RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-needs-a-hypersonic-capability-china-xi-beijing-missile-weapons-attack-defense-budget-11638827597?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Eighty years ago, imperial Japan used a technology first developed by the U.S. and the U.K.—carrier-based bombing and torpedo attacks—to cripple the American Navy at Pearl Harbor. Americans must now wonder whether China is setting the stage for another devastating attack on American forces using another U.S.-pioneered technology: hypersonic missiles.

China’s July 2021 test of a hypersonic missile was literally a shot “around the world,” according to Gen. John Hyten, the departing vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “It went around the world, dropped off a hypersonic glide vehicle that glided all the way back to China, that impacted a target in China,” he told CBS News. When asked why China was developing this advanced technology, Gen. Hyten replied, “They look like a first-use weapon. That’s what those weapons look like to me.”

Hypersonic weapons don’t follow a single trajectory like ballistic missiles. They can twist and turn on their way to a target, while their incredibly high speeds—above Mach 5, or a mile a second—make it impossible for existing land- and space-based systems to detect a hypersonic attack until very late in the missile’s flight path. It also isn’t clear whether current U.S. command-and-control systems can process data fast enough to respond to a head-on hypersonic threat.

China tested a second nuclear-capable missile carrying a hypersonic glide vehicle on Aug. 13. This means that Beijing is surging ahead with a technology against which the U.S. has very limited capability for defense or detection.

The shame is that the U.S. has been the primary developer of hypersonic vehicles, going back to the X-15 program in the 1960s. According to Mike Griffin, a former undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, the U.S. effectively shut down its hypersonic effort in the mid-2010s—while China made hypersonics a Manhattan Project-level priority. As a result, Gen. Hyten told the website BreakingDefense.com in October, China has performed “hundreds” of tests of hypersonic weapons in the past five years, while the U.S. has conducted nine.

https://bit.ly/32WalHj

Since the 1978/79 revolution against the Shah of Iran, the Ayatollahs regime has adhered to its mega-goal of global Shite domination, developing mega-capabilities (nuclear, ballistic technologies and worldwide terrorism), aiming to remove/subordinate its mega-obstacle, the USA.

During 1962-1970, then anti-US Egypt was involved in the Yemen civil war, as a springboard to topple the pro-US regime in Saudi Arabia and, subsequently, all other pro-US Arab regimes in a most critical region to global trade, oil and security, the Arabian Peninsula.

Since 2011, Iran’s anti-US Ayatollahs are deeply involved in the Yemen civil war on the side of the anti-US Shite Houthis (“Soldiers of Allah”) – via Iranian and Hezbollah manpower, military supplies, training and intelligence – as a springboard to oust the pro-US Sunni House of Saud (bordering north Yemen), and subsequently, all other pro-US Sunni regimes in the Arabian Peninsula.

In February, 2021, the US removed Yemen’s Shite Houthis – who are Iran’s proxy – from the list of terrorist organizations, courted Iran’s rogue Ayatollahs, terminated US support of the pro-US Saudi military offensive against the anti-US Houthis, and pressured Saudi Arabia on account of human rights violations. However, in November, 2021, the Houthis stormed the US Embassy in Sanaa, holding a few of the local staff hostage, demonstrating – once again – that Islamic/Arab terrorists bite the hands that feed them.

Yemen’s geostrategic importance for the US

The limbs of the Iranian octopus extend from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia to the whole Middle East, Europe, Africa, South, Central and North America, including Yemen, where Iran’s Ayatollahs outflank the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden, playing a decisive role in fueling the civil war, as a dagger aimed at its Sunni arch-rival, the pro-US Saudi Arabia.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/americas-enemies-fill-the-vacuum-she-leaves-abroad/

The oft-discussed Middle Eastern power vacuum does not exist. America’s adversaries have already filled it.

P resident Biden’s meeting with Xi Jinping on November 15 shifted media attention from COP26 back to great-power politics, but a more subtle, yet perhaps more consequential, shift has occurred over the past month. This shift is remarkable for its lack of American involvement — it presages a Middle Eastern regional transformation over which the United States will have little to no influence. Rather, Russia and increasingly China have become the region’s key external powers. The central question for both as they move forward will be the degree of Iranian expansionism they will accept.

