Tag: Obama

Posted on

OBAMA’S CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST

Ticking time bombs from Syria to North Korea.

Democrats inherit the foreign policy crises of a thousand Republican presidential fathers, but the foreign policy crises inherited by incoming Republicans in the White House are always orphans.

Or at least that’s how the media likes to spin it.

If you believe your random mainstream media outlet of choice, North Korea and Syria were crises freshly spawned by this administration with no prior history. But these ticking time bombs are the direct result of the two terrible terms of his predecessor.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner’s years in the White House were the most dysfunctional, schizophrenic and senseless eight years of our national foreign policy. His domestic policy was a disaster, but it was a radioactive toxic waste dump with clear and consistent goals. ObamaCare, the abuses of the Justice Department, the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency were the naturally terrible outcome of left-wing policies being implemented with inevitably terrible results.

But Obama’s foreign policy was a wildly inconsistent mess. The Nobel Peace Prize winner couldn’t quite decide if he was a humanitarian interventionist or a pacifist non-interventionist. He couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted to take the side of the Sunnis or the Shiites in their Islamic unholy war. He didn’t know if he wanted to appease Russia or sanction it, to pivot to Asia or run the other way, to play another round of golf or replace his defense secretary for the fifth time.

Obama could be consistent on domestic policy because there were few hard choices to make. Government had to be constantly expanded and every arm of it enlisted in pursuing left-wing goals. Republican opposition was largely hapless. The “Irish Democracy” of the public response to ObamaCare was more effective at sabotaging it, but by the time anyone understood that it was far too late.

The world stage was a much more dynamic place with players who didn’t fit into Obama’s ideology. The Islamist democracy proponents got Obama to kick off the Arab Spring. When Gaddafi shot the Islamists in the streets, the interventionists got him to sign on to regime change in Libya. But then Syria boiled down to Sunni and Shiite Islamists shooting each other and interventionism hit a roadblock.

Obama stopped at his own Red Line and couldn’t figure out what to do next. His foreign policy had somehow boiled down to helping Shiites kill Sunnis in Iraq and helping Sunnis kill Shiites in Syria.

He was bombing and arming the same Islamists at the same time to improve relations with them.

Even a guy who thought they speak Austrian in Austria and celebrated Cinco de Cuatro had to know that something had gone horribly wrong with his foreign policy. When the Russians stepped in and promised to clean up the WMD mess in Syria, he was happy to take them up on the offer without looking at the fine print.

Like a badly programmed computer, Obama locked up in Syria because Islamists fighting Islamists didn’t fit into his left-wing code. He feared alienating either Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile appeasement not only failed to defuse the growing conflict with Russia, but poured more fuel on the flames. And bluffing China with a hollow pivot only sent the message that America was impotent.

Obama’s tenure was marked by two inexplicable wars; a surge in Afghanistan that failed to accomplish any of its goals while killing and crippling thousands of Americans, and an illegal regime change operation in Libya that left the country looking like Iraq. Obama and his fans don’t talk about either of these wars. And you can’t blame them. They make ObamaCare look like a shining success story.

But they’re not the biggest Obama disasters that President Trump inherited.

President Bush left Obama a largely stabilized Iraq. All he had to do was keep the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds working together. It wasn’t a cakewalk, but it was far from the mess that it had been or would be again. A decade ago though Democrats had been as obsessed with Iraq as they would be with Russia. Obama, like the leading non-Hillary candidates, ran on being against the war. So he pulled out instead.

Pulling out alone might have been disastrous because it would encourage the Shiite majority to trample on the Sunni minority. But Obama combined a pullout from Iraq with backing for Sunni Islamists nearly everywhere else, including next door in Syria, who helped swell the ranks of ISIS.

The threat of ISIS and other Sunni Islamists helped Iran get a firm grip on Iraq and Syria. The Arab Spring wedged it deeper into Yemen. And Obama was too worried that Iran would walk away from a potential nuclear deal to do anything about it. The nuclear deal sealed the deal for a resurgent Iran.

