RUTHFULLY YOURS

By Herbert London President, London Center for Policy Research

Is it possible to detoxify the United States’ relations with Russia, China and the Muslim world? Is there a grand strategy that could maintain the honor of America and at the same time introduce stability in areas of the globe fraught with tension?

With a new administration taking hold in DC, new ideas abound. Among them is the offering of a grand strategy, i.e. an ideology that transcends and yet ameliorates competitive states. An example often cited is the Congress of Vienna (1814 to 1815), chaired by Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, which provided a long-term plan for the resolution of conflict resulting from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Despite conflicting claims and regional wars, the Congress accord did maintain relative tranquility for Europe till World War I, through an elaborate balance of power arrangement.

This model has reemerged with Alexander Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory and the work of several U.S. political theorists from the Kissinger School of Thought. While different in content, all rely on the supposition that “realists” can determine the fate of global affairs based on a system of “recognition and acceptance.” Dugin, for example, contends that if the U.S. were to accept Russian interests in Crimea and Syria, harmony with the U.S. might emerge.

More significant is what Dugin describes as “regional globalization,” what is usually referred to as spheres of influence. Presumably that would include an Anglo-American sphere, a European sphere and a Eurasian sphere including Russia, Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Iran. Dugin is not alone, in my judgment, albeit the carving out of spheres may vary from one philosopher to the next.

It is also presumed that this reconfiguration would occur peacefully through democratic means, on the order of a twenty-first century Congress of Vienna. This, of course, would be a metaphysical shift in world affairs were it to be anything more than a utopian fantasy.

But a fantasy it is. Clearly this idea would legitimate Putin’s imperial vision violating the sovereignty of several states. Second, it is hard to believe eastern Europe and the Baltic states would willingly accede to antebellum Russian domination. Third, the Chinese are already engaged in the subtle, but discernible effort to convert the Pacific Ocean into a Chinese Basin. Alarm bells throughout Asia have already gone off. Yet these arguments stand in stark contrast to America’s core belief in a liberal international order guided by an Enlightenment faith in individual liberty, the rule of law and the free market. Should the U.S. concede on this front in order to acquire global equilibrium, the tenets of international liberalism will be interred.

There once was a time when China was afraid of offending us, but liberal pundits, politicians, and those human equivalents of the dodo bird, career diplomats, are aghast that President-elect Donald Trump took a congratulatory phone call from the democratically elected president of Taiwan Tsai-Ing-wen. Trump acted to “buck diplomatic protocol”, the chattering class harrumphed, and offended China, whose leader, President Xi JinPing, President Obama bowed to in 2014 at the APEC Economic Leader’s meeting in China.

Trump’s hyperventilating critics forget that to accept a call from a foreign leader is not conducting foreign policy. President-elect Trump knows full well the President Obama will be both head of state and commander-in-chief for the next six weeks or so. He also knows that American foreign policy needs to be conducted in Washington, D.C., not Beijing. He knows that our ludicrous “one China” policy has not stopped China from becoming a strategic nuclear threat whose expansionist designs have caused Beijing to lay claim to Japanese islands in the East China Sea and to build its own islands in the South China Sea which China considers a Chinese lake. As Trump protested in a tweet,

We sell Taiwan billions of dollars in defensive weaponry and he can’t take a phone call? So we are arming one alleged part of China to defend itself against the rest of China? Hello?

Communist China’s designs on Taiwan are no different than Nazi Germany’s designs on the Sudetenland prior to World War II. China is rapidly building the naval, air, and missile forces needed to conquer Taiwan and eventually, challenge the U.S. for military, economic, and political domination of the Western Pacific. Why exactly do we have a foreign policy that treats Taiwan as the West treated Czechoslovakia in 1938? When China is ready to attack Taiwan, it will.

Former U.N. Ambassador and Secretary of State candidate John Bolton told Fox and Friends that Trump would be right if he decided to shake up the status quo and treat democratic Taiwan with respect and friendship:

Bolton responded to the news of a phone call between Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, which caused China to submit a complaint with the U.S. through its foreign ministry.

“Honestly, I think we should shake the relationship up. For the past several years China has made aggressive… belligerent claims in the South China Sea,” he said on Fox & Friends.

