http://thefederalist.com/2019/And:
(See 1 below.)
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I am an unadulterated hawk. Consequently, I would turn Gaza into a waste land as a result of incessant "mistake" Hamas rockets launched against Israel. These "mistaken" rockets were purposefully launched, I suspect, while Bibi was in America.
There comes a time when Israel must respond in an overwhelming manner. That time is now.
Bibi finally approved upgraded and more significant and larger targets. Based on reports Hamas is prepared to escalate with rockets that have increased range.
Will Iran begin a second front against the Golan?
I am sure Bibi, Trump, Pompeo and, Bolton discussed all options in their security meeting today. (See 2 below.)
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Glacier reconstituting itself and expanding. (See 3 below.)
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A variety of WSJ op eds. (See 4 ,4a, 4b, 4c, 4d and 4e below.)
What has happened since Sunday is truly monumental because it leads to so many unresolved questions which also need to be answered.
I am convinced Obama knew about Hillary's Dossier efforts , allowing top FBI officials to seek to destroy Trump's election efforts and using the government's power to illegally surveil, wiretap etc.
That said, Trump should move forward on the legislative front (particularly health care)and let others, particularly Sen. Graham, pursue the truth etc.
Let Democrats continue their impeachment and obstruction illusions because it will only fly back to haunt them in the 2020 election. Those behind this effort will continue to be discredited black and radical Muslim members of The House and it will simply create discord between radical Democrats and Pelosi and those candidates running for their party's ticket..
What Trump needs to do is get voters to separate personality from policy and he wins hands down.
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Dick
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1)
In wake of Mueller report, the left will now target Attorney General Barr
After two years of looking forward to the moment the report of special counsel Robert Mueller would be released, the conclusion of his probe was a bitter disappointment for President Trump’s partisan critics. Democrats’ confidence that Mueller would make the bad dream of 2016 go away vanished the instant they learned he had found no evidence of the collusion with Russia they were sure would sink Trump.
They were just as unhappy that the letter from Attorney General William Barr closed the door to a prosecution of Trump for allegedly obstructing justice in the case.
But rather than accepting defeat and moving on to the business of attacking Trump on the issues, Democrats can’t give up on the conspiracy theories they’ve been peddling since Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Far too much effort and emotion has gone into the business of treating Trump as an illegitimate occupant of the White House to change tactics now.
The investigations being pursued by Democratic-controlled House committees offer friendly venues for further pursuits of Trump. But shorn of the incendiary Russia charge that some Democrats likened to treason, even those who vowed to impeach Trump understand that probing his inaugural committee or private business dealings falls flat as a “resistance” rallying point.
Yet if the thesis that Trump plotted with Moscow is now irrevocably debunked, how to continue to stoke their base’s conviction about the president’s illegitimacy?
Had they not spent the last two years lionizing Mueller, they might have been able to pivot quickly and assert that the report was itself a coverup. But that option was foreclosed by Trump’s vitriolic attacks on Mueller that elevated him to the status of a national hero for those who despise the president.
That left liberal talking heads and pundits as well as Democratic members of Congress with only one available target: Attorney General William Barr.
Barr is coming under fire for essentially clearing the president on the charge of obstruction of justice even though his letter to Congress about the Mueller report conceded that Trump had not been completely exonerated by the probe. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler blasted that as a “hasty, partisan interpretation of the facts.”
Some on the left are also claiming that the legal veteran, who also served as President George H.W. Bush’s attorney general a generation ago, was tainted by a memo he wrote prior to his current appointment in which he said that Mueller ought not be allowed to pursue an obstruction charge against Trump.
That’s now producing charges that Barr did a secret deal with Trump in which he obtained his office by promising to spike the Mueller probe and is bent on protecting the president regardless of the facts.
But if trying to depict Barr as a conspirator is the best shot Trump’s critics have left, they might as well give up now.
The notion that Barr would be willing to destroy his good name after many years of public service or was acting out of ambition or partisanship to come out of retirement merely to help Trump evade justice is ludicrous.
Barr’s willingness to spike any obstruction charge is rooted in some basic facts. Absent the crime of collusion, it’s hard to argue that Trump obstructed anything.
