The war in Ukraine and the battle in Vienna
As Putin’s troops ravage a neighbor, his envoy steers talks with Tehran
Start with Vladimir Putin who, over the more than two decades he’s ruled Russia, has assassinated dissidents, slaughtered Chechens, detached two provinces from neighboring Georgia, seized Crimea from Ukraine while fueling conflict in the east of that country. He’s also helped the Assad regime kill Syrians – half a million and counting.
On Feb. 24, Mr. Putin again invaded Ukraine. He has been using artillery and dumb bombs to murder men, women, and children, and reduce cities to rubble. His apparent goal is to subjugate Ukraine, strip it of its independence, sovereignty, and freedom.
Move on to Joe Biden who, during his first year in the White House, capitulated on the battlefield in Afghanistan to the Taliban, a terrorist organization joined at the hip to al Qaeda. He left behind more weapons than a Ukrainian general could dream of. He then declared that mission a success.
President Biden now appears eager to capitulate at the negotiating table in Vienna to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime that funds and instructs Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthi movement in Yemen whose catchy slogan is “Allah is Greater, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam.” He’ll then declare that mission a success.
While Mr. Biden’s stated intention is to isolate Mr. Putin, his diplomats in Vienna continue to work hand-in-glove with Mikhail Ulyanov, Mr. Putin’s envoy.
That’s because the theocratic regime’s negotiators – as a matter of revolutionary Islamic principle – have refused to sit at the same table with Americans. The Biden team has meekly accepted this humiliation.
According to sources, Mr. Ulyanov is not just a go-between but “the dominant player,” proposing compromises to the Americans (who are always flexible) and to the Iranians (who never are).
As for Mr. Ulyanov’s interests, do you suppose they are peace, international security, nuclear non-proliferation, and a “win-win” outcome? Or does he want to please Mr. Putin by helping Iran’s rulers further humble and diminish the United States?
On Saturday, Moscow demanded a written guarantee that any sanctions imposed because of its war on Ukraine will not “in any way damage” its commercial and military relationship with the Islamic Republic. The Biden administration has rejected that demand – for now.
Perhaps you think, as does the U.S. State Department, that “Russia shares a common interest in ensuring Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon.” If so, think again.
Mr. Putin calculates that any nuclear-tipped ICBMs produced by Iran’s rulers will be pointed at America and used to keep America at bay while their proxies conquer and/or destroy more of the Middle East than they already have.
When Mr. Biden’s “indirect” talks with the clerical regime began, he vowed to produce a “longer and stronger” variant of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that President Obama concluded in 2015 and from which President Trump exited in 2018. It’s now clear that a shorter and weaker variant – more economic relief in exchange for fewer verifiable restrictions – has been taking shape.
It's not only sources who say so. It’s also Mr. Ulyanov. “Realistically speaking Iran got more than frankly I expected, others expected,” he told one reporter. “This is a matter of fact.”
He added: The “Iranian clerics are fighting for Iranian nuclear — national interests like lions. They fight for every comma, every word, and as a rule, quite successfully.”
Mr. Biden’s deal will provide Iran’s rulers with billions of dollars that they can spend on arms and even nuclear-power plants (for peaceful purposes only!) from Russia, and use to fund terrorists, and threaten their American-allied neighbors.
Mr. Biden won’t submit his deal to Congress as a treaty (as he clearly should) so it won’t bind the next administration. But Russian and Iranian negotiators are reportedly looking for a workaround.
For example, they might persuade Mr. Biden to agree that Iran’s enriched uranium be stored in Russia, with the condition that it will be returned to Iran if, at any time, Mr. Putin and Iran’s rulers jointly declare that the Americans are violating the agreement.
Or they might insist on an “inherent guarantee” that Iran’s rulers get to keep their advanced centrifuges on standby with permission to continue enriching at 60% if they decide the U.S. has transgressed.
By contrast, non-compliance and even out-and-out cheating by the theocratic regime will be ignored or forgiven. We know that based on the experience with the JCPOA.
Relatedly, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, said on Saturday that a new deal cannot be concluded unless Tehran first settles outstanding issues relating to nuclear material found at former Iranian nuclear sites that the regime failed to declare.
That will require months. Can a deal be announced before these issues are settled?
Logically no but, in the current era, logic is not a major component in the patterns of behavior driving American foreign policy.
