More Random Postings - A Lot But Worth The Time.

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The year is 1907, one hundred and 11 years ago.

Theodore Roosevelt's ideas on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN in 1907.

“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. BUT this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the Englishlanguage.. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
Theodore Roosevelt 1907

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Dangerous People Are Teaching Your Kids | PragerU

Dangerous people are filling the heads of young people with dangerous nonsense. Who are these people? They are what Jordan Peterson calls “the post-modernists:” neo-Marxist professors who dominate our colleges and universities. And here’s the worst part: we are financing these nihilists with tax dollars, alumni gifts and tuition payments. Time to wise up.

Click here to take a brief survey about this video.

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I am posting more random articles  I believe are worth reading and will discuss how far our ship of state has drifted in a subsequent memo.

Meanwhile:

As I was just coming home and worrying about all the stuff going on in my life - my family’s lives, my friends’ lives, and what's happening in Washington, Moscow, North Korea, the Middle East, Hillary Clinton's scandals, Donald Trump, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, the downgrading of our military, the terrorists infiltrating our border, the illegals, the refugees, and how our country is rapidly losing its sanity and its Christianity...

I saw a sign posted in a yard that said:

NEED HELP? CALL JESUS 800-555-3781

Out of curiosity and desperation, I called the number.

A Mexican with a leaf blower showed up.

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Rodney Dangerfield and The E.U, is their a valid comparison?

Hanson makes a compelling argument why Europe get's no respect.  In truth, they deserve no respect because, like our own Congress, they have abdicated their responsibilities and would rather rely on the U.S so they can complain while not measuring up to their moral obligations and written/verbal commitments..

Trump is a rough and tumble real estate developer from New Yawk, who tells what is on his mind in language that is understandable but offensive to delicate ears.  While there recently,  he told our European NATO allies  to quit depending on us to spend in order to protect them.  They did not like his bluntness and responded; they were moving in that direction and we too benefited from our own spending and the alliance.

Secondly, he told the Germans why should we defend you from Russia if you prefer getting in bed with the Bear?  They had no real and/or rational response.  We are capable of supplying Germany with their energy needs and would not cut them off as Russia certainly has done before and would do so again. Furthermore, Germany voluntarily rid themselves of established energy sources, thereby, making themselves even more dependent on and vulnerable to Russia.

Merkel is a female version of Obama and seems more interested in drowning German culture through the flood of  Moslem immigration. (See 1 below.)
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George Friedman comments  on The Trump Doctrine. (See 2 below.)
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While Israelis provide personal care packages to displaced Syrians, which are delivered to the fleeing refugees by The IDF, students at a California University continue to call for the total destruction of Israel as a nation.

Also, Sen. Graham warns BIBI about trusting Putin, Palestinians will not be placated by improved economics and Syrian refugees come at night for Israeli medical care. (See (See 3, 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d and 3e below)
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Let's all join hands and have a little civil disorder:  https://usat.ly/2uelbUW
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We know California is a bizarre state inhabited by an equally bizarre population of elitists, trend setters, drugees, brilliant technology types, misfits, illegal immigrants and a share of anti-Semites. (See 4 below.)
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More Victor Davis Hanson commentary :  populism by Victor Davis Hanson from The New Criterion. You can view the article here: https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/6/the-
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Judge Andrew Napolitano: Why I am so deeply disappointed by Trump's Supreme Court pick

I have cropped the op ed and posted the main reasons why Judge Napolitano is disappointed, (See 5 below.)
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Trump sending high powered team to speak with Mexico's new president. (See 6 below.)

And:

McCain tried to restrain Trump's meeting with Putin.

If McCain had any appropriate sense of loyalty to his own party he would resign now and should have several months ago.  He always loved being the maverick and apparently will continue until the day he dies.

I regret his illness but he has outlived his tenure. (See 6a below.)

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I have written, time and again, why I believe Obama was an unmitigated disaster and here is more evidence why, at every opportunity, he took the wrong path.

He began by apologizing, on a world tour, about out nation's, so called, colonial past history.  He supported The Muslim Brotherhood. He stated Erdogan was his closest friend and our best ally. He spread contempt for our police departments by associating them with overblown claims of racial bias.  This led to street violence and thus, he helped to birth protests relating to everything from Wall Street to Black lives etc.

He interfered in the Israeli election of it's prime minister and thus, cannot enter the court of clean hands attacking Russia for interfering with our own elections. (All nations interfere.  Russia was more successful because democracies are more open and thus more vulnerable.)

He whispered that he wouldbe more flexible when re-elected so I submit what he did therefater with utin was real collusion.  He shipped palletsof money to Iran at night while going around conressto deal with this renegade nation claiming his deal was not a treaty.  He also end ran Congress when it came to taking over 16%of the American economy with Obamacare.

Obama's every actions, notwithstanding his protests,  suggest he held deep seated empathy for radical Islamists. Why did he withdraw troops that allowed ISSIS to undo what  GW and Patreus had finally  accomplished?  He despised the military and ran up huge deficits which helped to financially disarm our military.  Some of our most senior and accomplished military officers retired rather than serve under his leadership.  Others he ushered out  because they disagreed with him.

I believe history will not treat Obama's 8 years well and deservedly so. (See 7 below.)

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Dick
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1)Why Europe Gets No Respect

by Victor Davis Hanson

After the recent G-7 meeting, some European nations such as France and Germany expressed anger that their views were given short shrift by Donald Trump—displaying fits of pique memorialized in a now infamous photo of standing G-7 leaders who were leaning into a surrounded and sitting Trump. “International cooperation,” huffed an unidentified senior French official, “cannot depend on being angry and on sound bites. Let's be serious.” The former British ambassador to the U.S., Peter Westmacott, sniffed, “Trump is readier to give a pass to countries that pose a real threat to Western values and security than to America’s traditional allies. If there is a ‘method to the madness,’ to use the words of British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, it is currently well hidden.”

Yet in current foreign policy journals, a constant theme is European leaders who lament that Europe does not get its due on the world stage. Why would that be?

After all, if “Europe” is defined by the membership of the 28-member European Union, then it should easily be the world’s superpower. The European project now has an aggregate population (512 million) that dwarfs that of the United States (326 million). Even its GDP ($20 trillion) is often calibrated as roughly equivalent to or even larger than America’s ($19 trillion).

Historically, European geography has been strategically influential—with windows on the Atlantic, Baltic, and Mediterranean, the ancient maritime nexus of three continents. Rome is the center of Christianity, by far the world’s largest religion. Some of the world’s great nations—Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, and the United States—were birthed as European colonies. Some two billion people speak European languages, including hundreds of millions outside of Europe whose first language is English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.

European products—Airbus, BP, Shell, and Volkswagen—are global household names. France each year hosts the greatest number of the world’s tourists. Europe as a whole is more visited than any other nation or geographical area—and no wonder, given Europe was the home to civilization’s most significant breakthroughs: the birth of the city-state, the emergence of Roman republicanism and its later globalized empire, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution.

