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Diplomacy 101 Versus Politics Writ Small By Angelo Codevilla

Posted By on July 17th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/17/diplomacy-101-vs-politics-writ

The high professional quality of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s performance at their Monday press conference in Helsinki contrasts sharply with the obloquy by which the bipartisan U.S. ruling class showcases its willful incompetence.

Though I voted for Trump, I’ve never been a fan of his and I am not one now. But, having taught diplomacy for many years, I would choose the Trump-Putin press conference as an exemplar of how these things should be done. Both spoke with the frankness and specificity of serious business. This performance rates an A+.

Both presidents started with the basic truth.

Putin: The Cold War is ancient history. Nobody in Russia (putting himself in this category) wants that kind of enmity again. It is best for Russia, for America, and for everybody else if the two find areas of agreement or forbearance.

Trump: Relations between the globe’s major nuclear powers have never been this bad—especially since some Americans are exacerbating existing international differences for domestic partisan gain. For the sake of peace and adjustment of differences where those exist and adjustment is possible, Trump is willing to pay a political cost to improve those relations (if, indeed further enraging his enemies is a cost rather than a benefit).

In short, this was a classic statement of diplomatic positions and a drawing of spheres of influence.

Flexibility and Inflexibility
As Putin listed his agenda, he showed that today’s Russia is a status quo power, whose primary objective is stability. Having come to power over a country diminished and dispirited, he sought to recover as much as possible of what Russia had lost in the Soviet break-up. He forcibly took back parts of Georgia and Ukraine. In doing so, he pushed against open doors.

Today, no other doors are open. Now being ahead, he wants to stop the game. He knows that this is possible because nobody is going to wage or even risk war against Russia to try disgorging Abkhazia and Crimea. He wants Trump to acknowledge that. Warning against extending NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, he signaled that all else is negotiable.

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What Critics Missed About the Trump-Putin Summit By Roger Kimball *****

Posted By on July 17th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/16/what-critics-missed-about-the

When Presidents Trump and Vladimir Putin ended their joint press conference in Helsinki, the punditocracy predictably swarmed all over it like ants around a pile of crumbs. Was Trump winking at Putin? Did he really say he believes Putin more than he believes Robert Mueller about whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election? Former Gus Hall enthusiast John Brennan, off his meds again, tweeted that the presser was “treasonous.” Professional chatterer Anderson Cooper said it was “perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit.”

Every phrase, every gesture of the event will be picked apart and second-guessed to death in the next few days. I’ll leave them to the carrion.

Would You Rather Fight?
To my mind, the chief point was enunciated by Winston Churchill in 1954: “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.”

As President Trump repeatedly put it during his 2016 campaign, it would be a good thing, not a bad thing, to get along better with Russia. Let me stipulate that I think that Vladimir Putin is a murderous thug. He has demonstrated time and again that while you can take the lout out of the KGB, it’s much more difficult to take the KGB out of the lout.

That said, Russia is a world power that commands an enormous nuclear arsenal. Which means we cannot—or at least we should not—simply take our marbles out of the game and go home in a snit because they do things of which we do not approve.

As Trump and Putin both frankly acknowledged, there are issues on which they diverge—the fate of Crimea may lead the list—but there are also many areas in which our national interests intersect. It is a mark of the realistic and far-seeing diplomat to seize and build upon the latter while trying to find common ground about the former. This is what both men are trying to do.

Big If’s
I think there are essentially two takeaways from this historic event in Helsinki. The first is that Donald Trump is a bold, risk-taking statesman whose demotic style of delivery prevents many from appreciating the beneficently radical nature of his diplomacy. Maybe he will wind up being played by Kim Jong-un. But maybe his astonishing meeting with the tubby tyrant in Singapore is the beginning of the normalization of North Korea. If that happens—and I acknowledge that history suggests it is a big “if”—then President Trump will have achieved a world-historical diplomatic victory. His willingness to meet “jaw to jaw” would then be seen as a gambit of genius.

Maybe Putin is running circles around a gullible Trump. But maybe it is a real, as distinct from an Obama-Clinton merely rhetorical, reset. Then that, too, will be seen as a masterly and peace-enhancing initiative.

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Trump’s Meeting With Putin Was A Major Missed Opportunity For American Interests Today the president let Vladimir Putin save too much face, which could delay improvement in U.S.-Russia relations.

