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September 2017

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The fringe has the momentum as farce and hatred go hand in hand at the Labour conference Marcus Dysch

By on September 29th, 2017

Tuesday morning’s row on the conference floor over how Labour will challenge and punish Jew-hatred was in equal parts shambolic and frightening.

Jews attacking Jews. Israel hated at every turn. Age-old tropes spewed from the podium. How the antisemites must have loved the Labour conference.

What an absolute shower. If ever there was an example of farce combined with despicable antisemitism, this was it.

Tuesday morning’s row on the conference floor over how Labour will challenge and punish Jew-hatred was in equal parts shambolic and frightening.

It is now beyond doubt who is truly running Labour. The mainstream has been blown away and the hard-left is tightening its grip on the party’s soul.

The absence of moderate MPs was noticeable in Brighton. Those who came were largely silent in public. This is a different party now and all discussion of leadership challenges or post-Corbyn reformation is redundant.

All the old boys were back — Ken Livingstone and Ken Loach all over the airwaves offering their unwanted views on Jews and the Holocaust; and amid it all, there was Mr Corbyn, on the dais, watching silently. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn.

The atmosphere around the main conference centre was horrible. I watched a group of delegates scream “f*** off” as Tom Watson, deputy leader, spoke, before bemoaning missing the opportunity to “bodycheck” Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC political editor, as she ran by. Then they asked John McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor, to sign autographs — and all of this within five minutes.

The depth of the party’s problem with antisemitism was all too visible – and this year it came with a new level of frightening warnings.

“Be careful,” one opponent of the proposed rule changes said from the podium, in what seemed to be a thinly-veiled threat followed swiftly by an antisemitic trope about collusion with right-wing media.

There was criticism of the Jewish Labour Movement after it put out leaflets on the eve of the rule change vote urging people to “help Jeremy Corbyn fight antisemitism”.

Mr Corbyn, remember, keeps telling us how much he hates abuse, but could not bring himself to utter just three words in his main speech: “Don’t be antisemitic”.

It was embarrassing to hear Emily Thornberry try to explain that he was not at the Labour Friends of Israel reception because he was preparing his speech, while he was partying his way through at least four other events.

JLM’s efforts in the past 18 months have been worthwhile but bringing up the leader’s name — with all that he implies for Jewish voters — amid days of foul rhetoric looked a misstep.

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What Parades in Pyongyang Ends Up in Tehran By Uzi Rubin

By on September 29th, 2017

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The latest parade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard displayed a new ballistic missile, the Khorramshahr. Though it had been modified to appear less threatening, the new missile matches a North Korean ballistic missile known by different names in the West, including BM25. The Khorramshahr could eventually enable Tehran to threaten the capitals of Europe with nuclear warheads, and it raises the level of the Iranian missile threat to Israel.https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/parades-pyongyang-ends-up-tehran/

Iran’s leaders love military parades and hold them twice a year. The first is in April, when the Iranian Armed Forces – the legacy of the Shah’s imperial military machine – celebrates “Army Day.” During the second annual parade, in September, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) celebrates “Sacred Defense Week,” which commemorates the eight-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

The IRGC overlaps the official armed forces in almost every respect, deploying its own infantry, armor, air force, and navy. But it possesses one service that is uniquely its own: a strategic missile force. The IRGC is tasked by the regime to develop, manufacture, and deploy Iran’s long-range as well as tactical-range missiles, including the famous liquid propellant Shahab 3 missiles and the somewhat less renowned solid propellant Sejjil 2 missiles.

The IRGC’s annual parade is a combination of carnival, exhibition of future projects, and demonstration of military power. The parade is arranged by order of significance. It ends with columns of mobile long-range ballistic missiles on their launchers, preceded by trucks bearing banners that read “Death To America” and “Death To Israel” in three languages: Persian, Arabic, and English (the English version is somewhat more polite: “Down With” rather than “Death To”). This latter part of the parade gets most of the world’s attention because it flaunts Iran’s new missiles.

