PRESIDENT TRUMP’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Sunday, October 4th, 2020
During times of war and chaos, someone profits. As the world continues to reel from the coronavirus pandemic, businesses have shuttered, families have lost loved ones, and governments at the federal, state, and local levels have scrambled to provide adequate resources to the public. Meanwhile, after lying to international health organizations and governments around the world, China seeks to repair its public image and capitalize on a pandemic it allowed to wreak havoc on the world.
Beijing is positioned to recover faster than its competitors, including the United States. Why that is contains a lesson for America going forward, if we don’t want to be back in this position again.
In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a plan to expand China’s global footprint in infrastructure projects abroad called the “Belt and Road Initiative.” What followed was a series of projects aimed at connecting over 65 countries with access to financing in excess of $1 trillion. The relationships span the globe, even including ambitions to control the Arctic Circle. The initiative has given China significant access to resources, economic zones, and trade routes. According to the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, from “2000 to 2017, the Chinese government, banks and contractors signed $146 billion in loan commitments to African governments and their state-owned enterprises.” Foreign Policy reports, “Djibouti, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Maldives, Mongolia, Pakistan, and Montenegro … owe more than 45% of their gross domestic products to Beijing over Belt and Road projects.”
And thanks to the Chinese Communist Party’s lack of political or economic competition at home, it has been able to lend money on terms advantageous to Beijing — and only Beijing. Azeem Ibrahim, a professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College, notes, “Beijing is becoming adept at translating outstanding debts into foreign assets.” The Belt and Road program largely relies on low-interest credit facilities collateralized by borrowing countries’ infrastructure or natural resources. Due to the poor credit of the sovereign borrower or low expectation of performance of the asset in question, many call China’s practice a form of “neo-colonialism” or “creditor imperialism” through what’s called “debt-trap diplomacy.” The Institute for Security Studies has gone so far as to call China’s behavior a “predatory system designed to ensnare countries into a straightjacket of debt servitude.”
How this works in practice: Borrowers that are unable to fulfill their loan obligations cede tremendous bargaining leverage to the Chinese when they seek to restructure the debt. If they default, the Chinese government simply seizes control of the asset. For example, the Sri Lankan government entered into a credit deal with the Chinese for a port (which reports indicate was a shaky bet, financially, from the start). When the asset didn’t perform to the terms of the contract, Sri Lanka granted China a 99-year lease on the port, including over 150,000 acres of land surrounding it. Just like that, the Chinese Communist Party gained control over a major waterway of another country.
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.
EDITORIAL – The ongoing attacks by the political establishment on President Donald Trump –which began even before he was elected – are without parallel in history. The savagery, frenzy, and outright hysteria displayed by the President’s enemies within the Democrat Party, the media, and the various power centers of the globalist elites have no prior precedent.
This President has been spied on, lied about, made the subject of phony foreign dossiers, insulted, ridiculed, scorned, mocked and threatened. We have witnessed Hollyweird celebrities advocate for blowing up the White House, demand the President be beaten, jailed or even assassinated, and his children tortured and sexually abused.
We have seen politicians in Washington try to convict the President of non-existent crimes, investigate him and his family members for everything from tax returns to guests at his hotels, project on to him crimes that they themselves have committed, and seed his Administration with leakers and double-agents.
No other President in American history has been treated in such a shameful manner. Not Lincoln. Not FDR. Not Nixon. Not Reagan.
What is it about this President that has roused such demons in his political foes? What is it about this President that drives his opponents to the brink of insanity? What is it about this President that so terrifies and terrorizes the Pelosis, Schiffs, Schumers and the George Soroses?
Is it simply that he is not part of the club, a brash outsider with a different style? Is it merely because he’s outspoken and tramples on political correctness? Is it because he’s sometimes unpresidential in his demeanor ( at least in their minds )?
Not at all. After all, aren’t these the same folks who loved Bill Clinton whose extracurricular activities involved cigars and staining blue dresses in the Oval Office?
The trade agreement negotiated in 2018 by the U.S., Mexico and Canada languished for more than a year as congressional Democrats pressed the Trump administration to extract concessions from Mexico on labor regulations and pharmaceutical patents. The amended USMCA, successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement, was signed this week, putting an end to 14 months of political wrangling. But to those of us who live in farm country, the pact means a lot more than politics.
To Sam Dobson, whose farm in Statesville, N.C., has been in his family for 150 years, the USMCA represents hope. He is a seventh-generation dairy farmer, and the USMCA boosts the chances that his son Chase will be the eighth. “In agriculture, your goal is to leave a legacy and not a liability, and the No. 1 goal for us on our farm is to leave our farm and our legacy just a little bit better than we found it when we got it,” says Mr. Dobson.
