RUTHFULLY YOURS

NO URL ERIC LEVINE IS AN ATTORNEY IN NEW YORK WHO SPEAKS AND WRITES FREQUENTLY ON ISRAEL AND FOREIGN POLICY

Speaking at the Atlantic Festival on September 30, 2023, Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan proudly bragged: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

Last week – a mere four months later – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken ominously proclaimed: “[W]e’ve not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the [Middle East] since at least 1973, and arguably even before that….”

How did we go from the golden age of American diplomacy to the dark ages of war in such short order? The answer is: Nothing has really changed. Unbeknownst to a clueless Administration, we have been in the dark ages of war since Joe Biden took office. His appeasement of Iran has seen to that. 

Despite Iran’s funding of Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and a vast terrorist network in Syria and Iraq, the Administration remains wedded to the fantasy that with the just the right policy and the right amount of cajoling from the United States, Iran will end its nuclear program and turn into a responsible citizen in the community of nations.  AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and their fellow Squad members are more likely to host next year’s Israel Day Parade in New York City.

Part of the Administration’s strategy of modifying Iran’s behavior entails failing to enforce economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic and providing outright gifts of billions of dollars of cash.  What could go wrong?  When Joe Biden became President, Iran had $4 billion dollars in foreign currency reserves; virtual bankruptcy.  As a result of this Administration’s policy of appeasement, Iran now has $70 billion to fund the precise malign behavior Biden claims he is seeking to prevent. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20381/biden-global-war

China and Russia [do]… not respect the sovereignty of other states.

Biden… should realize that there can be no accommodation with regimes that either seek the destruction of the United States—China and Iran, for instance—or regimes helping such enemies—most notably Russia. Biden should be supporting America’s friends to the hilt and seeking total victory for Ukraine and Israel.

Continuing with existing policies is perhaps the most dangerous option of all. Those policies may sound reasonable, constructive, and pleasing to the ear, but they have in fact created the disastrous situation that now exists.

Biden has opened the floodgates of Hell. Although nothing is inevitable, we are fast approaching the point where, as a practical matter, he will not be able to stop China and Russia, directly and through proxies, from merging existing conflicts and turning them into the next global war.

President Joe Biden should realize that there can be no accommodation with regimes that either seek the destruction of the United States—China and Iran, for instance—or regimes helping such enemies—most notably Russia. Biden should be supporting America’s friends to the hilt and seeking total victory for

President Joe Biden’s foreign policy has collapsed. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan effectively admitted that to CNN’s Dana Bash on February 4.

“You have said now a couple times on this show and you have said this many times before that the administration is trying to prevent this from spreading into a regional conflict,” Bash told Sullivan on “State of the Union,” referring to the war in Gaza.

The CNN anchor proceeded to list some of the places to which the Gaza conflict has now spread. Then she asked this:

“My colleague Peter Bergen smartly pointed out that this conflict involves 10 countries, at least four major terrorist groups, so isn’t this already a regional conflict?”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20361/us-withdrawal-syria-iraq

[T]he priority now for the White House must be to strengthen its military presence in the region, not reduce it. Worse, the vacuum created by any withdrawal by US troops is sure to be filled by adversaries of America and the free world.

Any US withdrawal is sure to be seen, especially after the US surrender in Afghanistan, as America running away — again.

[I]t would be folly of the highest order for the Biden administration even to contemplate a reduction of US forces in the region. With Iran clearly intent on pursuing its proxy war against the US and its allies, the US needs to demonstrate its determination to prevent Tehran from expanding its malign influence in the Middle East, rather than capitulating in the face of Iranian violence.

With Iran seemingly intent on intensifying its confrontation with the US, it is hard to imagine a worse time for the Biden administration even to consider withdrawing any of the US forces currently based in the Middle East.

Prior to the latest Iranian-sponsored attack on US forces based in Jordan, in which three serving American service personnel were killed and another 34 were injured, the White House had already opened negotiations with the Iraqi government on the future of US and other allied troops based in the country.

A statement issued by the office of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, after the first round of talks opened in Baghdad at the weekend, declared that the talks were aimed at ending the US-led coalition in Iraq.

There are currently an estimated 2,500 US troops based in Iraq. The US deployment in the country was originally part of the coalition formed in 2014 to fight Islamic State (IS). The force has continued to operate in Iraq despite the fact that the so-called IS caliphate established in the Syrian city of Raqqa has been destroyed.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-state-department-has-lost-the-plot/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm

Since the October 7 attacks, the State Department has exposed for all to see a level of rot within the institution that was once apparent only to Republicans, who would inherit the agency from Democrats only to find their imperatives implemented with conspicuous lethargy — if they were implemented at all.

