Trump's UN Speech was Properly Forceful and Pragmatic: Editorial, National Post, Sept. 22, 2017— On Tuesday, President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly.
Why the Left Hated Trump’s U.N. Speech: Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post, Sept. 20, 2017— When Donald Trump ran for president, he criticized the interventionist policies of his Republican and Democratic predecessors, sparking fears that he would usher in a new era of American isolationism.
At ‘Iran Summit,’ Bipartisan Hatred of Iran Deal Stands Stronge: Philip H. DeVoe, National Review, Sept. 22, 2017— During his first address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Donald Trump declared the Iranian nuclear deal “an embarrassment to the United States,”…
The Nuclear Deal Is Only Half of It: Lee Smith, Weekly Standard, Sept. 25, 2017 — The Trump White House has yet to roll out its much-anticipated, comprehensive, government-wide Iran policy review…
On Topic Links
Trump at UN: He’s back. (Video): Israpundit, Sept. 19, 2017
Unfashionable as it is to Say, Trump Spoke the Ugly Truth in his Refreshing UN Speech: Christie Blatchford, National Post, Sept. 22, 2017
State Department Waging "Open War" on White House: Soeren Kern, Gatestone Institute, September 17, 2017
Perfect Partners: Reuel Marc Gerecht, Weekly Standard, Sept. 18, 2017
TRUMP'S UN SPEECH WAS PROPERLY FORCEFUL AND PRAGMATIC
Editorial
National Post, Sept. 22, 2017
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly. If you only followed the media’s coverage of the event, you may be of the impression that it was a failure. Trump was widely ridiculed for referring to North Korea leader Kim Jong-Un as the “Rocket Man.” A picture of Chief of Staff John Kelly resting his head in his hand during the speech rapidly made the rounds on social media. The New York Times stated that Trump had “brought the same confrontational style of leadership he has used at home to the world’s most prominent stage.”
These sound bite accounts give Trump’s speech short shrift. If you watch the 40-minute address, there’s a good chance you’ll come away with a different view of it. Trump’s tone may have been bombastic, and his outlook unduly grim, but the positions he articulated on a wide range of issues — from global security to immigration to UN reform — were pragmatic. Trump used the speech to emphasize a basic, but often overlooked, fact of politics: a “government’s first duty is to its people, to our citizens … to serve their needs, to ensure their safety, to preserve their rights, and to defend their values.” Critics pounced on this “America First” rhetoric, suggesting it signaled a retreat from a commitment to pursue collective goals.
And Trump’s statements would have indeed been troubling if they had not been matched by clear language reinforcing the U.S.’ intention to work with its allies (as some of his earlier, ambiguous statements about NATO rightly led people to question). But this was not the case here. While Trump did emphasize the importance of state sovereignty, he also advocated for international action to address global problems. “Just as the founders of this body intended,” he stated, “we must work together and confront together those who threaten us with chaos, turmoil and terror.”
One important way the administration intends to do this, Trump made clear, is by dealing aggressively with the countries that are posing the most acute threats to global or regional stability: North Korea, Iran and Venezuela. To North Korea in particular, Trump delivered a forceful — but necessary — message: North Korea will suffer a terrible fate if the U.S. is forced to defend itself or its allies. Given Kim Jong-Un’s increasingly bellicose actions of late, it would be a grave concern if the U.S. administration were not employing severe actions and rhetoric to respond to Kim’s threats.
Which leads to Russia and China. Some pundits criticized Trump for only obliquely chiding these two heavyweights in his speech. While stronger language against Vladimir Putin in particular would have been welcome, it may have compromised nearer-term goals. Currently, the Trump administration is working to build international support to impose increasingly punitive sanctions on North Korea (last week, the Security Council unanimously passed new sanctions against the rogue state). For such efforts to be successful, the U.S. requires China and Russia’s co-operation. Similarly, if the U.S. does move ahead with plans to negotiate a tougher nuclear deal with Iran, it will need these two countries’ support, as they are signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear framework agreement.
On the question of refugees, Trump said that the U.S. will focus on supporting G20 agreements that “seek to host refugees as close to their home countries as possible.” While this message may not warm the heart like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s tweets aim to, the position is not unprincipled. As Syria’s civil war begins to wind down and ISIL becomes an increasingly diminished force, the region’s war-torn countries will need their human capital to return if they are to have any chance of rebuilding successfully. The U.S. may well get more bang for its buck supporting refugees from afar than it would from bringing a small number into its country for permanent resettlement.
Trump tackled another key issue: the UN must be reformed. “It is a massive source of embarrassment to the United Nations,” he noted, “that some governments with egregious human rights records sit on the UN Human Rights Council.” He’s right. Currently, the Council’s membership includes Venezuela, which is inching closer towards dictatorship every day; the Philippines, which has undertaken a massive program of extra-judicial killings to combat its drug problem; and Saudi Arabia, which generally requires women to obtain a male guardian’s permission to travel, marry, work and obtain health care.
