RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/17/bolton-pompeo-trump-iran-1329833

Rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran are also magnifying strains among President Donald Trump’s top foreign policy advisers: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton.Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against the mullahs in Tehran has exacerbated fissures between the two men over the tight control Bolton has tried to exert over the national security decision-making process — and introduced new ones over the direction of U.S. policy.

Pompeo and his special representative for Iran, Brian Hook, have indicated that the administration’s goal in squeezing Iran is renewed negotiations with Iranian regime, according to two sources familiar with their thinking — something Trump has expressed a desire to do. But Bolton is a deep skeptic of the value of negotiating with adversaries who, before joining the White House, called publicly for regime change in Tehran.

While Pompeo has worked to carry out the president’s foreign policy directives, Bolton has done more to try to shape them — at times contradicting the president, as when he walked back Trump’s call for a rapid U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/17/the_hard_politics_of_us-china_trade_talks_140352.html

Since neither side benefits from a trade war, why are both sides threatening one?The answer is straightforward. Although both sides could benefit from a deal, one side could benefit more — a lot more — depending on the final terms.Two key issues dominate the current stalemate. The first is how many of China’s mercantilist practices will be rolled back. These include tariffs on imports from America, required partnerships with Chinese firms, forced transfers of intellectual property, and sometimes outright theft of trade secrets. The second is whether the terms are precise, enforceable, and undertaken as formal commitments by China’s highest-level institutions.China’s problem is that its economy depends on these unfair practices, and communist leaders benefit from them, politically and financially. Some, like widespread theft of Western intellectual property, help lots of local companies. Others, like the coercion of foreign firms to accept local partners, help the party most because it picks the winners. As with any patronage system, the winners are politically connected firms that share the largess with their benefactors. (Economists call this “rent-extraction” politics.)Chinese political leaders are understandably reluctant to alter these sweet arrangements. They wouldn’t change them at all without significant outside pressure, which is exactly what the U.S. is exerting. Since Beijing has to make some kind of deal, it would prefer informal commitments, the vaguer the better. Later, China could edge away from them, hoping the U.S. would not retaliate.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273761/time-iran-face-reckoning-bruce-thornton

While the media obsess over chimeras like the president’s obstruction of justice for nonexistent crimes, and AG Barr’s impeachment for obeying the law, a collision between the U.S. and Iran is brewing in the Middle East. The question now is whether Iran will finally face the reckoning it has invited and deserved for 42 years, or the latest crisis will peter out into U.S. saber-rattling and empty threats.

Donald Trump has made a good start at ending our nearly half-century appeasement of a regime that has declared war on the U.S. and backed it up by murdering Americans and working to create nuclear weapons that would make even more difficult, or even prohibitive, the price of punishing them for their aggression.

Since Jimmy Carter’s timid, feckless response to the 1979 American embassy hostage crisis, we have signaled to the mullahs that we will not exact a cost for their aggression. And this failure has been a bipartisan effort. When in 1983 Iranian proxies murdered 241 of our military personnel in Beirut, the Reagan administration pulled out even as the French and the Israelis strafed and bombed “Little Tehran,” the terrorist camps set up in the Beqaa Valley by Tehran, which nurtured the attackers. Since then Iran has been implicated in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and periodically taken hostage American citizens and sailors. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran’s Quds Force, the regime’s shock troops of global terror, have facilitated and participated in the murder of our soldiers. And it has continued to train and financially support terrorist gangs like Hezbollah and Hamas.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273775/china-trade-war-national-security-line-michael-cutler Add the trade war with China to a long list of crises driven by greed and globalism that President Trump inherited from a series of prior administrations, from both political parties

Since President Trump declared that, unlike previous U.S. Presidents, he would no longer permit China to ride roughshod over the United States, Wall Street whined about how a trade war with China would be costly to America and Americans by causing products from China to cost more; and likely diminish American exports to China as China retaliated by increasing tariffs on those U.S. goods.

For Wall Street, the bottom line is the bottom line. This is a very short-sighted and dangerous example of myopia, focusing on profits while ignoring threats to U.S. national security.

