Policy whiplash

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve said it before but I want to say it again: one of the effects of the progression of US administrations of the 21st Century – Bush II followed by Obama followed by Trump followed by Biden – has been enormous reversals in a US foreign policy that used to be much more stable no matter which party was in power.

There were exceptions, of course, notable among them Vietnam. But still, there was a more basic majority bipartisan attitude, with hawk-dove variations but nevertheless a stability compared to now.

At this point I can’t imagine that anyone would trust the US no matter who’s in charge. The reversals have come fast and furious, the parties have alternated, and the world is realizing that the US is both weak and careening between two alternating points of view.

I saw a comment on this or another blog making the point that maybe distrust of the US will lead to a sort of enforced American isolation on the world stage. The person making that comment was happy about such a prospect. Although there’s something about it that attracts me as well, I see a huge danger. I’m far from a globalist, but I just don’t think isolation is possible in modern times. For better or for worse, what happens in the world affects us greatly. You can run, but you can’t hide.

Iran Deal 2.0 postponed

The New Neo Posted on by

I wrote “postponed” because I believe that the Biden administration has not given up on this pernicious endeavor.

But here’s the news:

For the last several weeks, reports of a new JCPOA “nuclear” deal with Iran being imminent have surfaced. Even as Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States was said to be forging ahead, with an announcement to be made any day. That despite the fact that Russia itself was the chief mediator.

Russia was the chief mediator?

More here:

…[L]ast Saturday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov unexpectedly demanded sweeping guarantees that Russian trade with Iran would not be affected by sanctions imposed on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine – a demand Western powers say is unacceptable and Washington has insisted it will not agree to.

Unexpectedly?

Russia’s envoy to the talks, Mikhail Ulyanov, dismissed suggestions that Moscow was the reason the talks had stalled, however.

“The conclusion of the deal does not depend on Russia only,” he told reporters after meeting EU coordinator Enrique Mora. “There are others actors who need additional time and who have additional concerns, and they are being discussed.”

He said he hoped the talks would conclude at the earliest time – but he could give no timeline for when they may resume.

Interesting.

European negotiators from France, Britain and Germany had already left a week ago as they believed they had gone as far as they could and it was now up to the United States and Iran to agree on the outstanding issues…

Four Western diplomats had said the talks were all but finalised until Russia made its demands.

So what’s going on? Do we have a temporary reprieve of sorts regarding the Biden administration’s intentions regarding Iran, due to Russian demands in light of its invasion of Ukraine? And if so, why, and is that the only reason?

My own theory – for what it’s worth – goes as follows: it’s partly that the Russians figured that while the US was making concession after concession after concession to Iran, they might as well get a concession that would be important to them. Why not, given how weak this administration is? So they may have miscalculated on that. But why would the US negotiators not just give in, in order to get their much-desired deal? I believe it may be because they thought better of signing a deal right now that most of America would hate if and when voters discovered what was in it.

And by “right now” I mean prior to the midterms, which are not all that far away. Most of this Iran deal isn’t a big story yet to anyone except political junkies. Perhaps it behooves the administration to keep it that way until after the November election, after which they may suddenly discover that they will have more flexibility. And then I predict that, even if the Democrats do poorly in the Congressional elections in November, the Biden administration can go full stem ahead with the deal as planned.

That’s my theory of the moment, anyway.

Two days ago I wrote a post in which I speculated on the administration’s motives in pursuing a deal so awful, and I added that I hoped that “there will be some sort of sticking point that will mean that no accord is reached.” That appears to be what has happened – for now. I have little doubt that the Biden administration has the same goals as before, though.

What are those goals? We already discussed some possibilities in that previous thread I just linked. But right now I’d like to add a suggestion to ponder, from this article by Caroline Glick:

The Biden administration justifies its pro-Iranian and anti-Israel/Sunni Arab policy by claiming it is a means to disengage the U.S. from the Middle East at a time that Washington is keen to concentrate its resources and attention on Asia and the rising threat of China. While on its face, this justification seems reasonable, it stands on a rotten foundation.

During his term in office, then president Donald Trump sought to minimize U.S. presence in the Middle East in order to focus U.S. efforts and resources in Asia to contend with the rising threat from China. To achieve this goal, Trump empowered America’s allies – Israel and the Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia. He provided political, diplomatic, logistical and when necessary, military support to ensure the success of their efforts to combat Iranian aggression against them.

