We are leaving this Thursday and will be returning Sunday a week. We are first going to Louisville to help our daughter and son in law hang pictures in their new homes, celebrate our 47th anniversary and our grandson's birthday somewhat early.
Then we leave for Maitland to be with our daughter and her husband to celebrate their anniversary and the birthdays of Blake and Dagny.
No memos for a while beginning later in the week.
With Trump on vacation negotiating an understanding with N Korea there should not be much reliable news we are normally fed when he is in town fighting assorted alligators.
While Trump is away, Adam Schiff will be preparing law suits to force Mueller to release the results of his findings. Last I heard, there was no Russian collusion but Trump did collude with Kraft, the Patriot's owner, in Jupiter. McCabe alerted The FBI who were able to take pictures of Trump going into the Spa.
When confronted by one of The FBI Agents, Trump explained he was trying to arrange for a week of full body massages for "Fat Boy" as an inducement to give up his nuclear weapons.
When Schiff and Waters heard about Trump's alibi they were furious and immediately alerted Mueller who agreed that it would mean another two years before he would be able to conclude his investigation. Mueller promised his report will be released the day after Trump wins his second term after defeating Bernie and his running mate, AOC.
While I still have my tongue in my cheek, I would like to comment on one other matter.
We watched the Oscar's,Sunday and frequently sped up the commentary of the winners because we did not care to listen to them thanking their entire universe of friends and co-horts. Negative comments about Trump were held to a minimum because Oscar ratings have been trending down as with The NFL games and the ads reflect audience lack of interest.
A lot of black talent was finally recognized and "Green Book" won the best movie award and now blacks are fighting with each other over the message because some believe the white driver was given more credit than his passenger. America remains consumed over race issues.. Ads now generally include blacks, Asians and even black and white couples. Madison Avenue is doing it's best to portray a nation that is engaged in a racial and ethnic love fest.
As for "Green Book," I did not see the movie when it was featured at The Savannah Film Festival but Lynn told me it depicted a true story and deserved to win.
Green now seems to have become a controversial color whether it pertains to a movie,and/or AOC's inane proposed climate legislation. As for myself, I like green. When I watch tennis I often turn green with envy at the beautiful strokes Federer and Rafi et al make.
It is a shame the Civil War is being fought again . One would have though after Civil Right's legislation was passed we would be beyond our "season of discontent." One commentator recently said we failed to debate the issue after Congress passed the legislation. Perhaps that is so but it seems to me, based on a recent survey, over 60% thought we were on our way toward comity back around the beginning of the 21st century and then everything seemed to fall apart after Obama was elected. What a shame.
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Why a wall:
A popular refrain is why build a wall if most drugs come through ports of entry and half the illegals are from overstayed visas. Taking what I believe to be an objective look at this,1. We don’t know what we don’t know, so how can you say that drugs only come through ports of entry?
2. Why are people overstaying visas still in this country? We can’t find them?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++3. Defer to those who understand the problem. The Border Patrol union says that substantial physical barriers in places not now covered would substantially aid them (together with other tools) in preventing illegal entry. That, alone, should be cause to get on with it.
Does Zarif's resignation mean anything? (See 1 below.)
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Zito's take on local versus mass media regarding Smollett. (See 2 below.)
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Abbas' good week might have helped Bibi out of the challenge he faces and lessons learned. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Saudis hedge their bets and cozy up with China. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) US dismisses surprise resignation of Iran’s Zarif
‘We’ll see if it sticks,’ Mike Pompeo tweets, calling the foreign minister a front man ‘for a corrupt religious mafia’
“We note @JZarif’s resignation. We’ll see if it sticks,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote on Twitter.
“Either way, he and @HassanRouhani are just front men for a corrupt religious mafia,” Pompeo wrote, referring to the country’s president.
“We know @khamenei_ir makes all final decisions. Our policy is unchanged — the regime must behave like a normal country and respect its people,” he said of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Zarif, 59, announced his resignation on Instagram, but it can only take effect once Rouhani accepts it.
He has served as Rouhani’s foreign minister since August 2013 and has been under constant pressure and criticism by hardliners who opposed his policy of detente with the West, as well as by the Trump administration, which has hammered away at the nuclear deal he helped broker.
