"Under the U.S. Constitution, it is the president of the United States who determines foreign policy. How can President Trump be “at odds with foreign policy” when he’s the one who determines it?"

Sharyl Attkisson writes in part in the Hill,

...There must be some confusion.

Under the U.S. Constitution, it is the president of the United States who determines foreign policy. How can President Trump be “at odds with foreign policy” when he’s the one who determines it?

President Trump may well have been altering foreign policy on Ukraine. It should be of no surprise that he wasn’t operating “business as usual,” since he ran on that platform and has executed it from day one. It’s clear that Kent and Taylor didn’t like or agree with Trump’s ideas, and believe they know what’s best. Trump rankled, contradicted and “embarrassed” them by operating outside the “regular” chain.

But they seem to miss the fact that their desires are subordinate to the president’s. “Official foreign policy,” as they called it, is not an independent unmovable-force object that exists outside the president’s authority; it is what the president determines it to be. The diplomats must execute the president’s wishes or resign from their posts if they feel they cannot bring themselves to do so.

Kent and Taylor genuinely seem to believe Trump was acting for his own political benefit — though they acknowledged they never had spoken to him or met him. Obviously, President Trump would say he was acting in the national interest. But their testimony makes it pretty clear why President Trump would develop a communications chain that would attempt to minimize career diplomats who do not wish to execute his wishes and may be working to undermine them.

Trump’s enemies may cheer on the idea of diplomats and other officials choosing to oppose or undermine his wishes. But based on our Constitution, the dissenting diplomats are the ones who are at odds with “official foreign policy”— not the other way around. To the extent they are attempting to further policies that oppose or undermine the president’s wishes, they are the ones conducting the “shadow campaign.”

Read more here.

Competent and comprehensive

Secretary of State Tillerson says the Trump administration is conducting a government-wide review of our policies toward Iran and North Korea. He gave a speech mostly about Iran, "the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism." He discussed Iran's actions in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and against Israel. He also showed how Iran is threatening Saudia Arabia's southern border, harassing US naval vessels, arbitrarily detaining and imprisoning innocent people, conducting cyber attacks against America, conducting assassination attempts, violating human rights, has nuclear ambitions, and is illegally conducting missile tests. Tillerson implied that Obama tried to buy them off, but that the Trump administration has no intention of passing the buck, as Obama did to Trump.

Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse lists some of the Trump team's accomplishments so far:

♦ The number of NATO countries now fulfilling their defense spending obligations has increased from 3 to 5, with all nations agreeing to reach the compliant 2% GDP spending within 12 months.

♦ NATO and EU countries now emboldened to stand up to Russia.

♦ Russia has become more isolated and somehow, f**king incredibly, President Trump has cut the cord connecting Russia and China.

♦ China abstained and did not veto, a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Bashir Assad in Syria. Russia became isolated in their veto position and only Bolivia would concur.

♦ U.N. and international leadership praise Trump administration position of taking a hard line on chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

♦ Russian Vladimir Putin refused to meet Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, then abruptly did an about face after the G-7 meeting with T-Rex – because Russia’s influence was being further reduced and Putin felt threatened by diminishment.

♦ President Trump announces he will not label China as a currency manipulator. China has made no efforts to manipulate their currency since the Nov 8th, 2016, election.

♦ China turns back 12 North-Korean cargo ships laden with coal.

♦ China offsets N-Korean coal refusal with increased purchases of coking coal (steel-making) from the U.S.

♦ China halts direct air travel between Beijing and Pyongyang.

♦ China begins oil and fuel embargo of exports to North Korea.

♦ Stunningly, China announces their willingness to consider “Five Party Talks” about the denuclearization of North Korea without the government of Pyongyang at the table. (China, Russia, U.S., Japan and South Korea)

None of these outcomes are delivered through the continuance of Bush/Obama/Clinton foreign policy of interventionism. Each of these outcomes is occurring because of talks, leverage, and alignment of economic influence on a larger scale than the individual interests of the countries involved.

[…] “I fully trust the capabilities of President Trump … he can succeed in so many fields that others cannot. I trust him wholeheartedly.”…

~ Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi

Pretty darned remarkable.

Read more here.

"Less than glorious"

Joel Kotkin writes in the Orange county Register,

Like a child star who reached his peak at age 15, Barack Obama could never fulfill the inflated expectations that accompanied his election.

...Rather than stress his biracial background, Obama, once elected, chose to place his whiteness in the closet and identified almost entirely with a particular notion of the American black experience.

Whenever race-related issues came up — notably in the area of law enforcement — Obama and his Justice Department have tended to embrace the narrative that America remains hopelessly racist. As a result, he seemed to embrace groups like Black Lives Matter and, wherever possible, blame law enforcement, even as crime was soaring in many cities, particularly those with beleaguered African American communities.

Eight years after his election, more Americans now consider race relations to be getting worse, and we are more ethnically divided than in any time in recent history. As has been the case for several decades, African Americans’ economic equality has continued to slip, and is lower now than it was when Obama came into office in 2009, according to a 2016 Urban League study.

On the economy, Obama partisans can claim some successes. He clearly inherited a massive mess from the George W. Bush administration, and the fact that the economy eventually turned around, albeit modestly, has to be counted in his favor.

Yet, if there was indeed a recovery, it was a modest one, marked by falling productivity and low levels of labor participation. We continue to see the decline of the middle class, and declining life expectancy, while the vast majority of gains have gone to the most affluent, largely due to the rising stock market and the recovery of property prices, particularly in elite markets.

At the same time, Obama leaves his successor a massive debt run-up, doubling during his watch, and the prospect of steadily rising interest rates. Faith in the current economic system has plummeted in recent years, particularly among the young, a majority of whom, according to a May 2016 Gallup Poll, now have a favorable view of socialism. Economic anxiety helped spark not only the emergence of Bernie Sanders, but later the election of Donald Trump.

Yet, as his term ends, if one looks around the world, the ascendant powers — China, Russia and Iran — are all effectively enemies of America, despite Obama’s attempt to placate them all. Our perceived lack of backbone is certainly one reason why China is pursuing its policy to turn the South China Sea into its own private lake, and some of our historical allies in the area are gravitating toward the Middle Kingdom.

The most tragic of Obama’s failures has been Syria, where he refused to enforce his own “red line” against the Bashar al-Assad regime and gradually conceded control of that devastated country to Iran, Russia and assorted, often conflicting, Muslim militias. Recent talks to settle the conflict include Russia and an increasingly hostile Turkey, but not the world’s putative top superpower.

Barack Obama was a master politician, but he also may end up as a largely failed one. Obama built an impressive “coalition of the ascendant” — minorities, millennials, well-educated liberals — but his current high level of popularity could not prevent his now dispirited party from suffering its worst defeats, in terms of officeholders, since the 1920s.

Following the Obama script, but without the man himself, the Democratic Party lost most of the country. Hillary Clinton may have achieved a plurality among all voters, but Republicans ran the table in most states, and received upwards of 3.5 million more votes than Democrats in congressional races. Obama’s presidency saw the virtual destruction of his own party in much of the country, notably in the South, Appalachia and the Great Plains.