All of the “proof” also comes in the form of public statements in which Trump was expressing resentment for being investigated on a charge for which he happened to be innocent, not some secret effort to derail Mueller who was allowed to drag out the investigation for two years.
Nor is it reasonable to allege that firing FBI Director James Comey obstructed the investigation, because it continued without him. The same is true about complaints that Trump answered written questions from Mueller rather than submitting to an interview.
Democrats need to understand that the American people aren’t going to buy a campaign to demonize Barr as a proxy for Trump simply because they’re unhappy about Mueller’s paltry results. Doubling down on Russia now is bad politics as well as bad for the country.
Whether they like it or not, Democrats need to finally accept the legitimacy of the 2016 election before they can think about doing better in 2020.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a contributor to National Review. Twitter: @jonathans_tobin
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2) 30 rockets pound Israel despite calls for cease-fire
By BEN BRESKY
Despite talks of a cease-fire by 11:00 p.m., rockets continued to be shot into Israel from Gaza. At approximately midnight, a rocket barrage was shot into the Eshkol Regional Council and the Shaar Hanegev Regional Council, where a spokeswoman for the cluster of communities said power was cut due to the attacks.
Many residents reportedly went to sleep in bomb shelters, as communities in the Gaza belt region have 15 seconds from the time the "tzeva adom" or "code red" warning siren is sounded until rocket impact. In most cases rockets are shot down in mid-air by the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system, which has been deployed in the south of the country.
The latest wave of rockets caused no injuries or property damage, said Adi Meiri, spokeswoman for Shaar Hanegev Regional Council.
School has been cancelled for Tuesday in the city of Ashkelon and the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council, areas that have been hit by rockets in past flare-ups, the Ministry of Education announced following recommendations from the Home Front Command. Residents will be updated in the morning if the situation continues.
The first rocket to be fired at Israel happened around 5:20 a.m. on Monday. Hamas launched a rocket that flew toward the center of the country, slamming into a private home in the Sharon region. Seven people were injured and four dogs were killed.
That rocket led to an escalation between Israel and Hamas, as Israel retaliated.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to return to Israel early Tuesday morning, skipping his cheduled speech at the AIPAC policy conference in Washington.
Elected officials across the spectrum have weighed in on the current security situation, including MK Moti Yogev, a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, who warned that a ceasefire with Hamas would not be enough of a deterrent.
"The destruction of terrorist homes is good," said Yogev in a tweet late Monday night, referring to the actions the IDF has taken against terrorists in the West Bank, "but in the Gaza Strip it is not enough."
He said that a ceasefire in the face of continued rocket attacks, "violates Israel's commitment to its citizens. Deterrence resides only when the leaders of terror are given a price that they will not be able to withstand."
He said that a ceasefire in the face of continued rocket attacks, "violates Israel's commitment to its citizens. Deterrence resides only when the leaders of terror are given a price that they will not be able to withstand."
3) Key Greenland glacier growing again after shrinking for years
By Associated Press
WASHINGTON — A major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds.
The Jakobshavn glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles and thinning nearly 130 feet annually. But it started growing again at about the same rate in the past two years, according to a study in Monday’s Nature Geoscience. Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary.
“That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system,” said Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland ice and climate scientist Jason Box. “The good news is that it’s a reminder that it’s not necessarily going that fast. But it is going.”
Box, who wasn’t part of the study, said Jakobshavn is “arguably the most important Greenland glacier because it discharges the most ice in the northern hemisphere. For all of Greenland, it is king.”
A natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters likely caused the glacier to reverse course, said study lead author Ala Khazendar, a NASA glaciologist on the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project. Khazendar and colleagues say this coincides with a flip of the North Atlantic Oscillation — a natural and temporary cooling and warming of parts of the ocean that is like a distant cousin to El Nino in the Pacific.
The water in Disko Bay, where Jakobshavn hits the ocean, is about 3.6 degrees cooler than a few years ago, study authors said.
While this is “good news” on a temporary basis, this is bad news on the long term because it tells scientists that ocean temperature is a bigger player in glacier retreats and advances than previously thought, said NASA climate scientist Josh Willis, a study co-author. Over the decades the water has been and will be warming from man-made climate change, he said, noting that about 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans.