While former US secretary of state John Kerry established a working rapport with Zarif, the Trump administration has taken a much harder line toward the so-called moderate, including one State Department official recently tweeting an unflattering GIF of Zarif saying: “How do you know @JZarif is lying? His lips are moving.”
In this January 16, 2016 file photo, then-secretary of state John Kerry talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Vienna, after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verified that Iran has met all conditions under the nuclear deal. (Kevin Lamarque/Pool via AP, File)
Within Iran, Zarif’s standing in the country’s political establishment took a hit when the US withdrew last year from the nuclear deal, aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear program, and the pact’s achievements became less and less clear as Iran’s economy nosedived.
Zarif was blamed by ultra-conservatives for negotiating a bad deal that had not gained anything meaningful for Iran in exchange for all the concessions it had made in its nuclear program.
Analysts say Rouhani faces growing political pressure from hard-liners within the government as the nuclear deal unravels. Iranian presidents typically see their popularity erode during their second four-year term, but analysts say Rouhani is particularly vulnerable because of the economic crisis assailing the country’s rial currency, which has hurt ordinary Iranians and emboldened critics to openly call for his ouster.
Reaction to Zarif’s resignation was swift. A prominent reformist lawmaker, Mostafa Kavakebian, wrote on Twitter that Rouhani should reject Zarif’s resignation as his departure would only “make enemies of Iran’s dignity happy.”
Hassan Mohammadi, a Tehran-based political analyst close to Rouhani, said he understood it was Zarif’s third time submitting his resignation in the last year.
“It is part of plan for changing the track in foreign policy in Iran. A negotiation-seeking foreign minister is not a favored person anymore,” Mohammadi told The Associated Press. “Iran needs a tough foreign minister from now on. Someone who does not offer smile towards the West.”
AP contributed to this report.
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2) While National Media Carried Water for Jussie Smollett, Local Media Did It Right
By Salena Zito
The first thing that caused newsman Rafer Weigel to blink when reading the TMZ report on "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett being brutally attacked by Trump-supporting, noose-wielding, racial-slurring assailants was the neighborhood in which the attack was reported to have happened.
The Streeterville neighborhood is not exactly "MAGA country" at any time, let alone 2 a.m.
"It is our job as reporters to be skeptical," said Weigel, a local Fox affiliate news anchor and reporter who grew up in Chicago.
How skeptical? "Well as the old adage goes, 'If your mother says she loves you, check it out,' so from the get go, when we heard this about Smollett, there were eyebrows raised for a whole host of reasons, just because we know the city well," he said.
As national media often omitted "alleged" from their reporting of the attack and instead saying that Smollett was attacked by two MAGA hat-wearing people who were "yelling out racial and homophobic slurs" and "poured an unknown chemical substance on the victim," the newsroom Weigel works in, along with several other competing Chicago print and media organizations, mostly stuck "alleged" in their reporting.
Local news organizations were doing what local news organizations do best: staying in constant contact with the local police, local officials and the community, and pursing the past behavior of the victim to look for additional red flags before going in head first with a narrative.
A news organization's relationship with the police, local officials and the community is critical, Weigel said, explaining that as a local news reporter, you often have to report on things that aren't favorable to the community or a local official or the police force. "But because you build trust by being honest and not sensational, those relationships remain intact," he said.
Weigel said the newsroom worked as a team, with people working the phones and talking to detectives in person, often receiving certain information off the record that the detectives would not share with the public because it could compromise their investigation. "So we honor that in order to keep that relationship open." He added: "We have to have good relationships with police officers and local officials, or they will completely cut us off. It is a two-way street. If they have a crime that needs to get solved, they'll turn to us to bring awareness to it, to get out suspects' pictures and videos and that sort of thing. If there's a high-profile case that's of high interest to the public, they understand that, and they will tell us what we can, or what they can, without compromising the investigation. So, it is a two-way street."
As any good local news reporter knows, those working relationships are critical. At the same time, it doesn't mean reporters don't hold them accountable. When there was evidence of a police cover-up of the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald by a police officer, the local Chicago media broke the story. The officers involved ended up going to trial. While they were acquitted, the police understand reporters have a job to do. As Weigel said: "We work in close proximity with these people. We know them by their first name, and so therefore, the local media will always have an advantage over the national media swooping in at the last minute, because we already know these people."