Beijing views Taiwan as a rebel province of mainland China, and the United States has recognized China’s claim since President Jimmy Carter officially acknowledged the “one China” policy in 1979.

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State John Kerry sharply criticized Israel’s continued construction on contested Palestinian territory and didn’t rule out administration support for action at the United Nations on the Arab-Israeli conflict before President-elect Donald Trump takes power.

Mr. Kerry, speaking at a Middle East forum in Washington, said Sunday that the Obama administration hasn’t made any decisions about actions at the United Nations Security Council, but that other countries are likely to introduce resolutions as they lose patience with the current situation, which Mr. Kerry said was “getting worse.”

“There’s been no decision made about any kind of step that may or may not be taken in that regard,” Mr. Kerry said, when asked if the U.S. would lay down new parameters for the conflict, possibly at the United Nations Security Council. “There are, however, other people out there, who because of this building frustration… [are] talking about bringing resolutions to the United Nations. If it’s a biased and unfair resolution calculated to delegitimize Israel, we’ll oppose it.”

‘If it’s a biased and unfair resolution calculated to delegitimize Israel, we’ll oppose it.’
—Secretary of State John Kerry, on a potential action at the United Nations Security Council

Mr. Kerry said Israel was “heading to a place of danger” as settlement building has narrowed the prospects for peace and a two-state solution. At the same forum earlier Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told attendees via satellite link that settlements weren’t an obstacle to peace. Mr. Kerry pushed back, saying, “Let’s not kid ourselves here.”

“I’m not here to say that settlements are the reason for the conflict.” he said. “But I also cannot accept the notion that they’re not a barrier to peace.”

The White House had earlier this year been exploring options to revive a Middle East peace push.

President-elect Trump’s phone conversation Friday with Taiwan’s democratically elected leader is the kind of engagement that any new U.S. president should undertake as he prepares to take office. In talking with President Tsai Ing-wen, Mr. Trump demonstrated why his presidency has the potential to return badly needed credibility to a host of global challenges where the Obama Doctrine has left vacuums, rising tensions and conflict.

America’s relationship with Taiwan is a good example of the drift in U.S. interests. The Obama administration likes to declare that we are experiencing the “best relationship ever.” But this assessment is predicated on an expectation that neither the U.S. nor Taiwan has ambitions for their relationship. Both have been far too preoccupied with their ties with China—a focus that has emboldened Beijing and fostered instability in the Taiwan Strait.

As a result, a dangerous vacuum has opened up in the U.S. relationship with Taiwan. The administration has all but halted arms sales to Taiwan even though such sales are guaranteed under U.S. law and have long been a mainstay of U.S. security relations with the island. So, too, the trade relationship has faltered. Our trade ties are better suited to those between the U.S. and Malta than with our ninth-largest trading partner. Trade ties drift aimlessly in the absence of broader goals such as investment and tax agreements or a bilateral free-trade accord.

Meanwhile, the Chinese have been pressing their objective: the unification and occupation of Taiwan through peaceful or military means. Beijing pursues economic integration and its smothering embrace, while its military modernization focuses on invading and occupying Taiwan. It points nearly 2,000 cruise and ballistic missiles at Taiwan’s people.

The U.S. has failed to meet this challenge, and it is into this vacuum that Ms. Tsai was elected in January. China’s response to her election has been to pressure Taiwan’s remaining allies, cut off direct communications with Taipei, and damage commerce by restricting mainland Chinese tourism to the island. It has also undermined Taiwan’s efforts to broaden its engagement with the global health community and to integrate better into the world’s global aerospace and transportation organizations. CONTINUE AT SITE

CALCULATED OR NOT THE ONE CHINA POLICY CRAVENLY INSTATED BY KISSINGER/NIXON IS RIDICULOUS. TAIWAN HAS GIVEN UP ANY CLAIM TO THE MAINLAND AND IS A THRIVING DEMOCRACY…..I EARNESTLY HOPE THAT TRUMP WILL GIVE TAIWN THE RECOGNITION IT DESERVES…..RSK

Americans had to get used to Donald Trump breaking all the rules of presidential campaigning, and it looks like the world will have to adjust to a President Trump who will also violate diplomatic convention. One early lesson is not to overreact to every break with State Department protocol as if it’s the start of World War III.

