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Netanyahu: Iran’s decision to enrich uranium at Fordow endangers the world
By TOVAH LAZAROFF
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Trump has a foreign policy doctrine? (See 1 below.)
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More ranting. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) The Trump Doctrine: Deterrence
without Intervention?
D onald Trump’s 2016 campaign sought to overturn 75 years of bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy, especially as it applied to the Middle East.
From 1946 to 1989, the Cold War logic was to use both surrogates and U.S. expeditionary forces to stop the spread of Communist insurrections and coups — without confronting the nuclear-armed USSR directly unless it became a matter of perceived Western survival, as it did with the Berlin airlift and the Cuban missile crises.
That logic led to major conflicts like Vietnam and Korea, limited wars in the Middle East and Balkans, interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and occasional nation-building in conquered lands. Tens of thousands of Americans died, trillions of dollars were spent, and the Soviet Union and most of its satellites vanished. “We won the Cold War” was more or less true.
Such preemptory American interventions still continued over the next 30 years of the post–Cold War “new world order.” Now the threat was not Russian nukes but confronting new enemies such as radical Islam and a rogue’s gallery of petty but troublesome nuts, freaks, and dictators — Granada’s Hudson Austin, an unhinged Moammar Qaddafi of Libya, Hezbollah’s terrorists in Lebanon, Nicaraguan Communist Daniel Ortega, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, the gang leader Mohamed Aidid of Somalia, the former Serbian thug Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar of the Taliban, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, arch terrorist Osama bin Laden, the macabre al-Qaeda and ISIS, and on and on.
These put-downs, some successful and some not so much, were apparently viewed by the post–Cold War establishment as our versions of the late Roman Republic and Empire policies of mowing the lawn, with an occasional weeding out of regional nationalists and insurrectionists like Jugurtha, Mithridates, Vercingetorix, Ariovistus, Boudicca, and the like. The theory was that occasionally knocking flat a charismatic brute discouraged all others like him from trying to emulate his revolt and upend the international order. Having one or two legions always on the move often meant that most others could stay in their barracks. And it kept the peace, or so the U.S., like Rome, more or less believed.
But the problem with American policy after the Cold War and the end of the Soviet nuclear threat was that the U.S. was not really comfortable as an imperial global watchdog, we no longer had a near monopoly on the world economy that subsidized these expensive interventions, and many of these thugs did not necessarily pose a direct threat to American interests — perhaps ISIS, an oil-rich Middle East dictator, and radical Islamists excepted. What started as a quick, successful take-out of a monster sometimes ended up as a long-drawn out “occupation” in which all U.S. assets of firepower, mobility, and air support were nullified in the dismal street fighting of a Fallujah or a Mogadishu.
The bad guys were bothersome and even on occasion genocidal, and their removal sometimes improved the lot of those of the ground — but not always. When things got messy — such as in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Somalia — it was not clear whether the American use of force resulted in tactical success leading to strategic advantage. Often preemptive insertion of troops either did not further U.S. deterrence or actually undermined it — as in the case of the “Arab Spring” bombing in Libya.
At home, in a consistent pattern, the most vociferous advocates of preemptory war usually claimed prescient brilliance, as when the American military rapidly dislodged the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. But then came the occupation and post-war anarchy. As American dead mounted, the mission mysteriously creeped into nation-building. Sometimes, in the post-invasion chaos, the once noble liberated victims became the opportunistic victimizers. Depressed, some of the original architects of preemption blamed those who had listened to them. The establishment’s calling card became, “My weeks-long brilliant theoretical preemption was ruined by your actual botched decade-long occupation.” In extremis, few kept their support; most abandoned it.
Into this dilemma charged Donald Trump, who tried to square the old circle by boasting that he would “bomb the s*** out of ISIS” (and he mostly did that). Yet he also pledged to avoid optional wars in the Middle East — given that they did not pencil out to the Manhattan developer as a cost-benefit profit for America. We had become the world’s largest large oil producer anyway without worrying very much about how many barrels of oil a post-Qaddafi Libya or the Iranian theocrats pumped each day, and our rivals, like China and Russia, would soon find out that their involvement in the Middle East would likely not pencil out.
Trump started well enough. He backed down the provocative North Koreans and Iranians with tougher sanctions, while refusing to use kinetic force to reply to their rather pathetic provocations. He bombed ISIS but yanked American “trip wire” troops out of the Kurdish-Turkish battle zones in Syria, and he green-lighted the military’s killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He ratcheted up sanctions against Russia and armed Putin’s enemies without committing to defend any of the old republics of the Soviet Union. He increased the defense budget and boomed the economy but did not use such newly acquired power other than against ISIS.
