What the Mueller Probe Really Means: Conrad Black, The National Interest, Apr. 20, 2019 — The Mueller Report, despite the best efforts of the chief author and his partisan investigative staff, is a bone-crushing defeat for the president’s enemies.
The Trump Doctrine: Michael Anton, FP, Apr. 20, 2019 — Two years into U.S. President Donald Trump’s tenure, there is still endemic confusion about what, exactly, his foreign policy is.
Give Trump’s Peace Deal a Chance: David Hazony, Forward, Apr. 17, 2019 — We know little about the coming plan for Middle East peace being offered by the Trump Administration, but the pre-emptive strikes against it have begun. “Dead on arrival” is a phrase we’re hearing a lot these days.
Trump’s Peace Plan and 37 Senior European Hypocrites: Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, The Tundra Tabloid, Apr. 22, 2019 — U.S. President Trump’s peace plan has yet to be published. This hasn’t stopped 37 European politicians – largely “has beens” — from publishing a joint letter against it in the frequently anti-Israeli UK Guardian Daily on April 15.
On Topic Links
The Mueller Report Concludes It Was Not Needed: Kevin Brock, The Hill, Apr. 20, 2019 — How would you like to spend two years and $30 million assembling a report that concludes you were not needed in the first place? Voilà: the Mueller report. Nice work if you can get it.
Mueller’s Report Speaks Volumes: Kimberley Strassel, WSJ, Apr. 19, 2019 — By the fall of 2017, it was clear that special counsel Robert Mueller, as a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was too conflicted to take a detached look at a Russia-collusion story that had become more about FBI malfeasance than about Donald Trump.
Bob Woodward: FBI, CIA Reliance on ‘Garbage’ Steele Dossier ‘Needs to Be Investigated’: Jack Crowe, National Review, Apr. 22, 2019 — Veteran reporter Bob Woodward said Monday that the intelligence community’s reliance on the infamous Steele dossier “needs to be investigated” in the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s failure to corroborate many of the document’s key claims.
Trump after Mueller: Rame Ponnuru, National Review, Apr. 22, 2019 – Now that Attorney General Bill Barr has released his summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into President Donald Trump, many people in the White House think that new opportunities are beckoning.
Victor Davis Hanson On His New Book, “The Case for Trump”: Victor Davis Hanson, Hoover Institute, Mar. 7, 2019 — Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson discusses his new book, “The Case for Trump,” at Hoover’s Washington, DC headquarters. YouTube.
WHAT THE MUELLER PROBE REALLY MEANS
Conrad Black
The National Interest, Apr. 20, 2019
The Mueller Report, despite the best efforts of the chief author and his partisan investigative staff, is a bone-crushing defeat for the president’s enemies. There is not a whit of evidence that any American collaborated with any Russian to alter the results of the 2016 presidential election, and there is extensive evidence that the Trump campaign was the subject of enticements to collaborate and rebuffed all of them at all levels. The laborious bulk of Mueller’s minute description of completely inconsequential twists and turns in his investigation leaves the reader in no doubt of his thoroughness, and in no doubt of the complete absence of any case that could be made for collusion, let alone cooperation in an actual crime of attempting to influence the election illegally. As there is clearly no excuse for the special counsel to have been established, Mueller devotes the second half of his report to an effort to scratch together a virtual justification for it, by leading the reader through another maze to imply that there might be a conceivable case against the president for obstruction of justice. He acknowledges that he does not have a clear idea of the president’s motives, and so cannot judge if there was a corrupt motive but cannot exonerate him either.