First and foremost, China is ruled by a totalitarian communist regime that is guilty of reprehensible human rights violations against its own citizens and is clearly working rapidly to expand its reach around the world by building its military capabilities.

Earlier this year I wrote about Chinese Aggression Against The U.S.A. As President Trump has noted, China has not only taken economic advantage against the United States but has engaged in widespread intellectual property theft (also known as industrial espionage). Indeed, China has also engaged in committing widespread espionage where our military technology is concerned and, incomprehensibly, the United States has admitted hundreds of thousands of Chinese STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) students and provided them with world-class education at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels. Such students then become eligible to apply for Optional Practical Training that enables them to be gainfully employed by U.S. companies, including companies that develop technology of our military.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/orbn_at_the_white_house.html

“Hungarians, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians, Czechs, and others correctly think of themselves as twice occupied — once by Hitler and once by the USSR.  Now they are free to be Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian, etc.  This has, for many of us, both positive and negative ramifications — none of which is equivalent to the Iranian practice of hanging homosexuals or stoning adulterers.”

Despite the fact that the Trump administration has spent two years communicating its concerns with Hungary regarding academic freedom, anti-Semitism, and other illiberal positions of the Hungarian government, the visit of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to the White House for a meeting with President Donald Trump has set off alarm bells — primarily among those already inclined to disapprove of the president’s guest list.

A former Obama staffer summed up the concern, saying, “It still remains rightly shocking to see Trump cozy up to authoritarian leaders. The American President should be supporting democratic allies with shared values rather than autocrats who are actively undermining U.S. interests.” (This from an administration that believed that the Islamic Republic of Iran should be legitimized and concluded diplomatic, trade, and travel agreements with Raúl Castro’s Cuba.)

Hungary and other Central European countries are complicated, and shunning them is likely to create more problems. These are NATO members, former Warsaw Pact members, E.U. members, bound to the West in ways that make their future a key interest of the United States and the rest of Europe. And, on the other side, Russia.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/acting-out-in-tehran-11557961728

When the U.S. withdraws its diplomats from a foreign country amid a security threat, the domestic reaction in a previous age would have been to show solidarity against an adversary. But this is Washington in 2019, so the loyal opposition is reacting to the threat from Iran by blaming—President Trump.

“Either the Trump administration is trying to goad Iran into war or a war could come by accident because of the administration’s reckless policies,” declared former Obama official Wendy Sherman Wednesday, after the State Department withdrew personnel from Iraq.

Ms. Sherman is sore that Mr. Trump withdrew from the failed nuclear deal that she helped negotiate with Iran, but even she must realize that Shiite militias in Iraq often act as proxies for Iran. Does she want another Benghazi? Yet she blames Mr. Trump for a “march to war with Iran” and wants Congress, Europe and business leaders to “stand in [national security adviser] John Bolton’s way.” Senator Bernie Sanders says he’s also worried about “provocations on the part of the United States against Iran.”
***

Who does Ms. Sherman want to stand in the way of Gen. Qassem Soleimani? He’s the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), that used the windfall from Ms. Sherman’s nuclear deal to finance terror and instability throughout the Middle East.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/13/pompeo-america-first-foreign-policy-is-inspired-by-the-founders/

Secretary of State Michael Pompeo gave the following remarks at the Claremont Institute’s 40th Anniversary Gala on May 11.

‘President Trump believes it is right – indeed more than right – for America to unashamedly advance policy that serves our interests and reflects American ideals.’

There is literally, as I travel the world, there is nothing more distinctive about the United States than our politics, and wonderfully so. We are the truly greatest experiment in human freedom that the world has ever seen, and I, as America’s senior diplomat, benefit from that every day.

I want to do a little bit of the history, because the foreign policy of the early republic reflected the attitude of a free nation which has thrown off an imperial power, which, frankly, I just left. And look, I think there’s three words that characterize that. They would be realism, restraint, and respect, and I’ll talk about each of them just for a moment.

