So the Jeddah talks have begun

 So post-America has finally deigned to meet a Ukrainian delegation, after sending unmistakable signals to the world that it cares not whether that nation continues to exist as a sovereign entity, and that, in its view, Russia has the more sensible view of how to proceed.

The meeting is being hosted by Saudi Arabia:

Ukrainian and U.S. delegates are starting their talks in Jeddah on March 11 in a meeting that will likely have a major impact on Washington's future support for Kyiv and any effort to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

"The meeting with the U.S. team started very constructively; we are working towards a just and lasting peace," said President Volodymyr Zelensky's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.

The Ukrainian delegation is said to include Yermak, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, and Zelensky's Deputy Chief of Staff Pavlo Palisa.

The U.S. delegation is led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz.

The stakes are high:

Kyiv is entering the talks with a weak hand but is prepared to do what it needs to to get the U.S. back on its side.

"We're ready," a source in the President's Office told the Kyiv Independent when asked about the prospect of signing the mineral deal.

In an effort to convince the U.S. that Ukraine is serious about peace and in the hope that Washington will resume military aid and intelligence sharing, Kyiv is also reportedlyproposing a partial ceasefire covering long-range drone and missile strikes, as well as hostilities in the Black Sea.

The U.S., however, may now want to extort more from a weakened Ukraine.

Having to offer so much to the U.S. before peace talks with Russia can begin in earnest is being keenly felt in Kyiv.

When asked what Ukraine was expecting at the talks in Jeddah, the source in the President's Office replied: "Finally hearing what the Americans want from the negotiations."

Deciphering that level of inscrutability is a daunting task. The Very Stable Genius's signals are anything but encouraging:

"So many of the things that Trump has said in the last two or three days give you the impression that he thinks Ukraine was going to lose regardless, that the Biden administration wasted a lot of money prolonging (the war), and we just have to get that over with," Volker said.

Nothing that has come out of the White House in recent weeks suggests Trump has any interest in reaching a peace agreement that is in Ukraine's interests.

After Polish President Andrzej Duda said that Ukraine would not survive without U.S. support, Trump was asked in an interview on March 9 if he was "comfortable" with the thought of his actions potentially leading to the destruction of the country.

"Well, it may not survive anyway," Trump said.

His assessment of Ukraine's future came around a month after he flippantly suggested the country "may be Russian someday" in comments that made clear his main interest lay in Kyiv's mineral wealth and the ability to pay back U.S. military aid.

Trump's transactional approach to negotiations that appear to have little regard for Ukrainian lives, territory, or sovereignty is a major source of concern in Kyiv, and the country as a whole.

"The expectations (of the Jeddah meeting) are alarming," Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, lawmaker from the Holos party, chairman of the parliamentary committee on freedom of speech, told the Kyiv Independent.

"Because recently the U.S. administration has demonstrated a desire not for just peace, but for the fastest possible reconciliation between the victim and the aggressor, without taking into account the interests of the victim."

Yurchyshyn acknowledged that an "optimistic" outcome for the talks would simply be to get relations back on track and for the U.S. to "take into account the interests of Ukraine in the future negotiation process."

But another unavoidable fact of the U.S.-led peace negotiations so far is that Washington has not yet had to truly negotiate with Russia.

The much-vaunted first round of talks between Washington and Moscow on Feb. 18 produced little of actual substance — restoring embassy staffing for further diplomatic missions, appointing representatives to further the negotiation process, and creating the necessary conditions for restarting U.S.-Russia relations.

While repeatedly strong-arming Ukraine into proving it is serious about peace, the White House has said nothing so far about how it plans to make Russian President Vladimir Putin order his armed forces to put down their guns.

There's going to be a lot of talk about "difficult choices" and "the realm of what's possible." That crap pales in comparison to the central issue: what's right and wrong. The Putin regime forcibly annexed Crimea in 2014 and assaulted mainland Ukraine in March 2022 with missiles, drones and ground troops. Children have watched their mothers raped by Putin's thugs. Other children - thousands of them - have been kidnapped and taken to re-education camps inside Russia. Hospitals and schools have been destroyed.  Russian government officials and television commentators have regularly bandied about the possible use of nuclear weapons.

And in the last month the Very Stable Genius and his geldings have re-conferred "legitimacy" on the Putin regime.

It's obvious why. The VSG things the world's dictators sit at the cool kids' table. They're the kind of leader who gets things done, who command deference just by walking in a room.

