RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18346/houthis-iran-irgc-terrorist-list

The Houthis are a dangerous and deadly, terrorist group based in Yemen. Recently, senior Houthi leader Mohammed Ali al-Houthi went on an antisemitic tirade in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stating, “It is because its President is Jewish. Any country run by a Jew ends up going to war.”

Does the Biden administration find such racist, slanderous statements acceptable? Will the Biden administration refute it? Or will they passively accept such slander the same way they passively accepted the Taliban taking over Afghanistan or Putin invading Ukraine?

The Biden administration would do well to make sure that something comes at a cost. It is this backwards and hateful way of thinking that underpins the atrocities being committed by the Houthis in Yemen every day.

The Houthis need to be put back on the List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations immediately — instead of the US taking Iran’s rapacious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) off it. The IRGC, which just claimed credit for attacking the Kurds in Erbil, will simply, while the world is looking the other way, take over Erbil and the rest of Iraq.

“[S]aying that the world’s largest terrorist organization is not a terrorist organization… This is too high a price” for “empty promises from terrorists” on a nuclear deal, according to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

If the US allows Iran to acquire nuclear weapons capability, you can kiss peace in the region goodbye. That will be President Joe Biden’s legacy.

America’s allies in the Middle East — Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — are raising serious concerns about any new agreement between the U.S. and Iran. They see that embracing Iran comes from a false hope that it will lead to better behavior on the part of its regime and terrorist proxies.

Those statements by one of the Houthis’ top officials give us a clear insight into what we can expect from Iran and its proxies. We should take them at their word.

Let us not make the same mistake the U.S. and Europe made by embracing Russia, or the mistake made in Asia by embracing China. We must recognize the Islamic Republic of Iran for the evil it is and redesignate the Houthis, who operate as a weapon of war for the Iranian regime, as the terrorist organization they are. The strategy of hope did not work for Russia or China, and it will not work with Iran.

Too often the West finds itself hoping for and seeing a positive outcome when reality presents something very different. Think about the West’s response to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, where we promoted Western values of openness as a replacement for Communism. Consider the vote by Congress in 2000 to grant China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status, a status I voted against when in Congress. Reflect on President Barack Obama negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2015. None of these major deals has worked the way the West and the United States had expected or hoped.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18335/anti-american-dictatorships

Buying oil from the mullahs of Iran means funding a regime that sponsors global terrorism and that is determined, as an oblation, to wipe out Israel and attack the US.

One day after the United Nations Security Council voted in favor of lifting the arms embargo on Iran in October 2020, the ruling mullahs unveiled a ballistic missile that reportedly can reach the United States. The headline of an August 15, 2020 report by Iran’s state-controlled Afkar News read in Farsi, “American Soil Is Now Within the Range of Iranian Bombs”.

The report boasted about the damage that the Iranian regime could inflict on the US: “By sending a military satellite into space, Iran now has shown that it can target all American territory; the Iranian parliament had previously warned [the US] that an electromagnetic nuclear attack on the United States would likely kill 90 percent of Americans.” — Afkar News, August 15, 2020.

The report also threatened the EU, which voted for lifting an arms embargo against Iran: “The same type of ballistic missile technology used to launch the satellite could carry nuclear, chemical or even biological weapons to wipe Israel off the map, hit US bases and allies in the region and US facilities, and target NATO even in the far west of Europe.”

The Biden administration, meanwhile, reportedly views Russia, China and Iran as “partners,” “competitors, or deal-makers.” Russia, China and Iran are not “partners”. They are not “competitors.” They are aggressors. You bet they would like to “help” the United States with “climate change” and “going green”: it would give them a vast new market for their oil and gas and as well as increased leverage over the West. European and the US reports already allege that Russian “dark money” (anonymous funding) has been going to Western non-governmental environmental groups to advance that agenda.

An America dependent for its oil and gas on anti-democratic dictatorships would be a windfall, economically and politically, beyond their dreams. Imagine an America reliant on the warmhearted goodwill of Russia and China.

Now, in the new “Iran deal,” it seems that not only has Russia been serving as the negotiator for the United States, and that the US has agreed to waive $10 billion in sanctions it just finished placing on Russia for having invaded Ukraine so that Russia will be able to build a nuclear plant in Iran, but also, according to Rep. Michael Waltz*, that all enriched uranium from Iran will now be sent to Russia. To top it off, according to Waltz, the new arbiter of whether or not Iran is in compliance with the deal, will be – Russia. What could possibly go wrong?

The West is in for yet another shock as the Biden administration seems to be turning to the Iranian regime — and approached the illegitimate government of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela — to purchase their oil instead of increasing US domestic oil production.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18331/us-reestablish-deterrence

The complacency with which the Biden administration has come to view military threats, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as a thing of the past has led to a misguided prioritization of issues such as climate change as the biggest threat facing the US. This misguided focus has come at the expense of a realistic definition of what the US’s vital national interests are and should be in the face of actual national security threats.

Over the past two decades, US leadership has waned, especially as it has retreated from the Middle East and Europe — where its military presence has been reduced from 400,000 troops in the 1950s to just around 60,000 troops today. US credibility has been compromised, as its reputation for adhering to US commitments — failing to prevent the crossing of red lines in Syria and the Afghanistan debacle, to mention just two examples — has been wrecked.

Rebuilding deterrence will require a massive political and military recommitment to vital national interests. Those will require a policy reorientation that acknowledges that the US is the primary Western force in a world with global military threats from a variety of bad actors — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea primary among them.

