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June 2017

Chastising Simon and Schuster By Eileen F. Toplansky

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/06/chastising_simon_and_schuster_.html

If you are disturbed about the gruesome photo shoot of Kathy Griffin depicting President Trumps’ severed head, then you will be equally disgusted at the comment of New York Times bestselling author children’s books Ken Jennings. Jennings tweeted the following:

Barron Trump saw a very long necktie on a heap of expired deli meat in a dumpster. He thought it was his dad & his little heart is breaking.

The left has no shame and that this former Jeopardy winner and author of children’s books should write this vile message should not go unnoticed. Jennings writes for Simon & Schuster. Thanks to a comment at the Gateway Pundit site, you can call the publisher at 1-800-223-2336, choose option 4 and let your voice be heard. I just did.

It is time to fight back.

Politically Incorrect Hollywood: Some Films to see By Armando Simon

Although at times it feels—quite correctly—like one is swamped with Politically Correct propaganda in the movies and television and magazines, a number of films have been made over the years that buck the trend. Unfortunately, many of them have not been well-publicized and/or not as patronized by conservatives as they should have been. By comparison, every time Hanoi Jane, Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone make a movie, liberals trample themselves over in a mad stampede to support their propaganda movies; conservatives, on the other hand, when they hear of a movie that might be putting up a fight against the totalitarians, often stay at home scratching their rear ends, complaining that Hollywood doesn’t make enough movies that support their viewpoints—and then wait until the movie comes out at Redbox or Netflix.

So here is a list of movies that you might want to watch:

Red Family

Although Kim Ki-duk did not direct this film, he wrote and produced it and it still came out great. The film centers around North Korea sleeper agents passing themselves off as a South Korean family, all the while carrying out espionage and assassinations and maintaining a harsh discipline and ideological purity. Throughout, Damocles’ sword is hanging over their heads because they are being monitored by other agents. Although initially being vicious, cold-blooded killers, with time they become corrupted by their environment and start acting more human, and even humane, with foreseeable results.

Katyn

You have to feel for the Poles. The Russians Germans, and Austrians have repeatedly raped Poland over the centuries. The Katyn massacre is one of those items that make up That Which Must Not Be Mentioned about WWII (another one is that the Soviet Union and the Third Reich were allied during the first few years of the war as they had agreed to partition Europe between them, starting with Poland. Later, when one of the allies attacked the other one, the original pact of alliance was never mentioned, as being in bad taste if you did).

The Katyn massacre, in particular, made a deep scar in the Polish psyche. Perhaps it was due because Russia invaded the country when it was trying to fight off the German invasion, perhaps because the subsequent occupation by the Communists tried to convince the Poles that the Russians were their friends, perhaps because the Russians refused to acknowledge what everyone knew. Who knows.

Another thing that makes one sick is that the Poles behaved with honor towards the conquerors, not realizing at the time what vicious monsters they were dealing with. Example: (a) the professors naively show up at the university, summoned by the SS officer, only to be brutally rounded up and sent to Sachsenhausen (b) the Polish officers are initially loosely guarded, which means that many could have easily escaped, but did not do so and therefore were subsequently butchered by the Communists. The ending of the film is brutal to watch, but it needs to be watched

Unfortunately, to people who are unacquainted with the history, as was the case with my wife, events seem to jump and are a bit disorienting. Had the director simply inserted at the right time in the film what is going on historically, e.g., the pact of alliance between Russia and Germany, the subsequent invasion of Russia by Germany, the occupation of Poland by Russia, etc., the movie would have flowed smoothly.

Hail, Caesar!

The first time I saw it, this film left me a bit befuddled. It took me a second time of seeing the film to truly appreciate it. Part of my initial confusion is that there were so many subplots going through the movie.

