Ineptitude is the theme that runs throughout her diplomatic and national-security career.Joe Biden is reportedly considering Barack Obama’s former national-security adviser Susan Rice to be his running mate. National Review’s Jim Geraghty recently told us “20 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Susan Rice.”
I worked with Rice during the Clinton administration and have five more things the public needs to know.
1. Rice was obsessed with U.N. peacekeeping to solve world conflicts. Rice was a key architect of a disastrous Clinton-administration policy — Presidential Decision Directive 25. PDD-25, as the document was called, sought to implement “assertive multilateralism” to address all global conflicts with U.N. peacekeepers. This concept, the brainchild of Rice’s mentor Madeleine Albright, former ambassador to the United Nations, rested on the assumption that due to the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and U.N. peacekeepers could be used to address global conflicts instead of U.S. troops. PDD-25 was so radical that at one point an early draft advocated giving the U.N. the ability to tax international phone calls to pay for new peacekeeping missions. Assertive multilateralism was a spectacular failure since it led to the deployment of lightly armed, often poorly disciplined U.N. peacekeepers in war zones such as Bosnia, Haiti, Liberia, and Somalia, where many were killed or taken hostage.
2. Rice disliked hearing opposing views. As part of my duties as a CIA analyst covering U.N. issues, I briefed Susan Rice on classified and unclassified information related to her job. It was clear that she was not interested in — and objected to — hearing intelligence that contradicted her personal views. She and her NSC boss Richard Clarke were determined to ram through PDD-25 and tried to silence officers from other government agencies (including myself) who expressed skepticism about deploying U.N. peacekeepers to war zones and civil wars. Rice also made clear to me that she did not want to hear about U.N. waste and corruption. During the one occasion when I tried to brief her on an incident of serious U.N. corruption, she cut me off by saying, “Do you know how much a B-1 bomber costs?” Her point was she did not care how much money the U.N. wasted because she believed the U.S. government wasted more.
Under president, Chinese intellectual property theft and security breaches aren’t tolerated
By Robert C. O’Brien, the assistant to the president on national security affairs
July 8, 2020
For decades, conventional wisdom held that it was only a matter of time before China would become more liberal, first economically and, then, politically. The more we opened our markets to China, the thinking went, the more we invested capital in China, the more we trained PRC bureaucrats, scientists, engineers, and even military officers, the more China would become like us.
Prior to Donald J. Trump taking office, it was under this premise that we welcomed China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 with vast concessions, overlooked gross human rights abuses and turned a blind eye to widespread technology theft. As China grew richer and stronger, we believed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would liberalize to meet the rising aspirations of its people.
We could not have been more wrong — and this miscalculation is the greatest failure of American foreign policy since the 1930s. How did we make such a mistake? We did so by ignoring the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology. Instead of listening to their leaders and reading their key documents, we believed what we wanted to believe — that they were Communist in name only.
Let us be clear: The Chinese Communist Party is a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist organization. The Party General Secretary Xi Jinping sees himself as Josef Stalin’s successor. In fact, as journalist and former Australian government official John Garnaut has noted, the Chinese Communist Party is the last “ruling communist party that never split with Stalin, with the partial exception of North Korea.”
Under Marxist-Leninism, individuals do not have inherent value. People are merely a tool to achieve the ends of the nation state. These ideas may sound remote, but they are as fundamental to the Chinese Communist Party as the Bill of Rights is to Americans.
THE WASHINGTON TIMESUnited States must restore its independence from China
Cold War games entwine medicine, rare earth minerals and more
by Jeb Babbin Jed Babbin, a deputy undersecretary of Defense in the George H.W. Bush administration, is the author of “In the Words of Our Enemies.” May 17, 2020
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Though no one in our government speaks in these terms, we are decades into a Second Cold War, this time with China. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is so deeply involved in our economy and brazen in its aggression that our ability to deal with the threats it poses is uncertain.
There are a dozen reasons for the U.S.-China rivalry — all of which are based on the ideological difference between America, a free nation, and Communist China, a totalitarian state. It was inevitable that, as China rose and the Soviet Union fell, the imbalance in global power would result in a second cold war between the United States and China.
The natural evolution of the new Cold War has produced an adversarial relationship from China’s pursuit of domination over U.S. allies such as Japan, its persistently aggressive cyberwar against us and its aggression in the South
In 1990, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping issued his “24-character strategy,” which centered around concepts such as “secure our positions,” “hide our capacities and bide our time” and “never claim leadership.” China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, hasn’t descended into the shrillness of Nikita Khrushchev’s “we will bury you,” but has given up the pretense of restraint in claiming China’s position as a global power.
One of the hallmarks of the first Cold War was the ideological struggle against Soviet communism. Another was the ever-present fear of nuclear war. Both of those factors are central to the new Cold War but seem to be ignored by American leaders.
Since January, U.S. scientists have been racing to develop a vaccine and treatments for the COVID-19 virus. Chinese cyber thieves have been working just as hard trying to steal every bit of information our scientists possess and every finding they make. China’s cyberattacks are reportedly also seeking to interfere in and sabotage our scientists’ work.