Consequently, the VSG is engaging in outright evil. The Oval Office humiliation of Zelensky, the "pausing" of intelligence-sharing and aid, Rubio's opening bid at this Jeddah meeting.

It's evil, but it may well prevail.

 

The worthlessness of ceasefires

 LITD posts have lately mostly been of a world-affairs nature, haven't they? That's because, for all post-America's other vexations - the utter silliness of both political parties, rampant loneliness, the resistance of the woke apparatus to being dismantled, the debt that is on track to crowd out all other government expenditures in a few short years, not replenishing the country's population, an utter disregard for the transcendent - foreign policy incoherence is the one most likely to take the first bite out of our safety and comfort and the reliability off our institutions.

Because each has been going on for a few years now, we have become inured to the severity of Russia's attack on a sovereign nation, and the savagery Iran, through its proxies, has inflicted on Israel. We assume that, with regard to the over-arching association of rogue players, each with its own ideology and internal agendas, that is bound together by a common intention to end the US-dominated international order that's been in place since 1945, sharp minds are on the case and will see that nothing gets too out of hand. 

Thus, we have clowns in the current administration, and the one coming in in January, coming up with "solutions" to the above-mentioned conflagrations based on an "end wars" mindset.

That's a really stupid way to approach the current situation. There are risks attendant to a goal of the attacked nation-states in each case winning their wars, but they're small compared to the consequences of appeasing the aggressors.

Tell you what. I'm going to quote Seth Mandel's latest column at Commentary in its entirety, because there'd be no point in trying to improve upon its incisiveness:

Buried in a New York Times explainer on the ICC’s issuance of an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu is this helpful nugget: “Gaza has been controlled by Hamas since 2007 and the militant group does not recognize its subjugation to a Palestine state.”

And why? Because Hamas is essentially a hostile occupying force on behalf of Iran. And who else falls into that category? Hezbollah in Lebanon. And for good measure, let’s add one more: Arguably the most troublesome pocket in the West Bank centers on Jenin, and the troublemakers in Jenin are proxies of Iran as well. For all intents and purposes, the city is foreign territory.

Here’s the point: Israel is not in conflict with any of the “host countries,” however generously we use that term, with whom it is supposedly negotiating.

It’s fun to pretend, but it’s not productive. Foolish faith in ceasefire agreements with entities that do not recognize the sovereignty of their own territory is how we got here. Oct. 6, 2023 was the last time a ceasefire’s false sense of security governed Israel’s understanding of the status quo. Oct. 7, 2023 was the result.

Let’s look at the ceasefire deal with Hezbollah announced yesterday.

The deal halts the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah for 60 days. Both the IDF and Hezbollah are to clear their forces from Lebanese territory south of the Litani River tout de suite. Filling the vacuum will be the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers—both of which are compromised by their deference to, and fear of, Hezbollah. A complaint board that will determine compliance with the agreement and adjudicate claims of violations will be under the supervision of the United States.

Yesterday, President Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron crowed that, “after many weeks of tireless diplomacy, Israel and Lebanon have accepted a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon.”

Between Israel and Lebanon? Have there been hostilities between Israel and Lebanon? Because it would be very silly to have Lebanese troops patrol the buffer zone if the buffer zone is meant to separate the IDF from Lebanese troops.

It’s wonderful that “Israel and Lebanon have accepted a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon.” Whoever this “Lebanon” guy is, he sounds nice. But I have no idea what he’s doing here.

Last week, men almost surely hired by Iran murdered in cold blood a Jerusalem-born Chabad rabbi in Dubai. Are Biden and Macron working on a “ceasefire” between Israel and the United Arab Emirates? Of course not, and no one is even suggesting such a thing, because it would be patently ridiculous on its face and arguably a mockery of the victim.

So that’s the conceptual absurdity of this ceasefire. What about its practicality?

“Eight vehicles and a motorcycle carrying Hezbollah personnel arrived at the ruins of Kfar Kila near Matula,” Israel’s Kann News reported this morning. “The IDF force that was on the spot drove them away with warning shots.”

Metula is an Israeli town on the border with Lebanon. Hezbollah had begun the ceasefire by advancing on Israel. Wrong direction, guys! Like legendary Vikings defensive end Jim Marshall recovering that fumble against the 49ers in 1964 and then running 65 yards into the wrong end zone—except on purpose.