At the latest parade, on September 22, the Iranians displayed a brand new ballistic missile, dubbed the “Khorramshar” (after a border city where an epic battle of the Iran-Iraq war took place). It was hauled on the same TEL (transporter erector launcher) that is used for the Shahab 3 and the Sejjil, but the missile itself was evidently thicker and shorter. The Iranians covered its bottom section, presumably to hide its propulsion system and thus obscure its source. But this precaution did not help: Most observers immediately associated the “Khorramshar” with the North Korean HS10 IRBM, first displayed in Pyongyang in 2010. Indeed, in a video the Iranians released shortly after the Tehran parade showing a flight test (the only one to date) of the Khorramshar, it appeared to be leaving a trail of flame similar to that of its North Korean twin.

These two missiles – the North Korean and the Iranian – originated in development programs that North Korea commissioned at the Makeyev missile factory in Russia immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. At the time, Russia’s defense industry, like the country in general, had reached a nadir, and the new government of President Yeltsin had difficulty supervising the arms factories. The Makeyev factory had been one of the pillars of the Soviet ballistic missile industry; it had developed the original Scud and the first seaborne ballistic missile of the Soviet Union, originally called the R27. This submarine-launched missile carried a single nuclear warhead of an unknown weight with a range of about 2,500 km (in improved models, the range increased to 3,500 km).

When Pyongyang came calling in the early 1990s, the Makeyev factory, like all the other former Soviet arms factories, was out of work and its engineers out of a livelihood. Almost anything could be bought from them. The North Koreans exploited the Russians’ distress and commissioned the Makeyev factory to develop two new missiles: a 1:1.5 scale-up of the Scud missile with a range of over 1,000 km; and a conversion of the sea-launched R27 (which was being phased out by the Russian Navy) into a mobile ground-launched missile.

The first project ended successfully, and the new missile, which in the West was called the Nodong (or Rodong), was displayed in Pyongyang in 2010. The second project was apparently stopped by the Russian government before completion, but the design documentation and the already manufactured components were transferred to North Korea along with a quantity of parts – mostly rocket engines – of R27 missiles that had been collected from Russian junk yards.

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US Ambassador: Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria ‘part of Israel’

By on September 29th, 2017

US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman supports the legal rights of Jewish communities beyond the 1967 boundaries, signaling a fresh approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In an expansive interview with Israeli media outletWalla!, the US Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, provided insight into the direction the US envisions for Israel as the Jewish state navigates shifting alliances in the region and its approach to resolving the Palestinian conflict. Among the topics Friedman addressed were Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and the future of the two-state solution.

With regard to the first point, Friedman explained, “I think the settlements are part of Israel,” which “was always the expectation when [UN] Resolution 242 was adopted.” Friedman added, “The 1967 borders were viewed by everybody as not secure. There was always supposed to be some expectation of [Israeli] expansion” into Judea and Samaria.

Friedman referred to the “important nationalistic, historical, and religious significance”of these communities, commenting, “I think the settlers view themselves as Israelis, and Israel views the settlers as Israelis.”

When asked about the prospects for moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, Friedman reiterated to Walla! that it was a question of “when not if,” and stressed that “most importantly [the US would] recognize Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the state of Israel and of the Jewish people.”

In discussing the broader geopolitical landscape for Israel in the year 2017, Friedman identified “more interest and flexibility in the Arab world generally,” commenting that “there are natural alliances between Israel and the Gulf, and Egypt and Jordan, that didn’t exist ten years ago and those are going to be an important factor in contributing to opportunities.”

When pressed on the fate of the “two-state solution,” Friedman responded, “Conceivably I think that phrase has largely lost it’s meaning … it’s not a helpful term because it just doesn’t mean the same thing to different people.” Friedman concluded, “The solution comes first, then we deal with the label.”