Many of the world’s greatest thinkers, writers, scientists, and politicians were European, from Plato, Socrates Cicero, Octavian and Pericles to Copernicus, Dante, Galileo, Da Vinci, Newton, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Einstein, and Churchill. And likewise, the greatest cataclysms in world history took place on European soil: The Black Death, Stalin’s genocide in Western Russia, World Wars I and II, and the Holocaust. The Western military tradition was born in Europe, and the world’s most lethal armies in history—Roman, French, German—were all European, as were the most skilled commanders, from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Napoleon and Wellington.

Why, then, are European leaders increasingly feeling irrelevant, often passive-aggressive in their exasperation, and seemingly without confidence in either their present or their illustrious past, and so often ignored by major powers?

In most high-stakes diplomacy—denuclearizing North Korea, attempting to make China play by international norms of trade and commerce, keeping Vladimir Putin within his borders, destroying ISIS, isolating a theocratic and potentially nuclear Iran, and the perennial Israel and Palestinian problem—Europe is largely a spectator. Its once heralded “soft power” of the 1990s and early 21st century is more soft than powerful. The friends of Europe no longer count on it; its enemies do not fear it.

The high-tech revolution that birthed Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft passed Europe by. Judged by the great historical determinants of civilizational power—fuel, energy, education, demography, political stability, and military power—Europe is waning. It is spending a mere 1.4% of its collective GDP on defense. Most analysts conclude that even what Europe does spend on security does not translate directly into military readiness, at least in comparison with the U.S. military. And with a fertility rate of less than 1.6%, Europe is slowly shrinking and aging—hence the short-sighted immigration policy of Angela Merkel who apparently sees immigration also as a solution to the demography crisis and a shortcut to low-cost labor.

Across the continent, laws against fracking, German dismantling of nuclear power plants, and massive green subsidies for erratic wind and solar generation—all self-inflicted wounds—have made European gasoline and electricity costs among the highest in the world. Europe remains dependent on Russia, Central Asia, and the OPEC countries for much of its energy needs. In the Times Higher Education World University Rankings of the world’s top 20 universities, only 1 was a continental European university; in contrast, 15 were American and 4 British.

Politically, the European Union has not squared the circle of uniting diverse peoples, languages, and cultures with long historical grievances into a pan-European nation—at least without a level of coercion that is inconsistent with democratic values. Instead, members increasingly find European Union dogma at odds with human nature, at least in terms of entitlements, immigrations, and national security. For a continent that celebrates diversity, the European apparat is quite intolerant of dissident voices.

The result is frustration and polarization, as the EU is slowing becoming trisected. Eastern Europeans revolt at the open-borders bullying of Berlin and Paris and are beginning to refuse entry to any more Muslim men from the Middle East. Meanwhile Mediterranean Europeans see their frontline burdens of dealing with massive illegal immigration not just as underappreciated, but also as another manifestation of an earlier northern European financial diktat.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom just drifts away. In the center of these regional tensions stands Germany, the EU’s largest nation—and the one with its most problematic history. In theory, Germany asserts that it no longer is the bully of 1871, 1914, and 1939. In fact, Berlin shows little patience with those who object to its plans of dealing with Brexit, Muslim immigration, and indebted southern European Union members.

These rifts are symptomatic of an existential paradox, similar in some sense to the contradictions of the progressive movement in the United States. European government is largely run by an elite class of professional and bureaucratic careerists. On matters such as illegal immigration and financial sacrifices, their privilege exempts them from the concrete consequences of their ideology and policy: someone other than they will bear the immediate consequences of massive illegal immigration on the schools, neighborhoods, and public safety.

The implementation of a social welfare state seeks to provide cradle-to-grave support for a static underclass in exchange for its political support for an entrenched elite. The expensive social project squeezes the middle class, as taxes rise to pay for entitlements for the poor and to subsidize the lifestyles of the mandarins of the administrative state.

The European social welfare state envisions military expenditures as theft from social welfare entitlements—a viable assumption as long as the United States continues to underwrite European national security.

European culture is uncomfortable with the individual drive toward upward mobility and entrepreneurialism. Its own attitude is more like the Obama platitudes “you didn’t build that,” “now is not the time to profit,” or “I do think at a certain point you've made enough money.”

Purely private research universities are almost nonexistent. The European ethos too often sees profit-making as a violation of fairness. Equality not liberty is the operative agenda, an idea that transcends the European Union and in theory applies to anyone from anywhere who can manage to cross the borders of the European Union.

Out of this complex matrix emerges the haughty European mindset that it alone has transcended the limitations of human nature, convinced that enlightened ideas about soft power and pure reason can eliminate war, poverty, and inequality not just inside Europe, but globally as well.

Loud professions of human rights, and deep antipathy to religion as a sort of dark, unenlightened force from Europe’s troubled past have deluded the European Union about the ultimate sources of its safety and prosperity. Its postwar trajectory to affluence and security partly rested on U.S. military subsidies, as well as the ability to run up large trade deficits with the United States that supported the evolution of a globalized economy. European foreign policy in the concrete hinges on trading and profiting with almost anyone, while in the abstract it opposes human rights abuses, often by its own trade partners. Europeans talk loftily, but act either in self-interested fashion or not much at all.

The 21st century has not been too impressed. A bullying China has sized up Europe and concluded that it either cannot or will not do much about Chinese mercantilism, which is based on violations of almost all the canons of postwar trade agreements. Two-million impoverished and mostly Muslim migrants rightly assumed that Europe is hopelessly divided and completely incapable of exercising either the political or moral will to protect its own sovereignty, much less defend its political and religious history and traditions. Russia cynically accepts that an unarmed and energy-hungry Europe will not to do much to check Russian expansionism. Europe appears to Russia more worried about oil and natural gas supplies than translating its moral outrage over Putin’s authoritarianism into any concrete pushback. Better, then, to buy as much Russian natural gas as possible, while damning a supposedly colluding Trump administration for being too soft on the Russian oligarchy.

Recent polls show a general drop in confidence in the European Union by its members. In some countries, the EU no longer wins majority support. A continental ethos of agnosticism, state dependency, childlessness, and multiculturalism leaves Europe especially vulnerable to both the foreign challenges of a dangerous neighborhood, and massive influxes of mostly Muslim immigrants, as its own shrinking population is in danger of becoming incapable of supporting the welfare state and pension payouts of an aging population.

An American solution to European stasis—deregulation, tax cutting, more referenda and plebiscites, increased defense spending, natural gas and oil fracking, border security—would be unthinkable Such a turnabout would be antithetical to the European elite’s own self-perceptions and humanitarian pretensions, and would entail a collective admission of failure.

The European Union is left with its signature mythology that pan-Europeanism alone has at least kept the peace for nearly 75 years, the longest period of uninterrupted continental calm since the unification of Germany in 1871. Such naiveté takes into little account the role of an American-led NATO or the anomaly that Germany, Europe’s largest, most dynamic country, and also its most aggressive nation historically, did not develop nuclear weapons, while its traditional frontline enemies in two world wars, France and the United Kingdom, nuclearized—on the instinct that power, not pretension, keeps the peace.

The European furor over Donald Trump is not, as alleged, because he and the nation that elected him are crude, but that he and his country are needed more than ever by a continent that has lost its way.