On October 22, Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett met Russia’s maximum leader Vladimir Putin at the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. The meeting was critical for Bennett given his domestic political position. Prime Minister Bennett’s minority right-wing Yamina/New Right party holds only seven seats, compared to his coalition ally Yair Lapid’s 17. Moreover, the rest of the coalition is composed of numerous splinter, generally secular parties from left and right. Bennett will retain some control in 2023, when the premiership is scheduled to rotate to Lapid. But his numerical disadvantage bodes ill for his and his party’s long-term political prospects.

In the next election, one would expect Bennett to tilt back toward the Right, playing a key role in a center-Right coalition government to box out the secular Left, with which Yesh Atid aligns. Yet Bennett’s erstwhile ally and mentor, recently ousted prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, retains significant political power despite his ongoing corruption trial. Not only has Netanyahu emerged as Bennett’s fiercest critic — his policy criticisms have some substance. Bennett is a shrewd politician, having served in ministerial positions since 2013, and as defense minister from 2019 to 2020. But Netanyahu’s foreign-policy experience was a critical selling point for Likud voters, and a line of attack he has exploited since leaving office. Netanyahu claimed that his personal relationship with Putin gave Israel greater flexibility in Syria, allowing the IDF to conduct a long-term interdiction campaign against Iranian targets without sparking Russian resistance.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/biden-admin-waives-sanctions-on-iran-as-nuclear-talks-restart/

The Biden administration quietly waived sanctions on Iran to allow the hardline regime to sell electricity to Iraq, according to a non-public notification obtained by the Washington Free Beacon that was provided to Congress just as nuclear talks between the United States and Tehran resumed this week.

The timing of the waiver notification—which was signed Nov. 19 but not transmitted to Congress until Nov. 29, the day nuclear negotiations resumed—has prompted accusations the Biden administration is offering concessions to Tehran to generate goodwill as talks aimed at securing a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal restart following a months-long standoff.

During the several-month pause, Tehran increased its nuclear program, including the enrichment of uranium and installation of advanced nuclear centrifuges. One senior congressional source familiar with the matter said the delay in transmitting the waiver to Congress indicates the administration is sensitive to the optics of waving sanctions just as negotiations resume.

Richard Goldberg, the former director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction on Trump’s White House National Security Council, told the Washington Free Beacon that the latest electricity waiver amounts to a “dressed-up Chanukah present to” Iran.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rogues-are-on-the-march-russia-kremlin-ukraine-putin-iran-nuclear-putin-xi-china-biden-11638724476?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s

If you think President Biden has trouble at home, take a look at what’s happening around the world. Iran, Russia and China are all seeking to establish new regional hegemony, and they’re often working together to do it. Their leaders don’t appear to believe Mr. Biden can or will do anything to stop them.

Iran revealed its disdain for U.S. entreaties last week as nuclear talks resumed in Vienna. The U.S. opened the proceedings with a sanctions waiver to let Iran sell electricity to Iraq. The result? A senior U.S. official conceded Saturday, after the latest round of talks finished, that Iran had shown no willingness to slow its uranium enrichment and even walked back its agreements from previous rounds.

U.S. and European officials briefed the press about Iran’s intransigence but seemed at a loss about how to respond. The Iranians are “continuing to accelerate their nuclear program in particularly provocative ways,” a U.S. official told the press on background, and their “latest provocation” was preparing “for the doubling of their production capacity of 20% enriched uranium” at its secret Fordow facility.

Sounds serious. So what is the U.S. prepared to do? It will beg Iran some more to return to the table with a better attitude.

“The world is prepared to support a mutual return to compliance by both sides. The world is prepared even to engage economically with Iran and diplomatically with Iran. But for that, Iran has to show seriousness at the table and be prepared to come back in short order in compliance with the deal,” the U.S. official said. Pleading with Iran to do what it has already refused to do will reinforce the view in Tehran that it will pay no price if it keeps enriching uranium until it gets to the brink of having a bomb.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17998/biden-summit-democracy

[W]hen you lack a foreign policy, why not pretend that you have one by holding an international summit?

To start with, what does Biden mean by democracy?

Biden’s invitation excludes at least 20 long-standing allies of the United States.

… Obama went around the UN and its agencies on a number of issues, including the “nuclear deal” with the mullahs of Tehran, the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, and the public-relations hoax known as “saving the planet”.