By: World Israel News Staff

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A swamp creature of the Clinton genus By Thomas Lifson

By on September 29th, 2017

Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation has uncovered a fascinating vignette from the swamp, involving high-level secrets, Clinton friends, and apparent failure to obey the rules. Oh, yeah – and money.

A company whose president is “best friends” with Chelsea Clinton received more than $11 million in contracts over the last decade from a highly secretive Defense Department think tank, but to date, the group lacks official federal approval to handle classified materials, according to sensitive documents TheDCNF was allowed to view.

Jacqueline Newmyer, the president of a company called the Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG), has over the last 10 years received numerous Department of Defense (DOD) contracts from a secretive think tank called Office of Net Assessment (ONA).

The important context here is the practice of contracting out highly sensitive policy-related functions to people who may or may not be reliable, because they and or their facilities have not gone through proper screening.

Adam Lovinger, a whistleblower and 12-year ONA veteran, has repeatedly warned ONA’s leadership they faced risks by relying on outside contractors as well as the problem of cronyism, and a growing “revolving door” policy where ONA employees would leave the defense think tank and join private contractors to do the same work.

This is classic example of Beltway Bandits cashing in and building big businesses, cutting themselves in for a piece of the action. The government pays more, the workers get more, the contractor take a percentage off the top, and everybody wins – except taxpayers. This happens on a vast scale, and when national security is involved, the stakes are high.

Still, the nature of the work performed for all those millions has a whiff of cronyism more than security lapses.

One of Lovinger’s main complaints about ONA was that many of the reports contractors imparted very little new information to the think tank. “Over the years ONA’s analytic staff has expressed how they learn very little from many (if not most) of our often very thin and superficial contractor reports,” he wrote in the Sept. 30, 2016 email.

Some of LTSG’s reports bear out Lovinger’s critique. A September 2010 LTSG report, titled “Trends in Elite American Attitudes Toward War,” came to the astounding conclusion that, “American intellectuals have for the last century held considerably more cosmopolitan views than their non-intellectual counterparts.”

Another LTSG report was “On the Nature of Americans as a Warlike People.”

Lovinger also suggested in a March 3, 2017 memo to the record that contractor studies should be peer reviewed. “There has never been an external review of these contractors’ research products,” he said, adding, “It is now clear that over several decades the office transferred millions of dollars to inexperienced and unqualified contractors.”

The contempt for taxpayers is almost palpable here.

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NFL: The National Felons League Crime Spree By Daniel John Sobieski

By on September 29th, 2017

It is hard to say what exactly NFL players who take a knee during the national anthem are protesting, but if it is alleged social injustice and police brutality against African-Americans, these players have to explain their own record of brutality and injustice against their fellow Americans.

We are all familiar with the workplace sign touting the number of days since the last accident. NFL locker rooms should have a sign showing the last player arrest for a criminal act. As of September 25, as Joseph Curl points out at the Daily Wire, it had been a mere 23 days since the last NFL player had been arrested for a crime. The average is about a week between NFL player arrests:

The average time between arrests is just seven days, while the record without an arrest is slightly more than two months, at 65 days, according to NFLarrest.com, which “provides an interactive visualized database of National Football League player Arrests & Charges,” the site says.

Players get arrested for a variety of crimes: drunk driving, drug offenses, domestic violence, assault and battery, gun violations, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, theft, burglary, rape and even murder

The NFL virtually embraces players who abuse women. Take this report in the Chicago Tribune: “In the first round [of the 2017 draft], the Oakland Raiders drafted Gareon Conley, who has been accused of rape. In the second round, the Cincinnati Bengals selected Joe Mixon, who in a much-viewed video punches a woman so hard that she falls down unconscious. In the sixth round, the Cleveland Browns selected Caleb Brantley, who was accused of doing pretty much what Mixon did.”

You might not be able to access NFLarrest.com. Recently the website was down due to heavy traffic, probably from disgruntled fans, many of them veterans, curious about the hypocrisy of the NFL and its players regarding violence and brutality. An early 2017 database of NFL player-criminals is available here.