Anyway. The title of the movie is the title of the movie being filmed in the movie, sometime in the 1950s. Got that? The main star gets kidnapped held for ransom from the studio. However, the main character is Eddie Mannix, one of the head honchos of the studio and he is primarily a “fixer.” He is presented with one problem after the other and he fixes the problems. Then, he is presented with the kidnapping. The kidnapping, by the way, was carried out by Hollywood communists, who are presented as a pack of intellectual buffoons spouting Marxist jargon. Mannix at the same time is being sought after to quit his job and go work for Lockheed, but he cannot make up his mind. At one point, one of the Hollywood communists gets picked up by a Soviet sub and is presumably taken to the Iron Curtain (in actual life, one of the Hollywood 10 communists did disappear and surfaced in East Germany). There are a lot of in-jokes regarding Hollywood of the ’50s, some of which, frankly, went over my head.

Pawn Sacrifice

When I was in my early 20s, I was touring Europe and the talk everywhere by Europeans was the intense chess confrontation between Fisher and the Russians in Iceland, exemplified by Spassky. Everyone was chuckling over Fisher’s antics and Spassky’s apparent befuddlement at Bobby’s behavior, thinking that the latter was messing with the Russian’s head. They jokingly referred to Fisher as being a crazy guy and were rooting for him. What nobody knew at the time, except for a handful of individuals was that Fisher was really crazy, that his antics and demands were not psychological warfare. This secret came to light many years thereafter.

The Soviets’ philosophy was that if they excelled at chess and at the Olympics, even through cheating, then it proved that Marxist totalitarianism was superior to a Western decadent democracy, so the state-funded chess players (and athletes) and gave them special treatment, unlike the Western countries. This fact is emphasized in the film.

Unfortunately, although Liev Schreiber does a convincing and likeable Spassky, the film does not show that he was a pretty decent guy, far from the usual mindless apparatchik. At a chess tournament against the Czechoslovakian players shortly after the Soviet invasion of their country, he shook their hands even though they wore black armbands as a sign of mourning, something that the Soviet authorities got angry about. Also not shown was that after Spassky lost the tournament in Iceland and returned home, he was hassled at the Moscow airport.

Ireland’s Reform Example A change in leaders highlights the country’s postcrisis success. See note please

Will the new leaders put an end to the anti-Israel bias that is the more painful because Irish fighters and pilots and captains helped Israel’s fight for independence; hundreds of Irish Americans like Paul O’Dwyer, Hugh Carey, helped mobilize support for Israel in America; the Lord Mayor of Dublin Robert Briscoe was Jewish, and Israel’s Major General Chaim Herzog who became Israel’s President in 1983 was born in Ireland…..rsk

We interrupt the panic about populism in Europe to bring some good news from Ireland. That country will get a new Prime Minister on Friday, and the Irish are choosing between two good options who offer a lesson for the revival of European economies.

The leadership change is precipitated by incumbent Enda Kenny’s resignation over a complex police scandal involving charges of special treatment for prominent officials. His center-right Fine Gael party must now select a new Prime Minister and party leader.

Fine Gael is traditionally the more free market of Ireland’s main parties but has often struggled to overcome entrenched interests in Dublin. So it’s remarkable that in this race both candidates to replace Mr. Kenny are running on aggressive pro-liberalization platforms.

The leading contender, Leo Varadkar, is the more eloquent of the two. Most of the media are wowed that he’s only 38, the son of an Indian immigrant and gay. But credit Fine Gael and Irish voters for taking Mr. Varadkar’s policy ideas more seriously than his biography.

Those ideas include administrative reforms such as prohibiting strikes by public-employee unions in critical services. He wants to address widespread worries about housing costs by phasing out subsidies for first-time buyers and focusing instead on new construction.

Mr. Varadkar and his challenger, Simon Coveney, both promise to reduce Ireland’s top marginal tax rate on income—income and payroll taxes combined—to below 50%, and reduce taxes for lower-income payers by adjusting brackets. Both advocate pension reforms centered on private savings accounts. Both would keep the 12.5% top corporate-tax rate while cutting other taxes on domestic firms and the self-employed to expand the economy beyond its reliance on global companies.

That reform agreement is a lesson to most others in Europe, not least British Prime Minister Theresa May, who is running on a welfare-state-as-usual platform. Mr. Kenny and his predecessor slashed government spending by €10 billion ($11.2 billion) to repair the post-financial crisis budget, as compared to €5 billion in tax increases. This weighting toward spending cuts helped return the economy to growth, and revenues are now booming. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Trump Jerusalem Waiver The President made the embassy move a test of U.S. credibility.