National news organizations, the ones with the most Twitter followers or influence on social media, cannot possibly work those kinds of relationships in a meaningful way. But many of them let the story stand without using "alleged" in their reporting, often retweeting celebrities, presidential candidates and influencers who personally condemn the attack, rather than prefacing the attack as an alleged attack.
That kind of omission, including any inference used in the delivery of a story, is damaging to our credibility as dispassionate deliverers of the news.
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3)
Abbas’s popularity alters Israel’s political landscape By Jonathan Tobin
Israeli voters will keep rejecting peace plans as long as Palestinian keep cheering for terrorists and their paymasters.
It was a rough week for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He saw his main opponents join forces and the Blue and White Party that resulted from this merger surpassed Netanyahu’s Likud Party in the polls. If that wasn’t enough, Netanyahu’s decision to encourage one of his coalition partners to take in a party whose leaders are followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane set off a storm of criticism from Jews who felt he was wrong to help legitimize an extremist group.
But while Netanyahu has been taking it on the chin, the man that much of the world still imagines is Israel’s peace partner seems to have had a very good week. And the explanation for that unexpected development is the reason why Netanyahu’s prospects for holding on to his office are not quite as gloomy as his detractors may think.
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas is currently serving the 15th year of the four-year term as president of the P.A., to which he was elected in January 2005. He is widely reviled by most of those whom he pretends to serve. The same is true for his steadfast refusal to negotiate peace with Israel. The kleptocracy over which the 83-year-old presides is a disgrace. He refuses to make peace with Israel, but is also dependent on security cooperation with the Jewish state.
But Abbas’s popularity is suddenly soaring. In the last year, both the United States and Israel have enacted measures to cut back on cash flowing to his regime in order to force him to end the practice of rewarding those who attack, wound and kill Israelis, Jews and Americans with salaries and pensions.
Last week, Israel tried to force Abbas’s hand on the issue of his pay-to-slay policy by deducting some $138 million from the tax revenue that it collects and then transfers to the P.A. But the Palestinian leader refused to budge. To the contrary, he vowed never to accept a single penny of the money Israel hands over to his government so long as any of it was held back.
In theory, this ought to have generated a revolt from ordinary Palestinians, who shouldn’t want the minimal services the P.A. performs for them to be impacted for the sake of terrorists. But it has had the opposite effect.
Palestinian social media is buzzing with praise of his stand. Outside of Gaza, whose people are being starved and squeezed by Abbas’s efforts to pressure his Hamas rivals that govern the strip, there’s every sign that his stand is widely applauded by most Palestinians who agree with his decision to keep funding “martyrs.”
To some extent, this is a familiar game of “chicken” that Israel’s government and Abbas have been playing for years. Neither Netanyahu nor Abbas wants to abandon the security cooperation that both keeps a lid on terrorism (if not eradicating it) and protects the P.A. leader and his cronies from Hamas. Israel doesn’t want the P.A. to collapse, which would force it to directly rule Palestinians in the West Bank, and Abbas and the rest of his corrupt gang that profits don’t want the flow of cash to their families and foreign bank accounts to cease.
But however this standoff is resolved, it goes a long way to explaining what’s been happening prior to the Israeli April elections.
Netanyahu is facing potential political doom because unlike the last three elections which he won, he isn’t facing off against an opponent that is easily labeled a “leftist” willing to make concessions to the Palestinians in the vain hope of peace. The Israeli left has been marginalized. Instead of a party of peace advocates, who can be pilloried for their naïveté, the alternative to the Likud is a party led by a trio of former generals.
Netanyahu and his allies are accusing the Blue and White—and its leader, Benny Gantz—of being leftist peaceniks flying under false centrist colors. Maybe there’s some truth to that argument, as Gantz will likely have to ally himself to the left in order to form a government. But since it counts among its leaders figures like former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who is arguably to the right of Netanyahu, that charge may not stick. Whatever you may think of the new party, its rise, coupled with the collapse of the left, stand as testimony to the post-Oslo era sea change in Israeli politics.
Who created that change? For all his tactical cleverness and sure governing skills, it wasn’t Netanyahu. The person who ensured that the Israeli public would draw conclusions from the last 25 years and to essentially give up on the notion of the Palestinian Authority as a peace partner is none other than Abbas. Had he really been different from his terrorist predecessor, longtime PLO chief Yasser Arafat, it’s conceivable that Netanyahu might have been in the opposition during the last decade.