His one great accomplishment, Obamacare, seems destined to be altered drastically under President-elect Donald Trump and a fiercely right-wing GOP Congress. His post-2010 achievements relied almost entirely on executive orders and regulatory rulings, most of which can be canceled out with the signature of President Trump. Obama may have soared into office based on his persona, but his denouement seems likely to be something less than glorious.

Read more here.

Foreign policy

At the American Interest Nial Ferguson writes,

Obama’s foreign policy has been a failure, most obviously in the Middle East, where the smoldering ruin that is Syria—not to mention Iraq and Libya—attests to the fundamental naivety of his approach, dating all the way back to the 2009 Cairo speech. The President came to believe he had an ingenious strategy to establish geopolitical balance between Sunni and Shi’a. But by treating America’s Arab friends with open disdain, while cutting a nuclear deal with Iran that has left Tehran free to wage proxy wars across the region, Obama has achieved not peace but a fractal geometry of conflict and a frightening, possibly nuclear, arms race. At the same time, he has allowed Russia to become a major player in the Middle East for the first time since Kissinger squeezed the Soviets out of Egypt in the 1972-79 period. The death toll in the Syrian war now approaches half a million; who knows how much higher it will rise between now and Inauguration Day?

Meanwhile, global terrorism has surged under Obama. Of the past 16 years, the worst year for terrorism was 2014, with 93 countries experiencing an attack and 32,765 people killed. 2015 was the second worst, with 29,376 deaths. Last year, four radical Islamic groups were responsible for 74 per cent of all deaths from terrorism: ISIS, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. In this context, the President’s claims to be succeeding against what he euphemistically calls “violent extremism” are absurd. Much opprobrium has been heaped on Donald Trump in the course of the past year. But there was much that was true in his underreported August 15 foreign policy speech on the subject of Islamic extremism and the failure of the Obama Administration to defeat it.10

The “Obama Doctrine” has failed in Europe, too, where English voters opted to leave the EU in defiance of the President’s threats, and where the German leadership he recently praised has delivered, first, an unnecessarily protracted financial crisis in the European periphery and, second, a disastrous influx to the core of migrants, some but not all of them refugees from a region that Europe had intervened in just enough to exacerbate its instability. The President has also failed in eastern Europe, where not only has Ukraine been invaded and Crimea annexed, but also Hungary and now Poland have opted to deviate sharply from the President’s liberal “arc of history.” Finally, his foreign policy has failed in Asia, where little remains of the much-vaunted pivot. “If you look at how we’ve operated in the South China Sea,” the President boasted in an interview published in March, “we have been able to mobilize most of Asia to isolate China in ways that have surprised China, frankly, and have very much served our interest in strengthening our alliances.”11 The new President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, apparently did not receive this memorandum. In October he went to Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to announce his “separation from the United States.”

Kissinger’s recommendations to Trump may be summarized as follows:
Do not go all-out into a confrontation with China, whether on trade or the South China Sea. Rather, seek “comprehensive discussion” and aim to pursue that policy of dialogue and “co-evolution” recommended in World Order. Kissinger sees the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, quite regularly. When he says that Xi regards “confrontation as too dangerous” and thinks that “adversarial countries must become partners and cooperate on a win-win basis,” he speaks with authority. The questions the Chinese want to ask the new President, according to Kissinger, are these: “If we were you, we might try to suppress your rise. Do you seek to suppress us? If you do not, what will the world look like when we are both strong, as we expect to be?” Trump needs to have answers to these questions. The alternative, as Kissinger has said repeatedly, is for the United States and China to talk past each other until they stumble into 1914 in the Pacific, not to mention in cyberspace.

Given a weakened, traumatized, post-imperial Russia, the recognition Putin craves is that of “a great power, as an equal, and not as a supplicant in an American-designed system.” Kissinger’s message to Trump is well calibrated to appeal to his instincts: “It is not possible to bring Russia into the international system by conversion. It requires deal-making, but also understanding.” The central deal, Kissinger argues, would turn Ukraine into “a bridge between NATO and Russia rather than an outpost of either side...

...Treat Brexit as an opportunity to steer the continental Europeans away from bureaucratic introspection and back to strategic responsibility.

Make peace in Syria rather as we made peace in the former Yugoslavia nearly twenty years ago. Kissinger now recommends a “cantonization” of Syria similar to the federalization of Bosnia under the Washington and Dayton agreements, with an “off-ramp for Assad” lasting around a year, all under the “supervision” of the interested outside powers. Iran must be contained, much as the Soviet Union was in the Cold War, because it poses a similar threat, acting as both an imperial state and a revolutionary cause. But keep the Iran agreement because to abandon it now “would free Iran from more constraints than it would free the United States.” And finally take advantage of the new-found, albeit tacit, anti-Iranian and anti-ISIS alignment of the Arab states with Israel to achieve a new kind of Arab-sponsored peace deal that would “improve the lives of Palestinians to the greatest extent possible, perhaps including quasi-sovereignty . . . that is, de facto autonomy without a legalistic superstructure.”

Okay, I admit it. This article just went on and on, and I lost interest. but you can read much, much more here.

Left behind

At the Wall Street Journal Brett Stephens laments that the Republican party has left him. On immigration he remembers a debate between George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan:

At a 1980 Republican primary debate in Houston, candidates George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were asked whether the children of illegal immigrants should be allowed to attend public schools for free. Mr. Bush said they should. “We’re creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law,” he lamented.

Reagan agreed. Instead of “putting up a fence,” he asked, “why don’t we . . . make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then, while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here.” For good measure, Reagan suggested we should “open the border both ways.”

Where, in the populist fervor to build a wall with Mexico and deport millions of human beings, is that Republican Party today?

Trade: In one of his final radio addresses as president, Reagan warned “we should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends—weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world—all while cynically waving the American flag.”

Where, in the tide of Tea Party opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and all those other “disastrous trade deals” that Donald Trump never fails to mention, is that Republican Party today?

Foreign policy: In 1947 Harry Truman asked Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to support his efforts to shore up the governments in Greece and Turkey against Soviet aggression. Vandenberg agreed, marking his—and the GOP’s—turn from isolationism to internationalism.

Since then, six Republican presidents have never wavered in their view that a robust system of treaty alliances such as NATO are critical for defending the international liberal order, or that the U.S. should dissuade faraway allies such as South Korea and Saudi Arabia from seeking nuclear weapons, or that states such as Russia should be kept out of regions such as the Middle East.

Where, amid Mr. Trump’s routine denunciations of our allegedly freeloading allies, or Newt Gingrich’s public doubts about defending NATO member Estonia against Russian aggression, or the alt-right’s attacks on “globalism,” or Sean Hannity’s newfound championship of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, is that Republican Party today?