“How many times do you have to make this point that if you don’t have more resources, you get political leadership that makes the case to the American people that we face threats on multiple fronts and if we want to defend our way of life as we know it and our interests around the world, protect our allies, not as acts of charity but because it benefits us, then you do it. And if you can’t do it, you can’t be a world power anymore…” — Former National Security Advisor, Ambassador John R. Bolton, Ronald Reagan Institute, February 24, 2022.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has proven, sadly, that US deterrence lies in tatters.

While Russia’s invasion represents an absolute low point thus far, US deterrence has been eroding for years. The cause is failed policies and ill-defined national interests, which bad actors such as Russia, China and Iran have clearly been noting.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/joe_bidens_crashandburn_foreign_policy_exposed.html

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the Hudson Institute’s Walter Russell Mead pronounces the Biden administration’s great power diplomacy an unmitigated failure.  Mead’s criticism cannot be dismissed as a partisan attack — he is a member in good standing of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.  Mead is also steeped in history and geopolitics — two subjects that appear to have eluded the stalwarts of President Biden’s foreign policy team.

“Most … of the ideas Team Biden brought to the White House,” Mead writes, “failed to work,” and most of the changes that U.S. foreign policy will require today and in the immediate future “will be toxic to much of the Democratic base.”  And while Mead suggests that Team Biden was right about NATO and “democratic values” as necessary elements of U.S. foreign policy, he understands that providing peace and stability in the world requires paying more attention to hard-headed and emotionally unsatisfying geopolitics.

And it is here — on the playing field of geopolitics — where Mead rightly claims that Biden’s approach to great power politics has “comprehensively failed.”

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/17/bidens-nuclear-deal-with-iran-is-set-to-be-even-more-disastrous-than-obamas/

Russia’s demand for a sanctions exemption is the only thing stopping the new, deeply flawed nuclear deal from going forward.

Under the Biden administration, the “worst deal ever” is getting even worse. When President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), he rightfully called it “the worst deal ever” because of its many serious flaws. But now, the Biden administration is close to announcing a new agreement to reinstate the JCPOA that is not only weaker but puts Russia in charge.

Making this worse, Russia is trying to exploit its prominent role in the new agreement by demanding that Russian trade with Iran — much of it weapons-related — be exempted from tough global sanctions imposed on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Monday claimed the Biden administration conceded on this issue.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/03/16/china_wins_a_little_loses_a_lot_from_russias_war_on_ukraine_147339.html

The unfolding mayhem unleashed on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin carries one major benefit for China and two much larger losses, plus a boatload of secondary effects. The main benefit is geostrategic: The United States must now keep more scarce military resources in Europe, instead diverting them to the Pacific, as it had been hoping.

That diversion would be costly for any president, but it is particularly costly for a Democrat, whose party habitually scales back military budgets to spend more on social programs. Biden’s budget, submitted before the war in Eastern Europe, certainly did. He proposed a 16% rise in social spending but only a 2% increase for defense, far less than the inflation rate. Those priorities are now imperiled.

Also endangered is any reorientation of America’s defense posture, to focus almost exclusively on China. That focus, shared by Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden, remains the country’s principal long-term challenge. But Putin’s aggression makes clear that the United States does not have the luxury of focusing on only one hostile (and nuclear-armed) power at a time. Russia’s war on Ukraine significantly raises the threat level in Europe and forces the Pentagon to avoid any drawdown there to fund increases in Asia. That’s true even though many of our NATO partners have finally agreed to spend 2% of their GDP on defense – a long-standing American demand. This renewed concern for Europe’s security is a potential gain for China.

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

War cannot happen in a vacuum. The tentacles of the hideous Russian invasion of Ukraine are reaching outward to involve not only the two parties in the conflict, but other countries and other policies.

Let’s start with the revived Iran nuclear deal meetings that have convened in Vienna. The U.S. administration has made no secret of the fact that it covets a deal and has been willing to provide benefits to Iran up front, including waiving sanctions on Iran’s “civilian” nuclear program. But Russia has been a major player in the negotiations; until now, Washington and Moscow had been coordinating their positions. As a historical competitor of Iran’s, Russia was not particularly interested in having Tehran produce nuclear weapons, so it was willing to push for certain U.S. points.

https://www.nysun.com/article/biden-resuming-role-of-dishonest-broker-in-middle-east?utm_content=The%20Evening%20Sun

The press is awash with negative comments about Israel’s policy on Ukraine. A rift is brewing between Washington and Jerusalem over the upcoming Iran nuclear deal. America’s ambassador in Jerusalem sharply attacks Israel’s policies. Is President Biden resuming a familiar role — that of a dishonest broker for Mideast peace?

It’s starting to look that way. This all stems from the prospect that American supporters of Israel are apt to become a political liability for Mr. Biden when he makes his concessions to Iran as part of a deal to renew the 2015 nuclear accord. The administration is beginning to distance itself from the Israeli government. 

Since the Vienna talks to renew the 2015 Iran deal resumed in the fall, Tehran has insisted that its terrorist arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, be removed from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. As diplomats close in on an agreement, America is reportedly prepared to make that concession. 

“Iran poses a threat to our allies, to our partners, in some cases to the United States,” the State Department spokesman, Ned Price, acknowledged Wednesday. Yet “the most urgent challenge we would face is a nuclear-armed Iran,” which, he suggests, is the reason diplomats prompted the deal in the first place.

Iranian missiles last week targeted an area near the American consulate at Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan. Rather than walk away from the Vienna talks, Washington officials leaked secondhand rumors that the Iranians hit an Israeli Mossad target. What in the world justifies that kind of blame-shifting?