But by sticking to the language of conflict with Israel and Zionism that is inextricably tied to the sense of Palestinian national identity that Arafat and Abbas fostered, the P.A. has ensured that most Israelis have stopped believing that peace is an option in the foreseeable future. Gantz is giving Netanyahu a run for his money because much of the Israeli public sees no real difference between their stands on the peace process. If, after staying too long in office, Netanyahu still has a decent chance of leading the next government, it’s because a critical mass of Israelis think the coalition of parties of the center and the right that he leads is the only government that can be trusted to deal with a P.A. leader that continues to financially reward terrorism.
Abbas may enjoy his popularity, but if his people actually wanted peace and a two-state solution, they wouldn’t be applauding his intransigence. Until something shifts, Israeli politics will continue to be a battle in which the parties of the left haven’t got a chance.
3a)Broad lessons to be learned from the Polish imbroglio By Isi Leibler
Emotions and realpolitik do not mix.
Jews with any connection to the Holocaust tend to harbor prejudice against Poles. Despite their 1,000-year sojourn in Poland, Jews were often discriminated against. In the Middle Ages, they were prohibited from engaging in agriculture or industry and were restricted to basing their livelihoods on moneylending or working as merchants, tax collectors or innkeepers. They were often perceived as alien extortionists and subjected to pogroms instigated by the ruling classes to divert attention from the prevailing poverty and abysmal social conditions.
In the 19th century, the majority of Jews lived in abject poverty in their shtetls but with Emancipation, some Jews emerged as leaders of trade and industry. Nevertheless, prejudice against Jews remained intenseand by the 20th century, anti-Semitism was rampant throughout Europe.
The Polish people were considered racially inferior by the Nazis whose occupation was brutal and who murdered millions of Poles. Unlike the French Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazis, the London-based Polish government in exile encouraged resistance. And unlike local non-Jews in the Baltic countries, Poles did not serve as guards in the concentration camps.
The extermination of the 3 million Jews concentrated in Poland was the prime Nazi objective. Jews were herded into ghettoes and then dispatched to death camps to be gassed. Auschwitz, the largest industrial complex for mass murder, was deliberately located in Poland so that Germans would not be directly exposed to the horrors perpetrated.
Even while suffering from the brutal Nazi oppression, many Poles continued to harbor prejudice against Jews. Some collaborated by acting as informants and others were rewarded by being permitted to take possession of homes and goods left by deported Jews.
But there were also heroic Poles who risked a mandatory death sentence for their help in hiding and saving Jews. We must also pay tribute to Poles such as Karol Wojtyła (who would become Pope John Paul ll), who protected many individual Jews, and Jan Karski, who tried, without success, to convince Western leaders to act and prevent the mass murders.
Unfortunately, those righteous gentiles who sought to save Jews and were executed rarely made headlines but the media excelled in highlighting the collaborators. A particular case was the exposure of murderous behavior of a number of Poles in Jedwabme who instigated a pogrom against Jews in 1941, burning over 300 alive in a barn. Unfortunately, most of the Polish authorities remained in denial over this mass atrocity until Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski bravely called this action not a pogrom but a genocide.
Anti-Semitism prevailed as evidenced by the 1946 Kielce pogrom in which 42 Holocaust survivors returning to their homes were massacred. But when the communists took over Poland in 1945, they suppressed exposure of the genocide. In 1968, the Polish government conducted an anti-Semitic purge and 30,000 Jews, the bulk of whom were Holocaust survivors, were expelled from the country.
After the collapse of communism in the early 1990s, the newly independent Polish government sought to create a fresh Polish image based upon nationalism and democracy. It sought to cleanse the record and set aside the ugly past episodes in its history. In this context, the Polish government passed a law last year that effectively criminalized anyone “besmirching” the Polish people by associating them with the Nazi genocidal industry applied against Jews.
This led to confrontational exchanges with Israel and in June 2018 a compromise law was finally passed by the Polish government, which many Jews and Poles still resented. It effectively emphasized the fact that the Holocaust was a Nazi objective in which some Poles collaborated and others endangered their lives by trying to save Jews. The highlight was that Polish people as such were not collaborators.