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2) The Trump Doctrine

All presidential doctrines represent a consistent end imposed by necessity.

By George Friedman 

A doctrine is how a president is forced to operate foreign policy in the reality in which he finds himself. Sometimes, presidents proclaim their own foreign policy doctrines. Other times, observers see a coherent pattern in a president’s foreign policy and outline the doctrine for him. In both cases, doctrines ought to be seen not as strokes of genius or decisions made at the will of the president but as actions imposed on him and dictated by reality.

The Truman doctrine was defined in 1948. Given the Soviet threat to Turkey and Greece, President Harry Truman announced that, as a general principle, he was committed to supporting free nations against communism. The United States could not accept a Soviet-dominated Europe because of the long-term threat it would pose. The U.S. lacked the capacity to launch a conventional war against the Soviets, so it was forced into a strategy of containment. Turkey, in particular, was indispensable to this strategy, as the Bosporus blocked Soviet access to the Mediterranean. The U.S., therefore, had to defend Turkey and Greek ports. The doctrine was determined by necessity.

The Nixon doctrine was established in 1969, when President Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. would provide support and protection for its allies but that those allies must depend primarily on their own resources for their security. Given that the U.S. was bogged down in Vietnam, the availability of U.S. forces to defend allies, except under extreme circumstances, was limited.

Barack Obama never outlined a doctrine himself, but observers derived from his actions a coherent policy to reduce U.S. military involvement in the Middle East and decrease hostility between the United States and the Islamic world. The U.S. was not succeeding militarily in its wars with the Islamic world, and limiting U.S. ambitions seemed necessary.

All presidential doctrines represent a consistent end imposed by necessity. This doesn’t mean that the president will be able to successfully implement the doctrine. Truman did. Nixon never tested the doctrine where it meant the most, in Europe and East Asia. Obama’s doctrine encountered both friction and the inertia of wars once launched. Some doctrines are criticized at home and abroad. Truman’s doctrine was seen domestically as taking too much responsibility for allies’ security and overseas as an American imperial imposition. Nixon was criticized for imposing a promise of weakness by some, and of trying to hide the fact that he was bungling Vietnam by others. Obama’s foreign policy was criticized in the U.S. as capitulating to the Islamic world and by foreign powers as being insular and lacking a strategy for critical allies.

While doctrines are determined by external necessity, that doesn’t mean that all presidential actions are driven purely by circumstances. There’s a degree of randomness in all actions, and not just those taken by a president. It does mean, however, that the main thrust of a president’s policies is defined by the circumstances he finds himself in, and the less critical an action the more likely it is to be unconstrained.

It is with this background in mind that I want to consider Trump’s foreign policy agenda. The Trump doctrine could be summed up as a policy to defuse situations that might require military actions and instead engage in an offensive economic policy, while disregarding opinions from abroad in the broadest sense.

Like the doctrines of previous presidents, Trump’s has been dictated by what the U.S. faces at the moment. The United States has forces deployed widely. They are engaged in combat in the Middle East and have been deployed to Poland and Romania to counter potential Russian moves. The U.S. Navy is involved in non-combat operations in the South China Sea. And U.S. forces remain in a position to strike at North Korea if necessary. U.S. military capabilities are therefore stretched thin, deployed over a vast swath of territory, and this creates a problem. The United States can’t sustain intense combat in all of these theaters simultaneously. An outbreak of war in any one theater would reduce U.S. capacity in another theater, increasing the likelihood of a power taking advantage of this weakness. Given the multiplicity of potential combat situations, and the wide dispersion of forces, avoiding combat is essential.

The only effective response to these crises, therefore, is diplomacy. Consider the North Korea crisis. The U.S. could have responded to Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons in three ways: launch a war, passively accept the situation or negotiate. Trump chose the only option he could, which was to try to reach some sort of understanding with North Korea. When it comes to Russia, Trump had a similar menu of options: aggressiveness, passivity or diplomacy. But given Russia’s involvement in Syria, an area where the U.S. is engaged, as well as the potential threat to Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, Trump had to take the diplomatic route, which explains why he is meeting with President Vladimir Putin next week.

At this point, going to war is a dangerous option for the U.S. Being overtly threatening is also unacceptable, as the intentions of its adversaries are to some extent unpredictable. The solution is to maintain a presence and avoid combat by engaging in extended negotiations that may lead to something or nothing but that would reduce the military threat.

On the economic and trade front, a very different landscape exists. For the United States, exports account for a relatively small percentage of gross domestic product. There are some sectors that are more reliant on trade than others, but for the most part, the U.S. economy is not heavily dependent on exports. Other countries, however, are heavily dependent on exports. Trump does not see the free trade regime that has emerged since World War II as advantageous to the United States. He’s also constrained by the interests of his core constituency, which voted for him in part because he promised to get tough on trade. Given that the United States must be restrained militarily at this point, economic tools can help shape relationships with adversarial powers like China.

This policy of applying economic pressure has of course further aggravated tensions with other countries and degraded the United States’ reputation abroad. This is not new. Ever since Vietnam, and really since World War II, the United States has been condemned for a host of policies. But it’s not clear that global public opinion has any lasting effect. Trump, therefore, has chosen to be indifferent to global public opinion, which may just be his personal preference anyway. But if he’s trying to reduce military pressure by applying economic pressure, it should be expected that his actions will arouse hostility at least as intensely as military actions have in the past.

A doctrine doesn’t have to work to be a doctrine. A president doesn’t have to be aware of the consistency and logic of his position. His policies may be driven by a strategy, but the need for that strategy derives from reality. When Trump took office, he likely didn’t expect that he would be visiting Kim Jong Un more than a year into his presidency. But events compelled him to. Trump may well have wanted to impose tariffs on China even before taking office. But he ended up doing so because of the reality he was presented with. Whether or not any of these individual actions were planned by the president himself, there is a logic to Trump’s handling of foreign policy.

But that is not altogether different from other presidents or world leaders. They enter office with policies that are merely the things they would like to do. Then reality hits and they discard the policies and begin acting tactically. Since the world is coherent, the actions in due course take on a coherence as well. It is from this reality that a doctrine emerges. In Trump’s case, that doctrine involves reducing military risks, using economics as a lever and ignoring the opinions of foreign governments and the global public. The president can only react to the situation he’s presented with and from there his doctrine is established

2b)    NATO Is Sick, And Trump Is The Best Doctor It's Likely To Get

<http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/12/nato-sick-trump-best-doctor-likely-get/
>  
If you don't like the messenger or how he messages, fine, but don't miss the
real issue: Does NATO as it is functioning require a bit of scrutiny and
reform? Obviously so.

By Paul Bonicelli 

NATO is needed and always will be as long as threats to the West exist in
the form of Russia and state sponsors of terrorism such as Iran, whose
utmost desire is the weakening if not destruction of Western civilization.
But support for NATO, just like support for free trade, does not mean that
the status quo must be protected and left unchallenged.

Not much in life escapes the need to be questioned, probed, and reformed.
Now, if you don't like the messenger or how he messages, fine, but don't
miss the real issue: Does NATO as it is functioning almost 70 years after
its birth require a bit of scrutiny and reform?