Trump also returned to a common, but important, theme: that other nations must contribute their fair share to the UN. The UN is comprised of 193 nations, yet, in 2017, the U.S. shouldered 22 per cent of its budget. The U.S. does not, obviously, house 22 per cent of the world’s population, so Trump is right to note that this math doesn’t work. Importantly, though, Trump reaffirmed support for the UN, and even noted the U.S. would be prepared to “bear an unfair cost burden” if the UN was reformed into a “much more accountable and effective advocate for human dignity and freedom around the world.” It is hard to disagree with this message.
In both style and substance, Trump’s speech did not resemble the kind of talks we’re used to politicians giving at the UN or other prestigious forums: it was blunt, forceful and firmly realist. Trump’s willingness to give voice to realities that other politicians refuse to acknowledge, or only delicately tiptoe around, is one of the reasons he was elected. The media does itself and voters a disservice when it fails to convey Trump’s true message.
WHY THE LEFT HATED TRUMP’S U.N. SPEECH
Marc A. Thiessen
Washington Post, Sept. 20, 2017
When Donald Trump ran for president, he criticized the interventionist policies of his Republican and Democratic predecessors, sparking fears that he would usher in a new era of American isolationism. But at the U.N. this week, Trump laid out a clear conservative vision for vigorous American global leadership based on the principle of state sovereignty.
Judging from their hysterical reaction, critics on the left now seem to fear he’s the second coming of George W. Bush. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called his address “bombastic.” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said it represented an “abdication of values.” And Hillary Clinton said it was “very dark” and “dangerous.” This is all the standard liberal critique of conservative internationalism. The left said much the same about President Ronald Reagan.
In New York, Trump called on responsible nation-states to join the United States in taking on what he called the “scourge” of “a small group of rogue regimes that . . . respect neither their own citizens nor the sovereign rights of their countries.” This mission can be accomplished, Trump said, only if we recognize that “the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.” He is right. Communism and fascism were not defeated by the United Nations, and global institutions did not fuel the dramatic expansion of human freedom and prosperity in the past quarter-century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. What has inspired and enabled the spread of peace, democracy and individual liberty was the principled projection of power by the world’s democratic countries, led by the United States.
This is what is needed today — and what Trump promised in his address. He recast his “America First” foreign policy as a call not for isolationism but for global leadership by responsible nation-states. He embraced the Marshall Plan — the massive U.S. effort to support Europe’s postwar recovery. And he declared that “if the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph” because “when decent people and nations become bystanders to history, the forces of destruction only gather power and strength.” Trump then used this theme of sovereignty to challenge the United States’ two greatest geopolitical adversaries, China and Russia, insisting that “we must reject threats to sovereignty from the Ukraine to the South China Sea.”
The president also had a blunt message for North Korea. He dismissed its leader, Kim Jong Un, as “Rocket Man” and said Kim “is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.” He made clear that “the United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” This message rattled some, and that was its intent. During the Cold War, Soviet leaders truly believed that Reagan was preparing for war and might actually launch a first strike. This belief is one of the reasons that a cataclysmic war never took place.
If we hope to avoid war with North Korea today, the regime in Pyongyang must be made to believe and understand that Trump is in fact, as he said at the U.N., “ready, willing and able” to take military action. His tough rhetoric was aimed not just at Pyongyang but also at China and other states whose cooperation in squeezing the regime is necessary for a peaceful solution. Those words must be followed by concrete steps short of total destruction to make clear that he is indeed serious and that North Korea will not be permitted to threaten American cites with nuclear annihilation.
Trump also put himself squarely on the side of morality in foreign policy and explicitly stood with those seeking freedom around the world. He promised to support the “enduring dream of the Cuban people to live in freedom.” He declared that “oppressive regimes cannot endure forever” and upbraided the Iranian regime for masking “a corrupt dictatorship behind the false guise of a democracy” while promising to stand with “the good people of Iran [who] want change.” He took on Iran’s ally, “the criminal regime of Bashar al-Assad” in Syria, whose “use of chemical weapons against his own citizens, even innocent children, shock the conscience of every decent person.”
And his best moment came when he turned to what he called the “socialist dictatorship” of Nicolás Maduro, declaring that “the problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.” Trump promised to help the Venezuelan people “regain their freedom, recover their country and restore their democracy.” This is classic conservative internationalism: a vigorous defense of freedom, a bold challenge to dangerous dictators and a commitment to the principle of peace through strength. No wonder Trump’s critics on the left are so upset.