Culture, civility and character:

For decades, conservative publishers have issued a long succession of titles on the importance of personal character to the preservation of democratic institutions. Notable on the list is William J. Bennett’s “The Book of Virtues,” whose first chapter deals with the importance of self-discipline. The former secretary of education followed that one up with “The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals,” timed to the Lewinsky scandal.

Where, in the apparently limitless forgiveness GOP voters are willing to extend to Mr. Trump for his public affronts to “that face” Carly or that “nasty woman” Hillary Clinton, is that Republican Party today?

... I don’t see the point of belonging to a party on the increasingly dubious assumption that it’s slightly less bad than the opposition. If I can’t get my Grand Old Party back, I’d rather help build a new one.

Read more here.

Self-indulgence, self-delusion and, finally, abject paralysis

When interest rates return to more normal historical levels of 4-5% per annum, the costs of servicing the debt—along with unsustainable Social Security and Medicare entitlement costs—will begin to undermine the entire budget.

...Illegal immigration poses a similar dilemma. No nation can remain stable when 10-20 million foreign nationals have crashed through what has become an open border and reside unlawfully in the United States—any more than a homeowner can have neighbors traipsing through and camping in his unfenced yard.

...Race relations pose comparable paradoxes. Inner-city Chicago has turned into a war zone with over 500 murders so far this year alone. As tragic as occasional police shootings are of African-American suspects, they do not occur at an incidence higher than the percentage of African-Americans who come into contact with law enforcement or who commit violent crimes. Yet when an African-American officer, in a department overseen by an African-American police chief, shoots an uncompliant but armed African-American suspect, a full-scale urban riot ensues, well beyond the ability of police to control.

No one would object that Americans need to be engaged in helping the inner-city poor—nor would anyone deny the moral importance of evaluating others by the content of their character, and not by the color of their skin. But Americans also accept society’s obligations to maintain law and order in communities racked by gang violence. The African-American community must, in the fashion of other ethnic communities in the United States, change its cultural norms around masculinity. It should define maleness in terms of a two-parent household and a father’s daily guidance and support of his own children. In a larger sense, the misogynist, anti-police, violent, and often racist lyrics of rap music should be as ostracized as Jim Crow-era stereotypes of blacks eventually were.

The cures for the maladies of the inner city are civic reengagement, honest talk, economic entrepreneurship, self-help, and self-reliance in the black community. Liberal elites who avoid the inner city and send their children to mostly white and Asian prep schools fear honest talk as intensely as they mouth off about racism. But because we do not wish to talk honestly about the absence of parity in racial relations, and the causes for it, we plod on ahead, struggling with a slow wasting away malady rather than the chemotherapy of tough and honest solutions.

Donald Trump, in supposedly reckless fashion, questioned the present status of the seven-decade-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the cornerstone of Western collective security that deterred 500 divisions of the Soviet Red Army from overrunning Europe west of the Elbe River. Trump blasted away at our European Union allies in NATO, the vast majority of which do not contribute their fair share to the alliance. Most forget that the sole obstacle to an outlaw world led by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Iran, ISIS, China, and North Korea is the deterrent ability of the United States.

...The same lose/lose dilemmas plague current foreign policy. Under the Obama administration, the old postwar order led by the security guarantees of the United States abruptly ended—the vacuum filled by ascendant regional (and often nuclear) hegemons. Russia is expanding control, or at least influence, over the old Soviet republics and Eastern Europe. China carves out a new version of the old Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere at the expense of the democracies in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. Iran is on the path to be the nuclear adjudicator of the Persian Gulf’s oil depot. Radical Islamic terrorism has made the Middle East a wasteland.

What would once have been seen as radical neglect of our existential problems is now the normal way of getting by one more day. What destroys civilizations are not, as popularly advertised, plagues, global warming, or hostile tribes on the horizon, as much as self-indulgence, self-delusion—and, finally, abject paralysis.

Read more here.

Political Sabotage

Shinmen Takezo writes to Donald Trump,

Just to let you know, this whole video incident was a setup from the get-go. From what I have learned from old contacts in the film industry yesterday, this tape was supposed to be used during the primaries when you and Cuckold-Bush III, where it was envisioned/predicted you both would go head to head—and this tape was to be the deciding ‘grassy knoll head-shot’ to knock you out of the primary.

The only problem is, you crushed Cuckold-Bush III (the establishment’s anointed one) like a greasy cockroach under your heel. Not only did you crush Cucky-Bush III, you completely humiliated him, spanked his bottom in public then set him back to the locker room with the rest of the establishment third sting losers.

So forgetaboutit! Now what?

SHINMEN’S ADVICE: GO TO TOWN WITH A TOMAHAWK!

Take no prisoners.

Your performance in Sunday’s debate was excellent—you showed massive contrast against Clinton.

This the operative strategy: MASSIVE CONTRAST.

You did not stand there with a nicey-nice, goody-two-shoes, Boy Scout, goofy smile on your face as Mitt (the pussy) Romney did against Obama in his last debate, when zinger after zinger and set-up questions were heaped upon him.

Nicely done Sir!

IT’S RAPE

Use the “RAPE” word—you missed this opportunity in the debate. You made your point, but missed tossing a spear into Clinton’s heart. Did you happen to see the “Scoobie Doo” (‘ruh-rooh!’) look on Bill Clinton’s face when you brought up the subject.

Had the “rape” word been used on TV, live, unedited and uncensored the whole narrative and a massive landslide of opinion would have completely shifted onto Bill and Hillary Clinton.

...Excellent move springing Bill’s victims on an unsuspecting MSM press pre-debate. We old political timers know about Bill’s sins and crimes going back over a generation—but the younger generation have no idea what went on with the Clintons prior to 2005.

Hammer home the “rape” and “assault” words with Bill Clinton and Hillary’s persecution of Bill’s victim (so she could ride his coat-tails later into some sort of political career for herself). The American people need to hear it—not the puff-ball yim-yammer from the candidates as in past elections.

BENGHAZI GUN RUNNING OPERATION

You’re missing the whole boat here buddy. Okay—yes, Clinton was literally asleep at the switch when Ambassador Stevens was begging for more ‘security’ and his rescue at the Benghazi consulate. But little of this shit sticks on Clinton, let alone does it stink.

The whole world (except the sheep here in the USA) knows full well that Ambassador Stevens and the Benghazi consulate was in fact a front for a massive gun running operation that put thousands of tons of weapons directly into the hands of this country’s enemies in Syria—who were radical Islamists who later became ISIS.

...The Benghazi Weapons Smuggling Operation was a key element in this Syrian regime-change operation. It brought death and destruction to thousands of innocent civilians in Syria now caught in the middle of civil war—brought about by western intervention. There would be no “Syria crisis” without the insane foreign policy of Clinton and Obama.

...THE CLINTON FOUNDATION – ORGANIZE CRIME PERFECTED

This is the biggest criminal pay-for-play operation since the days of Tammany Hall in New York City. The only difference between Tammany Hall/Boss Tweed and the Clinton foundation is that Tammany Hall was small potatoes compared to the global grift and graft exacted by Hillary Clinton for contracts and political favors.