“In the long run we’ll probably have to raise our predictions of sea level rise again,” Willis said.
Think of the ocean temperatures near Greenland like an escalator that’s rising slowly from global warming, Khazendar said. But the natural North Atlantic Oscillation sometimes is like jumping down a few steps or jumping up a few steps. The water can get cooler and have effects, but in the long run it is getting warmer and the melting will be worse, he said.
Four outside scientists said the study and results make sense.
University of Washington ice scientist Ian Joughin, who wasn’t part of the study and predicted such a change seven years ago, said it would be a “grave mistake” to interpret the latest data as contradicting climate change science.
What’s happening, Joughin said, is “to a large extent, a temporary blip. Downturns do occur in the stock market, but overall the long term trajectory is up. This is really the same thing.”
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4)
Now that special counsel Robert Mueller has found that no one in the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, Democrats are busy moving the goal posts. But this is a distraction from the real reckoning that needs to come.
4)
Mueller Exposes Spy Chiefs
Did our intel leaders have any evidence when they pushed the Russia collusion line?
By William McGurn
Now that special counsel Robert Mueller has found that no one in the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, Democrats are busy moving the goal posts. But this is a distraction from the real reckoning that needs to come.
The one we need is for all the intelligence officials—including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Central Intelligence Agency chief John Brennan, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe—who pushed the Russia conspiracy theory. The special counsel has just made clear they did so with no real evidence.
Mr. Mueller could have said he didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute. Instead he was categorical: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
This wasn’t for lack of trying on Moscow’s part. “Despite multiple offers” from Russia-affiliated individuals to help their campaign, Mr. Mueller reports, the Trump people didn’t take them up on it.
So why do 44% of Americans—according to a Fox News poll released Sunday—believe otherwise? Part of the answer has to be that the collusion tale was egged on by leading members and former members of the American intelligence community.
Intelligence professionals are trained to sift through the noise and distractions in pursuit of the truth. In this case, however, they went all in for a tale that the Russian government had somehow compromised Mr. Trump or his close associates. In peddling this line, their authority rested on the idea they had access to alarming and conclusive evidence the rest of America couldn’t see. Now it appears they never had much more than an unverified opposition-research dossier commissioned by Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
Nevertheless, they persisted. Start with the FBI’s Mr. McCabe, who boasts that he is the man who opened the counterintelligence probe into Russia and President Trump. Today the question has to be: On what evidence was this extraordinary step predicated, apart from Mr. Trump’s saying things the G-man didn’t like?
As recently as three weeks ago, Mr. McCabe—sacked by the bureau for a “lack of candor”—told CNN that he still thought it “possible” President Trump was a “Russian asset.” Again, on what evidence?
Ditto for Mr. Clapper, who said he agreed “completely” with Mr. McCabe that Mr. Trump could be a Russian asset. He added only that he couldn’t be certain whether it was “witting or unwitting.” Coming from a former director of national intelligence, this is a grave accusation. But on what evidence?
Or consider Mr. Brennan. After a presidential press conference in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin in which Mr. Trump refused to acknowledge Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Mr. Brennan tweeted that the president’s behavior was “nothing short of treasonous.” Not “wrong,” not “outrageous,” but “treasonous.”
It wouldn’t be the last time he invoked the “t” word. Mr. Brennan also used it after the president pulled his security clearance last August. During a subsequent appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” host Chuck Todd suggested that a former intelligence chief might wish to be a little more circumspect with his accusations.
“You are the former CIA director accusing the sitting president of the United States,” said Mr. Todd. “It’s not a private citizen. A lot of people hear the former CIA director accusing the sitting president of the United States of treason—that’s monumental, that’s a monumental accusation.” Mr. Brennan said he regretted nothing, and cited for his judgment his training as an “intelligence professional.”
Finally there’s Rep. Adam Schiff. As ranking member and now chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Schiff has been claiming for some time that there’s “plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy in plain sight.” This past weekend on ABC’s “This Week,” he said there’s “significant evidence of collusion.” Does anyone else think there’s a credibility problem when the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee starts sounding like O.J. Simpson vowing to find the “real killer”?