The recent NATO summit in Brussels underscored how much the United States'
relationship with European powers is under considerable stress. It is so
because the United States elected a businessman, not a traditional
politician, much less a traditional diplomat. Each thinks differently,
speaks differently, and seeks different outcomes. That above all is causing
the turmoil, not simply the president's blunt messaging.

Business People Want Results, Not Static

Business people like Trump see whatever and whoever is on the other side of
the table primarily as means to an end. It is not that they dehumanize them
or put no stock in having good relationships. Rather, they don't see any
arrangement as permanent because the bottom line is outcomes, not comity.
Politicians, on the other hand, tend to seek permanence in relationships if
they can achieve it because they like stability. True, politics spawns
reformers and revolutionaries, but they tend to seek stasis as soon as they
get the position they want; ruptures are exceptions and not the rule. As for
traditional diplomats, they are at the far end of the spectrum seeking
permanence in relationships: comity and quiet are the coin of the realm.
So whether it is trade, foreign policy, Supreme Court appointments, or just
plain old political campaigning for votes and legislation, Trump is bound to
disrupt every day and in every way until he gets the deal he wants. He
believes his approach to Kim Jong Un was successful and so far it is
working. He believes his approach to renegotiating trade arrangements is
working. The jury is still out on that one, but so far the markets and
investors are not shying away from keeping the economy growing.
With the events of the last few days, he is keeping up this approach with
his desire to see NATO members pay more of their share for the defense of
Europe. After all, NATO contributions have gone up some since he came to
office with this message.

There should be no surprise that he governs the way he campaigned for
office, so he's having success with the public as well. If the rattled
establishment and scandalized diplomatic corps would spend time talking with
average Americans, they'd find that many find Trump's MO refreshing and
valuable, even if most would say, "Well, I wouldn't have said it that way,
but..." If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that when I do my
informal polling around the country, I'd have a lot of dollars.
It's Not Helpful to Hide the Truth

The way Trump is going about his job disconcerts the diplomatic corps here
and abroad, the politicians who must make sense of where he is going, and
even the cabinet officials who surely are sitting in summit meetings the
likes of which they never dreamed they'd be a part of. Having served in the
executive branch in foreign policy positions, I am well aware of how
careerists of all stripes are experiencing Trump.

I witnessed colleagues' pearl-clutching when I used "undiplomatic language
and tone," but then I was saying things like "This Hugo Chavez guy coming to
power is not a democrat," and "There will be no peace between the Israelis
and the Palestinian Arabs as long as the latter live under dictatorship,"
and "We can spend taxpayer dollars on foreign aid for another 50 years to
dig wells and plant trees and even to promote capitalism, but until people
are free to self-govern, development is not going to be sustainable." But I
was right, and right to say it among rational adults.

But let's put aside for the moment that Trump is being harsh and
undiplomatic, because he has hit upon some real problems that everyone
agrees are problems, and they have agreed on these points through several
presidencies: European states are not paying a fair share of the burden of
defending the West.

The typical politician, especially the long-serving, is slow to bring up a
problem between allies, refrains from bringing it up very often, and is
cautious in articulating it. Ultimatums, blunt demands, and criticism would
likely be off the table unless an imminent threat were present. The
traditional diplomat would likely never bring up problems unless the
political leadership requires it, and even then there would be weeks and
months of wrangling over the language of communiqués so that above all there
would be no risk to the stability and comity of relations among the parties.
Not so for Trump. There's a problem? Then go on and name it and be clear
about requiring a change as we head into negotiations. This bluntness will
produce a backlash? Well, so what, maybe that is what is needed to get
everyone's attention. George W. Bush and Barack Obama rightly called out
Europe, but to no avail. Bill Clinton, Bush, and Obama rightly confronted
North Korea, but without doing so in a way that made the Kims and the
Chinese regime appreciate that the United States really means to effect a
change in a status quo that endangers our security and that of our allies.
Stop Pretending You Don't Know Diplomatic Talk

Let's remember that this is not the first time that Trump has focused on the
problem of European defense-not just European powers' lack of spending for
defense, but also the dangers of allowing Russia to control the energy
supplies of important states like Germany. He covered this in his Warsaw
speech in 2017 that was nothing if not a call for the defense of Western
civilization. He clearly meant what he said.

What is truly rankling his critics here and abroad is not that his facts are
wrong. Let's set aside the complaints that he is conflating NATO
contributions required by treaty with the contributions each NATO member
agreed to as long ago as 2006 and especially in 2014, when they did so in
formal terms. Such critics are technically correct regarding some of the
president's tweets and public statements, at least so far as they call him
on the lack of clarity of his statements.

But he knows what he is saying, they know what he is saying, they know that
he knows what he is saying, and he knows they know what he is saying. I
suppose we will have to get used to four or maybe eight years of the
president's critics pretending they don't know what he is saying or
demanding. That's odd because in politics and diplomacy officials often say
one thing when they mean another in order to let the other side save face.
So if you can figure out what people mean when they are being vague, surely
you can figure out what people mean when they are being blunt.

When President Trump is not being precise about the exact outcome he
demands, it is obvious he is pointing the other side in the direction he
wants the deal to go. And he wants to go further than his predecessors in
solving problems.

Sure, Trump brings a new approach: bluntness, over-demanding,
relentlessness, over-the-top praise one moment and trolling and gaslighting
the next, but he is not being unclear. His goal is to get the other side's
attention so he can frame the discussion in the United States' favor.
This will not change. It is time to get used to it and come to terms with
what the most powerful leader of the most powerful nation in the world is
negotiating for. He won't stop because critics call him a brute. He'll revel
in that, go up in the polls, and press on.

Consider This Applied to the Russian Energy Deal

The lead-up to the NATO summit, the bilateral meetings, and the press
coverage give us a great many quotes to draw from to illustrate the value of
Trump's approach to solving this problem of European defense. I'll choose
just one: the German-Russian energy deal, because it underscores how well
his method can play with the American public, the rest of the U.S.

government, and perhaps some on the other side of the table as the president
negotiates with them.

In discussions with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the president
pressed the point that while Germany fears Russian designs, it nevertheless
spends only 1.2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, far below
the 2 percent it agreed to years ago. Thus it is letting the United States
carry most of the burden for defending Germany. Yet Germany wants to make a
deal with Russia that makes Germany dependent on Russia for much of its
energy needs. How can this be? the president asks.

Said the president: "They pay billions to Russia for energy and then we have
to spend billions to defend Germany from Russia. It doesn't make sense." You
can't have it both ways, is in effect what the president is saying. He
raises an important question. It doesn't help the German strategy in the
president's mind when they have an energy need now that they turned their
back on nuclear power generation. You want to embrace Paris climate change
accord thinking? Don't ask the United States to pay for it.

We Want Defense, But Not to Pay for It

So NATO is ill, and the president has put his finger on a primary problem.
The members want defense, but all but four seem uninterested in paying for
it, rich though almost all of them are by world standards. They have been
content to let the United States bear most of this burden, not to mention
the fact that the United States-and only the United States-keeps the
sea-lanes open. That is, we do a lot more to defend the West than simply
paying our NATO dues and not being a burden to others.