The writer goes on to recommend talking points on the Second Amendment, Supreme Court nominees, the 20 trillion dllar debt, the war on western lands, foreign policy, and re-industrializng the USA.
Read more here.

Trained like Pavlov’s dogs

Bookworm writes, like nobody else can,

Charlie Kirk’s hypothesis about millennials forces one to reach much the same conclusion about them that Adams reached about women: The young Bernie supporters who cannot get excited about Hillary have been trained like Pavlov’s dogs to get excited about accusations of men engaged in sexual misconduct. While they wouldn’t vote for Hillary, now that she fits into their hardwired victim algorithm, they will turn out in droves to punish Trump.

Two other things lead me to believe we’re in the last half-hour of an opera that ends with all the good people scattered about dead on the stage:

The rampant voter corruption across America, which includes everything from hundreds of thousands of dead people voting, and not just in Illinois; to the fact that illegal aliens are being welcomed into polling spots; to the fact that states such as Colorado no longer even require a verifiable address as a predicate to voter registration, making it impossible to weed out those who are voting illegally.

The fact that FBI agents are whining that Comey sold them out but they’re too cowardly to come forward and tell the American people that, in their professional opinion, Hillary is guilty of gross violations of American security law and should be rotting in prison even now.
The fix is in. The soprano is already dead. She just doesn’t know it.

The next four years will set us on a path the effects of which will last decades and from which we may never recover:

The Supreme Court will be hard Left, meaning that the Constitution is a dead letter. A dead letter Constitution means no more religious freedom, no more free speech, no more freedom of assembly, no more Second Amendment rights, no more due process rights . . . all of it will be gone. America will be under a totalitarian rule that melds the worst American college campuses, where speech, assembly, religious rights, the right to bear arms, and due process are gone, with the South Side of Chicago, where the early death of the Second Amendment has already established criminal control over the streets. Sometimes the criminals will be employees of government agencies such as the IRS, EPA, FDA, DOE, etc., all of whom Obama has conveniently armed more heavily than the Marines, and sometimes the criminals will be your ordinary street psychopath. Regardless of their origin, we’ll be just as dead or cowed.

The fact that a corrupt FBI and DOJ gave Hillary a pass for gross, explicit, intentional violations of America’s national security laws, and that she then got rewarded with a all-expenses paid trip to the White House, means that the rule of law is dead in America. Absolutely nothing distinguishes us anymore from a banana republic.

Our medicine will be socialized. Moreover, because we’re $19 trillion in debt, and there’s no other American government to provide additional funding as America did for Europe during the Cold War, we won’t pass through the pleasant French or English experience in which people boasted about their access to doctors (never mind that they had consistently worse outcomes than in America). With our debt, we’re going straight to Venezuela. Stock up on those vitamin pills, people. You’re going to need them.

Euthanasia will become official government policy. When your medicine is Venezuela-level, it’s much cheaper and more effective to kill people than to try to treat them. An added benefit is that dead people don’t complain.

The rich and the upper middle classes, and then the middle classes, will be taxed into oblivion (with careful exemptions cut out for the people and corporations, such as the social media giants and Goldman Sachs, who provided the ideological muscle and the funding for Hillary’s ascendancy). In the first year those taxes are in effect it will look sweet, because America’s coffers will get a temporary boost. After that, the money will be gone. The taxed people will be wrung out, and there won’t be enough wealth left in the economy to trigger the creation of new wealth. And again, unlike the Cold War era, when American cash absorbed the worst of Europe’s socialized tax rates for forty-plus years, there will be no America to make up the difference. Again, hello, Venezuela!

The La Raza crowd will probably get what it wants: The entire American Southwest, and California of course, will once again revert to being extensions of Mexico.

Our military will continue on its path to rid the world of climate change and to ensure social justice for all except white people, especially white males. Within a few years, the US military won’t be able to take out Tonga should Tonga decide to attack.

Iran will go nuclear. Israel, if she’s unlucky, might just go altogether. Poof. (On second thought, looking at the worldwide awfuls a Hillary presidency ushers in, maybe I should say, “Israel, if she’s lucky, might just go altogether.” Living in a post-apocalyptic world isn’t fun.)

Europe, without an America on which to rely, will go two ways: Either full Muslim or it will fall into violent religious wars of the type that devastated huge swaths of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

As Russia is already demonstrating, without an American deterrent, it will control the entire Middle East, including Middle Eastern oil. Moreover, even though Middle Eastern oil is becoming more expensive to unearth, Hillary’s administration will put the kibosh on all American fossil fuel drilling. Thus, despite sitting on oil reserves that can last for generations, we will be more dependent than ever on Islamic theocracies, with the added punch that Putin will get a cut. Russia will also extend its control once again over Eastern Europe and perhaps Central Europe. Western Europe, either a Caliphate or a battlefield, will not be worth Russia’s effort.

China, too, will go to town without an American deterrent and will control the entire Asian Pacific. Citizens of the Asian Pacific region will not be happy.

Things will get really interesting if China and Russia end up in a hot war for world domination. I don’t think either would have second thoughts about total warfare of the type moral nations such as Israel and America have avoided since WWII.

The fact that the sane constitutionalists among us will have “I told you so rights” will be scant consolation. At the end of the day, all we can do is echo Candide: “All that is very well . . . but let us cultivate our garden.” (With said garden possibly providing the only food available to us.)

I am not sanguine.

UPDATE: A good night’s sleep helped reset my mood, and I am ready again to berate people into voting for Trump regardless of his sins. This may well be the last chance traditional, patriotic Americans (no matter their race, creed, country of national origin, sex, sexual orientation, whatever) can make their voices heard, and they should do it loudly and clearly. When we do so, we’re electing, not a man, but a set of core American values that we want to see in our lives and in our children’s and grandchildren’s lives.

We are flying blind!

Matthew Continetti writes at the Free Beacon,

We are flying blind. And the problem is much larger than the Middle East. A rudderless America, in a moment of transition, is heedlessly reacting to events rather than influencing them. What Halford Mackinder dubbed the world-island of Eurasia is ringed by wars both hot and cold—from the Baltics to the Donbas, across the Shiite crescent, along the Indo-Pakistani border, through the South and East China Seas.

Putin tests NATO, fuels guerilla war in Ukraine, and pummels Aleppo. Turks fight ISIS and Kurds. America fights ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Iran sends aid to Hezbollah, militias to Syria, and swift boats to the Straits of Hormuz. India and Pakistan battle over Kashmir. Americans fight in Afghanistan. China builds its forces in the Pacific. North Korea flirts with nuclear war.

This planet is laced with dynamite. Only one spark is necessary to light it up. And the chances of miscalculation are immense.

Our leaders are not exactly up to the task. John Kerry is possibly the most feckless, credulous, blithering secretary of State in U.S. history. President Obama is on his way out. Secretary Clinton is more eager to use force, defends our intervention in Libya as a success, and would have something to prove early in her term as the nation’s first woman president. Kaine’s response to any criticism of world affairs is “Bin Laden.” Pence decided just to make up his own policy. And Trump—well, we can only begin to imagine.