AT ‘IRAN SUMMIT,’ BIPARTISAN HATRED OF IRAN DEAL STANDS STRONG
Philip H. DeVoe
National Review, Sept. 22, 2017
During his first address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Donald Trump declared the Iranian nuclear deal “an embarrassment to the United States,” assuring the audience that they haven’t “heard the last of it.” Four blocks away, at “Iran Summit 2017,” speakers including former Florida governor Jeb Bush, former senator Mike Kirk, General David Petraeus, former senator and vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, and other diplomats and congressmen gave a similar assurance: Support for the Iran deal is as low as ever.
The summit, held by the bipartisan group United Against Nuclear Iran, involved a series of panel discussions during which speakers explored the threat that Iran poses to the United States and its allies. Speakers agreed that preventing a nuclear Iran should be Trump’s top priority. Per the terms of the Iran “deal,” drafted in 2015 by the Obama administration, the United States agrees to lift sanctions if Iran closes a percentage of its uranium-enriching centrifuges and keeps its nuclear materials below the enrichment levels necessary for weapon development. Though the deal was broadly unpopular in 2015, due in part to its failure to guarantee a non-nuclear Iran after its expiration, the focus on issues such as health-care reform and the debt ceiling during the early days of the Trump administration has put it out of voters’ minds.
But not, it seems, out of all minds. Indeed if the UANI summit is to be trusted as a barometer, the renegotiation of the Iran deal is still a high priority for many in Washington, D.C., even within a Congress that is frequently willing to stonewall Trump legislation. In statements made to National Review, Mike Kirk confirmed he has full confidence that Congress won’t block Trump’s decision to rescind the deal, should the president decide to do so. When Congress voted on the deal in 2015, four Democratic senators and 19 Democratic representatives joined the Republican majority to vote no. According to Kirk, the only force blocking more Democrats from voting against the deal was influence from the Obama White House, so Trump should have an easy path forward. “The only thing saving Iran was Barack Obama,” Kirk said. “Iran has no allies now.”
Kirk also cited Iran’s close relationship with North Korea as a reason why public frustration with the deal remains strong. It was a point that many other speakers made in their comments. Lieberman opened his remarks by reminding the summit’s audience that the partnership between those two nations was bad for the stability of the world: “Any development in North Korea [in ballistic-missile technology] we will see next in Iran.” Or, put another way: A deal that fails to prevent Iranian ballistic-missile development and ensure nuclear deproliferation after it expires also threatens to increase North Korea’s power.
Many at the summit spoke in support of Trump’s foreign policy. Surprisingly, Trump’s 2016 primary foe Jeb Bush was one of the most ardent defenders of the president. Speaking opposite former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, a Democrat who opposed the deal, Bush responded to a question about Trump’s behavior toward Iran and North Korea by praising the president’s use of “chaotic language” as an appropriate strategic maneuver for “set[ting] the table” when dealing with hostile regimes.
Despite pressure from the moderator, NBC News’s Nicolle Wallace, Bush specifically credited Trump’s foreign policy as “moving in a more traditional way.” Bush did criticize Trump’s lack of “consistent policy,” but he recognized the president’s generals and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley are “leading the charge” and commended them on “doing a good job.”
Supporters of the deal have attempted to cut public support by employing the same arguments used in the debate over leaving the Paris climate agreement: The deal is better than nothing, and ending it would alienate our allies. But as many on the summit’s panels pointed out, renegotiation is central to the decision. Pulling the deal cold would certainly be worse than the original deal, which is why correcting mistakes and producing a new deal is so important. Representative Steve Israel (D., N.Y.), who broke party lines to vote against the Iran deal, explained that a central focus of renegotiations would be expanding it to include Middle Eastern countries, such as Israel, that were not parties to the original pact.
Panelists agreed that the U.S. should rapidly increase funding for its missile-defense program while the deal is still in place, because the deal fails to prevent Iran’s development of ballistic missiles. Considering that the U.S.’s missile-defense systems cannot adequately protect against an attack from even North Korea, building the program is key to national security. Kirk told NR that Israel’s current defense systems are also inadequate, being too old to target, let alone track and fire back at, incoming missiles. If Iran launches an ICBM at Tel Aviv or the United States before the deal is renegotiated, the odds are low that either nation will be able to protect itself.
For Americans concerned about the weakness of the Iran deal, the summit should provide some hope. Despite attacks from the left on Trump’s seemingly inevitable decision to back out of the deal, many on both sides are working to remind the public — and Congress — of its problems, and how important renegotiation is to national security. If the summit is any indication, the deal’s supporters are still few in number, and its repeal and revision will be swift.