This law was regrettable but had to be viewed in the perspective of a right-wing nationalist government that condemned anti-Semitism and sought to create a new image by expunging or at least downplaying the role of Poles who collaborated. The government even invested in an impressive museum in the heart of Warsaw focusing on the Jewish contribution to Poland. In addition, together with Hungary and Slovakia, Poland has emerged as one of the most influential European supporters of Israel and acted as a restraint against anti-Israel forces within the EU.
But sensitivities and emotions remained fragile and when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in response to a question in Poland, was misquoted as saying “the Poles” engaged in anti-Jewish activity during the Nazi era even though in the same response he stated that many Poles saved Jews, there was an uproar. This was laid to rest when he clarified that he had referred to Poles but not “the Poles” or “thePolish people” or Poland. Nevertheless, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was distressed.
The following day, Israel’s newly appointed acting foreign minister, Yisrael Katz, on his first day in office, blundered into the debate, stating that “one cannot sugarcoat this history,” reiterating that “Poles collaborated with the Nazis, definitely” and quoting former Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir, who allegedly said that Poles “suckled anti- Semitism with their mother’s milk.”
The diplomatic upheaval caused by Katz led to the Polish prime minister accusing him of engaging in racist defamation of the Polish people and promptly canceling Poland’s participation in the Visegrád group summit of Central European countries in Jerusalem. The summit would have presented a united front against Iran.
There surely is a lesson to be learned from this self-inflicted fiasco. Other states and countries can act as important allies to Israel though their antecedents also included Nazi collaborators. The Polish case stands out because of the extent of the genocide; 3 million Jews were murdered in one country. But every single country under Nazi occupation included citizens who collaborated with the Nazis or benefited materially from the deportation of their Jewish neighbors. The clear majority simply stood by. A smaller number heroically saved Jews, often at the expense of their own lives.
Unfortunately, we can assume that most European societies would not behave differently were they facing similar circumstances today.
We must neither forget nor forgive those who betrayed us. But politicians should never generalize. The details should be left for our historians to compile and for our children to learn and understand.
We are living in a dynamic environment and remain the only state that faces an existential threat from its neighbors. We benefit from building new alliances.
Populist and nationalist parties are emerging as powerful political forces. They are likely to profoundly influence domestic and foreign policies in virtually every European country.
The main source of support for these populists derives from those who consider the flood of Muslim migrants to be detrimental to the quality of their lives, due to a massive increase in crime and social chaos that threatens their entire social order. In addition, there is the increased threat of both imported and home bred terrorists, from which no European city is immune.
Many of the voters for these nationalist parties support Israel as a bastion of the free world.
Until recently, some of these parties and states included fascists and Holocaust revisionists. Any Jewish cooperation with such groups would have been an unthinkable desecration of the memory of Holocaust victims. However, over the past decade, most of them began purging their ranks of anti-Semites and publicly undertook to eradicate all anti-Jewish elements and thus today the situation is dramatically changed.
There are those who say that by accepting the support of and allying with countries like Poland and Hungary, Israel is providing a fig leaf to fascists. This is nonsense. The reason for this relationship is that these governments support Israel and have pledged to combat anti-Semitism and purge Jew-baiters from their midst. There is less anti-Jewish violence in Poland and Hungary than there is in France. Besides, other than these Central and Eastern European states, Israel has no allies in the EU, which is now notorious for its shameless bias and double standards against the Jewish state.
Needless to say, their support of Israel does not preclude some fascists voting for them. Likewise, the fact that racists and fascists may support U.S. President Donald Trump does not mean that his administration is fascist. Nor have far-left anti-Semites or communists taken control of the U.S. Democratic Party by voting for it.
We do not boycott left-wing governments that appease Muslim extremists, most of whom lead the anti-Semitic packs. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other countries have not disavowed and purged their ranks of anti-Semites, but nobody suggests that we cannot cooperate with them on mutual objectives and confront common enemies. Limited cooperation on specific common interests does not mean that Israel necessarily endorses the other policies of its allies.
Many cynically describe this as realpolitik. In truth, it is acting in our self-interest.