And that means that Russia is the dominant power in the region.

Obama alienated Egypt by backing the Brotherhood.  President Trump has been trying to undo that disaster. Obama backed Turkey’s totalitarian Islamist tyrant even as he quarreled with and then sidled up to Russia. The only remaining strong ally in the region capable of defending itself is Israel.

Meanwhile possible alliances in Asia fell apart as Obama dithered. The Philippines has an anti-American government that Obama further alienated during his disastrous final months in office. South Korea has fallen back into political instability at a time when it can least afford it while Japan stands alone.

Obama’s Asia pivot was exposed as another gimmick when he proved unwilling to defy the People’s Republic in the South China Sea. His diplomatic efforts seemed to prioritize ideological gestures toward Vietnam’s Communist regime over meaningful strategic alliances. Aside from the risk of war over China’s expansionism, this failed policy was cutting off the non-military China route to resolving North Korea.

This is the route that President Trump is now struggling to reopen again by restoring leverage.

Perversely, Obama did more damage with his failed Asia pivot than he would have done by staying out of it. The non-military option, like so much of diplomacy, depends on the perception of what we might do. In Asia, as in Syria, Obama made it painfully clear that he would do nothing. And the average totalitarian regime has difficulty grasping that different American governments really are different.

The Iran deal once again sent the message to North Korea that nuclear weapons can only benefit it. And that, when combined with Obama’s failures in Asia, funnels us into the military option in North Korea.

Back in Syria, Obama’s Red Line stranded us in the middle of an Islamic civil war and credibility crisis. Obama had handed over the keys to the region to Iran and Russia. America is now stuck trying to get them back.

President Trump chose to do it by going back to the point of collapse and enforcing Obama’s Red Line. It was a controversial choice, but it made a clear statement that presidential promises mean something. It also sent a message to Syria, Russia and Iran that just because we don’t want yet another war, doesn’t mean that they have a free hand to do anything they want.

Obama saw foreign policy in the social justice terms of the left. Trump and his people see a geopolitical struggle. His predecessor believed that we had to atone for our historical crimes. Trump understands that at the root of local crises like Syria and North Korea is a larger contest with Russia and China. It’s the worldview that Obama had sneeringly dismissed as rooted in the Cold War in his debate with Romney.

And yet it’s far more useful than Obama’s incoherent foreign policy whose three pillars were Islamism, appeasement and global warming.

President Trump believes that global stability comes from the stability in the relationship between world powers. Syria and North Korea are just the ways that Russia and China test us to see how far they can push. His goal is to achieve stability from the top down by reaching an understanding with the other powers. And to do that he has to undo the credibility crisis that he inherited from Barack Obama.

Obama left behind plenty of domestic and international ticking time bombs, from ObamaCare to Iran, and Trump’s first years in office will be occupied with finding ways to keep the bombs from going off.

Published First in FrontPageMag.

Posted on

Get Ready for the Trump Doctrine

When Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched the 21st century’s second deadliest chemical weapons attack on Tuesday, President Trump must have paged through President Obama’s playbook in responding to this century’s deadliest chemical attack less than four years earlier and resolved to do exactly the opposite. It turns out he’s onto something.

When pro-regime Syrian forces gassed the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta in 2013, a year after President Obama warned Assad that use of chemical weapons would cross a red line, the Obama administration spent three weeks preparing to do something.

Cognizant that the American public was overwhelmingly opposed to military action, it decided to win congressional authorization first. Unwilling to act alone, the administration worked to secure international support for and participation in U.S.-led retaliatory air strikes.

Concerned that U.S. military action against the Assad regime would raise expectations of a broader policy shift against Assad, making it even harder to persuade the rebels to attend U.S.-brokered peace talks, Obama administration officials worked to deflate these hopes. Secretary of State John Kerry famously assured the world that the planned strikes would be “unbelievably small.”

Obama’s response to Assad’s 2013 chemical attack was a legendary failure.