Niall Ferguson wrote a book in 2006 I highly recommend. The argument of The War of the World is that the first and second world wars were indistinct. They were but phases of one giant conflagration incited by three factors. All of them are present today.

Ethnic Conflict. The move toward nationalism and sectarianism heightens tensions between nations and within them: Shia versus Sunni, Arab versus Persian, Muslim versus non-Muslim, Salafi versus heretic, Chinese versus Vietnamese versus Japanese versus Korean.

In the meantime the surge of Muslim refugees and economic migrants from the Middle East and Africa is reshaping the politics of Europe. Anti-immigrant parties are on the rise in Germany, in France, in England. Nor is the United States immune. Black Lives Matter, Colin Kaepernick, Donald Trump, the alt-right—racial politics is polarized, social cohesion frayed.

Economic Volatility.

Empires in Decline
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan clearly punctured national self-confidence, soured elites and the public on intervention. They also gave us the ambivalent leadership of President Obama, who destabilized one alliance after another as he cut defense budgets, mishandled Russia, emptied Guantanamo, labeled half-measures a “pivot” to Asia, drew red lines and ignored them, turned the Department of Defense into a social justice lab, belittled our friends, and catered to our enemies.

The result is an anxious Europe, a bloodstained Middle East, growing dangers to U.S. forces in the Pacific, and an inward-looking America that, I fear, has neither the strategy nor the will to sustain a global order it paid so much in blood and treasure to obtain.

Read more here.

Collapse of the Obama legacy

Charles Krauthammer writes in the New York Daily News,

Only amid the most bizarre, most tawdry, most addictive election campaign in memory could the real story of 2016 be so effectively obliterated, namely, that with just four months left in the Obama presidency, its two central pillars are collapsing before our eyes: domestically, its radical reform of American health care, aka Obamacare; and abroad, its radical reorientation of American foreign policy — disengagement marked by diplomacy and multilateralism.

Obamacare
On Monday, Bill Clinton called it “the craziest thing in the world.” And he was only talking about one crazy aspect of it — the impact on the consumer. Clinton pointed out that small business and hardworking employees (“out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week”) are “getting whacked . . . their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.”

This, as the program’s entire economic foundation is crumbling. More than half its nonprofit “co-ops” have gone bankrupt. Major health insurers like Aetna and UnitedHealthcare, having lost millions of dollars, are withdrawing from the exchanges. In one-third of the U.S., exchanges will have only one insurance provider.

What to do? The Democrats will eventually push to junk Obamacare for a full-fledged, government-run, single-payer system. Republicans will seek to junk it for a more market-based pre-Obamacare-like alternative. Either way, the singular domestic achievement of this presidency dies.

The Obama Doctrine

...This blessed vision has just died a terrible death in Aleppo. Its unraveling was predicted and predictable, though it took fully two terms to unfold. This policy of pristine — and preening — disengagement from the grubby imperatives of realpolitik yielded Crimea, the South China Sea, the rise of the Islamic State, the return of Iran. And now the horror and the shame of Aleppo.

After endless concessions to Russian demands meant to protect and preserve the genocidal regime of Bashar Assad, last month we finally capitulated to a deal in which we essentially joined Russia in that objective. But such is Vladimir Putin’s contempt for our President that he wouldn’t stop there.

He blatantly violated his own cease-fire with an air campaign of such spectacular savagery — targeting hospitals, water pumping stations and a humanitarian aid convoy — that even Barack Obama and John Kerry could no longer deny that Putin is seeking not compromise but conquest. And is prepared to kill everyone in rebel-held Aleppo to achieve it. Obama, left with no options — and astonishingly, having prepared none — looks on.

“What is Aleppo?” famously asked Gary Johnson. Answer: The burial ground of the Obama fantasy of benign disengagement.

What’s left of the Obama legacy? Even Democrats are running away from Obamacare. And who will defend his foreign policy of lofty speech and cynical abdication?

In 2014, Obama said, “Make no mistake: (My) policies are on the ballot.” Democrats were crushed in that midterm election.

This time around, Obama says, “My legacy’s on the ballot.” If the 2016 campaign hadn’t turned into a referendum on character — a battle fully personalized and ad hominem — the collapse of the Obama legacy would indeed be right now on the ballot. And his party would be 20 points behind.

Read more here.

I hope Donald Trump reads this!

With presidential debate number 2 coming up Sunday night, Victor Davis Hanson has some advice for Donald Trump.

In debate No. 2, Trump owes it to the ‘deplorables’ to focus on the issues and exert some self-control. In the first debate, Hillary stuck out her jaw on cybersecurity, the treatment of women, sermons on the need for restrained language, and talk about the shenanigans of the rich — and Trump passed on her e-mail scandals, her denigration of Bill’s women, her reckless smears like “deplorables,” and her pay-for-pay Clinton Foundation enrichment, obsessed instead with the irrelevant and insignificant.

In fact, the first presidential debate resembled the final scene out of the Caine Mutiny. Trump was melting down like the baited Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart), in his convoluted wild-goose-chase defenses of his arcane business career. Watching it was as painful as it was for the admiral judges in the movie who saw fellow officer Queeg reduced to empty shouting about strawberries.

...Trump’s detours de nihilo, the constant unanswered race/class/gender jabs by a haughty Hillary, and Trump’s addictions to broken-off phrases, and loud empty superlative adjectives (tremendous, awesome, great, and fantastic) won’t win him the necessary extra 3–4 percent of women, independents, and establishment Never Trump Republicans. Trump’s bragging that he has “properties” in your state or that he found a way to creatively account his way out of income taxes does not come off as synonymous with a plan to make you well off, too.

Moderator Lester Holt did what all mainstream debate moderators of a now corrupt profession customarily do: Before the debate he leaked that they might possibly be conservative, feigned fairness, and then reestablished his left-wing credentials by focusing solely on fact-checking Trump, so that he wouldn’t be targeted later by leftist elites whose pique could lead to temporary ostracism from the people and places Holt values.

So, of course, he audited Trump and exempted Clinton, as if Trump’s businesses were as overtly crooked as the play-for-pay Clinton syndicate, or Trump’s supposed insensitivities to a pampered beauty queen (with a checkered past) were morally equivalent to Hillary’s denigration of Bill’s women who had claimed sexual assault or her eerie post facto chortling over getting a defendant, accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, off with lesser charges.

Most newsreaders know little more than how to news read. So we should not have been surprised that Holt’s audits of Trump on the legality of stop-and-frisk, or Holt’s denial that violent crime was up, was about as accurate as Candy Crowley’s hijacking of the second 2012 debate to rewrite what Barack Obama said into what she thought he should have said. Trump, in fact, was right that his microphone did not work properly and right that the media was biased — but wrong that bringing any of that up mattered in analyses of his debate performance.