Like so many agencies within Joe Biden’s administration — up to and including the White House itself — the State Department is struggling to navigate a mutiny among the lower-level functionaries who are beside themselves over the president’s support for Israel’s defensive war against Hamas. Unlike most of those other executive agencies, Foggy Bottom has tried to appease the insurrectionaries under its roof. The latest example of that foolhardy impulse is apparent in its reported commitment to fast-track American recognition of a Palestinian state.

Axios reporter Barak Ravid has the details:

The Biden administration is linking possible normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia to the creation of a pathway for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of its post-war strategy. This initiative is based on the administration’s efforts prior to Oct. 7 to negotiate a mega-deal with Saudi Arabia that included a peace agreement between the kingdom and Israel.

Ravid adds that the U.S. could pursue this strategy either passively, by declining to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution admitting the territories as full member states, or actively by recognizing Palestine directly and encouraging its allies to do the same. Either way, it is an ideologically blinkered enterprise.

It is not as though there is no rationale for supporting Palestinian statehood today, even within the context of Israel’s anti-Hamas campaign. As Ravid notes, it could serve as an inducement to accelerate Saudi Arabia’s recognition of Israel. Past presidencies, Trump’s included, have paid lip service to the desirability of a Palestinian state as an aspirational objective as part of a broader regional normalization strategy. But to consent to that approach today would be to reward terrorism.

As many have rationally speculated, including Joe Biden himself, the impetus that led Hamas to execute the October 7 massacre was to advance the interests of the terrorist group’s Iranian benefactors by derailing the ongoing normalization process between Israel and its Sunni neighbors. Simply deeming Palestine a state as a direct result of Hamas’s attack will not impose sobriety on the Palestinian Authority, which the White House seems to regard as the only viable alternative to Hamas rule in Gaza. It would only create incentives for more terrorism — conduct in which the party in control of the Palestinian Authority is more than capable of engaging in, too.

The second, most intractable obstacle before Palestinian statehood is that “Palestine” is a fiction. No rational observer looks at the two noncontiguous territories in the West Bank and Gaza — two places with distinct governments (which, by the way, hate each other), disparate economies and foreign policies, and wildly divergent social contracts — and sees the Westphalian ideal. It’s especially telling that the State Department is evincing so much frustration with the uncooperative world that it appears inclined to simply impose statehood on the Palestinian territories in the absence of any reliable Palestinian negotiating partner. The whole initiative is an outgrowth of a variety of narratives to which America’s diplomatic class is beholden but do not much reflect the world it is tasked with understanding.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/did-the-state-department-just-let-an-architect-of-october-7-into-america/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

For the second time since the October 7 attack, the State Department has granted a visa to Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, to attend meetings at the U.N. this week in New York. That’s noteworthy, of course, because Iran is a significant backer of Hamas and the rest of the so-called “axis of resistance,” including the Houthis.

Amir-Abdollahian, who arrived today, was quick to meet with another of Tehran’s partners: The Russian foreign ministry posted a picture of him with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who is also in town for meetings at the U.N. Security Council this week.

Amir-Abdollahian played a major role in building out Iran’s alliances with regional terrorist groups as the de facto foreign minister of Qassem Soleimani’s Quds Force. In fact, an Iranian lawmaker once called him “another Qassem Soleimani in the field of diplomacy,” in recognition of his efforts to unite Iran’s many terrorist allies throughout the region.

If you buy into the Wall Street Journal’s October 8 report on Iran’s role in planning the massacres in Israel, he’s also a key architect of that terrorist attack. If that reporting is accurate, Amir-Abdollahian attended key planning meetings leading up to October 7, though many analysts have expressed skepticism of the degree of direct Iranian involvement in approving it in the way that the Journal described.

Either way, given Amir-Abdollahian’s close coordination with the Quds Force, the Biden administration has ample reason to claim an exemption to the U.N. headquarters agreement that otherwise compels the U.S. to grant visas to its adversaries. But for the second time since October 7, State has apparently chosen not to exercise that option.

https://www.memri.org/reports/why-do-us-and-israel-tolerate-qatars-blatant-anti-us-and-anti-israel-policies

Introduction

Two developments with dangerous and even explosive repercussions for the standing and interests of both the U.S. and Israel in the Middle East occurred in the last few days.