As long as leaders of the new generation publicly repudiate the crimes of their antecedents and practice what they preach, Israel would be making a major long-term blunder to spurn their support and continue accusing them collectively of being anti-Semitic. But that is what our foolish foreign minister did regarding Poland, with whom a strategic alliance would be of considerable benefit. Besides, if we continue to attack those seeking friendship and offering support, we shoot ourselves in the foot by deterring them from trying to make amends for the crimes and prejudices of their predecessors.
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4)The Saudis Hedge Their American Bets
God may be great, but for Riyadh’s strategic purposes, China’s Xi Jinping apparently is greater.
It is, in its way, the most shocking spectacle in world politics since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union: Even as Beijing is stepping up its persecution of Muslim Uighurs, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia cozied up to Chinese President Xi Jinping on his trip to China last week.
More than a million Uighur Muslims are said to be held in Chinese concentration and “re-education” camps, where beatings and mass rapes are reliably reported to be perpetrated against detainees. Yet the crown prince of the leading Sunni Islamic state signed almost $30 billion in trade agreements with China, hailed the long problem-free relationship between the two countries, pledged support for the Belt and Road initiative, and announced that Saudi Arabia respected China’s need to protect its domestic security in its own way.
God may be great, but Xi Jinping, apparently, is greater. Or at least more useful.
Saudi Arabia is not the only Muslim power kowtowing to China. Pakistan has also fallen strangely silent when it comes to the concentration camps now dotting the landscape in Xinjiang. A country that regularly whips itself into fits of murderous rage over the supposed plight of Muslims in Indian-controlled Kashmir remains rigorously calm about the massive religious repression by its more powerful neighbor.
Another sign of the strange new brotherhood between Islam and its persecutors: Saudi Arabia has pledged $10 billion to help build a refinery in the Pakistani port of Gwadar to speed Gulf oil across Eurasia. Among other things, the refinery will make it easier for China to fuel the vehicles transporting Muslim detainees to concentration camps.
For Americans, the important thing about the Sino-Saudi rapprochement isn’t the eye-watering hypocrisy; human beings can be astonishingly flexible about their principles when their interests change. What matters more is what this tells us about how Washington’s policy mix is shaping calculations in the Middle East. And the news is not good.
The White House hoped that in return for American help against Iran and a U.S. support for the crown prince’s economic reform agenda, Saudi Arabia would align strongly with the U.S. But while presidents have the preponderant voice, foreign policy results from the interplay among the White House, Congress and various interests entrenched in the executive branch.
Congress’s strong reaction to the Saudi murder of Jamal Khashoggi, combined with its skepticism of Riyadh’s Yemen strategy, threatens to torpedo the Trump Middle East policy. As the U.S. pulls away from the Yemen war, and as Congress pushes to impose sanctions on Saudis close to the crown prince over their alleged roles in the Khashoggi murder, some in the Saudi elite have lost faith in the possibility of a stable strategic partnership with the U.S. They worry President Trump cannot deliver.
The crown prince now seeks to strengthen relations with Pakistan and China—as well as Russia—as he looks for alternatives to the American alliance. If that means turning a blind eye to the suffering of millions of Muslims in China, so be it; the House of Saud has made hard choices before.
Yet the congressional approach is sure to fail on its own. Without an overall strategy, imposing sanctions on the Saudis over the Khashoggi murder is moral preening, not foreign policy; it is about how Americans feel about themselves, not about forcing change in Riyadh. This is partly because in today’s multipolar world, expressions of moral disapprobation from Washington matter less than they did 20 years ago. When rebuffed by Washington, the Saudis can go to Beijing, as the crown prince has done—or to Moscow or New Delhi. Sanctions are especially ineffective when—as is now the case—it is clear that the administration isn’t really behind them.
It’s easy to get lost in the twists and turns of the debates over Middle East policy, but the real news is that almost two decades after the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. still does not have a Middle East strategy that enjoys stable political support. The Obama administration’s Iran strategy, the Trump administration’s Saudi-and-Israel strategy, the Bush administration’s democracy-promotion strategy, the reach-out-to-moderate-
The lack of strategic consensus may not be the end of the world; muddling through is not always a recipe for disaster. But at the moment the conclusion seems inescapable: Mohammed bin Salman wasn’t only writing off the Uighurs on his road trip through Asia last week. He was writing off the U.S. If Americans can’t follow a coherent, unified policy in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia will have to hedge its bets.
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