Trump’s concept, which was successfully diminishing both the level of violence in the region and the U.S.’s direct involvement in the Middle East, was that since America’s allies share the U.S.’s interests in the Middle East, the more able they are to defend their own interests, the less the U.S. will have to invest in protecting its interests in the region.

Trump created institutional frameworks for cooperation between U.S. allies both by forging the Abraham Accords which effectively ended the Arab conflict with Israel, and by integrating Israel into Central Command and so fostering operational military cooperation between Israel and the U.S.’s Arab allies under the aegis of the U.S. military.

Those were the days, my friend.

Then, the deliberate reversal:

Biden’s policies are the polar opposite of Trump’s policies both conceptually and substantively. Biden’s policies represent a reinstatement and escalation of Barack Obama’s policies for Iran and the wider Middle East. In contrast to Trump, Obama, Biden and their advisors believe that the U.S.’s Middle Eastern allies – Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states – maliciously worked for decades to entangle the United States in the wars of the Middle East. To disentangle America from the region and its pernicious “allies” the Obama-Biden doctrine posits the U.S. must realign itself away from its allies and weaken them, and towards Iran, which it must empower.

This brings us to Israel, and what its government must do in the face of the administration’s betrayal. Since supporting Iran and undermining Israel are the founding principles of Biden’s Middle East policies, they are not subject to change. Israel cannot influence them. It doesn’t matter how many times Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid gush about Israel’s “true friends,” Biden and Blinken. They have chosen a path that is impermeable to reason and argument.

It appears that Glick’s article was written prior to the current stalling of the Iran Deal talks. But I don’t think that the stoppage would affect her analysis of what’s behind the administration’s policy and whether it will ever change.

Glick adds:

In 2014-2015, in their efforts to sell their original cataclysmic nuclear deal with Iran, Obama and his advisors ran a campaign to demonize Israel and its supporters in Congress specifically and in U.S. public life more generally. Now that Biden has agreed to an even more dangerous nuclear deal, Israel can expect for the demonization campaign that awaits it to dwarf its predecessor.

I would add that, because an Iran Deal was a prioritized goal of Obama from the very outset of his presidency, the retreat from decades of consistent US policy towards Israel began much earlier than 2014-2015. It took the form of Obama rejecting Netanyahu, and was spun as being about Netanyahu and his administration. But although Obama detested Netanyahu, I don’t think it really was about that at all. It was part of Obama’s campaign to ingratiate the US with Iran, in the service of the great big deal.

The Biden administration and its negotiators are still fully onboard with that general policy. Glick may indeed be correct about the reasons behind it; her explanation is a better one that most I’ve seen so far. One flaw, though, is that I don’t think this administration has any interest in “concentrateing its resources and attention on Asia and the rising threat of China.” I think that’s some sort of excuse. Perhaps the more basic reason behind this is to diminish the influence of the US and Israel – as well as Western nations in general – on the world stage.

Jussie Smollet receives a sentence, a fine, and a stern talking to

The New Neo Posted on by

I would have liked to have seen a longer sentence, but at least he got one:

Embattled actor Jussie Smollett was sentenced to 150 days in jail and 30 months probation on Thursday for falsely reporting to police that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack in 2019.

“You’re just a charlatan pretending to be a victim of a hate crime,” Judge James Linn told Smollett while announcing the sentence…

The judge excoriated Smollett during Thursday’s sentencing, saying he fabricated the tale for the attention. Linn said the false claim hurt genuine victims of hate crimes and that Smollett tried to exploit the real past and current injustices in the U.S.

“You took some scabs off some healing wounds and you ripped them apart for one reason: You wanted to make yourself more famous,” Linn said. “And for a while, it worked. Everybody was talking about you…

Smollett was also ordered to pay around $120,100 in restitution to the city of Chicago and was fined $25,000, the maximum allowed.

Smollet, ever trying to gain victim status for himself, gave this response:

…repeating, “I am not suicidal!” He said he was innocent that “if anything happens to me when I go in there, I did not do it to myself,” referring to jail.

The Babylon Bee outdid itself with this: “Cruel: Jussie Smollett Will Be Forced To Share A Jail Cell With His Attacker”:

When asked for comment, Jussie Smollet angrily yelled “This is MAGA country!” before punching himself in the face.