First, realism. The Founders were keen students of human nature and history. They saw that conflict is the normative experience for nations. Hamilton put this Federalist 34. He said, “To judge from the history of mankind, we shall be compelled to conclude that the fiery and destructive passions of war reign in the human breast with much more powerful sway than the mild and [beneficial] sentiments of peace.”

I’ll simplify: The Founders knew peace wasn’t the norm. And in response to this reality, the Founders knew the first duty of the federal government was to provide for the safety of its citizens. Madison said, “[Security] is an avowed and essential object of the American Union.” You all know that.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/14/the-u-s-doesnt-need-china-to-prosper/

The latest numbers on U.S. economic growth are astonishingly good. The land of the free enjoyed 3.2 percent annual real GDP growth for the first quarter of 2019. It would have been even higher—3.5 percent—without the government shutdown.

The numbers vindicate President Trump’s position on trade. The dealmaker-in-chief has been saying for decades that a trade deficit is a drag on growth. And we now learn that almost 1 percent of our GDP growth was a result of a reduction in imports.

Imports are down because Trump’s tariffs are driving down the trade deficit with China. Now that he’s increased tariffs on $200 billion more of Chinese goods, expect the U.S. economy to grow even faster.

Even investors, who have long been wary of tariffs, are now beginning to understand this. Despite the uncertainty surrounding trade with China, the stock market has experienced only modest losses, reflecting the overall strength of the U.S. economy.

The latest numbers on U.S. economic growth are astonishingly good. The land of the free enjoyed 3.2 percent annual real GDP growth for the first quarter of 2019. It would have been even higher—3.5 percent—without the government shutdown.

The numbers vindicate President Trump’s position on trade. The dealmaker-in-chief has been saying for decades that a trade deficit is a drag on growth. And we now learn that almost 1 percent of our GDP growth was a result of a reduction in imports.

Imports are down because Trump’s tariffs are driving down the trade deficit with China. Now that he’s increased tariffs on $200 billion more of Chinese goods, expect the U.S. economy to grow even faster.

Even investors, who have long been wary of tariffs, are now beginning to understand this. Despite the uncertainty surrounding trade with China, the stock market has experienced only modest losses, reflecting the overall strength of the U.S. economy.

The United States has put up with Chinese economic aggression for far too long, under both Democrat and Republican presidents. The Trump Administration has taken a decidedly different tack, pursuing an economic nationalist agenda that insists:

We must defend ourselves against China’s relentless cyberattacks on American businesses, and its theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in intellectual property each year.
We must stop China’s state-owned, state-subsidized and state-controlled enterprises from the wholesale dumping of products. Flooding foreign markets with steel and aluminum, not to mention autos and robotics, is only the first step. The end game is the destruction of free-market capitalism altogether.
We must stop China from forcing America companies to hand over their cutting-edge technology as a condition of doing business there. Forced technology transfer is theft, pure and simply.
We must stop China from manipulating its currency to gain an unfair advantage in trade.
Finally, we must defend Americans from the flood of fentanyl and other dangerous opioids that are killing them by the tens of thousands. The first two Opium Wars were waged by Great Britain against China. The Third is being waged by China against the United States and its people, and it must stop.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/trumps_china_tariffs_will_succeed.html

Free trade with China is like “free trade” with the thief who stole your car.

For the last four decades, the United States has often engaged in trading away its future by running up debt and selling assets instead of products. This brought about the stagnant living standards and incomes experienced by the U.S. middle class during the presidencies preceding Trump.

The countries with which the U.S. had the largest trade deficits (goods and services) in 2018 were:

China – $379 billion
Mexico – $78 billion
Germany – $67 billion
Japan – $58 billion.

These countries accounted for 93% of the total, with China, by itself, accounting for 61% of the U.S. trade deficit. Donald Trump was elected by the people who have borne the brunt of this policy failure, with a mandate to fix it.

On Friday, President Donald Trump took a huge step toward doing just that. He raised the U.S. tariff rate from 10% to 25% on $200 billion per year worth of Chinese goods that were being imported into the United States. Back in July, when Trump had initially imposed the 10% tariffs on Chinese imports, China responded by imposing tariffs on $110 billion of U.S. exports to China.