The U.S. media had their 19th nervous breakdown Friday after the Trump transition said the President-elect had taken a congratulatory call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen. Mr. Trump also later tweeted that he had spoken to “the President of Taiwan.” Doesn’t he understand this simply isn’t done? No American President or President-elect has talked to a Taiwanese President since 1979, and this violation of tradition is being portrayed as a careless, bone-headed provocation to Beijing.

Well, maybe it was calculated—and perhaps even useful. Trump Asia adviser Peter Navarro has advocated cabinet-level visits to Taiwan and an end to the U.S. bow to Beijing’s “one China” policy, which insists that Taiwan is part of China and shouldn’t be treated as an independent state. Perhaps that goes too far, but it is past time for the U.S. to recalibrate its Taiwan policy.

Ned Price, spokesman at the Obama National Security Council, suggested that Mr. Trump made a mistake, saying the U.S. remains “firmly committed to our ‘one China’ policy based on the three Joint Communiqués and the Taiwan Relations Act.” But the communiqués from the 1970s and ’80s do not say that the U.S. supports Beijing’s view of “one China,” only that the U.S. acknowledges that both China and Taiwan agree on that principle. That is a crucial distinction.

Taiwan and the world have also changed since those communiqués. Taiwan has become a prosperous and democratic polity integrated into the world economy. Most Taiwanese now want to maintain their de facto independence. They resent Beijing’s bullying to force their leaders to move toward reunification. CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON—President-elect Donald Trump spoke with the president of Taiwan on Friday, a conversation that breaks with decades of U.S. policy and could well infuriate the Chinese government.

The conversation between Mr. Trump and President Tsai Ing-wen runs counter to the longstanding effort by Beijing to block any formal U.S. diplomatic relations with the island off China’s coast. Chinese leaders consider Taiwan a Chinese territory, not a sovereign nation.

The Trump transition team didn’t give many details of the discussion but said Mr. Trump spoke with the Taiwanese leader, “who offered her congratulations.”

It is believed to be the first time a president or president-elect has spoken with the leader of Taiwan since diplomatic ties between Washington and Taipei were cut off in 1979.

Mr. Trump offered an explanation of the call in a Twitter post: “The President of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the Presidency. Thank you!”

A short time later, he tweeted again: “Interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.”

On a recent visit to Tinian, an island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, I visited North Field, site of the B-29 bomb-loading pits for the famed Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs. Early on the morning of August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay took off for Hiroshima and released Little Boy. Three days later, Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, delivering the final blow to the Japanese that led to the surrender of the imperial government.

A few days later, as part of a follow-up visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Park, I viewed the monument dedicated to the legacy of the first city in the world to suffer a nuclear attack and to the memories of the bomb’s victims. Much to my surprise, I learned that until recently, no sitting American president had visited the site since the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. Previous presidents had been wary of a visit that could be misconstrued as an apology for an action that many believe definitively ended the war and potentially saved up to one million lives in the process.

Although, technically, President Obama did not offer a formal apology during his visit in May this year, his remarks could easily have been interpreted as such. He stated that he hoped that his trip to the bombing site would prompt America’s “shared responsibility to look directly in the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.”

He ended with a reference to a future “in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening. … I hope that sometime in the future, they will start to realize that this was not the right thing.”

According to news reports, the rationale for Obama’s visit was to remind the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons, highlight the threat of a world that continues to produce nuclear weapons, and call for a nuclear “moral revolution.” The visit was of a piece with Obama’s perceived mantle as a world peacemaker. Yet, in truth, his actions have increased the opportunities for nuclear proliferation among nations hostile to the West while undermining the military strength of the U.S. and our longtime ally, Israel.

Early in his presidency, in Prague in 2009, Obama proclaimed his vision of a world without nuclear weapons. In fact, this declaration was largely responsible for his being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize with the hope that the award might spur his peace efforts. In Prague, Obama told a crowd of 20,000, “Today, the Cold War has disappeared, but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.”

In light of these facts, it is puzzling to consider the meaning of Obama’s Hiroshima visit after his promoting and signing of the Joint Commission Plan of Action or JCPOA with the Islamic terrorist state of Iran, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal; his ardent push for the treaty known as New START with Russia, thereby relieving the U.S. of nuclear weapons stockpiles; and his apparent tolerance for North Korea’s nuclear testing. This is curious indeed at a time when rogue states and non-state actors have been actively involved in the acquisition of nuclear weapons with little comment from the White House.

