RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mike Lee represents Utah in the U.S. Senate. Mike Kelly represents Pennsylvania’s third district in the U.S. House of Representatives.

‘What will it take to get an agreement in Paris?”

That’s the question on the minds of environmental activists, U.S. State Department officials, and foreign bureaucrats as we approach the latest round of United Nations climate-change negotiations in France’s capital city.

It was also the question asked of Sam Kutesa, the president of the United Nations General Assembly, at an event on April 17, 2015, according to an e-mail obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The author of the e-mail — subject line: “Best answer of night” — was President Obama’s chief climate-change negotiator, Todd Stern. Stern was writing to a colleague to recount how President Kutesa responded to this all-important question.

His answer? One word: “Money.”

Michael Auslin is a resident scholar and the director of Japan Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he specializes in Asian regional security and political issues. Before joining AEI, Auslin was an associate professor of history at Yale University.
There is a real threat here to peace in Asia, and the U.S. must not allow allies such as the Philippines to be browbeaten.
“Expect more.” That is the succinct response of a senior U.S. defense official when asked informally whether the dispatch in October of a U.S. Navy ship within 12 nautical miles of one of China’s newly constructed islands in the Spratly Island chainwas a one-off event.

Officials in the Obama Administration seem well aware that failure to follow on with their highly publicized freedom of navigation operations will send a signal of irresolve to China and Asia. The sail-through did little to settle the issue of Sino-U.S. tussling over the South China Sea, and the question now, is how will China respond.

From one perspective, the length of time that it took Washington to make the decision to send the USS Lassen near Subi and Mischief Reefs itself is an admission that the Obama Administration remains wary of provoking China. Months of public comments by officials from the president on down resulted in no action until last week, and even then, it was but a lone U.S. destroyer sent to transit what until a few months ago had always been considered international waters.

Even worse, claims that the destroyer engaged simply in “innocent passage” as opposed to any legally-allowed military activity on the high-seas further undermines the administration’s argument that it is not tacitly conceding China’s territorial claims.

Because (per Obama’s latest complaint) of “how decentralized power is in this system”, over 30 American governors have told the President they don’t want him shipping battalions of “Syrian” “refugees” to their states. He, in turn, has sneered that his critics are scared of “widows and orphans”. With his usual brilliant comic timing, he said this a couple of hours before a female suicide bomber self-detonated in St Denis.

Nonetheless, the presidential-gubernatorial split is an interesting development. Obama has responded with a brand new hashtag: #RefugeesWelcome. If you live in Hashtagistan, this is another great hashtag to add to such invincible hashtags as #PeaceForParis, #JeSuisCharlie, #UnitedForUkraine and, of course, #BringBackOurGirls. If you live in the real world, the magic hashtags don’t seem to work so well, and these governors seem to think #RefugeesWelcome will perform no better for New Mexico and New Hampshire than the others have worked out for Paris, Ukraine and Boko Haram-infested West Africa.

It’s frighteningly easy for an aspiring ISIS terrorist to obtain the documents needed to gain asylum in Europe, a Daily Mail reporter recently discovered. According to the Mail’s Nick Fagge, it took only four days and $2,000 to obtain a Syrian passport, ID card, and driver’s license at a Turkish border town:

The genuine documents were stolen from Syria when they were blank. The forger added our reporter’s picture and gave him the identity of a Syrian man from Aleppo killed last year. The documents, on sale for around $2,000, would help an asylum claim in Europe.

The forger who sold us the papers said that they are being used by ISIS fanatics to travel undetected across borders into Europe hidden among tens of thousands of genuine refugees fleeing the terror and destruction.

The forger told Fagge:

ISIS fighters are among the people going to Europe in this way. They are going to wait for the right time to become a fighter for ISIS again.