So I return to my first point: NATO is needed, troubled though it is. No
less than Henry Kissinger has answered the question "What is NATO needed
for?" It is needed to restrain the centuries-old Russian desire to
intimidate and conquer its neighbors out of both a sense of insecurity as
well as "destiny."

Confronting other enemies of the West like Iran is also NATO's purpose. The
united power of the world's richest and strongest democracies is necessary
to defeat those who despise and are jealous of our way of life. That is why
President Trump's diagnosis and prescription, blunt though they may be, and
delivered with a bedside manner that shakes up the status quo, are in order.
Trump is not trying to divide the West, unless one thinks that blunt talk
among rational adults about real problems that everyone acknowledges is
"divisive." He is trying to reform thinking and strategy in a dangerous time
by insisting on fixing NATO's problems. He values NATO, but not our
grandfathers' NATO.

Bonicelli served in the George W. Bush administration. His career includes a
presidential appointment with Senate confirmation as assistant administrator
at the U.S. Agency for International Development; as a professional staff
member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of
Representatives; and as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly.
He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Tennessee.

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3)IDF TRANSFERS CARE PACKAGES TO SYRIANS FLEEING REGIME OFFENSIVE

Care packages were made by residents of Israel's Golan Regional Council.

BY ANNA AHRONHEIM  

The IDF on Tuesday transferred aid and care packages donated by Israeli residents of the Golan Heights to Syrians displaced by fighting on the other side of border, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit announced Wednesday.

The transfer of the packages, which was done under Operation Good Neighbor, was carried out by the Bashan Division, which transferred them in two military operations to the other side of the fence for Syrians in camps in the northern and southern Syrian Golan Heights.

The IDF has been providing lifesaving humanitarian assistance to Syrians on the Golan Heights – all while maintaining the principle of noninvolvement in the Syrian civil war – as part of Operation Good Neighbor launched in June 2016.

Over the past week, hundreds of care packages were donated from communities in the Golan Regional Council. The aid included personal gift bags containing toys, crayons, games, candies and notes from Israeli children living on the Golan.

“For six years, a cruel war that has claimed the lives of more than 500,000 people has been taking place in Syria, and the world remains quiet in the face of this horror. We, the residents of the Golan, look right over the fence and see the people fleeing from the killing fields together with their children, and clinging to the fence with Israel,” said Eli Malka, the head of the Golan Regional Council, who initiated the collection.

“We feel the moral obligation, in accordance with our values, to send humanitarian aid and, as much as is possible, to build a relationship of humanity with those who have always been our neighbors on the other side of the fence. The residents of the Golan have come together wholeheartedly to raise and collect supplies, and make personal gift bags for the Syrian children, to give them a moment of happiness in a great chaos,” he added.

The Syrian Army, backed by Russian air strikes, has been pummeling the southwestern provinces of Deraa and Quneitra in an offensive aimed at recapturing the strategic rebel-held areas bordering Jordan and the Golan Heights. In recent days, rebels in Deraa handed over a swath of territory along the border with Jordan to Damascus.

The United Nations fears that between 285,000 and 325,000 internally displaced Syrians have fled since the beginning of the current offensive. Some 189,000 have headed toward the border with Israel.

According to the IDF, the military has recently carried out 30 designated aid operations for Syrians displaced by fighting on the Golan Heights, transferring more than 130 tons of food, 12.5 tons of baby food, 75,700 liters of fuel to operate generators, 20 medical equipment units, 77 tons of clothing, 556 tents and 30 shadow nets.

Calling the operation “unique and exciting,” Lt.-Col. “E.,” the commander of Operation Good Neighbor, stated that those living on the Syrian Golan Heights have understood that Israel is not a country to fear.

“The Bashan Division is responsible for preserving the security of the residents of the State of Israel, and of the Golan Heights in particular, and through the Good Neighbor command it carries out the mission of defending them, in partnership with the citizens [of the area]. All of this was done for our neighbors on the other side of the fence, who have been educated to hate Israel and everything related to it, and in recent years have understood that the only country that has aided them was the same one they feared.”

3a)

UC Davis SJP Admits They Want to See Israel Destroyed

BY AARON BANDLER 

Whether they realize it or not, the UC Davis Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter admitted in a recent op-ed they don’t think Israel should exist as a nation.

UC Davis SJP wrote an op-ed for The California Aggie in response to an Aggies for Israel op-ed that accused SJP of leveling anti-Semitic invectives toward Jewish and pro-Israel students in March. SJP claimed in their op-ed they were merely protesting Israeli government policies.

“Palestinian houses are simultaneously being demolished, and Palestinians are being imprisoned, slaughtered and tortured,” UC Davis SJP wrote. “We demand to have our voices heard because the voices of Palestinians are being killed off one by one. We will continue with these efforts because we will not allow the victims of Israeli colonization to be forgotten on this campus.”

The op-ed proceeded to ramble on about how it was hypocritical for students to be pro-Israel and stand with progressive causes, even promulgating the falsehood that the Israeli government forcibly sterilizes African migrants. But SJP let the cat out of the bag in the op-ed’s concluding paragraph.

“It is an ideological fantasy to really believe that progress is possible so long as the state of Israel exists,” UC Davis SJP wrote. “Underlying this naive fantasy is the belief that a state that engages in racist laws, systematic killings and home demolitions can also function as a beacon of peace. The goal of Palestinian resistance is not to establish ‘love’ with those who are responsible for the suffering of the Palestinian people; it is to completely dismantle those forces at play. So continue to watch in ‘horror,’ because we are here to stay.”

In other words: UC Davis SJP doesn’t want any part of a two-state solution, they want Israel gone altogether.

Charline Delkhah, a recent UC Davis graduate who served as the president of Aggies for Israel, explained in a July 9 Aggie op-ed that Jewish and pro-Israel students felt intimidated by SJP’s actions on March 5:

“This year, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held an event on the Quad sharing stories and poetry and showcasing Palestinian art, literature and clothing. Board members of Aggies for Israel (AFI) attended the event as bystanders and as students of the UC Davis community. Members of SJP decided to use the platform of the event to spew hate at those who showed up. Their ‘invite[s]’ for board members of Aggies of Israel to speak about how ‘they are able to defend a country of genocide and killing,’ were followed up by the yelling of ‘shame,’ (alluding to what was yelled at Jews during the Holocaust). As one may expect, our hearts started racing uncontrollably.

“The hate speech did not end there. A few minutes later, one of the speakers specifically singled me out, ‘invited’ me up again to speak and stated how AFI ‘is complicit’ and that we ‘lie and are hypocritical.’ This speaker continued by saying, ‘[We] are alone on this campus because [we] stand for racism, genocide and massacre,’ and that, ‘The UC Davis community stands for Palestinian people.’ He then turned the direction of the audience to my fellow board members with the intention of intimidating them and silencing their beliefs. In that moment we felt so alone, so scared, so unprotected and subjugated — as if no one cared for us or our protection on campus.”

