RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-has-an-opportunity-in-asia/

Marco Rubio’s confirmation for Secretary of State is most noteworthy for its bipartisan acceptance. While his confirmation hearing did not feature clickbait shouting matches, it did include a unique vision for furthering American interests in a region that the United States has largely neglected: Central Asia. During his testimony, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) discussed the region’s potential for realizing President Donald Trump’s policy priorities, especially with regard to energy and containing China.

Central Asia – which includes the countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – must be a strategic focus of American policy. The region offers a wealth of existing and untapped energy resources, both hydrocarbons and the critical minerals vital for high-tech and green energy. It is bordered by China, Afghanistan, Iran, and Russia – making it crucial to many of America’s core foreign policy priorities.

However, Central Asia has long been a blind spot in U.S. foreign policy. Within the labyrinthine bowels of the State Department, it has been repeatedly shuffled between different bureaus. American diplomats and experts working on the region often do so as a byproduct of prior education in Soviet studies, insufficiently grasping the region’s needs and challenges. U.S. policy in the region needs a shakeup.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States focused on the region’s most urgent necessities. Relations with Central Asia initially focused on denuclearization, economic liberalization, and arms control. After 9/11, the focus shifted towards removing the Taliban in Afghanistan, rooting out al Qaeda, and the Global War on Terror. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and other Central Asian states supported these security efforts by working alongside the United States.

Central Asia remains receptive to American foreign policy. When the trade war with China began, Central Asian states did not help China avoid tariffs. Many states in the region are eager for trade and investment, not handouts, and even when the United States erected tariffs, they maintained a low-tariff regime and welcomed American exports. This is not just for economic reasons but geopolitical ones: to reduce dependency on Russia and China.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21341/move-us-military-from-qatar

“This is Qatar’s classic game: support the Islamist terrorists and then present itself as a mediator, liaison, and even peacemaker – the arsonist playing firefighter. As in Afghanistan, as in Egypt in 2010, and as in every Muslim country. In every Muslim country where there is a battle between the Islamists and the secularists, Qatar supports the Islamists, as in Gaza supporting Hamas for years, building its military might and enabling October 7.” — Colonel Yigal Carmon (ret), MEMRI, January 21, 2025.

[Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa], who claims to have broken completely with Al Qaeda, apparently did so only because of strategic disagreements, not because he suddenly abandoned its plan to create an Islamic state in Syria.

Hurrying to the next scandal, the Biden administration practically threw itself at Sharaa’s feet. It rushed to meet with the terrorist leader, then immediately removed the $10 million bounty for his arrest, without even waiting to see what he would do.

The US cannot continue to reward terrorism. President Donald J. Trump would do well to declare as a Foreign Terrorist Organization the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the font of all Sunni Islamist terrorism and is effectively promoted worldwide by Qatar’s television bullhorn, Al-Jazeera. Trump would also be well-advised to move American forces completely out of Qatar’s enormous Al-Udeid Air Base, headquarters of the US Central Command, move them to the United Arab Emirates, and effectively cut ties with Qatar, a country “pretending to be an ally.”

“Biden failed miserably. Trump should not recycle Biden’s approach, and should recognize that Qatar and Erdogan are enemies despite their incredible skill in presenting themselves as friends, and as firefighters when they are actually arsonists. Trump would achieve the release of all the hostages if he were only to hint that it is conceivable that the CENTCOM base could be relocated out of Qatar. In fact, he owes this to the Saudis and the Emiratis, who are his true allies. If Trump clings to Qatar and Erdogan against these allies, he should not then wonder why his true allies, the Saudis and the Emiratis, are drifting towards America’s adversaries, China and Russia” — Yigal Carmon, MEMRI, January 9, 2025.

Qatar, the world’s foremost terrorist state, which seems never to have met an Islamist terrorist entity it did not support — from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to Al Qaeda and ISIS — has gained yet another win. It is Syria, the latest country seized in a hostile Islamist takeover by the formerly Al Qaeda affiliated organization Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known by his “nom de guerre,” Abu-Mohammed al-Jolani.

Throughout Sharaa’s decades-long career as a terrorist — from being a close associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, to founding Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, the Jabhat al-Nusra (Nusra Front), which he led from 2012-2017, to forming HTS as a conglomerate of various jihadist groups — Qatar has been a constant factor. The Qataris have financially supported Al Qaeda wherever it went — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria -– so the final victory of Sharaa, is an even greater victory for Qatar, proving that its “investment” paid off.