No one forced Mr. Trump to make his pledge. He chose to make it a campaign issue. The Israelis will be disappointed but are still delighted to have a President who is friendlier than his predecessor. The Palestinians will pocket this concession and hold out for more.

Way back in 1995, Congress passed a law requiring the State Department to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. On Thursday Donald Trump became the latest in a long line of Presidents to issue a waiver to put the move off.

Moving the embassy to the actual capital of the Jewish State is not the most important U.S. priority in the region. But because Mr. Trump made such a point of it in the campaign—vowing that he would make good where others had backed down—the waiver damages American credibility. As President Obama’s infamous red line in Syria illustrated, the world is more dangerous when Presidents show they don’t mean what they say.

In a statement explaining the waiver, the White House said that “the question is not if that move happens, but only when.” The statement further claims the embassy waiver was given in hopes of boosting chances for an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.

Here lies the bigger problem, which is less that the embassy is staying in Tel Aviv than that the Trump White House has concluded it should spend scarce political capital on a Palestinian-Israeli peace that has eluded Presidents for decades. That peace will only have a chance when the two parties are prepared to negotiate seriously, and the Palestinians now are not. They won’t be any more likely to deal because Mr. Trump backed down on the embassy.

No one forced Mr. Trump to make his pledge. He chose to make it a campaign issue. The Israelis will be disappointed but are still delighted to have a President who is friendlier than his predecessor. The Palestinians will pocket this concession and hold out for more.

Trump Bids Paris Adieu Growth and innovation are better forms of climate insurance.

President Trump announced the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement on Thursday, to the horror of green elites world-wide. If the decision shows he is more mindful of American economic interests than they are, the other virtue of pulling out is to expose the fraudulence of this Potemkin village.

In a Rose Garden ceremony, Mr. Trump broke with the 2015 agreement, starting the formal four-year withdrawal process: “We’re getting out. And we will start to renegotiate and we’ll see if there’s a better deal. If we can, great. If we can’t, that’s fine.”

This nonchalance inspired a predictable political meltdown, with the anticarbon lobby invoking death, planetary disaster and a permanent historical stain. Billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer called it “a traitorous act of war against the American people,” while Barack Obama accused his successor of joining “a small handful of nations that reject the future,” whatever that means. Get ready for another march on the White House.

But amid the outrage, the aggrieved still haven’t gotten around to resolving the central Paris contradiction, which is that it promises to be Earth-saving but fails on its own terms. It is a pledge of phony progress.

The 195 signatory nations volunteered their own carbon emission-reduction pledges, known as “intended nationally determined contributions,” or INDCs. China and the other developing nations account for 63% of annual global CO 2 emissions, and their share is rising. They submitted INDCs that pledged to peak the carbon status quo “around” 2030, and maybe later, or never, since Paris included no enforcement mechanisms to prevent cheating.

Meanwhile, the developed OECD nations—responsible for 55% of world CO 2 as recently as 2000—made unrealistic assurances that even they knew they could not achieve. As central-planning prone as the Obama Administration was, it never identified a tax-and-regulation program that came close to meeting its own emissions pledge of 26% to 28% reductions from 2005 levels by 2025.

Paris is thus an exercise in moral and social signaling that is likely to exert little if any influence on atmospheric CO 2 , much less on global temperatures. The Paris target was to limit the surface temperature increase to “well below” two degrees Celsius from the pre-industrial level by 2100. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Joint Program conclude that even if every INDC is fulfilled to the letter, the temperature increase will be in the range of 1.9–2.6 degrees Celsius by 2050, and 3.1–5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Such forecasts are highly uncertain, which is inherent when scientists attempt to predict the future behavior of a system as complex as global climate. The best form of climate-change insurance is a large and growing economy so that future generations can afford to adapt to whatever they may confront.

