Tag Archives: foreign policy

Worth a Shot

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President Donald Trump (R) is looking to sign an Executive Order lifting in large part sanctions currently extant on Syria. The sanctions were levied when Bashar al-Assad still reigned; he has since been tossed by an ex-Daesh terrorist middle manager and his cohort that had been operating in Syria after that middle manager had estranged himself from Daesh.

It may be that that ex-middle manager and now Syrian strong-man Ahmed al-Sharaa has, in fact, renounced his terrorist ways of his past and truly wants a more stable political and economic environment for the Syrian peoples [sic]. That remains to be seen.

This move may blow up in our face, just as welcoming the People’s Republic of China into the WTO and granting it US Most Favored Nation status ultimately blew up in our face. Or it might be a sound move, easing friction throughout the Middle East, supporting opportunities for prosperity for the several peoples resident in Syria, and reducing Israel’s security risks.

It’s worth a shot, although its value would be increased were it far more easily reversed should the move fail than has been reversing our coddling of the enemy nation, the PRC. Nominally, the Executive Order may well be more easily reversed than those moves regarding the PRC.

Misplaced Optimism

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The news writers over at The Wall Street Journal wrote this in all seriousness about the aftermath of the Israeli airstrikes on Iran; followed by the US’ MOP and cruise missile deliveries to Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan; followed by a cease-fire between Iran and Israel:

The attack [by US B-2s and cruise missiles] made the US and the region safer, but did the diplomacy? The answer depends on how Mr Trump plays it from here.

No, it does not. The “answer” depends entirely on Iran’s Ayatollah and his mullah cronies in the Iranian government. Those persons still hate Israel and Jews in general, and they still hate the US. They still adhere to a prior Iranian President’s statement as those current Iranian government persons now resume their efforts to put together nuclear bombs with which to destroy Israel and pass on to later-reviving terrorist proxies for their use. Rafsanjani’s statement—brag, really, and threat—about which I’ve written before, l repeat here:

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

On top of that, this war is not over because those Iranian government persons have not accepted defeat, and never will, much like Rome in an earlier period:

The Romans expected a war to end in total victory or their own annihilation…. This attitude prevented the Romans from losing the [Punic] war and ultimately allowed them to win it.

Iran, or at least the current crop of Iranian government persons, have not yet been annihilated. All that’s happened is that those persons have agreed to a cease-fire of uncertain durability and duration, during which they will rest their forces, refit them, rearm them, and then resume, possibly using alternative means, their murderous assaults on Israel, Europe, and the US.

It’s unfortunate that so many in the news writing business seriously think the Iranian government personnel think like Westerners do, have the same moral imperatives Westerners do, have the same value sets and respect for human life Westerners do.

These Iranian government persons are not interested in victory, per se. They’re interested in the destruction of Israel, and they do not care at all about the cost in lives to the Iranian people or to the lives of Muslims generally.

What Trump does, or does not do, diplomatically is wholly irrelevant.

Leadership Here Isn’t Important

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Folks are getting worried about the Trump administration’s moves to roll back hydrogen, carbon capture, and green energy initiatives, claiming such moves give leadership in those areas to the People’s Republic of China and to Europe.

Lost in the discussions—or simply ignored—is any discussion, any concern at all, of why we should care about leading the world in those technologies. The Left’s concern is centered on the premise of an impending climate disaster for the planet.

That premise, though, is far from established. The date of no return, past which that claimed disaster becomes unavoidable, keeps receding into the future. Climate models still can’t predict simultaneously the past and the present, and they have been shown over the last 25+ years to have badly overstated their predictions of global warming in each of those 25+ years. And, there’s the usual litany of ignored climate data regarding geologically historical atmospheric CO2 concentrations, how we’re still cooler than the geological planetary warming trend these 11,000 years after the last glaciation period, and on and on.

To the contrary, it might be useful to let the PRC waste its resources leading the way down that road to nowhere important. We don’t need to waste our resources racing to keep up with, much less stay in front of, the PRC.

No Way

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President Donald Trump (R) says “Iranian officials” had offered to travel to the White House to negotiate amid ongoing missile exchanges with Israel.

Trump should not waste his staffers’ time on meetings with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s staffers. If there’s to be a meeting, it should be between Trump and Khamenei, face to face. It also should not occur in the White House or Camp David or Mar-a-Lago.

Maybe such a White House meeting could occur, if it took place in the kitchen, or in a back hallway. Maybe, instead, hold it in a ground floor room in one of the rebuilt World Trade Center buildings.

This Should Not Be

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Iran is saying that it’ll negotiate—”this time we really mean it”—if the US stays out of the Iran-Israeli war whose current stage is in progress.

In the midst of a ferocious Israeli air campaign, Tehran has told Arab officials it would be open to returning to the negotiating table as long as the US doesn’t join the attack, the officials said.

I’ll leave aside the mullah’s cynical non sequitur that our participation in the war or not is a negotiable matter.

The mullahs of the Iranian government have welched on every agreement they’ve made with us, with Israel, with the West in general. Their word is worthless. It would be worse than a waste of time to pause the fighting now in favor of more Iranian dissembling under the guise of negotiating. It would cost even more friendly lives as Iran stalls, recovers it ability to build nuclear weapons, and then delivers them.

Apart from that, in addition to it, the US should play a limited offensive role. Iran’s Fordow nuclear weapons plant is under a mountain. Israel does not have the bombs or the delivery systems needed to attack it beyond (temporarily) closing its entry/exit points and, if they can spot them, the air vents. The US has the Massive Ordnance Penetrators capable of getting down to and destroying the Fordow facility, and we have the delivery systems. It would only take 3-5 of these MOPs to destroy that facility. If it isn’t destroyed, Iran would be able to resume building its nuclear bombs after the current stage of its war on Israel is concluded regardless of any other damage the Israelis could inflict.

The US should deliver those MOPs.