Qatar’s State Security Chief Khalfan Al-Kaabi visited Damascus on December 12, 2024, just days after President Bashar al-Assad fled the country on December 8, following HTS’s final offensive. In no time, the Qataris reopened their embassy in Syria.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/21/geographys-revenge/

Over the last few weeks, Trump has raised a lot of eyebrows by suggesting that our country should annex Greenland, invite Canada to join as the 51st state, and seek the return of the Panama Canal. Together, these remarks signal a break from prevailing norms and a plan to consolidate America’s dominant position in the Western Hemisphere.

Like much of what Trump does, it all seems cheeky, but only at first glance. Even if these maximalist positions do not prevail, they form an anchor for negotiations. Trump is actively seeking to expand U.S. influence over strategically significant regions within our immediate vicinity.

A new order is emerging where regions and their shifting balances of power are the dominant force in the world, rather than conflicts between mere nation-states. Among these competing regions, Europe, under the institutions of the EU, is becoming an economic and political force in its own right, often sidelining the U.S. Unlike NATO, we are not a member of the EU, and it provides space for Europe to assert its own collective interests as distinct from our own.

The BRICS consortium is also gaining power and becoming a viable node of international power, while China is making inroads to consolidate its own influence over Eurasia through its “Belt and Road Initiative.” China also maintains robust commercial ties with Africa and Latin America. Russia, of course, has been asserting its own sovereignty over the former Soviet Union in Georgia, Ukraine, and among the various Stans.

The U.S. is no longer as powerful as it once was in relative terms. We have done a lot on autopilot in recent years, continuing to assert our prerogatives as if the rest of the world has not taken notice of the humiliations in Afghanistan, Niger, and the Red Sea. Our adversaries and competitors are reevaluating things from a realist perspective, and we should as well, abandoning outmoded ideas about friends, enemies, and our own capabilities.

After the Cold War, for a time, we were the most powerful, but this led to a failure to set any priorities. National security strategy documents consisted of meaningless word salad without any intelligent effort to rank threats or connect one activity with another.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/could-musk-starmer-spat-threaten-us-uk-security-alliance/

There is no doubt that multi-billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has propelled the Muslim rape gang issue back into the public spotlight, where it should have been from the beginning. British politicians, the nation’s “security” apparatus, and its police all abandoned the victims, while protecting the  perpetrators in the name of “diversity.” But now the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost, and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is lashing out at Musk.

A Gateway Pundit report highlights the implications, and considers whether the incoming Trump administration holds Musk’s views. “Could Musk spat hit US-UK security alliance? Labour figures ‘horrified’ by billionaire’s tirade and ‘questioning intelligence sharing’ with closest ally,” by David Wilcock, Gateway Pundit, January 7, 2025:

The cracks are beginning to show in Britain and America’s so-called “special relationship…  British Prime Minister Keir Starmer may end his country’s security partnership with the United States if Donald Trump does not distance himself from Elon Musk’s recent comments on grooming gangs.

Nick Watt, a reporter for the nightly current affairs show BBC Newsnight, claims that Downing Street are going to give a “hard-headed assessment” of whether these views are held solely by Musk or by the administration as a whole….

Trump has been watching the Muslim rape gang horrors for some time, even prior to when he first became president in 2017. He read the Horowitz Freedom Center’s own Jihad Watch website and posted on Facebook: “Police arrest 900 Muslim migrants in England and Wales for ‘sickening’ crimes.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21265/elon-musk-taiwan

In fact, no Chinese ruling group has ever held indisputable sovereignty to the island.

From 1928 to 1943, the Communist Party itself recognized Taiwan as a state separate and apart from China.

If Xi Jinping thinks Trump will not defend Taiwan, will he then attack?

[T]he People’s Republic is getting weaker — the Chinese economy is failing — making notions of inevitability outdated.

“From their standpoint, you know, maybe it’s analogous to like Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China mostly because… the U.S. Pacific Fleet has stopped any sort of reunification effort by force,” Elon Musk, appearing remotely at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles in September, said referring to Taiwan.

In May, Musk talked to CNBC on the same topic. “The official policy of China is that Taiwan should be integrated,” he told the channel’s David Faber. “One does not need to read between the lines. One should only read the lines.” And then the world’s richest man stated this: “I think there’s a certain, there’s some inevitability to the situation.”

Musk is brilliant when it comes to providing what the world needs, but he is ignorant about Taiwan. His conclusions could not be more wrong.