Palestinians: Israel’s Goodwill Gestures Send Wrong Messages by Bassam Tawil

Here is what is being said on the Palestinian street: Today Israel runs away from the West Bank or the Gaza Strip; tomorrow Israel will run away from Ashkelon, then from Tel Aviv and from there to the sea, and we have achieved our goal of destroying Israel. Therefore, we need to continue attacking Israel.

As with the Gaza Strip, the withdrawal from Lebanon taught the Palestinians that terrorism could drive Israelis out of their country.

Never have the Palestinians given Israel credit for its goodwill steps. On the contrary, they scoff at these moves and describe them as “cosmetic changes”. The Palestinian line is that Israel’s steps are “insufficient” and “unhelpful.” Its concessions are regarded as gestures of a terrified people and as the rightful reward for terrorism. Far from satiating the appetite of the terrorists, such steps prompt them to step up their attacks against Israelis.

The West suffers under a major misconception concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: that “goodwill gestures” and territorial concessions on the part of Israel boost the prospects of peace in the Middle East. The facts, suggest that precisely the opposite is true.

Last week, Israel’s Channel 10 television station reported that the U.S. administration was pushing Israel to transfer parts of Area C — areas under full Israeli security and civilian control in the West Bank — to the control of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA). According to the report, the U.S. believes that the transfer of the territory to the PA would be a “goodwill step” towards the Palestinians, paving the way for the revival of the stalled peace process with Israel.

This assumption, of course, has already proven wrong. The experiences of the past few decades have shown clearly that Israeli concessions have always sent the wrong message to the Palestinians.

In fact, Palestinians read Israeli goodwill steps as signs of weakness and retreat. This misinterpretation on the part of the Palestinians then leads to more violence against Israel. It would be hard for anyone not to conclude that if pressure works, keep on pressuring.

The past 24 years are littered with examples of how the Palestinians react to Israeli concessions.

The Oslo Accords that were signed between Israel and the PLO in 1993 were seen by Palestinians as a first step by Israel towards total capitulation.

The accords, which brought the PLO from several Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, came after five years of the first Palestinian Intifada. By allowing the PLO to assume control over large parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel sent a message that it was caving in to the violence and terrorism of the First Intifada.

Barely a breath after Oslo, Israel was again asked to conciliate the Palestinians: this time, hundreds of prisoners, many with Jewish (and Arab) blood on their hands, were released from Israeli prison in order to create an atmosphere “conducive” to the peace process.

Instead of viewing the prisoner release for what it was, namely a generous gesture, many Palestinians considered it a “victory” for terrorism and violence. Worse, it was not long before many of the released prisoners were rearrested for their role in further terrorism against Israel. The release of prisoners also sent a message of recidivism to Palestinians: terror does indeed pay! A short stint in an Israeli prison is sure to lead to release in some Israeli “confidence-building measure” or other.

According to statistics, at least half of released Palestinian prisoners have returned to terrorism.

Despite the grim statistics, the international community regularly demands that Israel release more convicted terrorists as a “gesture” towards Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinians.

Palestinian terrorists who were released from prison by Israel as a “goodwill gesture” are honored at Mahmoud Abbas’ presidential compound in Ramallah, on October 30, 2013. According to statistics, at least half of released Palestinian prisoners have returned to terrorism. (Photo by Oren Ziv/Getty Images)

Since 1993, Israel has complied again and again with such international pressure, only to reinforce the message to Palestinians: terrorism is indeed worth the trouble.

Let us consider, for a moment, Gaza. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip, after destroying 21 Jewish settlements and expelling more than 8,000 Jews from their homes there.

In Palestinian eyes, however, the Israeli “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip was anything but an olive branch of peace. The withdrawal came after five years of the bloody Second Intifada, when Palestinians waged a massive campaign of suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israelis.

Thus, for Palestinians, Israel was once again retreating in the face of unremitting bloodshed.

Here is what is being said on the Palestinian street: Today Israel runs away from the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, tomorrow Israel will run away from Ashkelon, then from Ashdod and Tel Aviv and from there to the sea, and we have achieved our goal of destroying Israel. Therefore, we need to continue attacking Israel.