A Time to HateIt’s not too late.by Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq. – American Spectator – May 11, 2020
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to guard, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
— Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) 3:1-8Through eight years, I accepted the rules of the game. Obama was president. He won fair and square because the Republicans serially put up two milquetoast opponents who were incapable of offering a vision or articulating a message that inspired. John McCain had been an American wartime hero who stood by his men, refused early release, and withstood torture in the “Hanoi Hilton” 40 years earlier. But he had no business running for a presidency two generations later for which he was not prepared to fight and for which he had no vision. And then came Mitt Romney, his etch-a-sketch candidacy, his binders full of women, and his Romneycare, which served as the model for the Obamacare and which was the single most galvanizing issue in 2012 for Republican conservatives. In order to throw out Obamacare, the Republican Party offered us conservatives … what, Romneycare? Tough for us conservatives to sing in that tabernacle choir.I accepted Obama. I never articulated his first name, and I never called him “president,” but I accepted the results and accepted that this Pretender was our country’s lawfully elected chief executive. I watched his arrogance, the unctuous way he carried himself literally with his nose up, the way he never held a railing while walking a stairway because he was too cool, the kinds of human dreck he regularly invited as his White House guests, and I accepted it all with the soft whisper, “This, too, shall pass.” I watched the Corrupt Journalist Corps idolize him, crown him a king, admire him as a messiah and a deity, and I accepted the milieu. This, too, in time would pass. It meant living through eight years of the deepest public corruption. Lois Lerner stealing an election by leveraging the awesome power of the Internal Revenue Service to close down legitimate conservative political groups. Eric Holder — the nobleman who urged people to kick enemies — bringing lawlessness and corruption into the Justice Department, even approving the “Fast and Furious” idea of releasing lethal weapons to Mexican drug lords in the cockamamie scheme to find out how they access and move their weapons. Glenn Beck exposed Obama’s Maoist communications director, Anita Dunn, who walked children through the White House. There was ACORN. Just one corruption after another.
As much as $1 in every $4 from the first $8.3 billion aid package approved by Congress could be spent overseas or on foreign affairs.
The short answer is … a good bit may end up overseas.
The title of the first legislation was the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2020. President Trump signed it into law on March 6 after a bipartisan vote of Congress. The law appropriated $8.3 billion in initial response monies.
To put that into perspective, the first COVID-19 legislation exceeds the $1.1 billion appropriated for Zika in 2016, the $5.4 billion for Ebola in 2014, and the $7 billion for swine flu in 2009.
As much as $2.3 billion of the first $8.3 billion in funding falls into the categories of foreign aid, foreign affairs or overseas disease surveillance. Here’s how some of that breaks down:
Here are some other major categories where the monies can be spent under the law:
49K subscribers
When candidate Donald Trump campaigned on calling China to account for its trade piracy, observers thought he was either crazy or dangerous.
Conventional Washington wisdom had assumed that an ascendant Beijing was almost preordained to world hegemony. Trump’s tariffs and polarization of China were considered about the worst thing an American president could do.
The accepted bipartisan strategy was to accommodate, not oppose, China’s growing power. The hope was that its newfound wealth and global influence would liberalize the ruling communist government.
Four years later, only a naif believes that. Instead, there is an emerging consensus that China’s cutthroat violations of international norms were long ago overdue for an accounting.
China’s re-education camps, its Orwellian internal surveillance, its crackdown on Hong Kong democracy activists and its secrecy about the deadly coronavirus outbreak have all convinced the world that China has now become a dangerous international outlier.
Trump courted moderate Arab nations in forming an anti-Iranian coalition opposed to Iran’s terrorist and nuclear agendas. His policies utterly reversed the Obama administration’s estrangement from Israel and outreach to Tehran.
Last week, Trump nonchalantly offered the Palestinians a take-it-or-leave-it independent state on the West Bank, but without believing that a West Bank settlement was the key to peace in the entire Middle East.
Trump’s cancellation of the Iran deal, in particular, was met with international outrage. More global anger followed after the targeted killing of Iranian terrorist leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
In short, Trump’s Middle East recalibrations won few supporters among the bipartisan establishment.
But recently, Europeans have privately started to agree that more sanctions are needed on Iran, that the world is better off with Soleimani gone, and that the West Bank is not central to regional peace.
www.foxnews.com/politics/pompeo-warns-governors-of-china-infiltration
FOX NEWS
POMPEO WARNS OF CHINESE INFILTRATION INTO U.S.
February 8, 2020
China‘s Communist Party has infiltrated various levels of America’s infrastructure and is working to destroy the values of the United States, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said during a speech Saturday, while also warning state governors to be wary of China’s infiltration.
“We can’t ignore China’s actions and strategic intentions,” he said while addressing the National Governors Association winter meeting. “The Chinese government has been methodical in the way it’s analyzed our system… it’s assessed our vulnerabilities and it’s decided to exploit our freedoms, to gain an advantage over us at the federal level, the state level and the local level.”
“Competition with China is happening. It’s happening in your state,” Pompeo added. “In fact, I’d be surprised if most of you in the audience had not been lobbied by the Chinese Communist Party directly.”
He said groups loyal to communist China are operating out in the open in Virginia, Minnesota, Florida and dozens of other states all around the country. Other Chinese groups, however, practice their nefarious actions in the shadows in an attempt to exercise influence over U.S. citizens and lawmakers.