Posted By on July 17th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/16/trumps-meeting-putin-major-missed-opportunity-american-interests/

President Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and joint press conference have left many of his supporters scratching their heads. His opponents have been desperate for something to pounce on because they can’t get the collusion narrative to bear the fruit they need to neuter him, so they now alternate between condemnation and ridicule.

But observers who have applauded Trump’s tough words and actions regarding both U.S. allies and foes are having a hard time understanding why he did not choose to treat Putin as he has all others: with both carrots and sticks. Why all carrots for Putin in public?

Trump has been able to use words and deeds to get the kind of action he wants out of whomever he is negotiating with. So far it has been working fairly well, and certainly better than his predecessor’s approach. But today the president created a problem for himself that only strong action can mitigate. In short, he let Putin save too much face and that may well delay improvement in U.S.-Russia relations.
What Putin Wants from the United States

Putin is not interested only in the removal of sanctions and an end to U.S. strikes against his allies. He certainly wants that. But above all Putin wants to stay in power. It is a matter of survival for him. Unlike Western leaders, who win and hold power by elections, Putin holds and wields power by appearing strong and in charge. He needs to appear strong to the Russian people, and to his gang of elites, who regularly have to consider if Putin in power is good for their interests.

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Questions for Al Franken Since he is giving advice on how to question Brett KavanaughBy Kyle Smith

Posted By on July 17th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/al-franken-brett-kavanaugh-questions-pathetic/

1)Al, as you were posting on social media a list of proposed questions for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, did it occur to you that your opinion on the matter is no more relevant than Harvey Weinstein’s?

2) Al, is it appropriate for a disgraced former U.S. senator to use the Twitter cognomen “U.S. Senator Al Franken”? Are you aware that being a senator is simply a temporary public-service job, not a permanent title of nobility, the usage of which this country discourages?

3) Al, until the abrupt end of your political career, when your term in the U.S. Senate ended as badly as the release of your film Stuart Saves His Family, you had been a U.S. senator for eight and a half years. Yet you had been a carcinogenically unfunny comedian for more than 40 years. Would not the Twitter handle “Carcinogenically Unfunny Comedian” be more appropriate for you to use as a permanent title?

4) Al, should not a senator who disgraced his office by sexually assaulting various women adopt a public pose of contrition rather than arrogance in the months immediately following his resignation?

5) Al, when you publicly list the questions you’d like to ask Kavanaugh, do you think Minnesota’s new junior senator, Tina Smith, might have just cause to feel that you are infringing on her territory? Are you in effect mansplaining to Senator Smith how to go about questioning a Supreme Court nominee?

6) Al, in your strange resignation speech of December 7, when you said, “Some of the allegations against me are simply not true. Others I remember very differently,” were you implying that you were resigning despite having done nothing wrong?

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Thank the Lord Donald Trump Is Not an ‘Intellectual’ By David Solway

Posted By on July 17th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/thank_the_lord_donald_trump_is_not_an_intellectual.html

I recently participated in an email chain with conservative writers and thinkers on the inexhaustible subject of Donald Trump. Some of my correspondents, while supporting Trump as a political champion, regretted his “coarseness.” He is, they alleged, rather too crude and rough hewn to comport with their ideal of proper presidential stature.

Now I can understand that if Trump behaved like Hillary, prone to hysterics, outrageous and mendacious attacks on opponents, and perpetual grievance-mongering, one might regard him as unmannerly, unstable, and preposterous, as a truly “coarse” human being with a crippling behavior problem. If he had bevies of mistresses shuttling to and from the White House while his wife was away, as did JFK, I could credit similar levels of revulsion. If he used the N-word as did LBJ or enjoyed sexually cavorting with a young intern in the Oval Office, as did Bill Clinton, disgust would be in order. When it comes to The Donald, some proportionality would seem appropriate.

Admittedly, he is no paragon of genteel bearing, but he is a man who gets things done and is true to his electoral word, a Talebian black swan among presidents.

Trump-bashing is a national pastime, which is certainly the case in my country, where few people can find anything positive to say about him. Canada’s most popular newspaper, the Toronto Star, ludicrously asserts on its main page that Trump utters one false word in every 19.4 words. The entire apparatus of the paper’s “statistical correlations” is nothing less than a system of ideological banality, probably the most embarrassing statistical adventure I have ever come across. One might apply the same ridiculous fact-checking calculation to Canada’s sock puppet prime minister, whose ratio of false to true words would then clock in at approximately one in two, or to the Star itself, for whom a true word would send its editors into paroxysms of incontinent horror.