Delkhah added that UC Davis SJP has been waging a campaign to oust student president Michael Gofman because he’s a pro-Israel activist. She also explained that the UC Davis administration hasn’t taken any action against the campus SJP chapter because of freedom of speech.

“Why are actions like hate speech, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism going unnoticed?” Delkhah wrote. “Why are Jews and our safety not cared about by the administration? I, along with other members of the Jewish community, demand answers from the administration. We will no longer stay silent on these matters, especially when we do not feel safe on our own campus.”

3b)US senator warns Israel not to trust Russia to remove Iran from Syria

A senior US Republican senator warned Israel against striking a deal with Moscow, saying Russia cannot be trusted. 

By: World Israel News Staff

Just hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss Iran’s military entrenchment in Syria, a senior US Republican lawmaker warned Israel not to trust Russia.

“To our friends in Israel,” tweeted South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, “be very careful making agreements with Russia re Syria that affect US interests.”

“I don’t trust Russia to police Iran or anyone else in Syria,” he added. “US must maintain presence in Syria to ensure ISIS doesn’t come back and to counter Russia/Iran influence.”

Graham’s comment came amid speculation that US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart are considering a deal about the future of Syria at their upcoming bilateral summit in Helsinki next week.

According to Israeli media and a report in The New Yorker, a US-Russian-Israeli deal might be in the works.

The reports say that Israel would lobby the US to remove sanctions from Russia as punishment for violating Ukraine’s sovereignty by invading and occupying the eastern half of the country. In exchange, Russia would work to remove Iranian forces from Syria. The US would also agree to remove its troops from Syria.

Former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro concurred with the Republican senator.

“Senator Graham is absolutely right here,” he wrote on his Twitter account. “But he ignores that Trump is trying to cook up a ‘deal’ that lets US troops leave Syria, relies on flimsy Russian promises to expel Iran, and pays for all this in European currency — Ukraine sanctions, Crimea annexation, weaker NATO/EU.”

3c) Economics Won’t Help. The Palestinians Will Continue with Terror Attacks

Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser 

Many Americans and Israelis believe that economic improvements will reduce Palestinian motivation to carry out terror attacks. However, history shows that the Palestinians have another set of priorities.

The ostensible connection between the Palestinian economy and terrorism is now taking center stage in discussions about the Palestinians. American spokesmen, led by Presidential advisor Jared Kushner, emphasize the huge economic benefits awaiting the Palestinians if they adopt the new – and as yet unpublished – U.S. peace plan. In the context of Gaza, the United States and Israel are trying to promote investment in the Gaza Strip, not only out of real concern for its residents’ quality of life, but also based on the assumption that improving the economic situation will restrain terrorism in the short term and the threat of a broader war in the future caused by despondency and despair.

Many in Israel expressed surprise, anxiety, and frustration in the face of the destructive urges of the Gazans (many affiliated with Hamas) who set fire to the transfer facility at the Kerem Shalom border crossing, while Israel is making efforts to ensure the flow of goods into Gaza. Israel is even considering opening its border to Gazan workers and exploring the possibilities of opening a port for Gaza.

In the areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority and Israeli-controlled east Jerusalem, there is an assumption that the economic situation is affecting the level of terror. In a study recently published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the authors – who are Palestinians and Israelis – sharply criticize the struggle of the Palestinian Authority and the boycott movement against the normalization of economic ties between the Israelis and Palestinians in shared workplaces. They claim specifically that shared economic activities, primarily in Area C, could become a way to create a basis for promoting peace through shared economic interests in future growth. Prime Minister Netanyahu already raised in the past the idea of “economic peace” in this context

A Complex Equation

However, the connection between economics and peace is extremely complicated and unconvincing. The Palestinians carry out terror attacks out of ideological motives, and most of them see terror as a justified and effective way to act to advance their objectives in the conflict with Israel. The terrorists and their families are eligible for significant economic benefits in the form of the salaries that the Palestinian Authority pays them. The commitment of the Palestinian leadership to the struggle against Zionism is greater than the consideration of economic gain, even though the PA is aware that it needs to provide an answer for the Palestinians’ economic needs. As proof, the second intifada erupted during a period of impressive growth.

Deciding on the appropriate scope of terrorism reflects the perception of different elements within the Palestinian political system regarding the cost vs. benefit of different kinds of terror activities at any point in time. When assessing this comparison, various considerations need to be taken into account. Economics is seen as a restraining element, especially in the circumstances of a severe crisis. For example, the economic crisis in 2005, is seen as one of the reasons that brought the Palestinians to a decision to end the second intifada.

The discrepancy between commitment to ideological considerations and the importance of economic considerations is small among the Palestinian commercial sector. It grows among a comparatively pragmatic movement such as Fatah, broadened even more among a religious, ideological movement such as Hamas, which also has a commitment to govern Gaza, and has become even stronger among more extreme movements, such as the Islamic Jihad, that are not committed to dealing with the hardships of the population.

In any case, the chance that economic temptations will lead to a change in Palestinian national goals is very slight as long as the Palestinian system is not led by a political movement that gives priority to the welfare of its citizens. That movement must recognize that to provide for their economic needs, it must end its commitment to the struggle against Zionism, which is translated as yielding the “Right of Return” and deciding to forego the establishment of a Palestinian state in all of mandatory Palestine.

The approach of the U.S. administration criticizes the Palestinians and Hamas, in particular, for “not acting according to the needs of the Palestinian people.” This reaction indicates a lack of understanding for Palestinian priorities and superimposes upon them a Western order of priorities, which sees in the pursuit of happiness and prosperity as all people’s solitary goal.

The Palestinians explain to the world that they have a different order of priorities, including paying salaries to terrorists, “Return Marches,” the destruction of a critical truck crossing for goods, and the right to forgo both human life and prosperity. However, it appears that the Americans, Europeans, and many Israelis are not getting these messages. They continue to believe that economic considerations can lead the Palestinians to change their anti-peace policies.

We must not diminish the importance of investing in the advancement of the Palestinian economy and economic cooperation with them. These are based on ethical motives – from the desire to bring economic prosperity to our neighbors to advancing familiarity between both peoples. We must hope that in the end this will motivate the Palestinian to change their order of priorities.

3d)

In the dead of night, Syrians cross frontier for doctor's appointment in Israel

By Rami Amichay

SAFED, Israel (Reuters) - Keeping a doctor's appointment in Israel, Syrian children and their mothers stepped across a tense Golan Heights border in the dead of night under the watchful gaze of Israeli soldiers.

The patients, Israeli medical officials said, were not the walking wounded of the seven-year-old Syrian civil war but children with chronic health problems coming across the frontier for a day's treatment in a hospital in northern Israel.

Israel says it has treated between 4,000 and 4,500 war casualties from Syria since a humanitarian aid program was begun some five years ago.

The group of more than 40 mothers and children that crossed over in the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday were among the 3,000 Syrians who Israel says have received separate treatment in what it calls "Operation Doctor's Appointment".

Watched by Israeli soldiers with night-vision equipment, one woman - carrying one child and holding the hand of another - stepped through a gate built into Israel's security fence in the occupied Golan Heights.