Perhaps the most notorious NFL player-criminal was Aaron Hernandez of the New England Patriots, who was convicted of murder:

Aaron Hernandez’s murder conviction was formally vacated on Tuesday by a judge in Massachusetts because Mr. Hernandez died before his appeal was heard.

Mr. Hernandez, a former tight end with the New England Patriots, was convicted in 2015 in the killing of Odin L. Lloyd, who was dating the sister of his fiancée. Mr. Hernandez hanged himself in prison last month….

“In our book, he’s guilty, and he’s going to always be guilty,” Mr. Lloyd’s mother, Ursula Ward, told reporters after the ruling.

Another player arrested for a criminal act which killed people was Leonard Little. If you want talk about flaws in the criminal justice system, look at his crimes and the meager punishment:

Little was a star player in college and was drafted as an All-American into the NFL in 1998. The same year the North Carolina native started playing for the big leagues, Little left a birthday party drunk and decided to drive home anyway. In an inebriated state, the St. Louis Rams player drove through a red light, crashed into a vehicle, killing a mother and two children. Little was lucky and didn’t go to prison but instead received four years probation and 1,000 hours of community service. In 2004, Little was arrested again for driving drunk upon failing three roadside sobriety tests. He was sentenced to two years probation.

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The Iran Deal Isn’t Worth Saving The idea of ‘decertifying’ the agreement but staying in it is too cute by half. Trump should cut cleanly. John Bolton

By on September 29th, 2017

‘Cut, and cut cleanly,” Sen. Paul Laxalt advised Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, urging the Philippine president to resign and flee Manila because of widespread civil unrest. The Nevada Republican, Ronald Reagan’s best friend in Congress, knew what his president wanted, and he made the point with customary Western directness.

President Trump could profitably follow Mr. Laxalt’s advice today regarding Barack Obama’s 2015 deal with Iran. The ayatollahs are using Mr. Obama’s handiwork to legitimize their terrorist state, facilitate (and conceal) their continuing nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs, and acquire valuable resources from gullible negotiating partners.

Mr. Trump’s real decision is whether to fulfill his campaign promise to extricate America from this strategic debacle. Last week at the United Nations General Assembly, he lacerated the deal as an “embarrassment,” “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”

Fearing the worst, however, the deal’s acolytes are actively obscuring this central issue, arguing that it is too arduous and too complex to withdraw cleanly. They have seized instead on a statutory requirement that every 90 days the president must certify, among other things, that adhering to the agreement is in America’s national-security interest. They argue the president should stay in the deal but not make the next certification, due in October.

This morganatic strategy is a poorly concealed ploy to block withdrawal, limp through Mr. Trump’s presidency, and resurrect the deal later. Paradoxically, supporters are not now asserting that the deal is beneficial. Instead, they concede its innumerable faults but argue that it can be made tougher, more verifiable and more strictly enforced. Or, if you want more, it can be extended, kicked to Congress, or deferred during the North Korea crisis. Whatever.

As Richard Nixon said during Watergate: “I want you to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up, or anything else if it’ll save it—save the plan.”

Mr. Trump should not be deceived. The issue is not certification. The issue is whether we will protect U.S. interests and shatter the illusion that Mr. Obama’s deal is achieving its stated goals, or instead timidly hope for the best while trading with the enemy, as the Europeans are doing. It is too cute by half to employ pettifoggery to evade this reality. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Reality Check for NYC Department of Education By Marilyn Penn

By on September 29th, 2017

You know how low the bar is when you read the proud statement that no one has been murdered in a NYC high school sine 1992. You also know how meaningless a 73% high school graduation rate is in a school where more than half of those graduates were chronically absent in their senior year. The middle school that feeds into that high school had a pass rate of 13% on the statewide reading test and 5% in math. Simply put, 87% of the students who couldn’t read at an 8th grade level and 95% who couldn’t do 8th grade math were promoted into high school and subsequently shoved out with diplomas regardless of academic competence This Bronx high school with the lofty title of The Urban Assembly Wildlife Conservation School is headed by a non-profit organization that also runs 20 other schools in New York, all with pretentious claims to professional aspirations in law, justice, global commerce, media studies, environmentalism etc. It’s in the news today because it appears that one of the eponymous wildlife was actually inside the school and stabbed two fellow students, killing one and hospitalizing the other.