ADDENDUM: Ace makes a good point about Smollet’s deception:

And again, it was a hate crime, not a hate crime hoax; it was a legitimate hate crime, in which he sought to direct hate and violence towards white people. The fact that he did so through deceptive, false-flag means does not mean it’s not a real hate crime.

Cancel culture goes international, with consequences

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s another recommended aritcle, this one on the parallels between cancel culture and what’s happening to Russia right now in terms of sanctions by private companies or private groups in particular.

The excesses have been piling up. Don’t play Tchaikovsky? Ban disabled Russian athletes? These activities might even have the opposite effect from the desired one, drawing the Russian people behind Putin as the world takes it out on them.

And of course our own sharp reversals of foreign policy since Obama took office have informed the world that they can no longer depend on a certain basic consistency and reliability from the US no matter who is in charge, not just militarily but financially. Whiplash.

The world can also observe that we have elected – and seem to be tolerating as leader – a person who was never smart to begin with and now is further diminished cognitively. This cannot be hidden. There are consequences for the entire country, and not just as long as Biden remains president but beyond. And it’s not limited to just the direct damage he’ll do.

Kamala Harris leaves a slightly different but similarly incompetent impression.

All minority groups favor voter ID laws

The New Neo Posted on by

The results of a recent poll:

Rasmussen also found that on one key election reform issue, voter identification, support remains high. Overall, 74% of likely voters said that voter ID should be required, including 90% of Republicans and 59% of Democrats.

And despite complaints from some Democrats, including the president, that reforms like ID requirements are racist, even majorities of minorities don’t think so. The Rasmussen analysis added, “While some have claimed voter ID laws discriminate against racial minorities, majorities of every racial group — 76% of whites, 60% of black voters, and 78% of other minorities — agree that requiring photo ID to vote is a reasonable measure to protect the integrity of elections.

But there’s one key minority group that disagrees – and that’s the leftists who are currently running the federal government and the blue states.

On energy and the west’s enormous errors

The New Neo Posted on by

This depressing article about our energy policy and its consequences is well worth reading.

One caveat – I think this comment by Barry Meislin (which I believe was in response to a different piece) applies to the one I just linked as well:

…[I]t seems to be currently fashionable for all the “best people” to describe the Trump administration as “CHAOTIC”—as a terrible leader—while somehow(!) neglecting to mention that Trump’s presidency was—even before its inception—CONSTANTLY under attack, sabotaged and hog-tied by the Democratic Party machine and its loyal media lapdogs, and led by the Democratic candidate for president ably and willingly assisted by the outgoing (and spectacularly devious) president with tentacles reaching all the way down to the far-flung apparatus of government institutions, which comprehensive campaign of subversion resulted in the scurrilous allegations known as the Russiagate hoax.

“Chaotic”, they say (with no sense of irony at all…but a whole load of willful ignorance).

That’s also what I see the author of that article I just linked doing. He describes all sorts of terrible policies that Obama and Biden have implemented, but keeps saying that “we” did it – the “we” being the US.

And of course that’s correct: presidents make policy for the US. But the author ignores the fact that Trump was well aware of how destructive those things were and made every effort to reverse them. However, because Trump was followed by Biden – who reversed Trump’s reversals – and so we’re back at square one or actually much further back than that.

And all the author manages to say about Trump is that his administration was “chaotic,” without adding that Trump was under vicious attack from many sides during his entire presidency and even now.

The chaos was not caused by Trump – unless you consider mean tweets to be “chaos.”

Other than that, though, I recommend the article.

Meet Robert Malley, the head negotiator of our glorious new Iran Deal

The New Neo Posted on by

Till today, I hadn’t done research on Robert Malley, the Iran Deal’s chief negotiator (new deal as well as old deal). But I’ve been curious, and today I finally managed to do some brief research on him. I think it’s very instructive to learn the history of the person Biden or “Biden” chose to be chief negotiator with Iran – who is the same person Obama had chosen for the position during his administration.

From Malley’s Wiki page:

Malley was born in 1963 to Barbara (née Silverstein) Malley, a New Yorker who worked for the United Nations delegation of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), and her husband, Simon Malley (1923–2006), an Egyptian-born Jewish journalist who grew up in Egypt and worked as a foreign correspondent for Al Gomhuria. The elder Malley spent time in New York, writing about international affairs, particularly about nationalist, anti-imperial movements in Africa, and made a key contribution by putting the FLN on the world map.