After a brief security check, she joined others at the roadside to wait for a bus that would take them to Ziv Hospital in the northern town of Safed, where a medical clown entertained the children.

"They are treated in hospital and go back the same day," said Major Sergei Kutikov, an Israeli military health officer. "Sometimes they return twice or three times for further treatment or ... surgery."

Israel, which captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war, has largely stayed out of the current conflict.

But it has carried out scores of air strikes on suspected Iranian or Hezbollah deployments and arms transfers in Syria, and only hours after the latest batch of patients came across, sirens sounded in the Golan when an Israeli missile intercepted a drone from Syria.

For Israel, the medical aid program can help win hearts and minds in border areas where the number of refugees has increased in recent weeks as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces advance in an offensive to recover southwest Syria.

Michael Harari, a pediatrician at Ziv hospital, said medical infrastructure in southwest Syria has largely broken down, and groups of Syrian children are brought to the facility every two to three weeks.

"We were afraid in the beginning to come (because we regarded Israelis) as Zionists and enemies," said one woman, who brought her son for treatment. "It's the opposite."

(Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)

3e)

Top IDF Official: Due to Israeli Military Actions, Iran Is ‘Far Away’ From Where It Wants to Be in Syria

Israeli military actions have taken a toll on Iran’s efforts to consolidate its presence in Syria, a high-ranking IDF official said on Wednesday, Voice of America Persian reported.

Speaking at a Jewish Policy Center event in Washington, DC, Maj. Gen. Michael Edelstein — Israel’s defense and armed forces attaché to the US — explained, “If I would have to draw…a graph, and the Iranians would like to be here in July 2018,” Edelstein stated, as he raised his hand above his head. “They are far away from this, due to Israel’s campaign against Iranian activities in Lebanon, in Syria, and any other place that threatens us.”

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4) California Democrat accuses Israel of ‘genocide,’ praises anti-Semite Farrakhan

A Democratic candidate for the California State Assembly claimed Israel commits genocide against the Palestinians and declared that she “enjoy[s] listening to Farakhan’s sermons.”

By: World Israel News Staff

Maria Estrada, who is running for a seat in the California State Assembly to represent a suburban Los Angeles district, recently qualified for the November election, despite a string of social media posts spurring accusations of anti-Semitism.

Among Estrada’s controversial posts is one from last year reported by JTA in which the aspiring assemblywoman stated, “Democrats turn a blind eye to the genocide against Palestinians and justify it by bringing up the Holocaust. As if what happened 70 years ago justifies it. Anyone who believes they are one of ‘God’s chosen people’ automatically feels superior and justified in all they do. Religious fanaticism is used to justify apartheid and crimes against Palestinians and no one should be okay with it. #FreePalestine.”

Estrada returned to accusing Israel of genocide this week, posting on Facebook, “The argument from Zionists is that the number of Palestinians has grown. Apparently they aren’t killing enough Palestinians for them to consider it a genocide.”Estrada was also taken to task in Los Angeles’ Jewish Journal for tweeting, “I, for one, enjoy listening to Farrakhan’s sermons.”

The individual to which Estrada referred is Nation of Islam hate preacher Louis Farrakhan who has made anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and unrepentant Jew-hatred the centerpieces of his public speeches for decades.

Estrada represents the latest Democratic candidate to land in hot water for supporting anti-Israel positions that their critics argue stray into anti-Semitic territory.In Minnesota, a Muslim Democratic candidate named Ilhan Omar, who currently serves as a Minnesota state representative, accused Israel of “apartheid,” “hypnotiz[ing] the world,” and committing “evil doings” in Gaza.

In New York, a Democratic Congressional candidate named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently defeated an incumbent to claim her spot on the ticket in November, accused Israel of a “massacre” in Gaza in reference to the deaths of Palestinians in the violent Hamas-led “March of Return” riots. By Hamas’ own admission, the majority of those killed in the riots were members or affiliated with the terror group.

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5) "...at the last minute, a gaggle of Washington lawyers and lobbyists -- called the establishment when you agree with them and the swamp when you don't -- persuaded the president to reject his commitment to his sister and nominate Judge Brett Kavanaugh. He is the man Justice Kennedy had asked the president to nominate and is another former Kennedy clerk.

The suspense over all this was palpable earlier this week. The showman in the president beat a drum so effectively last weekend that we all watched with excited pulse rates on Monday night. I was and remain extremely disappointed. Donald Trump -- whatever you think of him as a president -- has been utterly faithful to his campaign promises in foreign and domestic policy. Until now.

Now he has given us a nominee to the highest court in the land who typifies the culture he railed against when he claimed he'd drain the swamp. This man and this culture accept cutting holes in the Fourth Amendment because they don't believe that it should protect privacy. This man and this culture accept unlimited spying on innocent Americans by the National Security Agency because they don't believe that the NSA is subject to the Constitution.

This man and this culture even looked the other way in the face of deep state shenanigans against President Trump himself. This man and this culture accept the federal regulation of health care and its command that everyone buy health insurance, called Obamacare. This man and this culture embrace the Nixonian mantra that if the president does it, it is not illegal.

What happened here?

The Kavanaugh nomination is not a question of his qualifications; it is a question of his values. It is dangerous for judges to embrace values that diminish personal freedom rather than expand it. When they do that, they reveal their view that freedom comes from the government, not from within us. Thomas Jefferson and all the Founding Fathers profoundly rejected the government-as-source-of-freedom argument, but Judge Kavanaugh accepts it.

Jefferson once remarked that unless you pick someone's pocket or break someone's leg, no one should care how you exercise your freedom or pursue happiness. I wish the president had nominated a person who believes that, as well. But he didn't."
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6) Trump Is Sending This Super Team To Mexico

Here is why?

Mexico just elected a new president who has promised a hard line on issues that have been plaguing the country for years. Trump sees this as an opportunity and is sending an all-star team to the country to meet with the outgoing and incoming presidents to see if any in-roads can be made.

President Donald Trump is sending a team of top officials to meet Mexico's president-elect on Friday to show the importance he places on the countries' relationship, the US said, after months of deeply strained ties.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will lead a high-level delegation for meetings with anti-establishment leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who won a landslide victory in Mexico's July 1 elections, opening a new chapter in what has been a troubled relationship since Trump came to office.

"This is an important trip scheduled at a key moment in our bilateral relationship," said a senior US State Department official in a background briefing on Thursday.

He confirmed that Pompeo would be joined by Trump's son-in-law, senior presidential adviser Jared Kushner; Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen; and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Trump is placing a huge importance on the relationship with Mexico. A strong Mexico will definitely ease the burden on American taxpayers.

6a) What's McCain Trying to Sabotage This Time?! 

Arizona Senator John McCain wants to scrap the planned summit between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, at least if he perceives Trump is "not prepared to hold Putin accountable."
 

Just one day ago, McCain tweeted out this regarding the Helsinki summit: “As all eyes turn to #Helsinki, @POTUS must reverse his disturbing tendency to show America’s adversaries the deference & esteem that should be reserved for our allies. He must be strong with #Putin & show willingness to defend the US &our allies against those who threaten us.”