The result was a legendary failure. Angry over the intentionally negligible scope of the planned air strikes, congressional Republicans withdrew their support. Britain’s parliament voted against air strikes, while NATO allies demurred with the exception of France. Moves to secure an Arab League resolution fizzled.

President Obama ended up abandoning the planned attack in favor of a Russian-brokered commitment from Assad to dismantle his chemical weapons arsenal. Not only was the agreement not fully implemented — smaller-scale chemical weapons use continued intermittently until this week — but it forced the international community to acknowledge and deal with Assad for the first time since the civil war began, leading Sunni governments to step up support for militant Islamists and paving the way for Russia’s military intervention the following year.

[the_ad id=”4690″]

Obama’s former defense secretary, Leon Panetta, later conceded that his handling of the crisis, “sent a mixed message, not only to Assad, not only to the Syrians, but to the world.”

President Trump appears to have learned all these lessons in the wake of the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town in Idlib province on Tuesday. He acted unilaterally, neither waiting for nor requesting the participation of other nations. He felt no inclination to shield himself from public backlash by seeking authorization from congress. And he acted quickly, with airstrikes coming less than three days later.

Trump’s response was quick, unilateral, and politically courageous.

Rather than assuring everyone beforehand that the planned strike would not change Washington’s posture in Syria, Trump hinted at further action, “to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria” and “end terrorism of all kinds and all types.”

Although Trump’s military action was every bit as limited as the air strikes planned by the Obama administration four years ago, it is likely to be far more effective in achieving its aims.

In addition to sending a clear message to the Assad regime that the U.S. will not hesitate to punish further use of chemical weapons, Trump’s military action signals unmistakably to other states in possession of unconventional weapons that the U.S. will respond forcefully to their use. The fact that the Trump administration was visibly warming to Assad as of the beginning of this week underscores that improved relations with Washington won’t offer much protection against the consequences of WMD use.

By washing away the stain of Obama’s shameful handling of the 2013 Ghouta attack, Trump’s bold action will make it easier for the U.S. to establish and enforce red lines regarding other adversaries on a range of other issues without having to resort to force.

But here’s the kicker. Ordinarily, an American president launching unilateral military action without United Nations approval or anything but pro forma consultation with allies would elicit howls of protest from the international community — doubly so, you’d think, if his name happened to be Donald Trump. The astonishingly favorable reaction to the strike throughout the world underscores that bold American leadership and decisive action are the way to win friends, not multilateralism and diplomatic nicety.

Originally published in the Hill under the title “Trump Learned from Obama’s Mistakes and Took Action.”

Posted on

THE CIVIL WAR IS HERE

The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule.

A civil war has begun.

This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn’t control.

The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don’t accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left.

It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning.

It was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it’s for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow. (As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over.

It was for Obama defying the orders of Federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever. It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become “patriotic”.

There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that’s not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it’s treason.

After losing Congress, the left consolidated its authority in the White House. After losing the White House, the left shifted its center of authority to Federal judges and unelected government officials. Each defeat led the radicalized Democrats to relocate from more democratic to less democratic institutions.

This isn’t just hypocrisy. That’s a common political sin. Hypocrites maneuver within the system. The left has no allegiance to the system. It accepts no laws other than those dictated by its ideology.

Democrats have become radicalized by the left. This doesn’t just mean that they pursue all sorts of bad policies. It means that their first and foremost allegiance is to an ideology, not the Constitution, not our country or our system of government. All of those are only to be used as vehicles for their ideology.

That’s why compromise has become impossible.

Our system of government was designed to allow different groups to negotiate their differences. But those differences were supposed to be based around finding shared interests. The most profound of these shared interests was that of a common country based around certain civilizational values. The left has replaced these Founding ideas with radically different notions and principles. It has rejected the primary importance of the country. As a result it shares little in the way of interests or values.