In light of Mr. Mueller’s findings, there are only two ways to interpret these actions and statements from senior members of the intelligence community. The first is that they got played because they were incompetent. Anyone who reads the compromising texts between FBI master spy Peter Strzok and his FBI lover, Lisa Page, might well find the clown argument persuasive.
But there’s something even worse than an intelligence community that has been played. It’s an intelligence community that chose to play along simply because its members hated Donald Trump. For a full reckoning, America will need an accounting of the evidence used to launch that counterintelligence probe, the unmasking of officials, the leaks, and the likely abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants.
The lesson here is this: Be careful what you wish for. Because the questions this special prosecutor has unleashed might yet yield federal criminal indictments. Just not for the people the fantasists of Russian collusion expected.
Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.
4a) Accountability for a Dossier
The dirty trick that started the collusion fable needs exposing.
The Editorial Board
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has dispatched the Russia collusion theories to the land of cranks and bitter-enders, but there are still some loose ends. To wit, how did the partisan propaganda known as the Steele dossier become the basis for an unprecedented FBI probe of a presidential campaign, an abuse of law enforcement, and two years of media and political hysteria?
We know the outlines of the story but not all the details, and no one has yet been held accountable under the law or even held to much public scrutiny. It’s time for both.
The dossier was concocted in spring 2016 by oppo-research firm Fusion GPS, and financed by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Fusion hired former British spy Christopher Steele to compile sensational claims, based on anonymous Russian sources, that Donald Trump was compromised by Russian intelligence.
All of this should have set off FBI klaxon bells. Mr. Baker has told Congress the FBI was wary of the dossier’s provenance, but FBI Director Jim Comey and his team nonetheless made the dossier a central feature of their unprecedented counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign in July 2016.
That included using the dossier’s allegations as part of its application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a wiretap warrant in October 2016 against former Trump aide Carter Page. The FBI obscured for the court the damning information it had about Mr. Simpson’s political paymasters. Mr. Comey has testified that the FBI targeted at least four Trump-related individuals.
Messrs. Simpson and Steele also spread all this to their friends in the press. They obliged with stories that portrayed the Steele info as credible, validated by the FBI’s interest, including a Yahoo News piece by Michael Isikoff on Sept. 23, 2016, “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.”
On Oct. 31, 2016, Mr. Corn ran his story, “A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging A Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump.” Mr. Comey’s briefing to President-elect Trump in January 2017 was leaked and provided the media a hook to publish the dossier. The collusion panic took off.
Mr. Mueller’s conclusion that there was no collusion suggests that he was not able to verify the dossier’s claims, and there needs to be a reckoning. The country has endured two years of angst and controversy based on a politically motivated invention financed by the Clinton campaign and promoted by former Obama CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
The Justice Department Inspector General is investigating, and so should prosecutors. Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham is promising hearings, and he should put this entire crowd under oath. The Steele dossier looks like one of the nastiest dirty tricks in political history, and its authors and promoters should be held accountable.
4b)
40 Years of Peace Between Israel and Egypt
Sadat and Begin gambled everything, and the bet paid off.
By
Israel and Egypt have been at peace for 40 years. In a region beset by national, sectarian and tribal conflicts, the treaty between the two nations has endured since its signing on March 26, 1979. It has withstood the assassination in 1981 of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, two Palestinian intifadas, two wars in Lebanon and the election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi as Egypt’s president in 2012. Even though Mr. Morsi refused to deal directly with the Israelis—or say “Israel”—he did not walk away from the treaty during his year in power.
The peace remains cold, with little contact between Egyptians and Israelis. Yet both governments remain invested in it. For Israel, this means the largest Arab state and army—linchpin of the coalition that fought Israel in four wars between 1948 and 1973—is no threat. Except when Saddam Hussein lobbed a few scuds during the 1991 Gulf War, no Arab state has attacked Israel in the intervening four decades.
Egypt has also gained from the accords. It has been spared costly wars—so much so that Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, once declared that if Al Jazeera was so eager to fight Israel, it could go ahead, but Egypt was done paying that price. Since 1979, Egypt has also been one of the largest recipients of U.S. military and economic assistance, totaling close to $70 billion.
