RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/01/wokeism-goes-global-bidens-foreign-policy/

There are broadly two ways of conducting a foreign policy. The first is responding intelligently to events abroad as they occur, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brexit, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or as Harold Macmillan once said: “Events, dear boy, events.”

The second way, sometimes called a Grand Strategy, prescribes the general direction in which you want your country to go and the policies needed to get there. Thus, Brexit was intended to transform Britain from “a country at the heart of Europe” (John Major’s formulation) into Global Britain.

But since the policies needed to achieve Global Britain were never pursued or even devised because they were opposed by people in government and major British institutions, that grand strategy was stillborn. A successful grand strategy requires the government to know roughly how it wants each crisis to turn out without having to work out its responses from scratch.

President Biden has so far had a mixed record on responding to events: he did badly in Afghanistan but well over Ukraine, where his policy has rallied the Western alliance and frustrated Putin’s Russia. What explains his success in one case and failure in the other?

The answer lies in part in the unusual reality that US progressive Left—which currently dominates the Biden administration—sees America as a racist, sexist, homophobic and white supremacist country. That makes it ambivalent about America’s national interest. Even if it sees the necessity for some purposeful action in a crisis, it can’t want the outcome to benefit the US. At the very least that mindset must weaken and confuse the US even when it follows a prudent course.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19259/us-china-failing-deterrence

In just two years since 2020, when the Pentagon wrongly estimated that it would take China a decade to double its nuclear stockpile at the time of approximately 200 nuclear warheads, China has already doubled its stockpile.

“As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking, It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are. As those curves keep going, it isn’t going to matter how good our [operating plan] is or how good our commanders are, or how good our forces are – we’re not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem.” — Admiral Charles Richard, defense.gov, November 3, 2022.

Unfortunately, the US is facing China with a lot of outdated military hardware.

Instead of doing all in its power to counter those adversaries, however, the Department of Defense has been focusing precious time on extremism, diversity, equity and inclusion, and climate change within the military….

In July, the Senate Armed Services Committee called on the Pentagon to stop its programs to prevent and root out extremism within the military, most notably Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s “stand-down” directive, which the military spent 5.4 million hours on implementing, at a cost of more than $500,000.

Overall, since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, at a time when every effort should have been geared towards countering top military threats, the Department of Defense spent nearly six million hours on extremism, diversity, equity and inclusion training, and climate change.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin gave a stern warning about US competition with China earlier this month at the Reagan National Defense Forum:

“These next few years will set the terms of our competition with the People’s Republic of China. And they will determine whether our children and grandchildren inherit an open world of rules and rights — or whether they face emboldened autocrats who seek to dominate by force and fear…

“The PRC is the only country with both the will and, increasingly, the power to reshape its region and the international order to suit its authoritarian preferences.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/mustsee_video_tucker_carlson_takes_on_the_zelenskyy_money_grab.html

Last night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy showed up in Congress to demand money. As one, the entire body of American politicians swooned before the man. One person who did not swoon was Fox pundit Tucker Carlson, who pointed out some uncomfortable truths and asked the all-important question about our politicians joyously pushing us towards a hot war with a nuclear Russia. Who benefits?

Russia may be nuclear, and it may have a very nasty, cruel man at its head, but it’s important to note that Russia, despite its natural resources, is a nothing of a country. Unlike the former Soviet Union, which had tentacles, satellites, colonies, and interests around the globe, not to mention all sorts of unwilling neighboring countries swept into its net to make up that Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Russia is a smaller country with no serious interests abroad.

Yes, Putin meddles in Syria and Turkey, but he’s no Xi Jinping. Other than natural gas, which Europe needs, Russia has not coopted all of America’s manufacturing, from our clothes to our appliances to our medicines. Mostly, Russia does not affect us.

Indeed, there’s only one reason Russia is perceived as a threat, and that’s because leftists have come to believe their own Russia hoax accusation that Putin put Trump in the White House. He didn’t but, because Democrats and NeverTrumpers (i.e., the Republican establishment that hates Trump as much as the Democrats do) believe that, Putin must be destroyed.

What none of these fanatics have thought through is what happens if they are able to get rid of Putin. Who comes next? Xi? A megalomaniac with dreams that go beyond Russia’s current borders? Biden, who needs help putting on his pants in the morning so that the zipper faces forward, has no answers.

The insistence that Ukraine is a beleaguered democracy is nonsense, too. Ukraine is and has long been an utterly corrupt country to which Western politicians go to launder taxpayer money.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/volodymyr-zelensky-goes-to-washington-ukraine-vladimir-putin-russia-war-biden-administration-11671661698?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Washington on Wednesday is a symbolically important moment after 10 brutal months of war in Ukraine. With his first trip abroad since the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24, the Ukrainian President is signaling how vital the U.S. is to his country’s survival, as Vladimir Putin attempts to bomb Kyiv into submission, and maybe the Stone Age.