Reflections on Daniel Gordis’s Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Roger A. Gerber

Daniel Gordis’s widely praised Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, chosen as the 2016 book of the year by the National Jewish Book Council, is a highly readable popular history that covers the history http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/reflections-on-daniel-gordiss-israel-a-concise-history-of-a-nation-reborn-by-roger-a-gerber.htmlof the State of Israel in a mere 425 pages of text, plus 27 pages of appendices that include helpful reference material, plus maps.

Gordis’s history has earned accolades from a wide range of luminaries including Ari Shavit, Dennis Ross, Michael Oren, Deborah Lipstadt and Yossi Klein Halevi, blurbs from all of whom adorn the back cover.

The book, taken as a whole, is a good popular primer but since it has received nothing but praise (with the exception of a generally favorable review by David Isaac in Washington Free Beacon that pointed out flaws), I will take this opportunity to point out some of the problematic sections in this account of Israel’s history.

Gordis does not profess to be a trained historian and his felicitous style masks the superficial treatment of several controversial topics of major import in Israel’s history, including the Altalena episode and the murder of Haim Arlosoroff, both of which roiled Israel’s society and politics from the early 1930’s (in the case of Arlosoff’s murder) to the present. After noting that the conviction of Jewish suspects was overturned by the British Court of Appeals, Rabbi Gordis concludes darkly that the murder “would not be the last time Jews killed Jews over political disagreements in the Jewish State”. This is despite the fact that it was never established that the murder of Arlosoroff was committed “over political disagreements”, nor that the killers were Jews. While Gordis writes that “Arlosoroff’s assassination remains a mystery,” he fails to indicate why this is so. Space precludes a discussion of the various speculations regarding the murder, including a possible connection to Arlosoroff’s alleged affair, while a student in Germany, with a close friend of his sister who subsequently became the wife of Joseph Goebbels. The thirty-four year old Arlosoroff was killed two days after he returned from negotiations in Germany arranged through Goebbels’ wife. The most plausible theory is that the killers were the two Arabs who actually confessed to the murder.

What is important to note is that the Arlosoroff murder left such an enduring scar on the Israeli body politic that in 1982, almost half a century after the crime, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, with cabinet approval, established an official commission of inquiry headed by David Bechor, a respected retired judge of Israel’s Supreme Court. In June 1985, after Begin’s retirement, the three man Bechor commission submitted a 202 page report unanimously exonerating the Revisionist suspects but failing to identify the perpetrators or to adduce new evidence in the case. Rabbi Gordis’s account gives no indication of the enduring impact on Israeli society of the Arlosoroff murder.

In discussing the ship named Altalena, whose destruction was the most divisive and dramatic episode in the birth of the State, Rabbi Gordis writes: “Suddenly, Palmach fighters …fired on the Altalena.” He fails to say that they did so on Ben-Gurion’s order or to mention his subsequent statement: “Blessed is the cannon that fired on the Altalena.” Sixteen Jews were killed, many others wounded, and large quantities of badly needed arms for the War of Independence destroyed. Gordis does write that among the Palmach commanders on the beach was Yitzhak Rabin, but without indicating that it was Rabin who commanded the group that first fired on the Altalena. In The Revolt, Menachem Begin devotes 22 pages to the discussion of the Altalena affair and it remains one of the most painful and controversial topics in Israel 69 years later.

In discussing the death of Avraham (“Yair”) Stern, the leader of Lechi (the underground group subsequently headed by future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir), Gordis asserts definitively that “Stern was killed in February 1942 in a shoot-out with British forces after a massive manhunt” (page 138). This is despite the fact that one of the three British officers alone with Stern admitted in an interview forty years later that the unarmed Stern was murdered in cold blood by a British officer. Even if Rabbi Gordis did not know this—and he should have—the official British story was considered highly suspect within the Jewish community from the beginning.