Instead it has retreated to cultural urban and suburban enclaves where it has centralized tremendous amounts of power while disregarding the interests and values of most of the country. If it considers them at all, it is convinced that they will shortly disappear to be replaced by compliant immigrants and college indoctrinated leftists who will form a permanent demographic majority for its agenda.

But it couldn’t wait that long because it is animated by the conviction that enforcing its ideas is urgent and inevitable. And so it turned what had been a hidden transition into an open break.

In the hidden transition, its authority figures had hijacked the law and every political office they held to pursue their ideological agenda. The left had used its vast cultural power to manufacture a consensus that was slowly transitioning the country from American values to its values and agendas. The right had proven largely impotent in the face of a program which corrupted and subverted from within.

The left was enormously successful in this regard. It was so successful that it lost all sense of proportion and decided to be open about its views and to launch a political power struggle after losing an election.

The Democrats were no longer being slowly injected with leftist ideology. Instead the left openly took over and demanded allegiance to open borders, identity politics and environmental fanaticism. The exodus of voters wiped out the Democrats across much of what the left deemed flyover country.

The left responded to democratic defeats by retreating deeper into undemocratic institutions, whether it was the bureaucracy or the corporate media, while doubling down on its political radicalism. It is now openly defying the outcome of a national election using a coalition of bureaucrats, corporations, unelected officials, celebrities and reporters that are based out of its cultural and political enclaves.

It has responded to a lost election by constructing sanctuary cities and states thereby turning a cultural and ideological secession into a legal secession. But while secessionists want to be left alone authoritarians want everyone to follow their laws. The left is an authoritarian movement that wants total compliance with its dictates with severe punishments for those who disobey.

The left describes its actions as principled. But more accurately they are ideological. Officials at various levels of government have rejected the authority of the President of the United States, of Congress and of the Constitution because those are at odds with their radical ideology. Judges have cloaked this rejection in law. Mayors and governors are not even pretending that their actions are lawful.

The choices of this civil war are painfully clear.

We can have a system of government based around the Constitution with democratically elected representatives. Or we can have one based on the ideological principles of the left in which all laws and processes, including elections and the Constitution, are fig leaves for enforcing social justice.

But we cannot have both.

Some civil wars happen when a political conflict can’t be resolved at the political level. The really bad ones happen when an irresolvable political conflict combines with an irresolvable cultural conflict.

That is what we have now.

The left has made it clear that it will not accept the lawful authority of our system of government. It will not accept the outcome of elections. It will not accept these things because they are at odds with its ideology and because they represent the will of large portions of the country whom they despise.

The question is what comes next.

The last time around growing tensions began to explode in violent confrontations between extremists on both sides. These extremists were lauded by moderates who mainstreamed their views. The first Republican president was elected and rejected. The political tensions led to conflict and then civil war.

The left doesn’t believe in secession. It’s an authoritarian political movement that has lost democratic authority. There is now a political power struggle underway between the democratically elected officials and the undemocratic machinery of government aided by a handful of judges and local elected officials.

What this really means is that there are two competing governments; the legal government and a treasonous anti-government of the left. If this political conflict progresses, agencies and individuals at every level of government will be asked to demonstrate their allegiance to these two competing governments. And that can swiftly and explosively transform into an actual civil war.

There is no sign that the left understands or is troubled by the implications of the conflict it has initiated. And there are few signs that Democrats properly understand the dangerous road that the radical left is drawing them toward. The left assumes that the winners of a democratic election will back down rather than stand on their authority. It is unprepared for the possibility that democracy won’t die in darkness.

Civil wars end when one side is forced to accept the authority of the other. The left expects everyone to accept its ideological authority. Conservatives expect the left to accept Constitutional authority. The conflict is still political and cultural. It’s being fought in the media and within the government. But if neither side backs down, then it will go beyond words as both sides give contradictory orders.

The left is a treasonous movement. The Democrats became a treasonous organization when they fell under the sway of a movement that rejects our system of government, its laws and its elections. Now their treason is coming to a head. They are engaged in a struggle for power against the government. That’s not protest. It’s not activism. The old treason of the sixties has come of age. A civil war has begun.