This is a reprehensibly unjust and shabby device. A special counsel is not in the exoneration business. If he thinks he has evidence of a crime by an incumbent president, that reaches the point of being beyond a reasonable doubt, he recommends impeachment. By this standard, nobody could ever be exonerated of anything—all you could say is that you don’t have enough, or in the case of collusion with Russia, any, evidence. Trump could, in theory, still be guilty of colluding with the Russians to rig the last election; there just is not a scintilla of evidence to support that conclusion. The criteria for obstruction are as enumerated by the attorney general in his summary of conclusions almost two weeks before the report was released: a corrupt act with corrupt intent in order to obstruct an actual or apprehended legal proceeding. There was no crime that Trump was attempting to withhold or shelter from just discovery and adjudication, no evidence of a corrupt intent, and no corrupt act. There is only, though Mueller did not have the elemental decency to put it so clearly, though the attorney general did, evidence that the president was frequently annoyed at being tormented and defamed as a suspect in the commission of a heinous offense, of which he was not only innocent, but which did not occur.
There was no excuse for the setting up of this special investigation. The previous special prosecutor legislation required a high confidence level that a crime had been committed. There was obviously no such thing in this case. If Attorney General Jeff Sessions had to recuse because of his presumably inadvertent, mistaken answers to questions in his confirmation hearings about speaking with the Russian ambassador, then he should have resigned. This would have allowed the president to name someone who could do the job through the difficulties that were clearly being fanned and seeded. The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, should not have buckled to Democratic pressure that was escalated by fired FBI director James Comey’s illegal leak to the New York Timesdesigned to provoke the appointment of a special counsel. Having determined to do so anyway, Rosenstein should not have asked Mueller to perform that function, given Mueller’s entire identification with the FBI and close past association with Comey and Rosenstein, including in the Uranium One affair involving the Clintons. Rosenstein had recommended the dismissal of Comey and signed an application for renewal of a FISA warrant authorizing surveillance of Carter Page, a minor former advisor to the Trump campaign on a basis that he should have known was false-the Steele dossier. The official Comey-Rosenstein position was that that dossier was “salacious and unverified” but they had reason to know that it was defamatory campaign fiction commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign. Rosenstein had more reason to recuse than Sessions did, and Mueller had every reason to decline to take on the assignment… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
THE TRUMP DOCTRINE
Michael Anton
FP, Apr. 20, 2019
Two years into U.S. President Donald Trump’s tenure, there is still endemic confusion about what, exactly, his foreign policy is. Many critics blame this confusion on the president’s purported inarticulateness. Whatever one thinks of his tweets, however, the fact is that he has also delivered a number of speeches that lay bare the roots, contours, and details of his approach to the world.
A simpler—and more accurate—explanation for the confusion is that Trump’s foreign policy does not yet have a widely accepted name. Names can be useful in sorting and cataloguing ideas and in avoiding the unnecessary elaboration of things everyone already knows. But to dredge up an old philosophic argument: The name is not the thing. The underlying phenomenon is what matters; the name is just shorthand. Yet too often the U.S. foreign-policy establishment—current and former officials, international relations professors, think tankers, and columnists—uses names as a crutch. People treat names as sacrosanct categories and can’t process things not yet named.
So, the fact that Trump is not a neoconservative or a paleoconservative, neither a traditional realist nor a liberal internationalist, has caused endless confusion. The same goes for the fact that he has no inborn inclination to isolationism or interventionism, and he is not simply a dove or a hawk. His foreign policy doesn’t easily fit into any of these categories, though it draws from all of them.
Yet Trump does have a consistent foreign policy: a Trump Doctrine. The administration calls it “principled realism,” which isn’t bad—although the term hasn’t caught on. The problem is that the Trump Doctrine, like most presidential doctrines, cannot be summed up in two words. (To see for yourself, try describing the Monroe, Truman, or Reagan Doctrine with just a couple of words.) Yet Trump himself has explained it, on multiple occasions. In perhaps his most overlooked, understudied speech—delivered at the APEC CEO Summit in Da Nang, Vietnam, in November 2017—he encapsulated his approach to foreign policy with a quote from The Wizard of Oz: “There’s no place like home.” Two months earlier, speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, he made the same point by referring to a “great reawakening of nations.”
In both cases, the president was not simply noting what was going on: a resurgence of patriotic or nationalist sentiment in nearly every corner of the world but especially in parts of Europe and the United States. He was also forthrightly saying that this trend was positive. He was encouraging countries already on this path to continue down it and exhorting others not yet there to pursue it.