And Israel’s response was to fire warning shots, because anything more aggressive—anything actually appropriate to the threat, in other words—would have triggered condemnation from the very allies that negotiated this ceasefire.

The Lebanese Armed Forces cannot enforce this ceasefire. If they could, they would have already cleared the area of Hezbollah, which has been operating with impunity for four decades. And the UN peacekeepers are Hezbollah’s trusted allies—that may sound harsh but it is just plain fact.

Yes, Israel is hoping to run out the clock on the Biden administration and have freer range of action once Donald Trump takes office. But Hezbollah knows Biden is on his way out, too, and that Trump is on his way in. And the enemy always gets a vote. Sometimes that vote is expressed by a nine-vehicle Hezbollah convoy encroaching on Israel’s sovereign border, in contemptuous contravention of a ceasefire signed by “Lebanon.”

And now, let us look at Keith Kellogg, the Very Stable Genius's choice for a guy to impose defeat on Ukraine: 

Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, President elect-Trump's pick for special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, has pushed a proposal to end the war between the two countries through Ukraine ceding land to Russia.

Why it matters: Trump named Kellogg as his choice for special envoy on Wednesday, months after Reuters reported on Kellogg's policy plan in June. The plan for a ceasefire signals U.S. support for the war effort would be scaled back.

• It also would mark a shift from the Biden administration's stance on the war and could be met with pushback from European allies.

Zoom in: Kellogg, who served as national security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, co-authored a research report detailing his Ukraine policy proposal with former NSA chief of staff Fred Fleitz.

• "The United States would continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement," Kellogg and Fleitz state in the plan.
• But future U.S. military aid will require Ukraine to participate in peace talks with Russia, according to the report.
• To convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to join peace talks, "President Biden and other NATO leaders should offer to put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees," the pair wrote.

The big picture: Trump has vowed to end the war in Ukraine using his personal relationship with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to get a peace deal.

Here's how the VSG thinks about such things:

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to end Russia's war with Ukraine if elected, saying in September that he would negotiate a deal "that's good for both sides." He also praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and questioned further U.S. assistance to Ukraine.

"Good for both sides." What the hell kind of formulation is that? Russia is the aggressor in this situation. The West has no business dangling a nice outcome before Putin. The only way to speak of Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine is in terms of defeat.

All the F-16s, ATACMs, mines and Storm Shadows should have been provided no later that March 2022. Yes, it's great that they're arriving now, but their ability to be game-changers is badly diminished.

Trump, of course, views the whole thing transactionally. He wants to wind this up with minimal bad effect on what he perceives to be Putin's high regard of him. 

Ceasefires are nothing but a tamping-down of wrongs that will come back in another manifestation at some point. Fifteen years after the 1953 armistice that stopped fighting between North and South Korea, the crew of the USS Pueblo spent a year in captivity in the Kim dynasty's worker's paradise. Nixon's "peace with honor" in Vietnam led to the April 1975 crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon by tanks from the North, and the still-repugnant scene of desperate Vietnamese trying to hang on to the runners of the last helicopter to take off from the US embassy roof. 

If Ukraine and Israel don't achieve total victory over Russia and Iran respectively, we will have abandoned the world stage to Dodge City status. 

Post-America has decided it  has no use for moral clarity. Bad things will result. 

More folks in Congress - including lotsa Democrats - are waking up to the realization that patty cake with Iran was always a bad idea

 The American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka, writing at The Dispatch, says that the Biden-era push to revive a deal with Iran on its nuclear ambitions is running out of steam among members of Congress:

“It is time to tell the Europeans—who[m] we have shown good faith with, that we were willing to enter into what was hopefully a stronger and longer deal—that the Iranians are not there,” Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Menendez told the AIPAC New Jersey spring leadership dinner last week. Sure, it was what his audience wanted to hear; AIPAC has been lobbying against Barack Obama’s Iran deal since it was first signed in 2015. But Menendez is not alone. A June 1 non-binding measure offered by Sen. Jim Lankford (R-Oklahoma) demanding that any nuclear agreement address Tehran-sponsored terrorism and opposing sanctions relief for the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps passed with every Republican but one, and 16 Democrats, including Menendez and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Lankford got a lot of support from across the aisle:

Democrats who voted with Lankford: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York ), Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), Chris Coons (D-Delaware), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada) Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire), Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), Angus King (I-Maine), Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), Gary Peters (D-Michigan), Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona), Jon Tester (D-Montana) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon). Of the 16, five are up for re-election in 2022, three in tough races (Cortez Masto, Hassan, and Kelly).