It took heroic leaders to produce the treaty. Sadat made a historic trip to Jerusalem, and later declared—echoing Begin—“No more wars, no more bloodshed.” He was ostracized in the Arab world, but he persevered, convinced that Arab states would, in time, come back to Egypt—and he was right.
Prime Minister Menachem Begin understood that an agreement would require total withdrawal from Sinai, including the Israeli settlements there—anathema to his political base. He knew that his plan for Palestinian autonomy would alienate his closest comrades, many of whom called him a traitor.
For his part, President Jimmy Carter was prepared to roll the dice in a high-stakes summit at Camp David and carry the burden of dealing with the leaders while thrashing out 22 drafts before reaching agreement. The security and financial commitments he made to both sides—$3 billion a year to Israel plus the costs of relocating the bases out of the Sinai and $2 billion a year to Egypt—helped close the deal.
Today prospects for peace between Israel and its other neighbors are uncertain at best, notwithstanding the common threat from Iran. Neither the Arabs nor Israel appears to have leaders with Sadat’s and Begin’s boldness. Yet we have the Egyptian-Israeli agreement to thank that peace is even thinkable.
Mr. Ross is counselor and Mr. Makovsky a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Their book “Be Strong and of Good Courage: How Israel’s Most Important Leaders Shaped Its Destiny” will be published in September.
4c)
Mueller and the Obama Accounting
The former President now owes the country an explanation for the historic abuse of government surveillance powers.
By James Freeman
The Mueller report confirms that the Obama administration, without evidence, turned the surveillance powers of the federal government against the presidential campaign of the party out of power. This historic abuse of executive authority was either approved by President Barack Obama or it was not. It’s time for Mr. Obama, who oddly receives few mentions in stories about his government’s spying on associates of the 2016 Trump campaign, to say what he knew and did not know about the targeting of his party’s opponents.
If he was briefed, for example, on plans by the Justice Department to seek wiretaps on Trump campaign associates, it’s hard to believe Mr. Obama would not have been highly interested in the matter. Going all the way back to his campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, Mr. Obama had aggressively advocated for preventing federal abuse of surveillance powers.
In September of 2004, the Chicago Tribune reported that candidate Obama “is ripping the controversial USA Patriot Act for violating U.S. citizens’ civil liberties in the battle against terrorism.” The Tribune reported: Answering a Tribune questionnaire on the issue of terrorism, Obama vows to support the repeal of several provisions of the act because he believes it failed to strike the appropriate balance between homeland security and protection of civil liberties.
...“The act goes too far in violating our fundamental notions of privacy, thus seriously eroding the very ideals at the heart of our country’s greatness,” Obama said in his questionnaire.
According to the Tribune, Mr. Obama said that “a cornerstone of our democracy” is “that actions of a sometimes overzealous and overreaching Executive Branch are subject to challenge.”
The next month, Madison, Wisconsin’s Capital Times reported on the Illinois candidate’s visit for a campaign event:
Barack Obama, the Illinois U.S. Senate candidate who became a national political phenomenon when he delivered the keynote address at this summer’s Democratic National Convention, says he would like to think he would be as courageous as Russ Feingold was when he cast the sole vote in the Senate against the Patriot Act...
“I like to think that, had I been in the Senate, I would have cast the second vote against the Patriot Act,” says Obama, who like Feingold is a lawyer and a passionate defender of the Bill of Rights.
It’s time for this lawyer and alleged passionate defender of the Bill of Rights to explain the actions of his overzealous and overreaching executive branch. If he didn’t find out about the wiretapping until after the fact, when exactly did he learn about it and how did he respond?
What has always seemed clear is that Mr. Obama never actually believed the now-discredited claim that the Trump campaign worked with Russia to rig the 2016 U.S. elections. In April of 2017, three months after Mr. Obama left office, this column noted that the former President had offered little criticism of the new President:
At the end of January, Mr. Obama broke his public silence, but it wasn’t to reveal a grand conspiracy among former or current Trump associates. The former president instead released via a spokesman a statement supporting protests of a new Trump executive order on immigration. “Barack Obama and his aides expected to take on President Donald Trump at some point, but they didn’t think it would happen this quickly,” Politico noted at the time. “Now they’re trying to find the right balance on issues that demand a response.” Politico further reported that from “his vacation spot in the Caribbean, Obama has been keeping up with news from Washington,” as well as following the anti-Trump protests that were occurring around the country.