For the most part, Trump is regarded by his detractors not only as a serial liar, but, as noted, an unreconstructed vulgarian. To cite the Ottawa Citizen, Trump is a “vulgar parrot,” an “offensive” boor with “the vocabulary of an eighth grader” who is a “threat to decorum” as well as to democracy. He has “crossed into a new frontier of vulgarity and coarseness,” we are told. Apart from the fact that one does not cross into a frontier, a phrase betokening a condition of agrammaticality, such criticasters – intellectuals, editors, journalists, talking heads – would have voted for Hillary and ushered in the very disaster they lay at Trump’s door – namely, “the erosion of institutions through greed, malfeasance, apathy, ignorance and ineptitude” – every word false with respect

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The Trump First Doctrine Putin respects strength but Trump showed weakness.

Posted By on July 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-first-doctrine-1531781061

Donald Trump left for Europe a week ago with his reputation enhanced by a strong Supreme Court nomination. He returned Monday with that reputation diminished after a tumultuous week of indulging what amounts to the Trump First Doctrine.

Mr. Trump marched through Europe with more swagger than strategy. His diplomacy is personal, rooted in instinct and impulse, and he treats other leaders above all on how much they praise Donald J. Trump. He says what pops into his head to shock but then disavows it if there’s a backlash. He criticizes institutions and policies to grab headlines but then claims victory no matter the outcome.

The world hasn’t seen a U.S. President like this in modern times, and as ever in Trump World everyone else will have to adapt. Let’s navigate between the critics who predict the end of world order and the cheerleaders who see only genius, and try to offer a realistic assessment of the fallout from a troubling week.

• NATO. The result here seems better than many feared. Mr. Trump bullied the allies with rhetoric and insulted Germany by claiming it is “totally controlled” by Russia. But his charges about inadequate military spending and Russia’s gas pipeline had the advantage of being true, as most leaders acknowledged.

The 23-page communique that Mr. Trump endorsed is a solid document that improves NATO’s capabilities to deter and resist a threat from Russia. Mr. Trump’s last-minute demand that countries raise military spending to 4% of GDP was weird, but he is right that more countries are likely to meet the 2% target.

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The President Turns the Tables on China He imitates Beijing’s mercurial approach to negotiation. By Jeff Moon

Posted By on July 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-president-turns-the-tables-on-china-1531778651

An overlooked irony of the American trade dispute with China is that Donald Trump is the first U.S. president to fight back using Chinese tactics. This time, it’s the Chinese officials who are frustrated over the lack of clarity in demands, the sudden changes in negotiating positions, and the unpredictable escalation of tensions.

Usually it’s the other way around, as U.S. negotiators in government and business can attest. Chinese officials often blame the foreign counterpart for any number of problems. The foreigners then have a duty, according to the Chinese, to make things right. An old proverb often cited is that a man who drops a stone on his own foot must take responsibility for picking it up.

But instead of specifying the terms for a resolution, the Chinese officials wait for foreign concessions. When the proposal arrives, the Chinese reject it as inadequate, forcing the foreigners to negotiate against themselves, offering more in each successive round. In the end, the foreigners are relieved when the struggle concludes, but they regret settling on terms much less favorable than they had planned. A 1995 Rand Corp. study traced these techniques to 1971, when Premier Zhou Enlai reportedly blamed tensions over Taiwan on the U.S. as he pressed Henry Kissinger for favorable terms normalizing U.S.-China relations. CONTINUE AT SITE

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A Union Scam Could Be About to End Home health workers get ‘organized’ without their knowledge or consent. Janus makes that harder.By Red Jahncke

Posted By on July 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-union-scam-could-be-about-to-end-1531778546

One of the worst public-sector union scams is about to end. “Partial public employee” unions represent in-home health aides, paid by states with Medicaid money to care for disabled beneficiaries—often the aides’ own children or elderly parents.

In recent decades, PPEs have typically come into existence when Democratic governors order union-certification elections with loose rules, usually including a participation rate of only 10%. Many workers are unaware that they have become union members. They remain ignorant, as the state deducts union dues and fees before sending payments. Such payments are usually made through direct deposit and often without an itemized pay stub.

The unions have no incentive to inform the workers—who in turn have no idea they need to contact the union to opt out. Thus money keeps flowing to these unions even though the Supreme Court, in Harris v. Quinn (2014), imposed on PPE unions a ban on forced nonmember “agency fees.” This year, in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the court extended that rule to all public-sector unions.