In 1969, the elder Malley moved his family—including son Robert—to France, where he founded the leftist magazine Africasia (later known as Afrique Asia). Robert attended École Jeannine Manuel, a prestigious bilingual school in Paris, and graduated in the same class (1980) as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The Malleys remained in France until 1980, when then French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing briefly expelled Simon Malley from the country to New York, due to his hostility towards Western colonialism and Israel.

Malley attended Yale University, and was a 1984 Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he earned a D.Phil. in political philosophy. There he wrote his doctoral thesis about Third-worldism and its decline. Malley continued writing about foreign policy, including extended commentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

So although Malley is an ethnic Jew (from the Middle East), his real identification – and the real religion in which he was raised – is the left. He has certainly proven his leftist bona fides. Interesting also that he went to school with Blinken, although it doesn’t say whether they were friends there.

As far as I can tell, Malley never had to have any Congressional approval to become the Iran negotiator and I don’t think there is any Congressional oversight of him now.

More from Malley’s Wiki page:

Malley has published several articles on the failed 2000 Camp David Summit in which he participated as a member of the U.S. negotiating team. Malley rejects the mainstream opinion that lays all the blame for the failure of the summit on Arafat and the Palestinian delegation. In his analysis, the main reasons were the tactics of then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and the substance of his proposal which made it impossible for Arafat to accept Barak’s offer.

It becomes more clear that Malley is a leftist who has no sense of obligation to protect the US or Israel or even perhaps the Western world. It is also fairly clear that the powers-that-be in the Biden administration thought Malley did a bang-up job conceding to Iran in the previous deal he negotiated, and that his instructions were probably to give away the farm this time.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) They’ve found Shackleton’s lost ship Endurance 10,000 feet underwater. It is remarkably intact. Photos and a video at the link; really quite extraordinary.

Without any exaggeration this is the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen – by far,” said marine archaeologist Mensun Bound, who is on the discovery expedition and has now fulfilled a dream ambition in his near 50-year career.

“It is upright, well proud of the seabed, intact, and in a brilliant state of preservation,” he told BBC News…

The mission’s leader, the veteran polar geographer Dr John Shears, described the moment cameras landed on the ship’s name as “jaw-dropping”.

“The discovery of the wreck is an incredible achievement,” he added.

“We have successfully completed the world’s most difficult shipwreck search, battling constantly shifting sea-ice, blizzards, and temperatures dropping down to -18C. We have achieved what many people said was impossible.”

My goodness. The day it was found was the 100th anniversary of Shackleton’s funeral.

(2) A prizewinning NY Times reporter admits to Project Veritas that the coverage of January 6th exaggerated the danger, that the demonstration wasn’t organized, and that there were “a ton” of FBI informants present.

(3) What’s Tchaikovsky got to do with it? Nothing, in my opinion. This is just stupid virtue-signaling, and there’s a lot of it going around.

(4) The left and the Democrats have been saying for many years that they want gas prices to skyrocket. I tend to take people at their word when they say something like that. Now they are getting their opportunity.

And no, I don’t think the left somehow persuaded Putin to invade Ukraine so we could apply sanctions that would raise gas prices. But I think they see recent events as a golden opportunity to help raise them.

(5) Oh, and they’re framing high gas prices as being Putin’s fault, despite the fact that they had risen a lot prior to Putin’s Ukraine invasion. This administration, the left, and the MSM think that Americans have the memories of plankton.

An Iran Deal many times worse than Obama’s

The New Neo Posted on by

As Obama himself reportedly said: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to F*** things up.”

And yet Joe’s ability in that regard is so prodigious that it’s hard not to underestimate it. And Biden’s Iran deal is so astoundingly awful that it’s hard to believe it’s some sort of mistake, and easy to think the prospective damage must be intentional.

Please take a look at this link:

Anyone seeking to gauge the imminent outcome of the international talks over Iran’s nuclear program being held in Vienna should take a look at reports from late January that three top U.S. diplomats had quit–largely in protest over the direction set by U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley, who serves as the U.S. government’s chief negotiator.

Having served for two years in former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Iran Action Group, I knew that this development was tantamount to a public cry for an intervention. Such resignations–not of conservative dissenters, but of career staff and President Joe Biden’s own political appointees–should have been cause for Biden or Secretary Antony Blinken to recall Malley and investigate. Their failure to do so is a sign either of a troubling lack of attention to the talks, or else the possibility that Malley–who served in the same capacity under President Barack Obama when the first Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was originally negotiated and signed–has been given a free hand to negotiate whatever he wants, as long as he gets Iran to sign.