1. The U.S. has extended its presence at Qatar’s Al-Udeid airbase – CENTCOM’s main airbase in the region – for another 10 years[1]: In recent weeks, there has been criticism of Qatar for its sponsoring of terrorism, causing President Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to maintain ambiguity about the future of the U.S.-Qatar alliance. This follows years of frequent undeserved U.S. praise for Qatar.

The Qataris, realizing that their very existence is threatened if the U.S. relocates its CENTCOM operations to the UAE or Saudi Arabia, hastened to nail down the U.S. for another decade in Qatar. This happened despite Qatar’s support of both Sunni and Shi’ite terrorist organizations worldwide, and despite its open alliance with Iran, including joint Qatari naval training with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).[2] And the fact that it is standing with the Houthis, with whom the U.S. is currently engaged in military conflict to ensure free passage of shipping in the Red Sea.

Without CENTCOM in Qatar, the ruling family will be unable to continue ruling Qatar. Yet it seems like the U.S.  did not demand that Qatar reverse its policies of sponsoring terrorism – let alone demand the release of American hostages held by its proxy Hamas in Gaza, after it killed 32 U.S. nationals on October 7. How can this inconceivable approach on the part of the Americans be explained?

2. Israel is allowing Qatar to take charge of all the humanitarian support entering the Gaza Strip, where it is hijacked by Hamas gunmen as soon as it crosses the border. In fact, Qatar is keeping Hamas fighters in power, enabling them to kill Israeli soldiers every day. This is being done with the total consent of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had, over the past decade, allowed Qatar to build Hamas’s military power in the first place. Netanyahu is now actually allowing an ongoing process, by which his soldiers are being killed every day because he is a captive and hostage of Qatar, as well as its collaborator, and does not dare confront it lest it expose him. One solution to freeing the aid from Qatar’s pro-Hamas influence would be by giving the money to Egypt and Jordan, who have peace agreements with Israel, so that they could fully control the humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, with no Qatari strings attached.

These approaches on the part of the U.S. and Israel are also prompting the natural allies of both, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to distance themselves from them and to join anti-U.S. alliances such as BRICS. How can these two mindboggling phenomena be explained?

This report will attempt to answer these questions.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/american-hegemony-is-not-a-distraction/

If the United States sacrifices its obligations, our threatened partners will seek accommodations with their aggressive neighbors at America’s expense.

Elbridge Colby is the rare Trump administration official who has established a bigger profile for himself outside the administration than in it. Rarer still, he’s achieved this feat while making largely productive contributions to the national discourse. Trump’s former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development has devoted himself to advocating a vigorous effort to deter China from executing a potentially disastrous attack on Taiwan. But in his singular — at times, prohibitive — focus on the threat posed by China, Colby downgrades the significance of seemingly every other American strategic priority. He appears increasingly committed to a myopia that renders his advocacy unserious and undermines the cause he claims to support.

Like many on the right who are eager to slough off the old Reaganite consensus, Colby sees the conflict in Ukraine as a “distraction.” Even before Moscow launched its second invasion of Ukraine, he and his co-author, Stanford University’s Oriana Skylar Mastro, argued that the United States had succumbed to “delusion” if it thought it could compete against China and Russia simultaneously. Support for America’s partner on the European frontier would necessarily come at the expense of its effort to hem in Beijing. “To be blunt,” they wrote, “Taiwan is more important than Ukraine.”

That’s a debatable proposition. The other side of the argument maintains that Europe, of all places, is no “distraction.” The continent is home to America’s most powerful allies and its foremost trading partners. Its wars have a demonstrated tendency to conflagrate, dragging the United States into them whether Washington is predisposed toward intervention or not. Containing those wars is vital for the preservation of U.S. alliance structure. After all, we’re not talking about Europe’s “neighborhood” — say, for example, Libya, where America’s interests are dwarfed by Europe’s. This is the NATO frontier, a border along which a variety of critical and increasingly nervous U.S. partners reside. Deterring Moscow from testing the integrity of the alliance directly or sowing so much doubt about America’s commitment to the defense of the former Warsaw Pact states that they freelance their way into an infinitely more dangerous situation than the one we are currently confronting is no “distraction.” It’s a core, long-standing, empirically observable feature of American grand strategy.

But let’s concede for the sake of argument that beating back Russian expansionist aggression is a “distraction.” That would be easier to accept at face value if Colby weren’t similarly eager to declare almost every other hot conflict on the planet a “distraction” from his preferred priority.