On its website, The Urban Assembly lists three pages of prestigious partners from the public, private, not-for-profit and higher education sectors – such impressive names as the Office of the Bronx D.A., JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Brooklyn Law School – even the New York Yankees. Will these partners look more closely at the 20 other schools supervised by this group now that the shocking failure rates on standardized tests give the lie to that inflated high school graduation rate? The murder has spurred demands for metal detectors in these schools but there should be an equal demand for mental detection on the part of overseers and the Chancellor of Education What is the point of a Board of Advisors and support from the community if they are not challenging the lack of achievement in the most basic tools of learning – reading and math? You can’t have a future in any career if you can’t read or count. And who is checking the budgetary expenses of schools with glaring disparities between test results and graduation rates? This is a red flag even for do-gooders suffering from cognitive dissonance and especially for politicos who have been steadily pushing the scandalous crisis in education under a thickly piled rug.

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France May Finally Be Getting Serious About Anti-Semitic Violence A hate-crime law has been in effect since 2003, but until recently prosecutors hesitated to employ it. By Eliora Katz

By on September 29th, 2017

Seventy-eight-year-old Roger Pinto was sitting in his suburban Paris home the night of Sept. 7 when three young men broke in and cut off the electricity. They knocked Mr. Pinto unconscious, according to his account, and when he came to, one of them said: “The Jews have lots of money, and you will give us what you have.”

They tied up and beat Mr. Pinto, his 72-year-old wife and their son, held them for several hours, and eventually ran off with jewelry, cash and credit cards. The Pintos were treated for minor injuries. Authorities are investigating the attack as a hate crime: “The motivation for this cowardly act seems directly related to the religion of the victims,” said Interior Minister Gérard Collomb.

Such an acknowledgment is unusual in France. Parliament enacted a hate-crime law in 2003, in response to attacks on Jews during the height of the second intifada in Israel. But the idea of crimes motivated by bias sits uncomfortably with the French Republican model, based on the notion of integration into a uniform national identity. France officially does not classify its citizens according to race, religion or ethnicity.

Thus officials have often equivocated about designating anti-Semitic attacks as hate crimes. In 2014 four armed burglars allegedly broke into a young Jewish couple’s residence and raped the 19-year-old woman while pinning down her partner. As in the Pinto case, the suspects demanded money, asserting: “Jews, you have money at home, you do not put it in the bank.” Prosecutors charged the suspects with group rape, robbery and abduction but dropped hate-crime charges this past February.

French authorities initially denied anti-Semitic motives in the brutal 2006 kidnapping, torture and murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi by a band of Muslim thugs styling themselves the Gang of Barbarians, only to acknowledge them at trial three years later. The clues weren’t hard to find: When the working-class Halimis couldn’t pay the ransom his captors initially demanded, the gang replied: “Go and get it from your synagogue.” They also contacted a rabbi and told him: “We have a Jew.”

This past April Sarah Halimi, a 66-year-old Orthodox Jew (who had no direct relation to Ilan Halimi), was killed when a neighbor allegedly broke into her third-story Paris apartment, beat her and pushed her out the window. The suspect was captured in another neighbor’s apartment, where he was holed up chanting verses from the Quran. (The suspect has claimed insanity.) Only last week, after months of pressure from the Jewish community, did French prosecutors classify Sarah Halimi’s killing as a hate crime.