This is a primal conflict between a totalitarian system and a democratic system. Its outcome will determine whether we will be a free nation or a nation of slaves.

Originally Published in FrontPageMagazine.

Posted on

TRUMP’S GREATEST DEAL

The Iran deal Trump needs to make with the Russians is clear.

What can be done about Iran? In Israel, a dispute is reportedly raging between the IDF and the Mossad about the greatest threat facing Israel. IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot thinks that Hezbollah is the greatest threat facing Israel. Mossad Director Yossi Cohen thinks Iran’s nuclear program is the greatest danger facing the Jewish state.

While the media highlight the two men’s disagreement, the underlying truth about their concerns has been ignored.

Hezbollah and Iran’s nuclear program are two aspects of the same threat: the regime in Tehran.

Hezbollah is a wholly owned subsidiary of the regime. If the regime disappeared, Hezbollah would fall apart. As for the nuclear installations, in the hands of less fanatical leaders, they would represent a far less acute danger to global security.

So if you undermine the Iranian regime, you defeat Hezbollah and defuse the nuclear threat.

If you fail to deal with the regime in Tehran, both threats will continue to grow no matter what you do, until they become all but insurmountable.

So what can be done about Tehran? With each passing day we discover new ways Iran endangers Israel and the rest of the region.

This week we learned Iran has built underground weapons factories in Lebanon. The facilities are reportedly capable of building missiles, drones, small arms and ammunition. Their underground location protects them from aerial bombardment.

Then there is Hezbollah’s relationship to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF).

For more than a decade, the Americans have been selling themselves the implausible claim that the LAF is a responsible fighting force capable and willing to rein in Hezbollah. Never an easy claim – the LAF provided targeting information to Hezbollah missile crews attacking Israel in 2006 – after Hezbollah domesticated the Lebanese government in 2008, the claim became downright silly. And yet, over the past decade, the US has provided the LAF with weapons worth in excess of $1 billion. In 2016 alone the US gave the LAF jets, helicopters, armored personnel carriers and missiles worth more than $220 million.

In recent months, showing that Iran no longer feels the need to hide its control over Lebanon, the LAF has openly stated that it is working hand in glove with Hezbollah.

Last November, Hezbollah showcased US M113 armored personnel carriers with roof-mounted Russian anti-aircraft guns, at a military parade in Syria. The next month the Americans gave the LAF a Hellfire missile-equipped Cessna aircraft with day and night targeting systems.

Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun is a Hezbollah ally. So is Defense Minister Yaacoub Sarraf and LAF commander Gen. Joseph Aoun.

Last month President Aoun told Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, that Hezbollah serves “a complementary role to the Lebanese army.”

And yet the Americans insist that it continues to make sense – and to be lawful – to arm the LAF.

You can hardly blame them. Denial is an attractive option, given the alternatives.

For the past eight years, the Obama administration did everything in its power to empower Iran. To make Iran happy, Obama did nothing as hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed and millions more were forced to flee their homes by Iran and its puppet Bashar Assad.

Obama allowed Iran to take over the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military. He sat back as Iran’s Houthi proxy overthrew the pro-US regime in Yemen.

And of course, the crowning achievement of Obama’s foreign policy was his nuclear deal with the mullahs. Obama’s deal gives Iran an open path to a nuclear arsenal in a bit more than a decade and enriches the regime beyond Ayatollah Khamenei’s wildest dreams.

Obama empowered Iran at the expense of the US’s Sunni allies and Israel, and indeed, at the expense of the US’s own superpower status in the region, to enable the former president to withdraw the US from the Middle East.

Power of course, doesn’t suffer a vacuum, and the one that Obama created was quickly filled.

For decades, Russia has been Iran’s major arms supplier. It has assisted Iran with its nuclear program and with its ballistic missile program. Russia serves as Iran’s loyal protector at the UN Security Council.