The doppelganger may furnish the emptiness for a few days and furnish a rudderless administration with a few favorable headlines. But it will provide no answer to problems the world faces today, problems that cannot be tackled without the participation of all nations within the framework of a world order based on law, not ideology.

What do India, Iraq and the Solomon Islands have in a common?

The answer is that US President Joe Biden has certified all three as “democracies” along with 106 other countries, by inviting them to a virtual “Summit for Democracy” on December 9-10, 2021.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17986/iran-killing-protesters

“We call on President Joe Biden, Secretary Antony Blinken, and all members of Congress to stand with the Iranian people. Diplomacy with the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism is never going to produce a favorable result that benefits the American people or the Iranian people. Diplomacy with the Islamic Republic was destined to fail from day one.” — Iranian Americans for Liberty, reported by Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post, November 27, 2021.

“[W]hen millions of Iranians took to the streets in June of 2009, when they demanded freedom from a cruel regime that threatens the world, when they cried out, ‘Are you with us, or are you with them?’ – the American president was silent,” — Mitt Romney, October 8, 2012.

“If the free world wants to stand on the right side of history, they should support the Iranian people who have been fighting for their freedom for the last 43 years. The Iranians need free internet because the regime has already shut down the internet in Isfahan. They want to kill the protesters ….” — Iranian dissident Sheina Vojoudi, Jerusalem Post, November 26, 2021.

Will the Biden administration stand with the Iranian people?

The Biden administration appears to be repeating the Obama Administration policy of choosing to be silent in the face of the Iranian regime’s bloodshed, human rights violations, and crackdowns that kill and wound peaceful protesters.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/tehran_seeks_a_better_deal_.html

“Iran is prepared to reach a ‘good agreement’ quickly, with the goal of protecting the Iranian people’s rights and interests,” the Iranian foreign minister announced as Ali Bagheri Kani, the country’s chief negotiator, was arriving in Vienna for another round of nuclear negotiations. Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper posits that the Islamic Republic is coming to Vienna to reap economic and political benefits for its people.

Go with it for a moment. Accept that Tehran only wants to take care of its people and seeks a better deal than the one that imposed sanctions, limitations, and inspections.

But be careful.

Western media and politicians like to date Iranian cheating from the Trump administration pullout of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But Iran cheated on the terms of negotiations with both the IAEA and the P5+1 before, during and after the deal. No less an authority than President Barack Obama said after cheating on agreements with the IAEA over the Fordow site was exposed in 2009, “As the international community knows, this is not the first time that Iran has concealed information about its nuclear program.”

The JCPOA was intended to halt all enrichment at Fordow and make it an R&D facility. Now, Iran has acknowledged not only continuing enrichment, but at higher levels with advanced centrifuges barred by the JCPOA.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/china-michael-ledeen/

China has long held a distinct advantage in the field of competitive intelligence, with its enormous edge in population.  This enables the People’s Republic to penetrate anywhere with a substantial ethnic Chinese population bloc with consummate ease, either by offering substantial amounts of money to potential allies or threatening to crack down on reluctant collaborators.

The Chinese have an ancient drive toward ethnic unity, and they do not accept the division of their people into tribes or clans. The current dictator, Xi, regards this unity in racial terms.  He believes that all Chinese share common characteristics, wherever they are born or raised.  Hence Xi believes that all Chinamen owe obeisance to the rule of China itself.  

It was no great surprise, then, when the United States discovered China at the heart of an espionage ring in the United Arab Emirates. The U.A.E. is one of the closest United States allies in the Middle East and has long manufactured American weapons and ammunition parts, but until recently there were only suspicions, not facts, to support the suspicions.  So far as Washington could tell, the U.A.E. was unaware of the military content of the Chinese project. So far as Washington could tell, the U.A.E. was unaware of the suspicions.  As the Wall Street Journal put the matter recently, the Middle East increasingly appears to be a primary ground for U.S.-Chinese competition.

The Chinese effort to penetrate the U.A.E. began like many of its previous espionage ventures, with considerable investment.  They apparently hoped to expand their outreach into directly manufacturing American equipment.  But their plot was discovered by American counter-espionage in time to prevent its fulfillment, and the plot was foiled.