If a former president, who had enjoyed unrivaled access to the relevant intelligence, believed that the country had been taken over by a cabal of Kremlin cronies, would he really be lying on a beach wondering which issues compelled him to criticize his successor—and having done so, decide that a Russia-engineered coup didn’t quite rise to that level?
If Mr. Obama never bought into the collusion conspiracy theory, then the question is why he endorsed or allowed the use of federal surveillance tools against the party out of power—a direct threat to the democratic process that is at the heart of our country’s greatness.
Mr. Obama might have room to deny any knowledge of the details of the surveillance abuses, given the story his FBI director told Congress—if anybody could believe that story.
The absolute bare minimum that Mr. Obama owes this country is an explanation of the actions of his government in spying on a presidential campaign.
***
Out on a Limb
“Conclusion of Mueller probe raises anew criticisms of coverage,” Washington Post, March 24
“Conclusion of Mueller probe raises anew criticisms of coverage,” Washington Post, March 24
Other Than That, The Stories Were Accurate
“For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration,” 2018 Pulitzer Prize citation lauding the staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post.
“For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration,” 2018 Pulitzer Prize citation lauding the staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post.
4d)
NATO Is Dying, but Don’t Blame Trump
Germany reneges on defense commitments, thumbing its nose at the alliance.
By Walter Russell Mead
Is NATO dying? The idea was once unthinkable, but after the German cabinet decided to keep defense spending as low as 1.25% of gross domestic product for the next five years it has become unavoidable. This decision is not driven by any fiscal urgency. Germany is projected to have a balanced budget after last year’s surplus of €11.2 billion, its fifth annual surplus in a row.
What Berlin means by this decision is clear: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the U.S. are not as important to Germany as they used to be. While irritation with and contempt for President Trump influence German foreign policy, something more profound is at work. Democrats including President Obama, as well as Republicans like John McCain, have long called on Germany to demonstrate its commitment to NATO by spending 2% of GDP on defense. By refusing even to come close to meeting NATO’s spending targets, Berlin is thumbing its nose not only at Donald Trump but at the U.S.
It’s also blowing off its neighbors. Britain and France are seething over German restrictions on arms exports that limit their ability to sell weapons developed in association with German defense companies to third countries of which Berlin disapproves, like Saudi Arabia. Germany’s eastern neighbors, including Poland and the Baltic states, want a stronger, better-funded NATO. Germany’s refusal to honor its commitments, combined with its cooperation with Russia over the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, leaves these countries deeply fearful.
Germany isn’t alone in distancing itself from NATO. Turkey’s plans to buy S-400 missiles from Russia, and Italy’s recent decision to sign on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, are also measures of the diminished value placed on the trans-Atlantic alliance.
The U.S. has also been backing away from the alliance for the better part of a decade. It did not start with Mr. Trump’s bluster. The Syrian civil war and the resulting flood of refugees caused grave political and social crises in Turkey and the European Union, and the Obama administration’s erratic and indecisive approach to the catastrophe sent an unmistakable message about American priorities to the allies.
NATO members are less committed to the alliance than they used to be because most worry less about conventional military attacks from Russia. During the Cold War, NATO was a military alliance that countries like Germany, Turkey and Italy thought was their best and perhaps only defense against Soviet aggression. For Americans it was the cornerstone of a global containment strategy. After the Cold War, Russia largely disappeared as a military threat for two decades, and NATO was repurposed into one of two tools (along with EU integration) for extending Western political, military and economic institutions into Eastern Europe. After 9/11 there were attempts to transform NATO into a global “out of area” alliance, either against terror or for other, vaguely defined purposes. Those efforts have clearly fallen short.