But for all the help it provided Tehran through the years, Moscow never presented itself as Iran’s military defender.

That all changed in September 2015. Two months after Obama cut his nuclear deal with the ayatollahs, Russia deployed its forces to Syria on behalf of Iran and its Syrian and Lebanese proxies.

In so doing, Russia became the leading member and the protector of the Iranian axis.

Russia’s deployment of forces had an immediate impact not only on the war in Syria, but on the regional power balance as a whole. With Russia serving as the air force for Iran and its Syrian and Hezbollah proxies, the Assad regime’s chances of survival increased dramatically. So did Iran’s prospects for regional hegemony.

For Obama, this situation was not without its advantages.

In his final year in office, Obama’s greatest concern was ensuring that his nuclear deal with Iran would outlive his presidency. Russia’s deployment in Syria as the protector of Iran and its proxies was a means of achieving this end.

Russia’s alliance with Iran made attacking Iran’s nuclear program or its Hezbollah proxy a much more dangerous prospect than it had been before.

After all, in 2006, Russia supported Iran and Hezbollah in their war against Israel. But Russia’s support for Iran and its Lebanese legion didn’t diminish Israel’s operational freedom. Israel was able to wage war without any fear that its operations would place it in a direct confrontation with the Russian military.

This changed in September 2015.

The first person to grasp the strategic implications of the Russian move was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu recognized that with Russian forces on the ground in Syria, the only way for Israel to take even remedial measures to protect itself from Iran and its proxies was to drive a wedge between President Vladimir Putin and the ayatollahs wide enough to enable Israel to continue its raids against weapons convoys to Hezbollah and other targets without risking a confrontation with Russia. This is the reason that Netanyahu boarded a flight to Moscow to speak to Putin almost immediately after the Russian leader deployed his forces to Syria.

Israel’s ability to continue to strike targets in Syria, whether along the border on the Golan Heights or deep within Syrian territory, is a function of Netanyahu’s success in convincing Putin to limit his commitment to his Iranian allies.

Since President Donald Trump entered the White House, Iran has been his most urgent foreign policy challenge. Unlike Obama, Trump recognizes that Iran’s nuclear program and its threats to US economic and strategic interests in the Persian Gulf and the Levant cannot be wished away.

And so he has decided to deal with Iran.

The question is, what is he supposed to do? Trump has three basic options.

He can cut a deal with Russia. He can act against Iran without cutting a deal with Russia. And he can do nothing, or anemically maintain Obama’s pro-Iran policies.

The first option has the greatest potential strategic payoff. If Trump can convince Russia to ditch Iran, then he has a chance of dismantling the regime in Tehran and so defusing the Iranian nuclear program and destroying Hezbollah without having to fight a major war.

The payoff to Russia for agreeing to such a deal would be significant. But if Trump were to adopt this policy, the US has a lot of bargaining chips that it can use to convince Putin to walk away from the ayatollahs long enough for the US to defuse the threat they pose to its interests.

The problem with the Russia strategy is that since Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the presidential race, the Democrats, their allied media outlets and powerful forces in the US intelligence community have been beset by a Russia hysteria unseen since the Red scares in the 1920s and 1950s.

The fact that Obama bent over backward to cater to Putin’s interests for eight years has been pushed down the memory hole.

Also ignored is the fact that during her tenure as secretary of state, Clinton approved deals with the Russians that were arguably antithetical to US interests while the Clinton Foundation received millions of dollars in contributions from Russian businessmen and companies closely allied with Putin.

Since November 8, the Democrats and their clapping seals in the media and allies in the US intelligence community have banged the war drums against Russia, accusing Trump and his advisers of serving as Russian patsies at best, and Russian agents at worst.

In this climate, it would be politically costly for Trump to implement a Russian-based strategy for dismantling the Iranian threat.

This brings us to the second option, which is to confront Iran and Russia. Under this option, US action against Iran could easily cause hostilities to break out between the US and Russia. It goes without saying that the political fallout from making a deal with Russia would be nothing compared to the political consequences if Trump were to take the US down a path that led to war with Russia.