Was it logical to respond to Mr. Putin’s many crimes over the years with a salad of carrots and not enough sticks to make a bonfire?
Was it logical to invite him to partner with the U.S. in negotiations with Iran’s rulers while excluding the American allies most threatened by Iran’s rulers?
Is it logical to give the theocrats in Tehran the means to do in the Middle East what Mr. Putin is doing in eastern Europe?
The Biden administration – building on the record of too many of its predecessors – has been establishing a shameful and damaging pattern of behavior: It is proving to be harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.
Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times.
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My friend Star Parker calls Biden's hand:
A Morally Weak Biden Invites Putin's Advances
There simply is no other way to understand the horrible realities we confront today.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is an evil man. A murderer and a thief. He chose to advance his outrageous and murderous agenda because he understood that opposite him in the world stood weakness and moral relativism, not strength and moral clarity.
While Putin utilizes Russia’s prodigious production of oil and gas as a major weapon in his war of aggression, the Biden administration is fighting its own war against America’s oil and gas industry.
This week on CURE America talks about the return of the evil empire. What President Biden didn’t address in his State of the Union address, to any satisfaction, is Ukraine. Coming out of Afghanistan, where we’re still praying for the people being left behind, we’re now watching Ukraine in real time being taken over because of the same philosophy of what Biden and his progressive’s are doing here at home.
Special guests and CURE’s weekly panelists expand on the issue of American energy independence, how prices will go up at the gas pump as a result of the Left’s brazen policies, and the central role these policies play in emboldening the aggressive actions of Russia.
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The Global, Spiritual Struggle of Good and Evil
“Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal. The glory of this land has been its capacity for transcending the moral evils of our past.” President Reagan spoke these words in March 1983, a speech which he famously called the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” But as we see the Russia of today attempt to retread its past, a perspective is gained when we refocus on what is going on in our own country. In fact, that refocus is needed, if we are to understand a retreated America on the global stage and an emboldened despot in the spotlight.
The Impact of Abortion on the Black Community
It is no accident that abortion has become so deeply entrenched within the black community. Margaret Sanger, a founder of the American birth control movement and the organization that is now known as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), was a leading spokesperson and activist in the promotion of controlling the birth rate among blacks and others she considered undesirable.
CURE Founder and President Star Parker and Vice President for Government Relations and Coalitions Marty Dannenfelser have signed onto a memo released by The Conservative Action Project entitled “Don’t Use Ukraine to Justify a Bad Spending Bill.”
“Members of Congress will soon vote on two forthcoming funding bills: an omnibus spending bill and a supplemental spending bill for Ukraine. Conservatives urge congressional Republicans to prioritize key policies, and to let these two spending bills stand alone, rather than as one single vote.
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We are there!
Four-bucks-a-gallon Biden Creating Energy Crisis
Financial crisis may follow with demise of dollar
By Christian Whiton
Acting impetuously to look tough is seldom good statecraft. But that is what Joe Biden has done, and he is leading us to an energy crisis, and perhaps one day, a financial crisis.
The price of oil has now spiked to around $110 a barrel, up from $66.50 on December 1. Americans are only beginning to feel the full extent of the pain this entails. The average price of a gallon of regular is now $3.73 across the USA, up nearly 20 cents in the past week and a full dollar from this point last year. Mid-grade is over $4 a gallon, and regular will soon follow as gasoline prices lag oil by about two weeks.
Higher oil and gasoline prices don’t just make it more expensive to fill up the car or pay the heating bill. They raise the cost of food and everything else that requires energy to produce.
Why is this happening? Have the Russians shut down the 10 million barrels of oil they produce each day, more than half of which they export? Have they blown up their own pipelines in Belarus that carry Russian crude to Europe, or the smaller-volume pipelines for crude that transit Ukraine? Have exports from North America or the Middle East been physically disrupted?
The answer to all of those questions is no. And yet the spike in cost is not just an added risk premium from speculators bidding up the price. Russian oil isn’t being delivered, at least not in the quantities it was before the war. While the Biden administration claims it designed sanctions on Russia not to impact oil, that is not reflected by reality. So broad and hasty are the restrictions, which include sanctions on major Russian banks and the country’s central bank, that oil traders and consumers are unwilling to accept Russian crude for fear of being targeted by the vengeful federal government.
