal, it would prefer informal commitments, the vaguer the better. Later, China could edge away from them, hoping the U.S. would not retaliate.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273761/time-iran-face-reckoning-bruce-thornton

While the media obsess over chimeras like the president’s obstruction of justice for nonexistent crimes, and AG Barr’s impeachment for obeying the law, a collision between the U.S. and Iran is brewing in the Middle East. The question now is whether Iran will finally face the reckoning it has invited and deserved for 42 years, or the latest crisis will peter out into U.S. saber-rattling and empty threats.

Donald Trump has made a good start at ending our nearly half-century appeasement of a regime that has declared war on the U.S. and backed it up by murdering Americans and working to create nuclear weapons that would make even more difficult, or even prohibitive, the price of punishing them for their aggression.

Since Jimmy Carter’s timid, feckless response to the 1979 American embassy hostage crisis, we have signaled to the mullahs that we will not exact a cost for their aggression. And this failure has been a bipartisan effort. When in 1983 Iranian proxies murdered 241 of our military personnel in Beirut, the Reagan administration pulled out even as the French and the Israelis strafed and bombed “Little Tehran,” the terrorist camps set up in the Beqaa Valley by Tehran, which nurtured the attackers. Since then Iran has been implicated in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and periodically taken hostage American citizens and sailors. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran’s Quds Force, the regime’s shock troops of global terror, have facilitated and participated in the murder of our soldiers. And it has continued to train and financially support terrorist gangs like Hezbollah and Hamas.