While noting that “Judea and Samaria [is] the biblical name by which many Israelis refer to it” (page 414), Dr. Gordis consistently refers to the area as “the West Bank.” This is an inexplicable distortion given the fact that the territory was universally called Judea and Samaria until 1950. In that year the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan annexed the land west of the Jordan River which it had seized in Israel’s War of Independence and began to refer to it as the “west bank” of the renamed Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Not only are the terms “Judea and Samaria” venerable names for the areas in question but they were precisely the names used by the League of Nations, by the British Mandatory authority,, and even by the United Nation General Assembly in its famous resolution 181. That U.N. Resolution, describing the projected boundary lines in the area now commonly called the “west bank”, used only the terms “Judea and Samaria”. To imply that those names were confined to ancient times is simply wrong.

Gordis describes the Gaza “disengagement” of 2005 as “a remarkable display of Israeli democracy at work” (page 335). Yet two pages later he contradicts himself, writing that “Sharon had run for office promising not to evacuate Gaza, and then never called for a plebiscite on the disengagement; the entire process struck many Israelis as fundamentally undemocratic.” Just so. While Gordis correctly states that Sharon never called for a plebiscite, he did call for, and pledged to abide by, a vote of the Likud party membership. When that vote went against him by a 3-2 margin Sharon simply repudiated his pledge. Moshe Arens stated that the disengagement would be “inconceivable in any democratic society in this day and age” and Yoel Marcus, a prominent liberal columnist who supported the “disengagement” wrote that the government’s methods engendered “this gnawing feeling of disgust inside me”. The high-handed undemocratic manner in which the retreat and destruction of Jewish settlements was handled divided Israel, to quote Daniel Pipes, “in ways that may poison the body politic for decades.“ Some “remarkable display of Israeli democracy at work”!

A Cloud Called Hezbollah by William Mehlman

Hezbollah, with an estimated 130,000-150,000 short, medium and long-range rockets steered by cutting-edge guidance systems, attack and suicide drones and the most advanced air defense hardware coming out of Russia, constitutes “the most serious conventional threat” Israel has faced since the major wars of l967 and 1973.

That’s the message coming out of the highly esteemed Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv. It’s an arsenal which exceeds the combined total of all 27 NATO nations, rated as capable of hitting Israeli targets, civilian and military, with 260 missiles every six hours, 1,200 a day. That they have not been unleashed has little to do with either the dwindling constraints of the Lebanese government which hosts this terrorist phenomenon on its southern border or the zero constraints of UNIFIL. UNIFIL is the alleged peace-keeping force that opted out, before the ink was dry, of its obligation under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 to prevent the rearming of Hezbollah following the termination of the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Two factors have kept the lid on a third Hezbollah strike against Israel, both of them linked to the terrorist organization’s financial and operational master, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The German daily Die Welt, citing Western sources, reported in April that Hezbollah is seriously overdrawn on its account with Tehran, the source of 75 percent of its weapons and the working capital critical to the support of 20,000 fighters and another 20,000 reservists. To put it bluntly, the “Party of Allah,” is flirting with bankruptcy, the direct result of its Iranian-ordered engagement in a war to defend and secure Bashar Hafez Assad’s power base in Syria. The generous remunerations to the families of the estimated 1,500-1,800 fighters who have been killed, the more than 6,000 wounded and the “hazardous duty” bonus allocations to the 8,000 on the front lines of this noble enterprise appear to have at least temporarily stalled plans for a major move against Israel.

The hidden danger to Israel lurking behind Hezbollah’s current financial straits is complacency. Major General Jim Molan, who served as Australia’s chief of operations in Iraq, writing in The Australian, contends that the current calm along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel may be as much a case of deception as necessity – an attempt to put Jerusalem off its guard. “It’s quiet,” he submits, “because Hezbollah wants it that way at present.” And that, of course, means Iran wants it that way until stagnant oil demand gets an expected summer boost and the till for a major operation against Israel is refreshed.

Indeed, any suggestion of permanency to the current quiet should have been dispelled by a Hezbollah sponsored “media tour” in April of the thin line separating Israel from its terrorist adversary. Conducted by a Hezbollah honcho in combat fatigues, it described in depth to the assembled journalists the IDF’s positions on the other side of the line, including a string of barricades designed to stall any breakthrough by infantry forces. Al Manar, Hezbollah’s official publication, quoted the tour leader as having told the journalists that the organization had developed “special tactics to deal with these structures” and boasted that it had compelled the “Zionist army for the first time in history to move to a defensive position.”