Rarely has such an empowered military relied so much on economic sanctions. And rarely have leftist pacifist advocates of using sanctions and boycotts so damned Trump’s reluctance to launch missiles and drop bombs — the only common denominator being that whatever the orange man is for, they are against.
Trump’s apparent theory is that time is on his side. The Palestinians are cut off from U.S. funds; their U.N. surrogates are orphaned from the U.S. The U.S. Embassy is in Jerusalem. The Golan Heights are not going back to Syria. It is up to the West Bank and Gaza to change the Middle East dynamic, since their Gulf paymasters could care less about them, given the Palestinians’ romance with an Iran that is slowly going broke.
North Korea is squeezed by toughed-up sanctions. They can conduct missile tests, threaten, and cajole, but ultimately their people will be eating grass if they don’t wish to deal. And if they do launch a missile toward the U.S., they are convinced that Trump will launch a lot more against them.
Iran wants a confrontation before the election to undermine the Trump Electoral College base of support. So Trump is apparently willing to overlook such petty slights as the downing of the American drone by Iranian forces. But the Iranians must know that if they start targeting U.S. ships, or attacking NATO allied vessels and planes, Trump will likely restore deterrence by one-off, disproportionate air and missile attacks against Iranian naval and air bases — without intervening on the ground and without worrying that Iranian oil will go off the market entirely.
So there is a sort of Trump doctrine that grew in part out of Trump’s campaign promises and in part from the strategic assessment in 2016-17 by then national-security adviser H.R. McMaster, outlining a new “principled realism.” The net result is not to nation-build, preempt, or worry much about changing fetid countries to look like us, but to disproportionately respond when attacked or threatened, and in a manner that causes real damage, without the insertion of U.S. ground troops, in the fashion of the past 75 years.
Balance in achieving deterrence is the key. If Trump’s protestations that he does not wish to take enemy lives or conduct endless wars for no profit encourage enemy adventurism, then he will have to respond forcefully when American forces are attacked — but in a way that is not open-ended. And that usually means not through the use of ground troops that involve wars that, in Trump’s mind, create bad optics and poor ratings back home.
There are three ways of losing deterrence. One is to bluster, boast, and threaten and then do little — as with Barack Obama’s bombast about red lines in Syria.
A second is to reach out and appease a thug who has no intention of seeing outreach as anything other than laxity to be exploited. The Obama administration’s Russian reset combined the worst elements of this strategy: alternately courting and lecturing Putin, while doing nothing as he invaded former republics and returned to the Middle East. With Recep Erdogan, Trump is in danger of following the disastrous Obama model. More than most dictators, Erdogan views magnanimity with contempt and as a sign of weakness, rather than a gesture to be reciprocated in kind.
A third way of losing deterrence is to get bogged down in a quagmire that encourages other would-be terrorists, revolutionaries, and psychopaths to try instigating more of the same. Afghanistan and the Iraq, from 2003 to 2006, are good examples of gridlock. The Libya project of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Hillary Clinton is a perfect case of hasty bombing followed by embarrassed indifference to the resulting chaos, and then withdrawal after the loss of four Americans. When Ronald Reagan inserted Marines into Lebanon, saw them blown up, and then yanked them, almost everyone concluded that Hezbollah and Iran had a free hand to do whatever they wanted. And they mostly did.
There is one final paradox related to the dilemma of maintaining deterrence without invading hostile countries. Trump apparently believes that a booming economy, a well-funded muscular military, and plenty of U.S.-produced oil and gas give America enormous power and a range of choices that recent presidents lacked.
The result would be that when forced to respond to an attack on an American asset or ally, the U.S. could do so disproportionately, destructively, and without any red line, promise, or virtue-signaling about what it might do next — given its unique ability to hit abroad without being hit at home, and with a well-oiled economy that has no need to beg the Saudis to be nice, or to urge the Iranians to pump more, or to get the Venezuelans back into the exporting business.
Add up all these paradoxes, and I suppose we could call the Trump administration’s idea of deterrence without preemptive intervention as either “Live and let live” — or, more macabrely, “Live — and let die.” Either way, the paradox is to maintain critical deterrence against American enemies to prevent a war, but without Pavlovian interventions, and without being baited into optional military action that is antithetical to the national mood that got Trump elected.
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump.