Jews have also been prominent public targets. A man pledging allegiance to Islamic State killed four at a Parisian kosher supermarket just after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015, and Mohammed Merah’s 2012 shooting rampage at a Jewish school in Toulouse also took four lives. Pro-Palestinian protesters chanted “Death to the Jews” and “ Hitler was right” in 2014, as they marched through Paris setting Jewish shops ablaze and besieging synagogues. Street assaults, graffiti and taunts are common.

The violence and hostility are taking a toll on the community. Whereas 30 years ago most French Jews enrolled their children in public schools, only about one-third do today. Some 40,000 French Jews have emigrated since 2006, more than 20,000 of them between 2014 and 2016. After the 2015 supermarket murder, 12,000 soldiers were deployed to protect Jewish institutions. But there are half a million Jews in France, and the army isn’t big enough to guard all of their homes. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Never-Trump Triumvirate What do Rand Paul, Susan Collins and John McCain have in common? Very little. By Kimberley A. Strassel

By on September 29th, 2017

The press corps is busy quizzing the president, the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader on their plans for tax reform. The question is why they aren’t chasing after the three people who actually hold all the power.

If the past eight months have proved anything, it is that all the 24/7 news coverage of Donald Trump’s antics, all the millions of words devoted to Paul Ryan’s and Mitch McConnell’s plans, have been a complete waste of space and time. In the end, control of the entire policy agenda in Washington comes down to three senators. Three senators whom most Americans have never had a chance to vote for or against. Three senators who comprise 8% of their party conference. Arizona’s John McCain, Maine’s Susan Collins and Kentucky’s Rand Paul. Forget Caesar, Crassus and Pompey. Meet the Never-Trump Triumvirate.

At least the House Freedom Caucus scuttles GOP legislation based on shared principles. Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have also led revolts against bills, again based on shared criticisms. But what do the Arizona maverick, the Maine moderate and the Kentucky libertarian have in common? Very little.

Well, very little save motivations that go beyond policy. And that is the crucial point that is missing from the endless analyses of the McCain-Collins-Paul defections on health care. The media has treated the trio’s excuses for killing their party’s top priority as legit, despite the obvious holes in their objections over policy and process. What in fact binds the three is their crafting of identities based primarily on opposition to their party or Mr. Trump. This matters, because it bodes very ill for tax reform in the Senate. Overcoming policy objections is one thing. Overcoming egos is another.

Mr. McCain, who is gravely ill with brain cancer, has decided his final legacy will be a return to the contrarian “straight talk” persona of old, which wins him liberal media plaudits. The Arizonan has never gotten over losing the presidency, and it clearly irks him that Mr. Trump succeeded where he failed. His personal disdain for the president is obvious, and his implausible excuses for opposing the Graham-Cassidy health-care reform are proof that this is personal.

Ms. Collins is reportedly days away from deciding whether she’ll ditch the Senate gig and run for governor. That potential campaign has guided her every move for at least a year now—perhaps her entire career—and was clearly among her reasons last summer to abandon her party’s nominee and publicly excoriate Mr. Trump. It is a basic precept in Washington that Sen. Collins votes in whatever way best serves Sen. Collins. Right now that means being Never Trump.

Mr. Paul worked hard during his first Senate campaign to reassure Kentuckians that he was not his father, and it turns out that’s very true. Because even Ron Paul was to be found with his party’s House majority on issues that truly mattered, and largely saved his defections for the lost causes that produced 434-1 votes. Sen. Paul’s standards for “conservative” policy are as varying as the wind, and lately they blow toward whatever position can earn him the title of purest man in Washington.

The press was fixated this week on Mr. McConnell’s bad week, which is an easy piece to write. But it ignores the obvious reality that the Triumvirate seems to have never had any intention of letting its party succeed. After all, a senator who intended to stand firm on “regular order,” as Mr. McCain said, would have informed his colleagues of that demand at the beginning, rather than allow his colleagues to set up for another vote and then dramatically tank it (again) at the last minute. A senator who voted for “skinny” ObamaCare repeal in the summer on the grounds that anything was “better than no repeal,” in the words of Mr. Paul, would not suddenly engineer an unreachable set of demands for his vote on an even better repeal.

