RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Carlos Manuel Figuerosa Alvarez climbed over the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, U.S. officials turned him over to Cuban police, who, according to reports,detained him and immediately began to beat him. Did U.S. officials assess if Figuerosa’s safety was in jeopardy? Did they ignore the policy that a Cuban may be eligible for refugee status in the U.S. if they are a human rights activist or former political prisoner?

A recent report by the Director of National Intelligence showed that of those so far released from Guantanamo Bay, 116 have returned to terrorist or insurgent activities and another 69 are suspected of having done so. These figures represent nearly 30% of released detainees.

President Obama pledged, “We are not going to relent until we bring home Americans who are unjustly detained in Iran.” But “we” have relented. If not, what are “we” doing to secure the release of the four Americans unjustly in Iranian prison?

The Obama Administration, to the chagrin of opponents of rogue regimes and terrorism, has made generous deals with the autocratic governments of Cuba and Iran, and seems in the process of making the release of terrorist detainees in Guantanamo Bay a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

Yes, he just said that:

While giving a press conference in Paris, President Barack Obama told reporters that the mass shootings that plague the United States just never happen in other countries.

“With respect to Planned Parenthood, obviously, my heart goes out to the families of those impacted,” Obama said in response to a reporter’s question. “I mean, I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings; this just doesn’t happen in other countries.”

For those living under a rock, the city of Paris itself was just hit with a series of simultaneous terrorist attacks. The majority of 130 deaths were in mass shooting attacks, where the ISIS-affiliated terrorists attacked public places with automatic rifles. Nearly one hundred people alone were killed in just one mass shooting at the Bataclan theater.

Earlier this year, Paris was also the victim of a terrorist attack targeting the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists wielded assault rifles, killing 11 innocent people.

“We have one message,” Brandon Scott tells me. “We must stop killing each other. We’re not focused on any other issue.”

Mr. Scott is a city councilman in Baltimore, where jury selection began Monday in the trial of the first of six police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray in April. The deaths of Gray and other young black men who encountered police have prompted nationwide protests and ample media coverage over the past year. But Mr. Scott says that “it is unhelpful to only talk about the police behavior. For the most part in Baltimore, the violence is citizen-on-citizen.”

To that end, Mr. Scott and Munir Bahar, a community activist, co-founded 300 Men March, a volunteer organization that trains young men to patrol tough neighborhoods, urges kids to reject gang culture, and calls attention to the far more common inner-city violence that doesn’t involve police. The group, started in 2013, holds a yearly march in honor of the hundreds of annual victims of gun violence perpetrated mostly by gangs and drug crews in the city. Members sport T-shirts emblazoned with the simple message: We Must Stop Killing Each Other.

Mr. Scott stresses that reaching the men in these neighborhoods is key. “For far too long in Baltimore and many cities across the country, overwhelmingly the work at the community level has been done by women,” he says. “This is about getting men involved. When men are consistently engaged in a community and are present, a lot of the nonsense doesn’t take place.”

Before I thank Henry Kissinger, and before delivering my modest message, I feel obliged to alert college students, progressive academics and all other deeply sensitive souls that these words may contain phrases and ideas that challenge your prejudices. In other words, I formally declare this room an “unsafe space.”

I was honored when the Hudson Institute asked me to address this gathering, particularly as you, Henry, agreed to make the introduction—at the very least I knew that you would be diplomatic. Having been in China recently, and spent some time with President Xi Jinping, it is very clear to me how much China has changed and how much Henry played a role in that change.

And beyond China’s borders, your insightful volumes have taught us much on the arts of diplomacy and the profound role played by leaders and leadership, a quality in somewhat short supply today.

Leaders sense when difficult decisions must be taken, and that is a rare quality in an age too often defined by narcissism. No leader will fight for values, for principles, if their government is a value-free vacuum. Moral relativism is morally wrong.

For a U.S. secretary of state to suggest that Islamic terrorists had a “rationale” in slaughtering journalists is one of the low points of recent Western diplomacy, and it is indicative of a serious malaise.