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2)The stock market continues to rise, and is highly likely to continue to do so. Despite all the recession and gloom and doom talk from the talking heads over the past year, and all the forecasts of weak earnings, reality is the economy is slower, but still strong, and earnings were much better than forecast. Once the China deal is signed in two weeks, and its full contents revealed, I expect the market to go higher, and the pressure on Pelosi to bring USMCA to a vote will intensify. The UK election is in 5 weeks and it is widely expected Johnson will win and have enough seats to finally get Brexit done and in place by end of January. It is impossible to know yet if China thinks it can get away with just doing phase I, or if they will really be intent to complete the rest of the deal. Very likely Trump will keep tariffs in place but postpone the new ones slated for December, until there is a phase II done.
A new study revealed that most of the runup in Bitcoin to $20,000 in 2017 was due to the manipulation by a single party. That is further evidence to me that crypto coin is just for speculators playing a high risk game, and it is not for anyone who is not a player. Another study reveals that 95% of Bitcoin trades are fake orders. It is definitely not for the average investor. It will be years before Facebook or anyone can launch Libra, or a true crypto coin that is legit and accepted as currency.
The Southeast Asian nations and China have created a new trade pact but not including India. It is not clear how much difference this new pact, replacing TPP will really accomplish, nor if it will have a negative impact on the US. Without India, the group is not as influential as it might have been, but India also may not be the winner. It is too early to know what this all will really mean, although it might be brought up in the election attacking Trump for not doing TPP, which now would have been dead anyway.
Low interest rates and other events are responsible for people remaining in their current home five to nine years longer than they were doing as recently as 2014. Because you can now refi for around 4% pretax, and after tax for little more than 3%, it is far easier for people to just stay where they are, than when rates were 8% years ago. Now, for baby boomers, they have a much longer life thanks to medical advances, so it is no longer required to move to assisted living and nursing homes as young as before. In fact there has been a decline in occupancy of those facilities lately. So now we have many fewer existing homes for resale as was the case just a few years ago. In addition, there are thousands of houses that are being bought by investors and rented out, instead of being put back on the market. Lastly, due to the resulting inventory shortage, prices in places like Salt Lake where a lot of Californians are moving, have risen 75% over the past few years because there is no inventory. For older people, they seem to now be able to remain in their home and be healthy, and at the same time, they can refi and live with a small low cost mortgage, instead of buying a larger or other home for a lot more cost. This is likely to be a long term trend as rates remain low, and as people stay healthier longer. Result is home prices are not going down for maybe several more years. Over regulation, and the high cost of land and building materials has made it too expensive for developers to build a lot of new homes to meet the demand. The places to get a deal are now NY, CA, and NJ-all high tax and high cost states. They are also the ones hit hard by SALT regs in the new tax code, In NYC it is near impossible to sell a condo or coop unless you deeply reduce the price. In the Hamptons, where most people can afford whatever they want, there are almost no sales of homes because the tax issues and new taxes added by the state on resale. Friends who have homes for sale do not even get lookers anymore. Manhattan is not much better in the multi- million dollar category. With thousands of new high cost units still coming online, and new taxes taking effect, it is unlikely the market will improve for years to come. It is why I decided to not even put my apartment up for sale now. With homes in both Manhattan and the Hamptons, I will be sitting with my homes for a long time.
Pay close attention to the anti-Iran protests in Iraq and Lebanon. Like Hong Kong, we may be witnessing an inflection point. 250 people have been killed in Iraq by Iran proxy forces, and the protests in turn have become even more violent against Iran. This is not going to be suppressed, and is going to get more violent, and widespread. This, combined with the sanctions, and the violation of the nuke deal, may start to spell the end of the mullahs in a couple of years, or maybe sooner. If Trump is reelected, the sanctions get tougher, and at some point the protests start inside Iran, and they will be violent. This time they will have major backing from the US as opposed to Obama sitting it out in 2009, and probably major cyber attacks by the US to further strain the regime. In the meantime Iran is likely to stage another attack somewhere to try to get other nations, and Europe to relent. It will not work and sanctions will get tougher. Iran's regime will strike out and step up nuke development, and in the end it is possible the US and Israel will attack to stop the nuke work, then a full war will be on. All of this is now possible, but nobody knows what will happen.