The Senate has no lack of lime-lighters. Nor is it low on Trump critics. Think Nebraska’s Ben Sasse and Arizona’s Jeff Flake. The difference is that the clear majority of the critics aren’t allowing ambition or disdain get in the way of votes for better policy.

But this raises the question of whether the White House understands that the Triumvirate is also the prize on tax reform. Mr. Trump took a shot at Mr. McConnell this week, but the president needs to shift his focus to those who hold the actual power. Those dinner invites to Chuck and Nancy would be better reserved for Ms. Collins. Its internal conversations need to focus on what forms of flattery or policy or misery might appeal to the political motivations of Messrs. McCain and Paul, and get them on side. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Prepare for the Worst With North Korea By Matthew R. Costlow

By on September 29th, 2017

Failure is an option, especially when it comes to U.S. policy towards North Korea. Decades of diplomatic efforts have failed to de-nuclearize and pacify Kim Jong Un’s regime while parallel efforts to deter small-scale conventional and large-scale cyber-attacks have also failed.

Despite these failures, however, U.S. policy-makers appear to still be enamored with the idea of getting up, dusting themselves off, and going for one more spin on the North Korean nuclear merry-go-round: provocation, emergency U.N. Security Council meeting, a new round of sanctions, failure of diplomatic talks, provocation, ad infinitum.

There are ways to break this cycle and achieve some form of success, options which the Trump administration appears to be considering.

However, while the Trump administration hopes for success in these endeavors, it should not forget to prepare for failure. Previous failures in U.S. and allied diplomacy and deterrence have led to dozens of deaths and millions of dollars in damages. Future failures could lead to the death of millions and damages measured in trillions of dollars.

Paradoxically, preparing for failure, in either diplomacy or deterrence, is the greatest way to increase the probability of success. If Kim Jong Un believes the United States can mitigate or significantly contain the consequences of a failure of diplomacy or deterrence, he may be less likely to initiate a provocation in the first place.

So what does preparing for failure look like in U.S. policy?

To begin, U.S. and allied policy-makers must examine why deterrence has failed, or nearly failed, in the past. For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Cuban leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara both lobbied for the use of Soviet nuclear weapons against the United States to advance the cause of the “socialist camp.” The Cuban leaders were rational in their own atypical non-Western way but were willing, even eager, to die for their cause. Kim Jong Un may not be all that different. His provocations may look crazy to the Western mind, but coldly rational to him.

The difficulty of deterrence is that it does not work in the same way universally, considering the diverse set of cultural values that each foreign leader holds. Demonstrating this reality in an academic setting, researchers in comparative psychology recently showed East Asians and Westerners the same picture for a short period of time and then asked the subjects what they remembered about the picture. The two groups, who saw the exact same picture, gave very different answers, in part, due to their cultural values which compelled them to focus on some things in the picture and not others.

This same dynamic recently manifest itself on the Korean peninsula. A few weeks ago, the U.S. military made the decision to withhold U.S. bombers from bilateral exercises with the South Koreans to signal North Korea its willingness to de-escalate the situation. Days later North Korea tested its largest-yield nuclear weapon ever. In the words of General Vincent K. Brooks, Commander of U.S. Forces Korea: “Apparently the changes in the exercise did not matter.” Both sides saw the same picture but gave different answers.

In fact, there is very good evidence that North Korean leaders hold dramatically different cultural values than the United States, namely, their elevation and devout protection of their leader’s “honor.” U.S. leaders regularly accept offenses to their honor as the price of politics. However, East Asian cultures in general, and North Korea, in particular, hold honor in much higher regard and are willing to go to greater lengths to defend it. This has major implications for the failure of deterrence and diplomacy.

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