Evidence for the latter view can be gleaned from the fact that Blinken has reneged on his pledge that his Iran negotiating team would have “a diversity of views.” Instead, he has let Malley continue to concede issue after issue in Vienna. Multiple career officials view these capitulations as so detrimental to U.S. national security that they contacted me requesting that I rapidly share details of these concessions with Congress and the public in an effort to stop them…

With Robert Malley in the lead, the United States has promised to lift sanctions on some of the regime’s worst terrorists and torturers, on leading officials who have developed Iran’s WMD infrastructure, and has agreed to lift sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) itself. In exchange, Iran will receive fewer limitations than those imposed under the JCPOA, and the restrictions on its nuclear program will expire six years sooner than under the terms of the old deal. And that’s just the beginning.

Why would Biden sell the United States down the river to its arch enemy? I wrote “Biden” there, but he’s not doing this alone and may be only tangentially involved. It’s the people he appointed who are doing the hands-on work. Malley, the man in charge, is the same person who negotiated Obama’s deal, which was bad enough. So why is this so much worse?

Are these people being paid off? Are they Iranian moles? This doesn’t really seem to be about climate or the Great Reset or any of those obvious leftist motives other than sheer spite and nihilism and destructiveness. And although the Democrats seem to have come to hate Israel, I don’t think that hurting Israel is quite motive enough, either. And although “doing the opposite of Trump” is clearly part of what’s going on, it just doesn’t seem to be sufficient as an explanation, particularly since Obama engineered his own awful deal before Trump was ever in the picture.

I confess to being somewhat stumped and deeply alarmed at the sheer awfulness of what’s being reported, and reduced to hoping that it’s an exaggeration and that the final result won’t be as bad. Or that there will be some sort of sticking point that will mean that no accord is reached.

But if this terrible deal is in fact what’s about to be announced, can the American people do anything to stop it from being implemented? And what is the GOP doing? Congress didn’t seem to be able to stop Obama’s Iran deal, despite some efforts to do so. And are the Democrats really eager to walk off this particular cliff? Are they all advocates of this destructive deal?

This action, if it’s as reported, should be more than enough to impeach and convict Biden (in fact, I see it as actually treasonous), but I don’t see any bipartisan move whatsoever for that, and it would have to be a bipartisan move to be successful. Even if that were to happen, what would we get? Kamala Harris? And wouldn’t the same negotiators just continue under her unless they were removed from office as well?

Events are in the saddle and ride mankind.. But this particular event was engineered by human beings and was never the least bit inevitable.

Coming to a decision

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently on this blog and elsewhere I’ve seen variants of the question “doesn’t it bother you that on the issue of Ukraine you are in some sort of agreement with Democrats?” – only it’s often asked in a way that isn’t so polite.

Here’s a polite version: “It should give a person pause that Soros, Adam Schiff, the Clintons, the Deep State and everyone else you don’t trust is so intensely against Russia.”

It gives me nearly zero pause and I’ll tell you why. That’s not the way I evaluate a situation. I do my own research, trying to use sources other than just political pundits or politicians. I actually haven’t read a great deal of what the left has to say on this question, although I’ve read some of it. I don’t think politicians on either side influence me much one way or the other to either agree or disagree with them, although I’m aware of what they generally are saying.

On most topics – and that certainly includes Ukraine and Russia – I attempt to learn as much as I can of the facts (not always easy to ascertain the truth, though) and come to my own conclusions. I also try to read about the history of the conflict, whatever it might be, and often seek out relevant articles that were written before the specific incident or incidents began, in an attempt (not always successful) to get some less-political background.

In the end, I come to a conclusion that is always open to change if new and relevant and reliable information comes out. Sometimes I end up disagreeing with most people on the right. More often – much much more often – I end up disagreeing with most people on the left. But I never reject a position because people I’ve disagreed with most of the time take that position. Nor do I adopt a position because people I usually agree with take that position.

I believe that’s part of the reason I was able to make a political transition. I’m not interested in bandwagons or groupthink, whether positive (agreement) or negative (disagreement). I didn’t start a blog to be a tool of any side, although since my philosophy and outlook skews more to the right I naturally will wind up agreeing with the right more often, even when using my own independent judgment. But I care little what the people listed in that commenter’s quote think about this issue, pro or con, and I certainly don’t use it as a guide to my own opinion.