And for good reason. Iran has once again been showing itself to bed a bad-faith negotiating partner:

The Board of Governors for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) passed a resolution condemning (with only two nations opposing) Tehran’s failure to disclose requested information about nuclear activity at three previously undisclosed sites. While the work was alleged to have taken place prior to 2003, documents spirited from Iran by Israel reveal a complex effort (which included documents stolen from the IAEA itself) to hoodwink the international nuclear agency. Any steps to condemn Iran at the IAEA would follow a two-year hiatus during which European powers and (reportedly beginning in November 2020) the Biden administration tried their best to sweet talk, cajole, bribe, and threaten Tehran back into compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal.

This whole undertaking was always a bad idea. Barack Obama and John Kerry pursed it so vigorously in the first place because they're both flaming narcissists who had some kind of idea that history would regard them as visionaries ushering in an unprecedented era of unicorns and rainbows. Kerry wanted it so badly he was willing to be publicly humiliated and insulted by Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at the interminable meetings at which the JCPOA was hammered out. And the Obama administration and those shilling for it continued to offer up flimsy defense of it afterward, even as top Iranian officials continued to cal the US the Great Satan and Iran's number-one enemy, even as Iran continued to wage proxy war through terrorist groups, and even as it captured a US Navy crew - on the day of an Obama State of the Union address - and distributed photos world wide of the crewmen on their knees with their hands behind their heads.

Appeasing bad guys is always a bad idea.

 

 

 

An appallingly amoral foreign policy framework

 ADA University professor Damjan Krnjevic Miskovic has a piece at The National Interest today the thrust of which is basically that he's in Henry Kissinger's corner with regard to Ukraine. He does offer his own elaboration of that position, and it's one I find icy in the extreme.

I have no problem, in and of itself, with an assertion he makes in the first paragraph:

Disorder cannot be transcended because human nature is not pliable like Play-Doh: we have deceived ourselves into confusing humanity’s indisputable technological progress with the illusion of our moral progression. 

But when he brings two of the most hardass historians of all time into the discussion, we get our first hint of where he's going with his argument:

 

Only in periods of history in which sophistry is mistaken for prudence and deliberation is permitted to atrophy into wishful thinking can there be a failure to understand that the teachings of thinkers like Thucydides and Machiavelli describe and explain the ways of the world better than any chiliastic alternative.

I really don't even have a problem with Miskovic's summation of the Kissinger view of what is possible regarding a sustainable world order in general:

As Kissinger has rightly underlined, no balance of power system has ever been designed to eliminate crises and conflicts. When functioning properly, such systems of international order are simply meant to limit the scope of domination and conflicts. Their aim is to foster both stability and moderation, not perpetual peace or other such nonsense. Optimally, a balance of power system keeps everyone’s dissatisfaction at a low enough level to not result in attempts to overthrow the basic tenets of the system.

That actually sounds about right. No world-stage arrangement can be expected to be permanent. 

I also think his point that the absence of an envisioned outcome in Ukraine, broadly agreed upon in the West, is going to have to be addressed pretty soon:

After one hundred days of driving, the destination remains unknown: the fundamental question of Western war aims in the conflict over Ukraine is simply not being answered—not just in public, which is fine, but most probably in private, too, which is not. Is the aim to engender regime change in the Kremlin? The destruction of Russia’s capability to fight and win wars? A return to Soviet-era living standards for the citizens of the Russian Federation? A war crimes tribunal? A ceasefire? A peace agreement? A territorial settlement? A new European security architecture?

But in the next paragraph, he employs the term "maximalist" to describe Kyiv's position - i.e., that it will not give up any territory that has been seized by Russia, certainly since February of this year, and, if possible, since 2014. As he pursues his argument, it becomes clear he means "maximalist" in a disparaging way.

And then he really get to the crux of his rationale, which is that, since Ukraine is not militarily powerful enough to qualify as a first-tier world power, its demand for justice amounts to nothing more than a ratcheting up of the danger level in relations between those first-tier powers:

. . . the truth is—however uncomfortable it may be to accept—that Ukraine was and remains an object of great power relations and not a subject of international order. Indeed, it would be hard to argue persuasively that a country that depends almost entirely on the free guns, ammo, and reconnaissance supplied by foreign powers is either fully sovereign or fully independent, regardless of its regime type.