Janus struck a second blow by requiring affirmative consent before collecting money from public workers.

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The Russia Indictments: Why Now? The point of the hacking appears to have been to hurt President Clinton, not elect President Trump. By Michael B. Mukasey

Posted By on July 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-russia-indictments-why-now-1531778599

The indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence agents last week, on charges they hacked into Democratic National Committee and other servers during the 2016 campaign, raises questions about the timing of the announcement and the work of the hackers themselves. The news came on the eve of the Trump-Putin summit. Why then?

The president was told of the indictments before he traveled. Yet the plain effect of the announcement was to raise further doubts about the wisdom of the meeting—and perhaps to shape its agenda. Neither is the business of the special counsel or anyone else at the Justice Department. The department has a longstanding policy, not directly applicable here but at least analogous, that candidates should not be charged close to an election, absent urgent need, lest the charges themselves affect the outcome. The general principle would seem to apply: Prosecutors are supposed to consider the impact of their actions on significant events outside the criminal-justice system, and to act with due diffidence.

From a law-enforcement standpoint, there was nothing urgent about these indictments. All 12 defendants are in Russia; none are likely ever to see the inside of a U.S. courtroom.

Alternative strategies were available. In 2008 Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, known to law enforcement as the “Merchant of Death” and the defendant in a sealed indictment, was lured in a sting by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents to Thailand, where he was seized. The Thais, to their great credit, resisted heavy Russian pressure to release him. Instead they fulfilled their treaty obligations and granted a U.S. extradition request.

It has been argued that the objective of last week’s indictments was not to prosecute the defendants but to “name and shame” them. They were named, and even their military intelligence units disclosed—but shamed? In 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector to the U.K., was poisoned in London with polonium from a Russian nuclear facility. Litvinenko had charged that Vladimir Putin was directly responsible for bombing a Moscow apartment building in 1999, an event used as a pretext for the invasion of Chechnya. CONTINUE AT SITE

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8 Times Obama Sold Out America to Russia Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on July 16th, 2018

As sure as sunshine in Southern California, the media was just waiting for President Trump to meet with Russia’s Putin to begin shouting, “Traitor.”

Here’s the voice of the Amazon resistance, the Washington Post, taking up the clamor.

Greg Sargent / Washington Post: – Trump is now repaying Putin for helping him win the presidency

And here’s the New York Times.

Charles M. Blow / New York Times:- Trump, Treasonous Traitor

Journalism.

Oddly enough the media had no problem with Obama running on a reset with Russia. The reset blamed the bad relationship on Bush and the Iraq War. That wasn’t treason.

And here’s what happened when Obama met with Putin.

“I’m aware of not only the extraordinary work that you’ve done on behalf of the Russian people … as president, but in your current role as prime minister,” Obama said during a breakfast meeting at Putin’s country home on the outskirts of Moscow. “We think there’s an excellent opportunity to put U.S.-Russian relations on a much stronger footing.”

Where were the same media trolls shrieking now about praising dictators? Or a failure to defend America?

Obama met with Medvedev at the Kremlin, while Putin received him at Novo-Ogaryovo, where a sumptuous breakfast with caviar was laid out. Trying to make conversation, Obama began by asking rhetorically, “How did we get into this mess [in U.S.-Russian relations]?” In response, Putin gave him an hourlong lecture as to how precisely it had happened. Obama listened without interrupting.

What did Putin get from Obama?

1. A free hand in Georgia

2. A free hand in Syria

3. The betrayal of Poland vis a vis the missile shield

4. The betrayal of Ukraine by refusing to provide its governor with useful weapons

5. A whole bunch of our uranium via Uranium One

6. A deal allowing Russia’s Iranian allies to go nuclear

7. Failure to do anything about the same Russian actions that the media is now blaming Trump for. Instead his administration actually issued a stand down order.

What has Trump given to Putin? Nothing. He’s come to the defense of Poland and Ukraine when Obama wouldn’t.

If this is the media’s metric for treason, then Obama is a traitor. He not only praised Putin, he promised to make a sweetheart deal with Russia after the election was over.

That’s number 8.

President Obama was running for re-election in March 2012, when a live microphone picked up his whispered conversation with then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Obama told Medvedev it was important for incoming President Vladimir Putin to “give me space” on missile defense and other difficult issues and that after the 2012 presidential election he would have “more flexibility.” Medvedev said he would “transmit” the message to Putin.