The Clinton debate formula should have been clear: Bait and prod Trump to go into egocentric rants about his businesses, or a beauty queen, or another non-story, and then let the moderator massage the playing field, and let Hillary fill in dead time with empty platitudes (we are all racists/we need more solar panels/the wealthy don’t pay their fair share), and unfunded promises, while pandering along race, class, and gender lines.

Trump has to find a way to blow apart that script — largely by repressing his ego and simply not talking about any of his businesses or going down into the Clinton muck. Period.

...He should blunt all Clinton attacks with either an upbeat, simple positive statement (“I built things in Manhattan, where few others on the planet could”), or just offer no more than a ten-second negative joust (“I ran a business that provided jobs and gave people places to live; you, Hillary, helped oversee a foundation syndicate that created nothing really other than cash and free travel for your family and cronies”). Trump should not spend one second beyond that. Any talk about his business or slogging in the mud with Hillary is precious campaign time lost that otherwise could remind the country of her defects and her trite and tired visions as an Obama 2.0.

Otherwise the news cycle should frame the debate. There are about five issues. Trump simply needs to go through them quickly. If he is short, as usual, on specifics, the lack of detail will matter less, the more crises he can cover:
1. Chaos and Change. The world is in chaos — and wants an American leader, not another temporizing college law lecturer or a weak imitation of a tired Angela Merkel. About every week there is either a terrorist attack, news of more scandal, or a riot. The common denominator is that Obama-Hillary lost the country respect and deterrence: No one honors the police and law at home just as no one respects our diplomats and officials abroad. The result is a green light to harm them without expecting consequences. Voters share a collective fear that things of the last Obama-Clinton eight years simply cannot go on as they are.

2. Illegal Immigration. No country can exist without borders. Hillary and Obama have all but destroyed them; Trump must remind us how he will restore them. Walls throughout history have been part of the solution, from Hadrian’s Wall to Israel’s fence with the Palestinians. “Making Mexico pay for the wall” is not empty rhetoric, when $26 billion in remittances go back to Mexico without taxes or fees, largely sent from those here illegally, and it could serve as a source of funding revenue.

Trump can supersede “comprehensive immigration” with a simple program: Secure and fortify the borders first; begin deporting those with a criminal record, and without a work history. Fine employers who hire illegal aliens. Any illegal aliens who choose to stay, must be working, crime-free, and have two years of residence. They can pay a fine for having entered the U.S. illegally, learn English, and stay while applying for a green card — that effort, like all individual applications, may or may not be approved. He should point out that illegal immigrants have cut in line in front of legal applicants, delaying for years any consideration of entry. That is not an act of love. Sanctuary cities are a neo-Confederate idea, and should have their federal funds cut off for undermining U.S. law. The time-tried melting pot of assimilation and integration, not the bankrupt salad bowl of identity politics, hyphenated nomenclature, and newly accented names should be our model of teaching new legal immigrants how to become citizens.

3. Debt and the Economy. Hillary served in an administration that doubled the national debt to $20 trillion and lobbied to keep interest at near zero to finance it. That incomprehensible sum is a prescription for disaster the moment rates rise. She talks grandly of spending, but never of balancing — largely because she has always lived high on someone else’s money. Slashing defense and raising taxes still got us $500 billion in annual deficits — just what we would expect from those who short the military and soak the well-off in order to waste more money on programs with no record of success. No economy can grow with ever more debt, regulations, and higher taxes.

4. Foreign Policy. The world is becoming a mess, beginning with Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. Iraq blew up. Syria is a wasteland. So is Libya. ISIS went from declared “jayvees” to undeclared pros. Iran is a regional bully whose neighbors assume it will be nuclear soon. Russia has contempt for the West — NATO and the EU in particular — and seems to be reassembling the old Soviet empire. China is recreating the old Japanese East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Common denominator? They all figured out Obama-Clinton-Kerry weakness — assured that in any crisis the U.S. would predictably back down from any red line, deadline, or step over a line it so loudly and sanctimoniously set. Talking moralistically and provocatively while carrying a tiny stick is a fatal combination. Electing Hillary Clinton in 2016 is like reelecting Jimmy Carter in 1980. When Obama brags abroad “I don’t bluff,” or Hillary chuckles, “We came, we saw, Qaddafi died,” should we laugh or cry?

5. The deterioration of the middle class. Obamacare is ruining health care for the middle classes, who were asked to pay for the poor while the rich found ways to navigate around the rules they created for others. “Free trade” was certainly not “fair trade,” but it did enrich a global elite at the expense of displaced middle-class workers. Where Obama left off with “clingers,” Hillary has now taken up with “deplorables.” Trump might ask her, “Why do you hate a quarter of the country?”

Trump owes it to these forgotten Deplorables to prepare for the last two debates and to talk about them, and not himself. If he doesn’t, he will wreck their hopes, betray their trust, and walk away a loser as few others in history.

But if Trump fights Hillary with a coherent plan that is the antithesis of the last eight years, rather than harping about his business reputation and obsessing with the trivial, he still might win a conservative Congress, a cadre of loyal conservative cabinet officers, a rare chance to remake the Supreme Court in a fashion not seen since the 1930s — and at 70 years of age make all his prior celebrity achievements of the past seem as nothing in comparison.

Read more here.

"It has never even occurred to me to interview a government official in one country about what’s happening in another country."

Michael Totten is a journalist who travels the world, learning about other countries from the people who live there. In a recent blog post at World Affairs Journal, he reacted to the big story in Washington. I refer to David Samuels’ long-form essay last weekend in the New York Times Magazine about President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser and spokesmen Ben Rhodes.

Rhodes had to sell the Iranian nuclear deal to a skeptical American public. He freely admits that he did so by manipulating a select group of reporters that he and staff think are idiots and molded them into his own personal echo chamber.

It wasn’t difficult. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he told Samuels. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

... it’s true that the vast majority of newspapers no longer have foreign bureaus. Foreign correspondence is spectacularly expensive to produce. Newspapers can’t afford it. Hardly anyone subscribes anymore, and one of their biggest old cash cows—the classified ads section—has been outsourced to eBay and Craigslist. Money is tight and foreign bureaus were always the most expensive part of a news operation.

If you want to blame someone or something, blame the Internet.

This sentence, though, is incredible: “They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo.”

What on earth could a White House official possibly know about what’s happening in Moscow or Cairo? Journalists should only call Ben Rhodes if they want to know what’s happening in the White House.

If you’re a reporter who wants to know who’s who and what’s what in Russia or Egypt, you should get on a plane. It will set you back thousands of dollars, though, and your editors will pay you a couple hundred bucks at most for a story, so it’s not a viable option if you don’t have a trust fund.

I spent more than a decade interviewing people all over the world, sometimes on the phone and via email, but most of the time in person on the other side of the world. I’ve interviewed every type of person imaginable, from military commanders and heads of state to war refugees and homeless people who sleep outside in slums.