Sounds harsh? Well, the support provided to Ukraine by the West comes in the form of arms sales and weapons transfers, military training, real-time intelligence sharing, direct cash grants and massive loan guarantees, an open-door refugee policy, and the threat of repurposing billions of U.S. dollars of seized Russian assets for reconstruction coupled with the promise of spending untold amounts of Western resources on the same. A report by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy indicates that between January 24 and May 10, 2022, the West (this includes Turkey) provided at least €64.6 billion worth of military, financial, and humanitarian commitments to the country, of which €42.9 billion (66 percent) came from the United States (more than half of the U.S. contribution is earmarked for military and weapons purchases). These staggeringly large figures appear to be conservative estimates, given that they neither include commitments by international financial institutions, philanthropies, and other non-governmental actors. And since the publication of that report, such unprecedented quantities may have already doubled.

It is thus becoming increasingly hard to disprove the Kremlin’s claim that the conflict over Ukraine amounts to a proxy war between the West and Russia—or at least that it has become one since the West realized that Moscow’s “special military operation” would not produce the rapid capitulation of the government in Kyiv. Consequently, the West was able to rally behind Kyiv’s “David versus Goliath” narrative, personified by its young and telegenic president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

A bit later, this disparaging use of the term "maximalist" shows up twice in one paragraph:

. . . one or another version of this maximalist posture is irresponsibly being encouraged by various Western leaders, as epitomized by the young and telegenic Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, whose position the New York Times characterizes as Russia “must be defeated at all costs, and without compromise.” Other members of this Western maximalist faction include some (but not all) leaders of former Warsaw Pact states (all of which are now NATO members, which means they’re armed with the near-certain knowledge that they will not have to suffer the consequences of their tough talk), the UK government, and some parts of the Biden administration, including (it sometimes seems) the president himself.

As he unfolds his argument some more, he brings up a point that let's-drop-Ukraine-like-a-hot-potato types of several stripes like to mention: that Ukraine in modern times has a history of instability and corruption.  I would offer the view that, even though the invasion by Russia is ongoing, we have already seen a dramatic shift in the political character of Ukraine. There is not only the resolve of President Zelenskyy, but that of the mayors of cities around the country, the clarity with which members of the Ukrainian parliament have spoken on Western media and to Western forums, and, finally, the deep humanity of the citizens-turned-refugees. It may seem like a small matter, but I've been impressed with the number of them who were unwilling to leave their pets behind as they fled their homes.

No, Professor Miskovic, while you may have a point that no one should expect that a Ukrainian victory would usher in an age of unicorns and rainbows, it is in the interest of the West to foster such an outcome because it is right. If you'd like me to put that in more pragmatic terms, letting an unjust outcome suffice sets a precedent of which other hegemonic powers will take note. Want an example? China's designs on Taiwan will be given encouragement.

Sorry, Professor, but what you're dishing up is a highbrow justification for appeasing the bad guy. 

 

 

 

Principled political figures are as rare as snow in July, but once in a while you find one

 

 

I'm more reluctant by the day to lionize any political figure, especially since the Trumpism phenomenon made my heart heavy with disillusionment. 

But as of now, Liz Cheney is on my list of supremely cool people. Watch her Meet The Press Interview from this morning.  She give exactly the right answer to the two most important questions in the seven-minute conversation. 

When asked about what kinds of compromises might bet necessary on Ukraine's part to achieve a cease-fire, she says, in so many words, "none." Just so. It would be like a woman negotiating with her rapist on the consequences of his aggression. 

And she's similarly spot-on about the attempt to put the JCPOA back together. Chuck Todd tries to parse matters by asking her if she'd be cool with a deal on Iran's nuclear capabilities if Russia weren't involved. "Nah," she basically says. A pariah state is a pariah state. Surely we're learning that from the Eastern European cataclysm.

If I do vote for president in 2024 - and it's far from certain that I will - it will be for her, whether or not she's on the ballot.

All for naught

Both our current president and his immediate predecessor have had a thing for appeasing America's enemies.

In the case of Barack Obama, the motivation was a mixture of the leftism he was steeped in, which sees the United States as needing to make amends for a supposed world-stage arrogance, as well as Obama's inherent narcissism, which manifested itself as a desire to be remembered as a visionary who ushered in a new era of global harmony. His narcissistic secretary of state John Kerry shared this latter motivation.