Reunification Only Way to Defuse Korea Crisis by John R. Bolton

Barack Obama’s foreign-policy failures, and those of his predecessors, regarding North Korea, are coming back to bedevil Donald Trump’s new presidency. Trump administration spokesmen have rightly said that Obama’s policy of “strategic patience,” a synonym for doing nothing, is over. But they have not yet articulated a replacement strategy.

Analysts across the political spectrum now believe that North Korea is perilously close to fabricating nuclear devices — at least five of which have already been detonated — small enough to mount on intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking targets within the continental United States. Some estimates posit this capability as early as 2018, with targets closer to the Korean Peninsula, including Japan and Hawaii likely at risk earlier.

Time is thus in desperately short supply, one of the fruits of 25 years of wasted efforts negotiating with Pyongyang. The harsh reality is that Kim Jung Un and his predecessors were never going to be chit-chatted out of their nuclear-weapons program, which they have always regarded as essential to regime survival. Neither persuasion nor coercion, nor any mix of the two, has succeeded before, and we have no reason to believe they will start succeeding now.

There are any number of suggestions about how to increase military pressure on North Korea, including scenarios for pre-emptive attacks against its nuclear and ballistic-missile assets. Certainly, no American president should be willing to countenance the risk to innocent U.S. civilians, and those of our vulnerable friends and allies in the region, that Pyongyang’s erratic leadership increasingly poses. Moreover, we must be sure China understands President Trump’s determination — reportedly explained in person to Chinese President Xi Jinping during the recent Mar-a-Lago summit — not to be held hostage by Pyongyang.

Unfortunately, however, years of savage Obama Administration defense budget cuts have rendered U.S. military options far from optimal. Obama underfunded national missile-defense programs, thereby rendering this last line of defense woefully inadequate compared to how President George W. Bush originally conceived it.

Donald Trump Withdraws From Climate Deal He Says Is Unfair to U.S. Trump says nation will begin negotiations to re-enter accord or start new deal on ‘fair’ terms By Eli Stokols and Rebecca Ballhaus

President Donald Trump said Thursday he has decided to withdraw the U.S. from the “draconian” Paris climate accord in an effort to boost American industry and independence, making a dramatic shift in policy despite intense lobbying from business leaders and close U.S. allies.

“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Mr. Trump said, calling the decision a “reassertion of our sovereignty.”

Mr. Trump said he would begin negotiations to either re-enter the agreement under new terms or craft a new deal that he judges fair to the U.S. and its workers.

Framing the decision mostly in economic and political terms, the president focused on the agreement’s benefits for the world’s other leading carbon emitters, China and India. He voiced his concern for protecting the environment and eschewed any reiteration of his past claims that climate change isn’t real, but he said his decision is rooted in protecting the country’s interests.

“This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the U.S.,” Mr. Trump said.

The president’s “America first” stance was aimed squarely at his own political base, as he claimed a political win by delivering on a bold campaign promise after several others have thus far been unfulfilled. He has muddled the NAFTA trade deal and declaring China a manipulator, and was talked down from moving the embassy in Israel.

Mr. Trump’s action represents a 180-degree turn from the agenda of former President Barack Obama. It was cheered by some domestic industries, notably independent coal, oil and gas companies, including Murray Energy Corp., the country’s largest privately held coal miner.

But many large U.S. corporations opposed the move, including Exxon Mobil Corp. , General Electric Co. and Apple Inc., whose chief executives all publicly argued in favor of remaining in the pact. After Mr. Trump’s announcement, Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk said he was withdrawing from the president’s advisory councils, saying the decision “is not good for America or the world.”

Many big companies said exiting the Paris deal would have little immediate impact on their investments and strategies because they are facing customer and shareholder demands to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. They also operate in other countries, and in U.S. states, where climate rules remain a fact of life, so they continue to face government pressure on the issue. CONTINUE AT SITE