In his book, Obamabomb: A Dangerous and Growing National Security Fraud, Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and senior vice president with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., explained how the JCPOA increased the threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and made Iran a greater danger to regional and international security.

With Turkey’s help, Russia is conducting direct negotiations with Syrian rebels, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. The FT wrote that one opposition figure, when asked why he thought Russia would seek a deal with the rebels just as Assad appeared to be winning, said Moscow was “essentially saying: ‘Screw you, Americans.’”

Turkey in effect is saying the same thing to Washington. The London-based newspaper explains:

Four opposition members from rebel-held northern Syria told the Financial Times that Turkey has been brokering talks in Ankara with Moscow, whose military intervention on the side of President Bashar al-Assad has helped turn the five-year civil war in the regime’s favor. Russia is now backing regime efforts to recapture the rebels’ last urban stronghold in Syria’s second city of Aleppo.

“The Russians and Turks are talking without the US now. It [Washington] is completely shut out of these talks, and doesn’t even know what’s going on in Ankara,” said one opposition figure, who asked not to be identified.

This puts into context the kerfuffle over General Michael Flynn’s Election Day recommendation that the United States pay more attention to Turkey’s point of view, especially in relation to a home-grown Islamist movement with terrorist overtones. Flynn, the designated National Security Adviser for the Trump administration, was formerly head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the first senior intelligence official to warn of the emergence of ISIS at a time when President Obama dismissed the Islamist movement as “junior varsity.”

In particular, the general cited the Turkish government’s consternation at America’s refusal to extradite the exiled Islamist leader Fetullah Gülen, who fled a Turkish charge of subversion and has been living in Pennsylvania since 1999. Last July 15 a group of Turkish officers apparently loyal to Gülen attempted to overthrow the government of President Tayyip Recep Erdogan. As early as 2008 Michael Rubin, a Middle East expert now at the American Enterprise Institute, warned that Gülen would use millions of followers and billions of dollars in business assets to launch an Islamist coup. That is what Gülen apparently did last July, and Flynn argued that the United States should back Turkey’s elected leader against the coup plotters.

That seemingly uncontroversial suggestion triggered a sewage storm.
Curiously, Michael Rubin came out as one of the fundamentalist leader’s strongest supporters against the Erdogan government, alongside Commentary Magazine’s Noah Rothman. Both attacked Flynn for supporting the Erdogan government against the Gülenist attempted putsch. Rothman added that Flynn was a “dubious choice” for National Security Adviser because his consulting company had had a Turkish corporate client, suggesting that Flynn’s views on Turkey raised a “conflict of interest.”

Commentary Magazine, formerly a conservative voice in public affairs, backed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy against Donald Trump, and the allegation that Flynn’s views were shaped by a single consulting client might be dismissed as ordinary political slander.

When David Petraeus appeared Monday at Trump Tower for a meeting with the president-elect, the headlines naturally fixated on whether the retired Army general and former CIA chief would serve as secretary of state for the incoming administration.

Certainly Mr. Trump’s choice here will be one of his most consequential cabinet picks. But the appearance of Mr. Petraeus carries an even more striking implication. Because his presence is a reminder of a painful truth that Mr. Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all found easier to ignore throughout the 2016 election campaign.

The truth is this: America is still at war in Iraq.

All throughout the campaign, Mr. Trump rightly thumped both President Obama and Mrs. Clinton for their refusal to use the I-word—Islamist—when speaking of the terror threat against the American people. But when it came to the W-word—war—Mr. Trump was not much better.

In three presidential debates, neither Mr. Trump nor Mrs. Clinton used the word war to describe the fighting in Iraq in which our troops are now engaged. When they did use the word, the context was almost always frozen in 2002.

There are political reasons for this. Mrs. Clinton, for example, is well aware that the Bernie Sanders wing of her party regards her as a latter-day Dr. Strangelove. So when she did talk about war and Iraq, it was mostly to declare that her Senate vote to authorize it was a mistake she deeply regrets.

Mr. Trump mostly fixated on the past as well. On almost every occasion the Iraq war came up, Mr. Trump used the opportunity to insist he’d opposed it from the start.