Of course, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action into which they convince an alliance of Western nations to enter with Iran was a joke. While Iran may have temporarily reduced its production of  nuclear fuel, it continued apace with missile production, sponsorship of terrorism, belligerent rhetoric and gestures of humiliation. Particularly symbolic was its capture of a US Navy crew the day of Obama's State of the Union Address. The captors made much hay of the photograph it took of the crew members on their knees with their hands behind their heads.

The Very Stable Genius is likewise a narcissist, but, as with any other trait he exhibits, it gets erratically expressed and doesn't lend itself to the kind of analysis that assumes any kind of strategy. In the case of Trump and North Korea, a notion to try cozying up to Kim rather than continue in a mode of tension just popped into his head one day. There resulted two summits, one in Singapore and one in Vietnam. Three, if you count Trump's stepping, for a few minutes, over the border between the ROK and the DPROK while on a visit to the former. There was the Trump-speak gushing about "beautiful letters" and how North Korea had the potential to be a robust player in the international community.

Again, the result is now confirmed to be a joke:

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has no interest in maintaining a good relationship with US president Donald Trump, it is reported on the the two year anniversary of the leaders first summit. 

Amid heightened inter-Korean affairs, the despotic regime has announced it sees no improvement in relations and says US policies prove Trump's administration remains a long-term threat to the secretive state and its people.

North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Son Gwon made statement carried by state news agency KCNA, in which he slams a "hypocritical empty promise" made by Trump at the historic meeting two years ago.

The Singapore summit in June 2018 represented the first time a sitting American president met with a North Korean leader, but the statement that came out of the meeting was light on specifics, and instead gave four general commitments. 

Ri said in retrospect the Trump administration appears to have been focusing on only scoring political points while seeking to isolate and suffocate North Korea, and threatening it with preemptive nuclear strikes and regime change.

"Never again will we provide the US chief executive with another package to be used for achievements without receiving any returns," he said.

"Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise." 

On Thursday North Korea criticised the United States for commenting on inter-Korean affairs, and said Washington should stay quiet if it wants the upcoming presidential election to go smoothly. 

Ri said North Korea's desire to open a new cooperative era runs deep as ever, but that the situation on the Korean peninsula is daily taking a turn for the worse. 

"The U.S. professes to be an advocate for improved relations with the DPRK, but in fact, it is hell-bent on only exacerbating the situation," Ri said.

Ostentatious fawning got the VSG exactly nowhere.

Sucking up to bad guys is never a smart move.

 

Let's review some basics

1.) It's impossible by definition for there to be a right to health care.

2.) It's impossible by definition for there to be a right to a job.

3.) Until the last 20 years, no culture anywhere in the world defined marriage in such a way as to include the union of two people of the same sex.

4.) Gender is not fluid.

5.) The global climate is not in a state of crisis.

6.) A good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth. Allowing any other party to be part of that agreement distorts the value that buyer and seller have agreed upon.

7.) Appeasement of rogue states and rogue regimes invites continued hostile behavior directed at the nation-state doing the appeasing.

Bolton's departure

Surprising in some ways, not in others. It actually looked like a doomed arrangement from the start. Bolton has a set of core principles that drive his policy positions, and his boss - well, we know that he's driven by his craving for self-glorification.

But the fronts on which the rift widened had been increasing for a while:

Back in May, with tensions rising between the U.S. and Iran, Trump’s Fox buddy Tucker Carlson began taking hard shots at him on the air for his hawkishness. It got worse in June when Trump canceled a bombing strike on Iran at the last minute against the advice of Bolton, among others; Carlson took to telling Fox viewers that Bolton was a “bureaucratic tapeworm” and Trump reportedly lamented to a confidant about his own natsec advisors, “These people want to push us into a war, and it’s so disgusting.” A few weeks later, Bolton was conspicuously absent from Trump’s big photo op with Kim Jong Un at the DMZ, having been tasked with a visit to Mongolia at the time instead. (Ironically, Carlson did accompany Trump, albeit as part of Fox’s team.)