Mr. Zelensky, in his trademark fatigues, met President Biden at the White House and addressed Congress. He has been a brave and charismatic wartime leader, and his speech was eloquent in explaining that Ukraine is fighting for its independence as Americans once did. He thanked Americans for their support, and he sought more aid as the war moves into the harsh winter months.

Mr. Biden announced another $1.85 billion in military aid and hardware, including some long sought weapons that the U.S. has been reluctant to provide. The Pentagon will deliver a Patriot missile-defense battery to intercept more of Russia’s assault from the skies against civilians and electric-power sites. The shame is this will take weeks to deliver and could be there now if the U.S. had acted sooner.

The aid package also includes more ammo for the Himars artillery missile systems as well as “precision aerial munitions.” The latter are usually launched from fixed-wing aircraft, which makes us wonder why the U.S. has been reluctant to provide old F-16s.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19252/china-saudi-arabia-alliance

Nothing better illustrates the utter ineptitude of the Biden administration’s dealings with the Middle East than Saudi Arabia’s decision to forge a strategic alliance with China.

Biden set the tone for his strained relationship with the Saudi royal family during the 2020 presidential election contest when he denounced the kingdom as a “pariah” state over its involvement in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, although there has never any audible distress from the Biden administration over Iran’s 2007 abduction and presumed death of ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson.

By any standard, the deepening military cooperation between Russia and Iran should serve as a wake-up call to the Biden administration to redouble its efforts to reaffirm its commitment to key allies in the region such as the Saudis, who are committed to resisting any attempt by Tehran to expand its malign influence in the region.

That Riyadh is now moving away from its traditional alliance with the US and strengthening its ties with Beijing is a strategic disaster of epic proportions, and serves as a damning indictment of the Biden administration’s careless treatment of the Saudis, for which the president is personally to blame.

Nothing better illustrates the utter ineptitude of the Biden administration’s dealings with the Middle East than Saudi Arabia’s decision to forge a strategic alliance with China.

This is a time when Washington should be working overtime to strengthen its ties with long-standing allies like the Saudis to combat the mounting threat Iran poses to the region’s security.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/millions-in-hundred-dollar-bills-flown-to-the-taliban-for-humanitarian-aid/

As the Taliban were taking over Afghanistan, I predicted that Biden would fund the Taliban using “humanitarian aid” as a pretext. Since then, Biden has provided $1.1 billion in Afghan aid.

Despite assurances that the money would not go to the terrorists, the Biden administration issued global licenses authorizing financial transactions with the Taliban and the Al Qaeda allied Haqqani Network that include the “delivery and provision of humanitarian aid”.

Biden looted $3.5 billion from money awarded to the families of 9/11 victims in a lawsuit against the Taliban and put in a “trust fund” to provide “humanitarian aid”. His DOJ then went to court arguing that the judgment for the victims was too large and that it interfered with the Biden administration’s foreign policy in Afghanistan.

Now an Australian Broadcasting Corporation report has revealed massive stacks of hundred dollar bills sitting on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport. ABC noted that “the picture is just one of several images of United States $100 notes boxed, bagged, or bound in plastic, posted on Twitter by the Taliban-controlled central bank of Afghanistan in recent weeks.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/11/why-is-joe-biden-still-trying-to-raise-the-iran-nuclear-deal-from-the-dead/

After almost three months of incessant turmoil, the revolution in Iran has now engulfed more than 280 cities in each of the country’s 31 provinces.

The savage crackdown by the theocratic regime’s security forces has led to the deaths of at least 700 people and a demand for a full-scale independent inquiry by the UN. 30,000 protesters have been detained. In Tehran, a spokesman for the mullahs’ judiciary, Massoud Setayeshi, confirmed this week that another five people had been sentenced to death for their role in the uprising, bringing the total number of death penalties handed down to protesters so far to eight.

The mullahs’ regime has executed over 500 people this year, in a wave of killing designed to crush opposition. Many of those sentenced have been accused of “moharebeh” or “corruption on earth,” a charge which carries the mandatory death penalty in Iran.

Undeterred, industrial action and boycotts by shop owners, hospital staff, factory workers, truck drivers and university students, in solidarity with the uprising, have developed into a general strike which has paralyzed the nation.

The clerical regime, led by the elderly and fanatical Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has oppressed and brutalized the Iranian people for four decades, but is now at its weakest point since the 1979 revolution that brought the mullahs to power. The daily mass protests resonate with chants of “Death to Khamenei” as demonstrators demand the downfall of the regime.