Obviously, the economic and human costs of such a confrontation would be prohibitive regardless of the political consequences.

This leaves us with the final option of doing nothing, or anemically continuing to implement Obama’s policies, as the Americans are doing today.

Although tempting, the hard truth is that this is the most dangerous policy of all.

You need only look to North Korea to understand why this is so.

Seemingly on a daily basis, Pyongyang threatens to nuke America. And the US has no good options for dealing with the threat.

As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged during his recent trip to Asia, decades of US diplomacy regarding North Korea’s nuclear program did nothing to diminish or delay the threat.

North Korea has been able to develop nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles while threatening the US with destruction because North Korea enjoys the protection of China. If not for the Chinese, the US would long ago have dealt a death blow to the regime.

Israel has moved Russia as far away from Iran as it can on its own. It is enough to stop convoys of North Korean weapons from crossing into Lebanon.

But it isn’t enough to cause serious harm to Tehran or its clients.

The only government that can do that is the American government.

Trump built his career by mastering the art of deal making. And he recognized that Obama’s deal with Iran is not the masterpiece Obama and his allies claim but a catastrophe.

The Iran deal Trump needs to make with the Russians is clear. The only question is whether he is willing to pay the political price it requires.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 

Posted on

North Korea, Iran, and the War Against Israel

With reports flying across the web that the Trump administration is considering the use of force against the North Korean regime, Seal Team 6 and F-35’s are set to participate in the annual Foal Eagle military drills between the US and South Korea.

South Korea’s Joon Gang Daily reports the following:

“The U.S. Navy’s Special Warfare Development Group, better known as the SEAL Team 6, will arrive in South Korea soon for joint military drills and take part in an exercise simulating the removal of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, according to the Ministry of National Defense Monday.”

A report at the Yonhap News Agency went further:

“A bigger number of and more diverse U.S. special operation forces will take part in this year’s Foal Eagle and Key Resolve exercises to practice missions to infiltrate into the North, remove the North’s war command and demolition of its key military facilities,” the official told Yonhap News Agency asking not to be named.

As the North Korean regime gears up for further ballistic missile tests, the Trump administration appears determined to preemptively stop them.

What Changed?

Successive American Presidents have all considered North Korea to be one of the most dangerous countries around.  A nuclear armed Kim Jong-Un with what looks to be an upcoming ICBM test puts the US in direct harm.  Most observers consider Kim to be mentally unstable, which complicates any policy in handling him. This is precisely why a military confrontation is far more likely now. Trump cannot allow to develop an accurate way of delivering nukes against the USA let alone Japan or South Korea.

The Iran Connection

It has been known for some time that Iranian missile technology was developed in North Korea.  Both regimes see the USA as their number one enemy and have worked together to build a situation where they would pose a serious threat to the USA. To most observers North Korea and Iran are in constant coordination as can be seen from last week’s ballistic missile test in Ira, which followed North Korea’s launch of four missiles near Japan.

Researchers from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies published a research paper (.pdf) in January 2016 outlining Iran’s past and present military dealings with North Korea, concluding that “the signs of military and scientific cooperation between Iran and North Korea suggest that Pyongyang could have been involved in Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile program, and that state-run trading companies may have assisted in critical aspects of Iran’s illicit nuclear-related activities.”

War Against Israel

It should not be lost on anyone that the same Obama administration that failed to curb Kim Jong-Un’s race towards a nuclear arsenal also actively empowered the Iranian regime in its own nuclear development.  The outcome of this is a nuclear Middle East whose Shiite Crescent with Russian backing threatens to engulf Israel. Trump’s move against North Korea must be coordinated with Israel, because when the war starts on the Korean peninsula the Iranian regime will act aggressively against the Jewish state.

In the coming weeks and months expect American forces to ready themselves to invade North Korea before Kim Jong-Un achieves delivery breakout, because if he does, the world as we know it will look very different.