Trust me on this: government officials are almost always the worst sources and interview subjects. That’s true everywhere in the world. They live in rarefied bubbles. They lie. They leave things out, sometimes because they want to and sometimes because they have to. They’re often incompetent and even more often shockingly ignorant. Everyone has opinions, and lots of people have agendas, but nobody has an agenda the way government officials have agendas.

It has never even occurred to me to interview a government official in one country about what’s happening in another country.

...“We created an echo chamber,” he said when Samuels asked him about the “onslaught of freshly minted experts” who explained the Iran deal to the American public. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

This wouldn’t be the big deal that it is if Rhodes gave honest information to the journalists in his little chamber, but he didn’t.

...Ben Rhodes has no more experience with arms control or Iran’s internal political system than the 27-year old reporters who, according to him, “literally know nothing.”

...“Like Obama,” Samuels writes in the New York Times Magazine, “Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.”

...Rhodes hates the foreign policy establishment. He calls it, for whatever reason, the Blob. Its members are all, according to him, a bunch of “morons.” “According to Rhodes,” Samuels writes, “the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.”

...Aggressive intervention in Iraq failed to make the Middle East a better place. No question about it. So did light intervention in Libya. So did non-intervention in Syria. Nothing seems to work over there. Whether you’re hawkish or dovish, interventionist or isolationist, the last decade of history should be embarrassing.

Read more here.

Calculable rather than chaotic

Lots of people are writing about the differences and similarities between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. How would they be in foreign policy? Here is an excerpt from Spengler's piece in Asia Times:

Cruz, if elected, will have to do his own thinking, to an extent that no American president has had to do since Lincoln. He is intelligent enough and arrogant enough to do that, and he will owe no favors or patronage to the Establishment. He would be the cleverest man to occupy the oval office in a century and a half. He carries no baggage from the Bush administration, and will not invite the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol or Fox News’ Charles Krauthammer to draft an inaugural address, as did Bush in 2004. He won the Iowa caucuses by building the strongest grass-roots network in the country (he claims to have a campaign chairman in every county of the United States), which makes him independent of the party apparatus, such as it is.

Endearing, boyish, photogenic and eloquent, Marco Rubio is the candidate that Central Casting sent the Establishment from the studio pool. Rubio, a middling student at university and a Florida machine politician throughout his career, says his lines well but does not have an original thought about foreign policy. That is why the Establishment likes him. Cruz knows that the Establishment is naked, and is willing to say so. That’s why they don’t like him.

...Cruz is not (as the Establishment punditeska suggests) a “Jacksonian” isolationist in the sense of Walter Russell Meade’s use of the term; rather, he is a John Quincy Adams realist in Angelo Codevilla‘s reading. Cruz feels no ideological compulsion to assert America’s world mastery. He is concerned about American security and American power. The Establishment came into being in America’s brief moment at the head of a unipolar world, and is imprinted with that notion the way ducklings are imprinted with the image of their mothers. The world has changed: China is becoming a world power, albeit a world power of a sort the West has trouble understanding, and Russia is fighting for national revival. These things are neither good nor bad for America, but exactly the opposite. From a Cruz administration we would expect the pursuit of American self-interest, which would mean a substantial improvement in military technology as well as collaboration with Russia and China where it suits American interests and opposition where it doesn’t.

I do not mean to suggest that Beijing or Moscow would be happy with a Cruz presidency. For one thing, it is likely that Cruz would try to widen the gap between America’s military technology and the rest of the world’s. But foreign policy, would be calculable rather than chaotic, and that is something America’s competitors could live with.

Read more here.

Self-deceptions

Brett Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal about Obama's conduct of foreign policy:

It’s also easier to lecture than to learn, to preach than to act. History will remember Barack Obama as the president who conducted foreign policy less as a principled exercise in the application of American power than as an extended attempt to justify the evasion of it.

...Barack Obama told the U.N.’s General Assembly on Monday he’s concerned that “dangerous currents risk pulling us back into a darker, more disordered world.” It’s nice of the president to notice, just don’t expect him to do much about it.

Recall that it wasn’t long ago that Mr. Obama took a sunnier view of world affairs. The tide of war was receding. Al Qaeda was on a path to defeat. ISIS was “a jayvee team” in “Lakers uniforms.” Iraq was an Obama administration success story. Bashar Assad’s days were numbered. The Arab Spring was a rejoinder to, rather than an opportunity for, Islamist violence. The intervention in Libya was vindication for the “lead from behind” approach to intervention. The reset with Russia was a success, a position he maintained as late as September 2013. In Latin America, the “trend lines are good.”

“Overall,” as he told Tom Friedman in August 2014—shortly after ISIS had seized control of Mosul and as Vladimir Putin was muscling his way into eastern Ukraine—“I think there’s still cause for optimism.”

Read more here.

Refuting her own past behavior

Victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review,

...that almost every issue that Ms. Clinton has raised and every position of advocacy that she now embraces are direct refutations of either her present or her past behavior — and sometimes both. Surely she is aware of that?

Bill Clinton’s sordid sexual harassments are ancient history better forgotten. But Ms. Clinton must accept that her advocacy video about sexual assault and harassment unfortunately dredges them back up. Do her present boilerplate professions of believing the alleged victim amount to a sort of postmodern “I will let you down” confession? For two decades of Bill Clinton’s political ascendance, Ms. Clinton’s own attitude toward women who alleged that they were either harassed or sexually assaulted by Governor and then President Bill Clinton was that they were either delusional or gold-digging connivers. Nothing that Ms. Clinton said or did ever suggested that Juanita Broddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, or Monica Lewinsky — or scores of others — was anything other than a liar or an opportunist. All these victims advanced claims as convincing as, or more so than, the he-said/she-said campus incidents in the news, whose resolutions apparently demand suspension of the Bill of Rights.

...Mindboggling was the variety of charges against Bill Clinton. They represented a primer on the current debate over what constitutes both felonious and nihilistic male aggression against women: coerced rough sex; on-the-job roughhouse groping; demands for humiliating ad hoc sex acts; the use of power and position by the employer to leverage quickie, on-the-desk gratifications from young and vulnerable female interns. In other words, Bill Clinton became iconic of just the sort of multifaceted sexual assaults — and of male denials and conspiratorial female efforts to demonize the victim — about which Ms. Clinton now shakes her finger. At various stages of his life, Bill Clinton has played the archetypal wild campus womanizer, the vain, sexually manipulative careerist, the lecherous employer, and the immune sex harasser, all of which current campus assault advocacy targets. Surely she knows that?

...Her $10,000-a-minute fee for a hack ramble is emblematic of college financial mismanagement, the effects of which fall ultimately upon indebted students.

...As for Iran and Ms. Clinton’s record as secretary of state, history is already the judge. The disastrous U.S. foreign policy toward Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the Middle East in general was established on her watch. Her team favored the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, set the stage for the U.S. abdication from a once-quiet pre-ISIS Iraq, was in charge of the “lead from behind”/ “We came, we saw, he died” fiasco in Libya, established the security protocols in Benghazi and then blame-gamed a video-maker for the violence, dubbed Assad a “reformer” before he was to be red-lined out of power, estranged Israel from the U.S., invited the Russians into the Middle East, and gave non-negotiable requisites for non-proliferation talks.

