RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-united-nations-security-council-ceasefire-israel-hamas-china-russia-6e05fe71?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The Biden Administration got what it wanted Friday at the United Nations, and Israel will pay the price. Tired of being criticized for supporting an ally, the U.S. proposed a cease-fire resolution that was anti-Israel enough to draw 11 of the Security Council’s 15 votes while still baiting Russian and Chinese vetoes.

To garner meaningless votes, the Biden Administration revised its initial resolution to introduce more daylight between the U.S. and Israel. The final U.S. draft “determines the imperative of an immediate and sustained cease-fire” to protect civilians and facilitate more aid but not necessarily to free Israeli hostages. That direct linkage was dropped from a prior draft.

Instead, the linkage comes only at a remove, in expressing support for diplomacy “to secure such a cease-fire in connection with the release of all remaining hostages.” The U.S. couldn’t “demand” the release of hostages if it wants to be popular at the U.N. In case President Biden forgot, among the 134 hostages left in Gaza are five U.S. citizens who may still be alive.

Despite all the word games, Russia and China vetoed the resolution, as all knew they would. The resolution includes several obvious poison pills for these nations, including condemnation of Hamas. The U.N., for all its posturing, won’t do that.

This allowed the U.S. Ambassador to comment right after the veto that “Russia and China still could not bring itself to condemn Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Oct. 7. Can we just pause on that for a moment?” It’s worth reflection, but at the U.N. condemning Hamas for Oct. 7 is a way of trying to draw a veto, not get a text passed.

After that veto, the Council passed a resolution demanding more delivery of humanitarian aid, with no condemnation of Hamas and no cease-fire. The U.S. and Russia abstained.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/21/american-in-retreat-a-record-11-embassies-have-been-evacuated-under-biden/

With the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Haiti last week, President Joe Biden extended his historic lead for fleeing embassies – a dubious distinction once held by Barack Obama.

That’s according to the Daily Signal, which dug into the records and found that as the world has slipped into chaos over the past three years, the U.S. has been forced to withdraw from embassy after embassy.

“Since Biden took office in January 2021, his State Department has partially or fully evacuated 11 U.S. embassies via what are known as authorized or ordered departure directives,” writes Tony Kinnett. The number is actually 14 if you count the fact that this is the fourth time Biden has ordered Americans to bolt from the U.S. embassy in Haiti.

Biden is now well ahead of Obama, who ran from eight embassies over his eight years in office (which included those in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and South Sudan). During Donald Trump’s term, only three embassies were evacuated, Kinnett reports.

The Biden embassy evacuation timeline:

Burma, March 2021
Chad, April 2021
Afghanistan, July 2021
Ethiopia, November 2021
Ukraine, February 2022
Belarus, February 2022
Russia, February 2022
Nigeria, October 2022
Sudan, April 2023
Niger, August 2023
Haiti, November 2021, December 2022, July 2023, March 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-weakens-americas-global-clout-defense-budget-deterrence-failure-44d13d14?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

With Niger’s gross domestic product at a miserable $545 per person in 2022, the United Nations ranks the landlocked country as one of the five least-developed nations on the planet.

Over the weekend Niger’s government responded to American accusations that it was negotiating to sell uranium to Iran by ending military cooperation with the U.S. The decision is another win for Vladimir Putin’s effort to extend Russian power, a welcome boost to Iran, and a serious blow to America’s plans for combating the return of jihadist violence across a swath of Africa.

It is also one more sign that the Biden administration is losing its ability to shape international events.

In blowing off President Biden, Niger’s military junta is joining a global trend. Mr. Putin renews his threats of nuclear use, rejects talk of diplomacy and hints at even greater ambitions as he grinds out bloody conquests in Ukraine. Iran is helping one of its proxies close the Red Sea while another fires missiles and rockets into Israel. North Korea is beefing up its nuclear and conventional forces. China is massively boosting defense spending while pressing its advantages across the Indo-Pacific and into the Western hemisphere. From Haiti to Sudan, warlords and gang bosses thumb their noses at American diplomatic efforts to restore stability.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-nuclear-program-international-atomic-energy-agency-rafael-grossi-biden-administration-98b75965?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The Iranian nuclear program hasn’t gone away, even if the Biden Administration would rather pretend it has. Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, shared troubling news Monday: “The Agency has lost continuity of knowledge in relation to [Iran’s] production and inventory of centrifuges, rotors and bellows, heavy water and uranium ore concentrate.”

In plainer English, the world is in the dark, raising the risk that Iran accumulates a secret stock of advanced centrifuges to pursue a quiet nuclear breakout.

The IAEA’s new quarterly report finds that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium continues to increase, though Iran tried to offset the bad press with a slight decrease in its level of uranium enriched up to 60%. The Institute for Science and International Security, which has followed Iran’s program for years, says Iran can enrich enough uranium for 13 nuclear weapons, seven in the first month of a breakout. “Iran is able to produce more weapon-grade uranium (WGU) and at a faster rate since the IAEA’s last report in November 2023,” it finds.

Tehran won’t allow key monitoring equipment into the country, and it has excluded some of the IAEA’s most experienced inspectors. Under such conditions, the world can hardly rely on the IAEA to detect diversion of nuclear materials to new and undeclared facilities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20463/losing-war-to-houthis

What is the Biden administration doing wrong? Apart from scale, it’s trying to target Houthi drones and missiles, and some air bases…. This is the same approach that failed in Iraq….

When rockets are targeted, the terrorists run away and regroup, but when the terrorists are targeted, they have to keep running, so they don’t have the time and space to regroup.

That is what the proposed hostage deal and the various calls for a ‘ceasefire’ are really about.

Biden is unwilling to target the Houthis and so they keep attacking.

Given a choice between alienating the country and his party’s terror supporters, he chose a middle ground of “show” strikes… that will avoid offending terror supporters but also will not end the Houthi attacks.

This strategy serves no one except Biden who has sacrificed the nation’s prestige, a major international waterway and the lives of two U.S. Navy SEALs to win an election.

After President Joe Biden came home from his Caribbean vacation, the Deputy Defense Secretary came back from hers and the Secretary of Defense was on the verge of being released from the hospital, airstrikes were finally authorized against the Houthi Jihadis attacking ships in the Red Sea.

Biden said that the air strikes sent “a clear message that the United States and our partners will not tolerate attacks on our personnel or allow hostile actors to imperil freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most critical commercial routes.”