The other, more familiar phrase for the president’s foreign policy— “America First”—is much maligned, mostly for historical reasons. But the phrase itself is almost tautologically unobjectionable. After all, what else is the purpose of any country’s foreign policy except to put its own interests, the interests of its citizens, first?
Few countries ever act exclusively out of self-interest. Indeed, states sometimes do things that run counter to their immediate interests. For instance, it’s rarely in a country’s direct interest, narrowly construed, to accept refugees. Yet many countries do so because their leaders have concluded that welcoming the dispossessed serves some higher good
That said, one never sees nations sacrificing themselves for other nations, the way individuals sometimes do—by fighting for their country, for example. In this sense, Thomas Hobbes is instructive: All countries live in the state of nature vis-à-vis one another. Not only is there no superseding authority, no world government, above the nation-state to enforce transnational morality; there is also no higher law for nations than the law of nature and no higher object than self-preservation and perpetuation.
For all its bluntness and simplicity, America First is, at its root, just a restatement of this truth. Countries putting their own interests first is the way of the world, an inexpugnable part of human nature. Like other aspects of human nature, it can be sublimated or driven underground for a time—but only for a time. You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, Horace said, but it keeps on coming back… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
GIVE TRUMP’S PEACE DEAL A CHANCE
David Hazony
Forward, Apr. 17, 2019
We know little about the coming plan for Middle East peace being offered by the Trump Administration, but the pre-emptive strikes against it have begun. “Dead on arrival” is a phrase we’re hearing a lot these days.
It’s odd: If the White House is trying to resolve the century-long conflict between Jews and Arabs, should we not give it every ounce of support to succeed? Shouldn’t we give peace a chance? I actually believe — and I ask you to bear with me — that after decades of failed attempts, this one has as good a chance of succeeding as any that came before it. I know it seems counterintuitive. But to understand why requires taking a hard look at why the others failed. There are two vastly different, mutually exclusive approaches to peace talks.
One version — let’s call it the Diplomat’s Approach — has dominated peace efforts for half a century. This approach says let’s get everybody to the table. We all want basically the same things, per the Diplomat’s Approach, and only by talking can we find the formula to end the conflict. Just by showing up, each side shows it wants a deal; the only question is how to achieve it.
In this approach, we get together, we talk, we allay concerns and incentivize concessions, we find points of agreement, we assume good faith, and ultimately, we get it done. Like going out to a restaurant for dinner, the most important thing is not which restaurant you choose, but what happens in that room.
But there’s a problem with this approach: It’s a lot easier to agree on a restaurant if everyone’s hungry. But if somebody doesn’t really feel like eating, or they’re not in an accommodating mood, their position may harden. “Burgers or nothing” suddenly becomes reasonable when you don’t care if anyone else gets to eat.
The downside of the Diplomat’s Approach, in other words, is that it incentivizes talking rather than agreeing. It focuses on creative formulae and vapid speech-making rather than changing minds. The diplomat’s job is to bring the sides to the table, and not much else. Middle East peace is like curing cancer: Nobody ever got fired for failing to make it happen. It’s the effort that counts.
The second approach — let’s call it the Dealmaker’s Approach — says something very different. Dealmakers don’t care too much what happens in the room. They focus on what happens beforehand. They work on building leverage, threatening competitors, filing lawsuits, moving tanks, limiting the other side’s options. A dealmaker analyzes a situation through what we call a “power map.” Who has power? How is each side vulnerable? What are the different parties likely to do, and how can we use our own power to change the other guy’s mind? The dealmaker’s basic assumption is that the will to agree is something fluid, and the goal is to get the other side to want a deal — on your terms. If there’s a summit or a peace conference, it’s meant to reflect a change that you engineered in advance. Its purpose is not to talk but to close.
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The last generation has seen a long series of failures in the peace process under the Diplomat’s Approach. The 1993 Oslo Accords brought massive rewards to the PLO in exchange for a promise of nonviolence: weapons, land, control, money. But there was no peace. There was no “end-of-conflict” clause in the accord. There was no disarmament; quite the contrary.