With oil supplies as tight as they are, the loss of perhaps 3 million or more barrels per day of Russian crude is debilitating. It doesn’t help that the USA is producing 1.5 million barrels per day less than before the coronavirus crisis. Unbelievably, on February 20, the Biden administration halted all new oil drilling on public lands and in federal waters. That decision came after a year of bullying investors to avoid investments in traditional energy. Biden and his enablers in Washington just don’t care about what you pay.
Other spare capacity might come from the Middle East. But Biden and Congress have made it a point to alienate Middle Eastern partners like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for over a year. Washington decided to make a pariah of the man who effectively runs Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Biden blew kisses at Iranian-backed Houthi insurgents in Yemen who occasionally rain missiles down on their neighbors, while high-minded moralists on Capitol Hill threw up obstacles to selling Arab allies the advanced arms they want to defend against the mullahs in Iran who aspire to nuclear status. Now Biden is lecturing them over remaining neutral in the war. It should come as little surprise that these governments have declined to act even though Biden is begging them to increase their own production of oil.
But isn’t this cost worth paying if it helps the beleaguered population of Ukraine? Unfortunately it won’t do that, nor will it hurt the Russians much beyond the short term. Ukraine’s fate is probably sealed and the USA has no vital interests there; our involvement gives rich Europe another excuse not to pay to defend itself. Moscow may have to sell its oil at a discount in the near term, but eventually Europeans will do what they always do and put their morality aside to purchase cheap Russian energy—especially with Biden already sending more U.S. troops to defend Europeans who want to spend their money on welfare states instead of defense.
China will buy Russian oil and gas in much greater quantities; Beijing was already planning to do so before the war. One of China’s greatest vulnerabilities is that much of its oil comes from the Middle East through the Malacca Strait off Singapore, which can be controlled by the U.S. Navy in a conflict. Ending this risk by bringing oil and gas overland from Russia and gaining financial influence over its northern neighbor appeals to Beijing.
The price of oil will only come down if oil traders can buy Russian crude, or if there is a recession that cuts demand. By refusing to climb down and allow the former, Biden and his zealots make the latter more likely. Thanks to Biden’s high inflation and grotesque incompetence, the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank recently predicted the current quarter will have zero growth.
Worse, energy crisis may give way eventually to long-term financial crisis because Biden has judged there to be political upside in having the most aggressive pissing match possible with Moscow. Washington took the unprecedented act of freezing—effectively stealing—Russia’s foreign-held reserves in dollars and cut off the central bank from dollar-denominated transactions. This step was not lost on China, which has $2 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities, or other governments that want to end the dominant position the dollar has held in international finance since 1944. Creating an alternative to the dollar has just been shifted from the “nice-to-do” pile of work to the “must-do” pile in a dozen foreign capitals. Similarly, cutting Russia off from the SWIFT mechanism of moving funds across borders will only enshrine China’s CIPS as a growing alternative.
The impact of the loss of dollar’s status would be devastating for the USA. Our ability to maintain our lifestyle through the crises of 2008 and 2020 and blow trillions on losing wars and paying people not work is due in large part to the dollar. Because the pool of dollars is so big, we can create new ones out of thin air with little consequence. Pour a cup of hot water in a cool bucket at it will make a noticeable difference. Pour a cup of hot water in a giant pool and it will not.
If the dollar is no longer the reserve currency, that pool will shrink dramatically. We will no longer be able to create dollars without consequence. A fate to contemplate is Great Britain’s long financial decline in the decades after World War II once the pound sterling was repeatedly undermined. And far from preparing for a rainy day, we have maxed our national debt to higher levels than even France, and can no longer rely on loose monetary policy with inflation already here.
Biden’s reckless actions are subjecting Americans to immediate pain at the pump that may lead eventually to sustained economic stagnation. Is it worth it for our politicians to be able to say they were tough?
And:
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Here are six Conundrums of socialism in the United States of America:
1. America is capitalist and greedy - yet half of the population is subsidized.
2. Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims.
3. They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government.
4. Their representatives run the government - yet the poor keep getting poorer.
5. The poor keep getting poorer - yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
6. They have things that people in other countries only dream about - yet they want America to be more like those other countries
And:
Exclusive Footage — Private School Teachers Nation-Wide Implementing Race-Essentialist Curricula, Trained by Black Panther
https://www.breitbart.com/poli
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Biden has managed toake us the laughing stock of the world:
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