Obama Foreign Policy

How to lose friends and influence over people

Featured image I write to commend Mohammed Khalid Alyahya’s Tablet column “How to lose friends and influence over people.” The headline works a twist on Dale Carnegie’s best-selling How To Win Friends and Influence People. It’s the granddaddy of self-help books and the advice remains worthy. Alyahya writes: “As a Saudi who loves the United States, and believes deeply that our two countries need each other, the only word that comes to »

Via Meadia

Featured image The Wall Street Journal’s Global View columnist Walter Russell Mead wrote an excellent column for us on his interest in the subject of his new book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. Having spoken with Walter in his office in 2015, I vividly remember his discussion of American attitudes toward the Middle East. He was finishing God and Gold: Britain, »

The Vindication of Mitt Romney

Featured image That’s not a headline I’d normally expect to write, since Mr. Romney’s irritating preciousness has gone to eleven in recent years, but he deserves props for his statement in the 2012 campaign that “Russia is our most significant enemy.” I think it’s actually China, but the point is, recall how Romney was ridiculed, especially by President Obama, who said, “The 1980s called—they want their foreign policy back.” The media was »

Cotton letter lessons revisited

Featured image Apart from the Afghanistan fiasco, I omitted foreign policy issues in my bill of particulars accounting for the Biden administration’s slide in the esteem of voters since January 2020. The slide is multifactorial, overdetermined, and precipitous, as such things go. I left out foreign policy issues because, short of war, they rarely move American voters. That’s not to say such issues shouldn’t be taken into account. They certainly mean a »

From the Iran file (1)

Featured image The State Department informed Congress late yesterday that it would waive sanctions on Iran’s illicit oil trade so that the regime can access frozen funds from South Korea and Japan. The Washington Free Beacon story on the waiver is here and it is worth reading. The appeasement goes on, we learned yesterday (as the also Beacon notes), even though four Iranian intelligence officials were indicted on charges of conspiring to »

Speaking of genocide

Featured image It is news of a kind that President Biden has now recognized atrocities against Armenians as “genocide.” The Associated Press has three reporters with a byline (including the excellent Matthew Lee) on its story covering this development. As the AP notes at the top, the genocide in issue is a matter of history. It was perpetrated by the rulers of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. You might »

Diplomacy, Iranian style

Featured image Barack Obama realigned the position of the United States in the Middle East with the regime whose motto is “Death to America” rotating with “Death to Israel.” When it came to the regime’s nuclear program, Obama sought to extend the timeline while extending generous financial support. Why would he do that? The mullahs never even offered a timeout from the “Death to America” routine. I think the simplest hypothesis explaining »

Coming soon, another bad deal

Featured image The Biden administration is determined to reenter the nuclear deal with Iran (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) in some form. See, for example, the Jerusalem Post/Reuters story “US already in Iran deal talks, officials met in New York – report.” It’s a critical component of the great undoing in which Biden and his cast of retreads are engaged to set us back to where we were when Barack »

Conventional wisdom distilled

Featured image As Obama administration Secretary of State, John Kerry delivered the deal with Iran that made the Munich Agreement look good and lied volubly about it in crushing tones of condescension. The signing of the Abraham Accords at the White House this week affords us the opportunity to look back at this piece of conventional wisdom circa 2016 and evaluate it in light of this week’s events. Often wrong but never »

Waiting for John Kerry or someone like him

Featured image Democrats concede nothing to President Trump and his reversal of Obama foreign policy in critical matters involving Russia, China, and Iran. They seek a return, for example, to the putative alliance of the United States with the enemies of the United States in the Iranian mullahcracy. Obama Secretary of State John Kerry helped deliver the disgraceful nuclear “agreement” that resulted in our funding the Iranian regime and placing it on »

Robert Levinson, RIP

Featured image Robert Levinson was a former FBI agent who became a private contractor and traveled to Iran in 2007 on behalf of a client, but also with a secret, unauthorized charge from the CIA. He was captured or arrested by Iranian authorities who briefly announced that they had him in captivity, but then deleted that claim and denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. He was last known to be alive in »

Pence does AIPAC

Featured image Vice President Pence addressed AIPAC’s annual policy conference in Washington yesterday. I have posted the video below. The White House has posted the text of Pence’s speech here. The depth of the Trump administration’s support for Israel, as faithfully recounted by Pence, is astonishing. It is hard to believe that any other of the 2016 Republican contenders would have had the audacity to do all that Trump has done. As »

Notice this

Featured image Bill Browder is the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, through which he became the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005. Sergei Magnitsky was his lawyer. Through sharp practices with a new twist, Russian authorities misappropriated three of Browder’s companies and used them in a scheme to take $230 million from the Russian government in the form of a tax refund. When Magnitsky figured out what had happened »

“A little bit of money” revisited

Featured image The Democrats can’t wait to realign American policy on Iran consistent with the inclinations of the mullahcracy. It is a bloody disgrace. Lee Smith performs a great service reminding us of the essential elements of Obama’s policy in the Tablet column “Obama passed the buck.” I had forgotten some of the details. I strongly recommend Lee’s refresher course. The cash and other financial resources made available to Iran in part »

Biden rewrites history

Featured image President Trump’s decision to take out terrorist mastermind Qassem Soleimani has had the predictable effect on Democrats. Where once they derided him for weakness and sought to impose the vision of Benghazi on the assault on our embassy in Baghdad, they now criticize Trump for his bad manners. They say that politics makes strange bedfellows, but this is insane. Joe Biden joined the Democrats’ parade on behalf of Soleimani. He »

Trump explains

Featured image This afternoon President Trump gave a prepared statement on the successful operation resulting in the assassination of Iranian terrorist mastermind Qassem Soleimani (video below). Long story short: Khameni’s main man crossed Trump’s red line and was hoping to do so again soon. “We caught him in the act and terminated him,” Trump announced from Mar-a-Lago. Soleimani “made the death of innocent people his sick passion,” the president explained. Wasting no »

Protest this

Featured image It’s not just the New York Times and the Washington Post that are lying about the attacks on our embassy in Baghdad, but they certainly are at it in a remarkable fashion. Below is one notable example in the Washington Post to kick off the new year. Literally the first word that WaPo prints in 2020 is a lie. Spectacular. https://t.co/vDOXiATroo — The Partyman (@PartymanRandy) January 1, 2020 As I »