And after the news broke of the indictment of the Russian intel officers, McCain issued a stronger statement making it clear that “if President Trump is not prepared to hold Putin accountable, the summit in Helsinki should not move forward.”

...

“President Trump must be willing to confront Putin from a position of strength and demonstrate that there will be a serious price to pay for his ongoing aggression towards the United States and democracies around the world. If President Trump is not prepared to hold Putin accountable, the summit in Helsinki should not move forward.”

McCain's statement came the same day as a number of high-profile Democrats also trashed the summit.
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7)Obama Cyber Chief: You’d Better Believe I Was Ordered To Stand Down On Russia

By ED MORRISSEY

Consider this a confirmation of an allegation that first emerged in March, because the co-author of the book that contained it certainly does. Michael Isikoff and David Corn published an explosive allegation that the Obama administration issued a stand-down order to efforts to counter Russian cyberwarfare in 2016. Yesterday, the head of the Obama administration’s cyber programs told the Senate Intelligence Committee that’s precisely what happened:

The Obama White House’s chief cyber official testified Wednesday that proposals he was developing to counter Russia’s attack on the U.S. presidential election were put on a “back burner” after he was ordered to “stand down” his efforts in the summer of 2016.

The comments by Michael Daniel, who served as White House “cyber security coordinator” between 2012 and January of last year, provided his first public confirmation of a much-discussed passage in the book, “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump,” co-written by this reporter and David Corn, that detailed his thwarted efforts to respond to the Russian attack.

They came during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing into how the Obama administration dealt with Russian cyber and information warfare attacks in 2016, an issue that has become one of the more politically sensitive subjects in the panel’s ongoing investigation into Russia’s interference in the U.S. election and any links to the Trump campaign.

Three months ago, the book’s pre-release teasers identified Susan Rice as the person who delivered the order. Isikoff and Corn laid out the sequence of events in memorable fashion:

But Wallander and Daniel’s bosses at the White House were not on board. One day in late August, national security adviser Susan Rice called Daniel into her office and demanded he cease and desist from working on the cyber options he was developing. “Don’t get ahead of us,” she warned him. The White House was not prepared to endorse any of these ideas. Daniel and his team in the White House cyber response group were given strict orders: Stand down. She told Daniel to “knock it off,” he recalled.

Daniel walked back to his office. “That was one pissed-off national security adviser,” he told one of his aides.

At his morning staff meeting, Daniel matter of factly said to his team it had to stop work on options to counter the Russian attack: “We’ve been told to stand down.” Daniel Prieto, one of Daniel’s top deputies, recalled, “I was incredulous and in disbelief. It took me a moment to process. In my head I was like, Did I hear that correctly?” Then Prieto asked, “Why the hell are we standing down? Michael, can you help us understand? “Daniel informed them that the orders came from both Rice and Monaco. They were concerned that were the options to leak, it would force Obama to act. “They didn’t want to box the president in,” Prieto subsequently said.

When asked about this passage from Russian Roulette, Daniel corroborated it as “an accurate rendering of what happened.” In fact, the stand-down order came along with a mandate to start cutting the number of personnel working on the issue:

[Daniel] said his bosses at the NSC — he did not specifically mention Rice in his testimony — had concerns about “how many people were working on the options” so the “decision” from his superiors at the Obama White House was to “neck down the number of people that were involved in developing our ongoing response options.”

Daniel added that “it’s not accurate to say that all activity ceased at that point.” He and his staff “shifted our focus” to assisting state governments to protect against Russian cyberattacks against state and local election systems.

But as for his work on developing cyber deterrence measures, “those actions were put on a back burner and that was not the focus of our activity during that time period.”

Let’s not forget that this took place after Obama rejected efforts by Tom Cotton to strengthen the US posture against Russian cyberwarfare and disinformation campaigns. Cotton had raised alarms about this issue starting in 2015, but the Obama administration argued that Cotton’s proposal would duplicate existing efforts — at the time when Susan Rice was shutting those efforts down:

The White House opposed a Republican-led push earlier this year to create an executive-branch task force to battle Russia’s covert information operations, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.

Sen. Tom Cotton, a leading GOP defense hawk who has long urged President Barack Obama to take a harder line on Russia, sought to force the White House to create a panel with representatives from a number of government agencies to counter Russian efforts “to exert covert influence,” including by exposing Russian “falsehoods, agents of influence, corruption, human rights abuses, terrorism, and assassinations.”

But the administration rejected the call, saying in a letter to Congress that hasn’t been released publicly that the panel would duplicate existing efforts to battle Russian influence operations — an argument Cotton rejects.

And at the same time as that, the Obama administration was dismantling a State Department program to combat Russian disinformation campaigns in cyberspace:

Nearly a year ago, the State Department created a Counter-Disinformation Team, inside its Bureau of International Information Programs, as a small, start-up effort to resist Russian disinformation. Consisting of only a handful of staffers, it was supposed to expose the most laughable Moscow lies about America and the West that are disseminated regularly via RT and other outlets. They created a beta website and prepared to wage the struggle for truth online.

Alas, their website never went live. Recently the State Department shut down the tiny Counter-Disinformation Team and any efforts by the Obama administration to resist Putin’s propaganda can now be considered dead before birth. Intelligence Community sources tell me that it was closed out of a deep desire inside the White House “not to upset the Russians.” …

Who killed the Counter-Disinformation Team and why? What did the team produce during the time it existed? What has become of this product? How many people were on it? Does the State Department not consider countering Kremlin disinformation to be in its remit? Does the White House agree? What about the National Security Council? Is anybody in the U.S. government authorized to debunk Putin’s lies – if so, who? If not, why not?

The Obama administration had plenty of warning, and plenty of resources to fight the Russian cyber offensive. Rather than doing so, however, they chose to stand down and leave it to a single finger-wag from Barack Obama to Vladimir Putin. With all of the dubious speculation over “collusion” between the Russians and the Trump campaign, we have heard very little about this suspicious sequence of events, in which the Obama administration seemed determined to leave the US defenseless in a cyberwar.

And in fact, the White House had an explicit entrée to fight one particular part of the cyber offensive. Former assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland not only corroborated Daniel’s testimony, she revealed that the Obama administration had good reason to intervene against Russian diplomatic personnel in the effort:

Nuland also revealed, in response to questions by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, another previously unpublicized dimension to the Russian attack. That summer, Collins said, FBI officials advised the committee that Russian diplomats were traveling around the country in areas they were not — under diplomatic protocols — permitted to visit , apparently to collect intelligence. Asked by Collins if she believed this was part of the Russian so-called active measures attack on the election, Nuland responded, “I do.”

Only after Hillary Clinton lost the election did Obama retaliate by expelling the diplomatic personnel involved. By then it was far too late, an empty gesture after a series of purposeful surrenders. Perhaps at some point, we’ll get an investigation into these decisions, which would be much more useful than having a special counsel prosecute Paul Manafort for a case the Department of Justice had in 2014, and running a couple of questionable obstruction cases that have nothing to do with Russian collusion.

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