In the past I have pointed out the false claim of inequality that permeates politics and the media. Phil Gramm has now provided updated data which confirms what I have been saying. As opposed to the claim that the top quintile earns 60 times as much as the bottom, the reality is, when the data are corrected for the receipt of $1.9 Trillion of entitlements, which are tax free, and when you take account of taxes on the high income people, inequality is not really out of line.. 80% of all tax is paid by the top two quintiles And 70% of entitlements goes to the bottom two quintiles. The census bureau does not count taxes as lost or reductions from income, and they do not count entitlements as increased income. So the top is far over stated, and the bottom is grossly understated, as to net after tax cash income. The top quintile earns 60 times the bottom quintile on gross income, but when corrected for taxes and transfer payments to the bottom rungs, it is really 3.8 times as much. The bottom quintile actually receives, on average $50,900 of cash net income. While the average top quintile earns net of taxes $194,906. The difference is, the top works far more hours to earn that much more, than does the bottom group, some of whom do not even work at all. The average top quintile pays on average $109,105 in taxes. Someone please explain about how the top does not pay its fair share when the bottom 50% of households pay only 3% of all income taxes.??? The whole inequality mantra is simply political rhetoric not based on any actual facts. It is now considered politically correct required for rich guys to say they worry about income inequality. Reality is some people are smarter, some work harder, some are willing to make sacrifices to get ahead, and some are born into rich families whose father worked harder and longer to make the family rich. Those same rich guys contribute huge sums to charities that do the work that government is so bad at. They make things happen with donations and time they give, instead of the useless training and other government programs that let politicians say-- look what I did for the community, when that money is often wasted and ineffective. A lot of rich guys do far better things and then keep their mouth shut about what they have done, unlike politicians.
The Dems are playing the impeachment game for all they can. Now It is selective transcripts being released to try to build an image of Trump being guilty. The two transcripts so far are from people who had nothing at all to do with the issue of arms deals. They were simply more Democratic pile on junk to find something to make Trump look bad for the election. The problem they have, is to answer -guilty of breaking exactly what law. If you listen to the Dems they talk about abuse of power-whatever that means, or forcing an ambassador out, which is perfectly legal, but rarely about a specific law that he broke. They talk about campaign finance laws, but the aid was given, the Ukrainians never even knew there was an issue, and there was no investigation by Ukraine, and the Ukrainians say there was no pressure and no quid pro quo. So they claim he broke the law for asking for an investigation of what was clearly a bribe to the Biden family. Everyone apparently knew about the payments to Hunter, and they all knew not to make it an issue with the then VP Biden. Now there is brand new evidence Hunter may have pressed the state department to back off Barisma. If that evidence is real, and it seems to be backed up by emails, then the entire impeachment circus dies. Followed by the Horowitz report, and then indictments from Durham, and the Dems will get crushed in Nov. Schiff will once again be shown to have lied. Don't we as voters have a right to know this about the Dems top candidate. The press was quick to make all sorts of claims about a proposed Trump hotel deal in Moscow that was never real. Hunter actually received millions in payoffs. There has been speculation. Ukrainians played a role in the dossier, so it is perfectly right for Trump to ask for that to be investigated. It seems perfectly right to ask why was Hunter Biden being paid off while his father is VP. Clearly it was a bribe to get to his father, and that is corruption. For the press to say there was no law broken by Hunter is absurd. He was paid huge bribes. If Don Jr was hired in a similar position by the Ukrainians, the press and Dems would be all over it as corrupt and criminal. The Dems are going to sink with the impeachment game. In the end, the Dems think they can stop Trump with this. It will turn out the whistle blower will be a associate of Brennen. Another part of his effort to stage a soft coup. Wait for the Durham indictments which will come around the time the Democratic primary is in full swing and when the Senate is dealing with the impeachment that is sure to come.
DeBozo and the left wing City Council of NY have been attacking cops for several years. Now when they decided to make Garner a political issue, and the cop was fired for doing his job, the cops have stopped making petty crime arrests. Arrests in NYC are down 27% since they fired the cop. So once again the people pay the real price of less protection. Already petty crime is rising, and reversing all the years of effort to reduce
crime using the broken windows theory of policing- zero tolerance. So now NY has bad transport, growing petty crime, less police protection, many more homeless, and dirty streets again, after all of that had been greatly improved by Giuliani and Bloomberg. This is what happens in all of the Democratic run major cities like San Fran, LA, Portland, Seattle, DC, Chicago and Baltimore, and now Austin.
This week I played tennis with a guy who had a large tumor removed from his brain seven weeks ago. He played reasonably well. Next time you complain about some ailment keeping you from doing something, keep this guy in mind. At some point you will have forever to rest and feel no pain.
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