Obama Foreign Policy

Ukraine: Dem orthodoxy evolves

Featured image Inside the impeachment inquiry is a classic satire of democratic politics struggling to get out. (I would like to take up Quigley on Evidence. For the moment I will only observe that Quigley should find his place in a sequel to My Cousin Vinny.) On the substance of yesterday’s hearing in the impeachment inquiry hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, I wondered: wasn’t it only yesterday that the Obama administration »

None dare call it deceit, cont’d

Featured image On the FOX News Sunday gabfest this morning, Karl Rove made the salient point that I highlighted here, quoting Byron York. Rove put it this way (my transcription): I love, I love the fact that the Democrats are now decrying the president’s decision not to move aid, lethal aid, rapidly to Ukraine. After all, the previous administration, a Democratic administration, did nothing to send lethal aid to Ukraine — and »

Team Iran

Featured image If you want to understand the current state of play with Iran, there is nothing better to read than Lee Smith’s “Team Iran. This long Tablet column extricates us from the fog of stupidity that permeates the subject among Democrats and their mainstream media adjunct. I would only add this note. Lee credits Obama with decent motives for realigning our foreign policy consistent with Iranian interests. Michael Doran’s 2015 analysis »

Obama Swept Iran Terror Plot Under the Rug

Featured image Former Defense Secretary James Mattis has a book coming out in which he is harshly critical of President Obama. Among other things, he recalls his dissent from Obama’s decision to pull troops out of Iraq prematurely, which had nearly-disastrous consequences. But this less well-known story about Iran is also noteworthy: Mattis says Washington didn’t even inform him when Iran committed an “act of war” on American soil. Mattis was CENTCOM »

Iran revisited

Featured image What did the Obama administration have in mind when it chose to empower and enrich the murderously anti-American and viciously genocidal regime Iran? Michael Doran explained all in the Mosaic 2015 essay “Obama’s secret Iran strategy.” Doran’s analysis is still worth reading and still hard to believe. Why was the strategy secret? Perhaps the Obama administration promulgated some counterpart to the Truman administration’s NSC-68, the top secret strategic assessment adopted »

“Death to America,” he explained

Featured image Iran has been at war with the United States since the overthrow of the Shah and the ascent of the mullahcracy in 1979. The Iranians held American hostages for 444 days in 1979-81, until President Reagan was sworn in. On Reagan’s watch, however, the mullahs upped the ante, dispatching their Hezbollah subsidiary to murder 242 Marines in Beirut in 1983. The Iranians have kept right at it, murdering and maiming »

The great undoing continues

Featured image In his great undoing of the “accomplishments” of the Obama administration, President Trump has withdrawn the United States from the humiliating and destructive Iran nuclear deal. The deal funded a terrorist regime that remains at war with the United States and that continues to avow its dedication to our destruction. The Trump administration has also reimposed sanctions on the Iranian regime. There was no bridge too far for Obama in »

Helping the AP get it straight

Featured image Michael Doran retweets Omri Ceren’s correction of the AP (below) with the comment: “In order to fuel its attacks on Trump, the press is actively, constantly rewriting the history of Obama’s Iran concessions. You can see it in real time below.” We are suffocating in media lies and Orwellian revision of recent history. It is exceedingly difficult to keep the facts straight. Orwell himself put it this way: “To see »

John Kerry regrets [UPDATED]

Featured image Former Secretary of State John Kerry has written a book: Everyday Is Extra. Margaret Brennan of CBS News must be one of the few who have read it. This Sunday on Face the Nation, she pressed Kerry on his admission in the book that the U.S. paid a price for not enforcing President Obama’s “red line” on the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Kerry does some dancing, »

Obama caught lying…again

Featured image Glenn Reynolds could have trademarked his expression of exasperation “I don’t want to hear another goddamn word about my carbon footprint.” I have a similar feeling about of exasperation complaints of President Trump’s challenges to veracity. Reading Marc Thiessen’s great column today about newly revealed disgraces committed by Team Obama in furtherance of the Iran deal, I don’t want to hear another goddamn word about Trump’s lying. Here is the »

The Final Year, Thank God (2)

Featured image As I have said a time or two before, Samantha Power made a name for herself with a book proclaiming our obligation to stop genocide abroad. Once she took office in the Obama administration, however, she became an apologist for Obama’s detachment from the catastrophe in Syria and his deal with the genocidal maniacs in Iran, among other things. It’s almost enough to make one question her bona fides, or »

The Final Year, Thank God

Featured image Now playing on HBO is Greg Barker’s documentary The Final Year chronicling President Obama’s foreign-policy team during Obama’s last year in office. It gives us a fly-on-the-wall view of John Kerry, Samantha Power, and Ben Rhodes doing their job through election day and slightly beyond. I watched it last night. Only 90 minutes long, the film began to grate on me as we rounded the corner into minute 2. Yet »

Obama Staffers Try to Undermine U.S. Foreign Policy

Featured image It is hard to be surprised these days, but this New York Times op-ed by former Obama staffers Steve Simon and Jonathan Stevenson is genuinely shocking: it urges European countries to withdraw their diplomats from the U.S. and expel American ambassadors. Seriously: After months of swaggering hesitation, President Trump finally announced the United States’ withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran, to which Britain, France, Russia, China, Germany and the »

A cynical moan about leaving the Iran deal

Featured image President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal has produced much hand-wringing from its supporters. Some of the angst is understandable. Former administration officials and many in the foreign policy establishment thought the deal was our best option for dealing with the threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons. I don’t agree, but acknowledge that the path Trump has chosen carries considerable risks (as, of course, did Obama’s). However, one »

Sarah Sanders Responds to Iran Critics

Featured image This is an example of why I like Sarah Sanders. From yesterday’s press briefing: Q Thank you, Sarah. Yesterday, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and former President Barack Obama all weighed in on the President’s Iran decision. A sampling of what they said: John Kerry was, it “weakens our security, breaks America’s word, isolates us from our European allies.” President Obama — former President Obama said that — called for, “principled, »

Killing the worst deal ever (8)

Featured image When I visited the White House last year for one of President Trump’s 100-day events, Roger Kimball asked the question I wanted to hear: “What about Iran?” Good question! And it elicited a good response. I reported it here on Power Line. “We can never let Iran have nuclear weapons,” Trump said, and, by contrast with his predecessor, seemed to mean it. “Israel wouldn’t have a chance,” he added. “They’ve »

Killing the worst deal ever (6)

Featured image To the extent attention has been paid to Bibi’s bombshell this week, the Obamabots and their media tools insist that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s presentation on the Iranian nuclear archive (which I think barely scratched the surface) added nothing to what they already knew. Matthew Kroenig addresses this point in “Why Netanyahu’s revelations are significant.” He elaborates two points I sought to make earlier in this series. As he puts it, »