Countries with the misfortune to be neighbors of Russia are still enthusiastic about NATO. But the anti-Russian zeal of Poland and the Baltic states is something of an embarrassment for Germans eager to cut Nord Stream 2-type deals with Moscow over the heads of their mostly small, poor and importunate eastern neighbors. And even the U.S. is not sure what to think of them. Mr. Trump’s electoral base is divided between national-security hawks, who see Eastern Europe’s NATO stalwarts as serving American purposes against both Moscow and European neutralists, and unilateralists and neo-isolationists, who yearn for a grand bargain with Russia.
Meanwhile, although political support for NATO is in recession, its bureaucratic structures remain robust. There are battalions of generals, flocks of ambassadors, and armies of paper shufflers who intend to go on doing their jobs as long as they get paid. Unintentionally, perhaps, NATO has found a new function: a grand experiment to see how long the bureaucratic structures of cooperation can prolong the existence of an alliance when its key members no longer believe the security calculations at its heart.
Sooner or later, even in diplomacy, reality sweeps even the most imposing shams aside. NATO is not a sham—yet. It is still a valuable institution honoring an important purpose. There will be ceremonies and speeches when it turns 70 in April.
But without a change of heart on the part of its most important members, the outlook for NATO is poor. The longest-lived and most-effective multilateral military alliance in history is not what it was in its prime. This is a consequential fact in world politics, and in Moscow and Beijing, conclusions are being drawn.
4e) Trump’s Golan Decision Is Moral and Strategic
The vicious regime in Syria shouldn’t be rewarded for trying to conquer Israel in 1967.
By Lindsey Graham
President Trump’s tweeted last week that the U.S. will formally recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israel. The decision is strategically wise and morally important.
Israel secured the Golan Heights in 1967 after the Six Day War, a defensive conflict Israel fought in response to attacks from Syria and other Arab nations. Since then, the Golan has been a critical part of Israel’s defenses.
I witnessed that dynamic two weeks ago as I stood atop the Golan with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel. With Syria, ravaged by civil war, at our backs, we talked about the Golan’s strategic importance as high ground bordering an unfriendly nation. Before the Six Day War, Syria used the Golan to shell Israeli towns, villages and farms in the Galilee indiscriminately. Those dark days ended with Israel’s victory in the Six Day War.
Any thought of returning the Golan to the aggressor—Syria and the butcher of Damascus, Bashar Assad—would be disastrous for Israel, morally wrong and strategically dangerous.
Rewarding Syria for attacking Israel in 1967 and again in 1973 would dramatically change the cost-benefit calculations of other expansionist dictators. When a state decides whether to invade a neighbor, it has to take account of the risk that it will lose land instead of gaining it. If the Golan Heights are returned, it tells invaders that territory they lose will eventually be given back. That would unburden aggressors from much of the risk involved in starting wars—a recipe for more aggression.
Mr. Trump’s decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty in the Golan also sends an unequivocal message of condemnation of the Assad regime, which since 2011 has conducted a horrific campaign against Syrian citizens, raining barrel bombs and chemical weapons down on unarmed civilians. For Mr. Assad and his henchmen not to pay a price for a conflict in which around 500,000 people have been killed and countless atrocities have been committed would again be immoral and dangerous. It sends a message to every dictator around the world that there is no penalty for murdering your own citizens en masse.
Another negative consequence of the Syrian civil war is the foothold Iran has gained in the country. Tehran and its proxies, especially the terror group Hezbollah, played a major role saving the Assad regime. Their presence in Syria opens a new front in their war against Israel. As the U.S. redeploys forces to Syria, it is important to demonstrate America’s determination to confront Iran, which seeks hegemony in the region. Recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan helps convey that the U.S. stands with Israel and won’t pressure Jerusalem to take steps that would undermine its own security.
Mr. Trump has been one of the most effective American leaders in strengthening the country’s relationship with Israel. His decision to recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israel should prove yet another major, lasting achievement for his administration.
Unfortunately, there exists the possibility that Mr. Trump’s decision could be undone by a future president who is a friend to Syria or a foe of Israel. To guard against that possibility, Congress should immediately vote on the legislation proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Mike Gallagher, putting both chambers on record in support of the Trump policy on the Golan.
Mr. Graham, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from South Carolina.
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