Things seemed to deteriorate from there. The most hardcore Republican Bolton critic in Congress, Rand Paul, was deputized by Trump in July to try to broker negotiations with Iran. (Paul is already celebrating Bolton’s termination on Twitter today.) More recently reports being bubbling up that Bolton had been sidelined from the peace process in Afghanistan and was being excluded from meetings. Rumors began circulating that his relationship with Mike Pompeo, a Trump favorite, had collapsed, with natsec deputies unsure who was actually steering the diplomatic ship between the more negotiation-minded Pompeo and the more hardline Bolton.

The final straw may have been Bolton reportedly (and correctly) urging Trump to resist his instincts to invite the Taliban to Camp David for peace talks. If anything finished him off in Trump’s eyes, it may have been the public perception over the last 48 hours that his NSA was right about that and showed “toughness” and judgment that Trump lacked. In fact, Trump may have suspected Bolton or his team of leaking the fact that Bolton opposed Trump’s idea and chose to axe him for that reason. The president hates when his aides get the glory that he thinks he deserves, as Steve Bannon might tell you.

Regarding the above-mentioned set of core principles, adherence to such a thing comes as such a shock to most people in our relativistic, situational age that it's axiomatic that references to Bolton in news stories are going to preface his name with the adjective "hawkish." What that means, as applied to Mr. Bolton, is that he understands this: You never legitimize rogue states or groups. It's folly of the highest order. North Korea, Iran and the Taliban are deadly serious about destroying the United States and imposing an order on the world that would be the antithesis of Western liberalism.

Trumpists employ the term "endless wars" with predictable frequency. But as Andrew McCarthy points out in a piece at National Review today, the fact that the US has been in Afghanistan 18 years does not by itself mean anything:

Afghanistan is not the war. The war is against the jihadist forces of sharia supremacism. We have to fight them wherever they work to stage attacks against the United States, our allies, and our interests.

Per the first excerpt above, Pompeo seems more inclined to see possibility in negotiation, but that may be due to the nature of his current job. I don't think there's a gaping amount of daylight between Bolton and Pompeo in terms of basic worldview. I certainly don't have a fly on the wall reporting back to me from either the White House or the State Department, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to see Pompeo leave under some kind of circumstances sooner rather than later.

It's this kind of stuff - today's edition

Axiom number one about the Very Stable Genius: He will always go for the most boneheaded way he can find to make his point.

Today's Exhibit A:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

Really bad news! The Baltimore house of Elijah Cummings was robbed. Too bad!

4:58 AM - 2 Aug 2019

Look, there's a lot of layers of background that can be sorted through. We are all now aware that Cummings himself called the blighted parts of his district "drug-infested" twenty some years ago, and that certainly gives the Trumpists justifiable fodder for a "see-it's-not-racist" stance. There are those, including right-of-center folks, who, in defending Cummings from Trump's go-back-and-fix-your-drug-infested-district tweet - and probably this one as well - point to times Cummings has graciously defended Republicans in committee hearings. Ah, but then there are the children Cummings has had out of wedlock and his IRS troubles. All very exciting if you're defending one brand or another.

But whatever one would like to emphasize in all this, it's just unseemly for a US president to gloat on social media about a Congressman's home being invaded.

We have a track record of over two and a half years to examine now, and the evidence is clear: Donald Trump is not become more statesmanlike.

He may be all that stands between us and the nightmare vision of the Democrats becoming a reality, but let's dispense with talk of him being able to make America great. He's as much an agent of cultural rot as any leftist.

UPDATE: The VSG sees fit to have a big yuk over a Congressman's house being robbed, but has nothing but effusive gushing for a dictator who has had his uncle and half-brother killed (the latter by having VX nerve agent tossed in his face at an airport), had his defense minister ripped to bits at close range by ant-aircraft guns for falling asleep at a government event, and holds 200,000 of his citizens in prison camps, and has resumed missile testing. And, of course, he stresses that only he can bring out said dictator's desire to see his country become a land of milk and honey:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

.....Chairman Kim does not want to disappoint me with a violation of trust, there is far too much for North Korea to gain - the potential as a Country, under Kim Jong Un’s leadership, is unlimited. Also, there is far too much to lose. I may be wrong, but I believe that......

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

....Chariman Kim has a great and beautiful vision for his country, and only the United States, with me as President, can make that vision come true. He will do the right thing because he is far too smart not to, and he does not want to disappoint his friend, President Trump!

It's this kind of thing - and the characterization of Hong Kong protests as "riots" about which I wrote yesterday - that causes me to give a big thumbs down to Adil Najam's endorsement of Trump mediating the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir.   Real bad idea.