Oslo was an ill-conceived interim deal in which all sides could claim victory, but all the key questions were pushed off to a later date: Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, sovereignty, final borders. Subsequent peace efforts — Wye River, Camp David II, Annapolis — all followed the same pattern. Failure was followed by violence, and eventually Israeli brute force brought calm for Israelis. Palestinians meanwhile were forced to live under multiple oppressions: the oppression of the Occupation, the oppression of the Palestinian Authority, and, if you happen to live in Gaza, the oppression of Hamas.
But the endless, fruitless process brought infinite self-importance for diplomatic professionals. And for the diplomatic world, the Palestinians became superstars. Their cause is the holy grail of peacemaking. Their suffering trumps other suffering, their umbrage other umbrage. So, it has been for three decades. It seemed we would be stuck in this morass forever. But then something unexpected happened: Donald J. Trump… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
TRUMP’S PEACE PLAN AND
37 SENIOR EUROPEAN HYPOCRITES
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
The Tundra Tabloid, Apr. 22, 2019
U.S. President Trump’s peace plan has yet to be published. This hasn’t stopped 37 European politicians – largely “has beens” — from publishing a joint letter against it in the frequently anti-Israeli UK Guardian daily on April 15. The signatories criticize the U.S. writing: “Unfortunately, the current U.S. administration has departed from longstanding U.S. policy and distanced itself from established international legal norms. It has so far recognized only one side’s claims to Jerusalem and demonstrated a disturbing indifference to Israeli settlement expansion.” The signatories want a Palestinian state to be created next to Israel and assume that this is not part of the Trump plan. The letter says that “despite uncertainty as to if and when the plan will be released, it is crucial for Europe to be vigilant and act strategically.”
In the heading of the article the signatories urged the EU to reject any U.S. Middle East plan unless it is fair to Palestinians. What fairness means to people who acclaim and reward murderers of civilians and name streets, sports facilities and so on after the most revered killers is not explained in the letter.
A quick look at the signatories identifies a number of well-known anti-Israeli inciters. Among them: former Finnish socialist foreign minister, Erkki Tuomioja. He compared in an interview Israeli defensive measures to the Nazi persecution of European Jewry: “It is quite shocking that some implement the same kind of policy toward the Palestinians which they themselves were victims of in the 1930s.”
Former Danish foreign minister and speaker of the parliament, socialist Morgens Lykketoft said on television when Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi was murdered in 2001 that “there was no difference between that assassination and Israel’s targeted killing of terrorists. Another signatory is former Danish foreign minister, Martin Lidegaard, who threatened Israel with sanctions from the European Union in 2014 if the indirect talks between Hamas and Israel did not yield significant Israeli concessions.
Lena Hjelm-Wallén, a former Swedish social democrat foreign minister was also a signatory of an anti-Israeli letter in 2014 of people who arrogantly called themselves “European eminent persons.” One suggestion of the letter was that the Arab Peace Plan composed in 2002 could form a pillar of a new EU approach. Yet another signatory of both letters was the conservative Benita Ferrero-Waldner, former European Commissioner for External Relations and former foreign minister of Austria. Yet another double signatory is socialist former NATO secretary general and Spanish foreign minister Javier Solana.
When Carl Bildt of the moderate party was foreign minister of Sweden in 2009, the country’s largest daily, the socialist Aftonbladet published an article by Donald Boström. It claimed that the IDF was killing Palestinians and harvesting their organs for transplants in collusion with the Israeli medical establishment. The author had to admit that he had no concrete evidence for his article. Bildt, when solicited to condemn this statement, refused to do so. He said that freedom of th press is part of the Swedish constitution. He also told his country’s ambassador in Israel to remain silent on the issue.
The only German signatory is the former foreign minister and ex-leader of its socialist party, Sigmar Gabriel. He accused Israel of being an apartheid state. Gabriel apologized for this statement only many months later. Former Irish President Mary Robinson co-wrote in 2014 a pro-Hamas letter jointly with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in the Guardian in 2014… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