THE NUCLEAR DEAL IS ONLY HALF OF IT
Lee Smith
Weekly Standard, Sept. 25, 2017
The Trump White House has yet to roll out its much-anticipated, comprehensive, government-wide Iran policy review, but administration principals have met over the last few weeks to iron out details regarding the nuclear deal with Iran, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. On September 14, as expected, Trump renewed the waiver that provides sanctions relief to Iran under the JCPOA’s terms, while the Treasury Department at the same time imposed new sanctions targeting supporters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
That recipe—waive nuclear sanctions while imposing other sanctions—is in keeping with the administration’s larger message about Iran, namely, that the problems the Islamic Republic poses go far beyond the nuclear program. These include support for terrorism and criminal enterprises, threats to strategic waterways, and ballistic missile development. The question still outstanding is whether that big picture will come to affect U.S. policy towards Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, where the Islamic Republic is further entrenching its position.
The next Iran deal milestone comes October 15 when the president must again certify to Congress—per the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act—that Iran is meeting the conditions of the JCPOA. Trump, who criticized the deal during his presidential campaign, is reportedly keen to decertify. In July he told the Wall Street Journal that “if it was up to me, I would have had [Iran] noncompliant 180 days ago.” So far, though, he hasn’t done so, blaming his secretary of state for keeping him from making a command decision. And Rex Tillerson is trying to do so now. According to an Associated Press report last week, the State Department has already urged the president to certify Iranian compliance again and then go to Congress to fix the deal.
“The secretary of state and his staff have been working since the transition to play Trump for an idiot on Iran,” says one veteran Iran hand closely involved in the decertification debate. “During the first round of waivers and recertifications in April, they tried to slip it by the president as just a minor ‘technical’ issue that he didn’t have to worry about. The next time certification came up in July, they simply denied him any other option. This time they’re trying to entangle him in process.” (The 2015 law requires certification every 90 days.) To ensure that Trump certifies in October, the State Department had tried to push a diplomatic process to tighten aspects of the deal, in partnership with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Europeans. But they predictably rebuffed State’s efforts, as did Iran. The point of that proposal, as with the latest initiative to “fix” the deal, is to tie Trump down in a process that will prevent him from decertifying—the first step in dismantling the deal entirely.
So what are the president’s options for October? He can still tear up the deal entirely, a scenario endorsed by John Bolton and previously promised by Trump. Another option would be to decertify Iran’s compliance with the deal but not reinstate sanctions, not yet anyway. “Trump can decertify on the condition that the JCPOA is not in the U.S. national interest,” says Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a leading expert on the deal. “Then it goes to Congress for debate for 60 days where the president needs to lay out a persuasive case that this is not the time for Congress to reinstate sanctions and abrogate the deal.”
According to Dubowitz, this tactic not only puts Iran on notice but gives our European allies plenty of advance warning to develop a common policy on how to fix the fatally flawed nuclear deal. The preference is do this together. But everyone needs to understand that the United States is prepared to reimpose sanctions instead of giving Iran patient pathways to nuclear weapons and ICBMs. “Europeans would prefer a common approach on Iran. They will always choose access to the $19 trillion U.S. economy over a $400 billion Iranian one,” says Dubowitz. “American coercive financial power, especially under Trump is real.” On the other hand, says Dubowitz, “if the president certifies [Iran’s compliance with] the JCPOA again next month, he’ll lose credibility—with Democrats, Europe, never mind Iran and other interested observers, most notably North Korea and Russia. If he does certify yet again, he will have an uphill battle going forward to demonstrate that he is prepared to walk away and use all instruments of power to pressure Iran and permanently cut off its pathways to atomic weapons.”
Trump at UN: He’s back. (Video): Israpundit, Sept. 19, 2017—PRESIDENT TRUMP: Mr. Secretary General, Mr. President, world leaders, and distinguished delegates: Welcome to New York. It is a profound honor to stand here in my home city, as a representative of the American people, to address the people of the world.
Unfashionable as it is to Say, Trump Spoke the Ugly Truth in his Refreshing UN Speech: Christie Blatchford, National Post, Sept. 22, 2017—Unfashionable and hazardous as it is to say this, I’m with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Neetanyahu, who tweeted on Tuesday after U.S. President Donald Trump’s inaugural speech to the United Nations, “In over 30 years in my experience with the UN, I never heard a bolder or more courageous speech.”
State Department Waging "Open War" on White House: Soeren Kern, Gatestone Institute, September 17, 2017—The U.S. State Department has backed away from a demand that Israel return $75 million in military aid which was allocated to it by the U.S. Congress. The repayment demand, championed by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, was described as an underhanded attempt by the State Department to derail a campaign pledge by U.S. President Donald J. Trump to improve relations with the Jewish state.
Perfect Partners: Reuel Marc Gerecht, Weekly Standard, Sept. 18, 2017—When he won election, Donald Trump—along with his national security adviser Michael Flynn, his all-purpose counselor Stephen Bannon, and, perhaps, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner—was fond of the idea that Russia and Iran, comrades-in-arms in Syria, weren’t natural partners.