Read more here.

Scott Walker a great foreign policy president?

Kim Hughes believes Scott Walker would make a great foreign policy president. Read why here.

Is this 1939 or 2015?

Victor Davis Hanson writes in Jewish World Review to show us how Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan all first forged new empires before Hitler started World War II by invading Poland in September 1939.

The contemporary world is starting to resemble the 1930s, and maps again must be redrawn.

The Islamic State plans to take Baghdad to make it the capital of a radical Sunni caliphate from what is left of Syria and Iraq.

Its enemy, theocratic Iran, is forging its own Shiite empire. Through its proxies, Iran now effectively runs much of Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. When Teheran gets a nuclear bomb, it will urge on Shiite minorities to overthrow the Sunni monarchies in the rich, oil-exporting Persian Gulf nations.

Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks he can reconstitute the empire of the czars and the later Soviet Union. American "reset" diplomacy green-lighted his annexation of the Crimea and his occupation of areas of Ukraine. Should Putin wish to absorb Estonia or other Baltic States, NATO probably would not stop him.

China is vastly increasing its strategic air force and navy -- and reminding its neighbors from South Korea to Australia of its new military clout. It has recently instigated various territorial disputes with Japan, Malaysia the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. As a clever way to control key sea lanes and oil-rich areas in the South China Sea, the Chinese are building new military bases by turning small coral reefs into islands of sand.

Is this 1939 or 2015?

In 1945, after some 60 million had perished in World War II, the Western democracies blamed themselves for having appeased and empowered fascist empires. That sadder but wiser generation taught us two lessons: Small sacrifices now can avoid catastrophic ones later on, and dictatorial regimes on a roll never voluntarily quit playing geostrategic poker.

If the present trajectories continue, a reconfigured Middle East will be bookended by radical Islamic empires -- the Islamic State caliphate and a new Persian empire. China will control most of the Pacific and adjudicate trade, commerce and politics west of Hawaii and to the south and east of India. The client states of a new Russian empire will border central Europe and be under constant pressure to leave the EU, NATO or both.

How does all this end? One of two ways.

America and its allies can reawaken, gradually restore deterrence and re-establish the old postwar order without a global war.

Or the United States will not be bothered -- at least until this new generation of dictators bothers us at home.

Read more here.

Pointless

Why is the media asking the presidential candidates all the wrong questions? Pete Hoekstra writes in the Washington Examiner,

Asking presidential candidates whether they support or would change past foreign policy decisions is the most common line of questioning among members of the media. It's also the most pointless.

Should President Clinton have killed Osama bin Laden when he had the opportunity in 1990s? Should President Bush have sent the U.S. military into Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein in 2003? Should President Obama have withdrawn all troops from Iraq in 2011?

Such questions provide no real insight into future considerations. Whether or not they would have done anything differently no longer matters. Besides, since when is hindsight not 20/20?

Here is today's reality: Iraq is aflame, Afghanistan rests on perilous ground, Yemen has descended into chaos, Libya has devolved into a failed state and the Islamic State not only threatens many parts of Africa but also inspires pledges of solidarity from around the world, including in the United States.

Earlier this month, jihadists from Arizona drove to a Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, to massacre hundreds of people. They might have succeeded if not for an off-duty traffic officer who skillfully killed them before they could harm anybody.

Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated — if not outright angry — as they read daily headlines such as "Enemy Inside: ISIS the 'Greatest Threat since 9/11,'" "DHS Secretary: 'New phase' in the global terrorist threat" and "Former CIA official cites agency's failure to see al-Qaeda's rebound."

The U.S. is losing the war against radical Islamists, and Americans want to know if there is anybody capable of doing anything about it. They are pleading for a commander in chief who can shine in the following three areas.

First, the next president must identify and define the Islamist terror threat. It is the proverbial 800-lb. gorilla that too few politicians seem to want to acknowledge. We can no longer stumble along with different descriptions of who the terrorists are and what motivates them or debate whether they pose a serious danger at all. The task becomes more urgent by the day as their sphere of influence broadens beyond the Middle East and North Africa.

Second, we need a leader who is willing to examine the successes and mistakes of the last three administrations — and to do so honestly and without political bias. All three are guilty of serious policy errors that have cost us dearly. Nobody today would describe Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria or Libya as success stories. Some today, including me, describe them as abject failures. An effective leader of the free world will understand the need to step back and fully absorb the lessons they provide.

Third, we need a president who can unite the country and build a consensus about the menaces we face and how to defeat them. We also need other public officials who will eschew partisanship and work for the common good.

The media should probe and challenge candidates to help voters understand their views on foreign policy. Questions should include: What lessons have you learned from past foreign policy decisions? How will they shape your vision as commander in chief? What is America's role in the world?

No president can amend the past, and the public is tired of candidates who simply point fingers instead of offering their own solutions. They want a leader who will describe the threats as they are and rally the country behind a strategy to defeat them.

We cannot know how current decisions will affect the future. But we know that if we don't confront our current threats, the leaders of tomorrow will turn around and rightfully ask: "What were you thinking?"

Rudderless and reactive

Stuart Schneiderman has a post entitled, When You've Lost the AP. He quotes the AP's chief diplomatic correspondent, Matthew Lee:

there are growing fears that the U.S.'s Mideast policy has become rudderless and reactive, and may be contributing to worsening conditions and a rise of Islamic extremism, notably in Syria and Iraq.

Lee goes on to list Obama/Clinton/Kerry failures around the globe.

The need for prudent American realism

Mac Owens writes,

Ending wars is no virtue if the chance for success has been thrown away, as it was in Iraq.

Observers disagree about the causes of the Obama failures in foreign policy. Some attribute them to indifference, others to incompetence—although the two are not unrelated. Still others contend that the results we are seeing represent the desired outcomes of more insidious motivations. But no matter the cause of Obama’s dysfunctional foreign policy, the result is the same: weakness that opens the way for those who wish America ill. Winston Churchill’s 1936 characterization of the Stanley Baldwin government as Hitler gained strength on the Continent echoes ominously today: it was, said Churchill, “decided only to be undecided, resolved to irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.”

The United States must return to the more classical connection between force and diplomacy. For too long, American policy makers, motivated by the assumptions of liberal internationalism, have acted as if diplomacy alone is sufficient to achieve our foreign policy goals. But as Frederick the Great once observed, “Diplomacy without force is like music without instruments.” Prudent American realism recognizes that diplomacy and force are two sides of the same coin. Finally, the United States should not hesitate to use its economic power as an instrument of foreign policy. The changing geopolitics of energy provides an opportunity for the United States to counter the likes of Putin, and others in the world who have wielded the energy weapon against America in the past.

For those who desire freedom and prosperity, there is no alternative to the United States.

Read much more here.

Thanks to Grim.