Since Nafta came into force, U.S. agricultural exports to Canada and Mexico have quadrupled, from $9 billion in 1993 to $39 billion in 2017, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. But dairy farmers were left behind as other agricultural exports boomed. U.S. milk prices are in the fourth year of a slump due to chronic oversupply. Canada has historically restricted how much U.S. milk it imports, putting U.S. dairy farmers at a disadvantage.
Farmers in Iredell County, N.C., which I represent in Congress, produce more than 3 billion gallons of milk a year, according to the American Dairy Association of North Carolina. In the 1970s, there were more than 200 dairy farms in Iredell County. Now there are 22. This is a trend that goes far beyond North Carolina. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that 2,731 dairy farms across the U.S. closed last year due to a combination of low profit margins and a gradual decline in milk consumption. “Without these agreements,” Mr. Dobson says, “you’re going to see a disappearance of the industry.”
Written by Alex Newman
Under the guise of keeping America “competitive” in the looming high-tech future, the globalist Council on Foreign Relations is urging policymakers at all levels to dramatically expand the size and scope of government. The bloated welfare states in Sweden and Denmark are cited as examples of the “advantages” of massive government programs to take care for people. Without the sort of fundamental transformation of America envisioned by the CFR, the nation will supposedly be left behind in the emerging new paradigm, the organization claimed. Critics, though, blasted that idea.
In its new report, dubbed “The Work Ahead: Machines, Skills, and U.S. Leadership in the Twenty-First Century,” the CFR Task Force offered a broad array of policy recommendations for federal, state, and local officials. These range from ever more immigration and a greater role for government in various facets of the economy, to a dramatic expansion of the welfare state modeled on Big Government schemes from Northern Europe. The CFR’s demands regarding education, which are a key component of the report, will be covered in an upcoming article.
Some of the leaders involved in creating the CFR report told The New American that without implementing the sought-after changes, America would be left behind as the world moves toward a globalized future of fast-moving technological progress. But experts and legislators invited to participate in the scheme who spoke to The New American sounded the alarm about the CFR’s vision. Among other concerns, they warned that the controversial CFR report and outreach efforts selling it to policymakers reveal a hidden plan to push a dangerous agenda and bring state and local officials into the establishment’s globalist orbit.
One reason why the CFR’s pronouncements are so important is because of the key role they play setting policy. Indeed, looking at its membership and influence, many analysts consider the CFR to be a key Deep State hub in America. The late U.S. Admiral Chester Ward, a CFR member for almost 20 years before defecting and blowing the whistle, explained that this enormous power is used for neferious purposes. In fact, Ward said, the main objective of the organization is to undermine U.S. sovereignty and facilitate the merger of the United States into what he described as an “all-powerful one-world government.”
The way it advances its objectives was explained by Admiral Ward, too. “Once the ruling members of CFR have decided that the U.S. Government should adopt a particular policy, the very substantial research facilities of CFR are put to work to develop arguments, intellectual and emotional, to support the new policy, and to confound and discredit, intellectually and politically, any opposition,” he said. “The most articulate theoreticians and ideologists prepare related articles, aided by the research, to sell the new policy and to make it appear inevitable and irresistible.”
“By following the evolution of this propaganda in the most prestigious scholarly journal in the world, [CFR mouthpiece] Foreign Affairs, anyone can determine years in advance what the future defense and foreign policies of the United States will be,” the respected admiral warned after ditching his membership at the CFR. “If a certain proposition is repeated often enough in that journal, then the U.S. Administration in power — be it Republican or Democratic — begins to act as if that proposition or assumption were an established fact.”
While that may not be true in the Trump era, when voters and their president have openly rejected globalism, it certainly has been true for decades, if not generations, regardless of the party formally in power. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted publicly that the CFR told her what she should be doing and how she should be thinking about the future. Former Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, joked that he worked for CFR boss Richard Haass. Even many top “Republicans” are involved.
Of course, the latest CFR agenda starts with a kernel of truth. As anybody with common sense can see, the economy is changing and will be undergoing further changes in the years ahead. As a result of technological developments, the future of work will look very different in 30 or 40 years than it does today. Many Americans will lose their jobs. All that is true. Of course, it would be difficult to sell enormous policy changes if the entire premise behind them was nothing but fiction, obviously.
But the agenda being pushed is another matter. Under the pretext of responding to the obvious changes coming in the years ahead, the CFR — a leading Deep State institution in America that has dominated foreign policy for generations — is pushing what critics warned was a dangerous scheme to expand the power of government. The plan also advances globalism at every level of society, a key goal of the CFR dating back to its founding. In short, it is a massive and dangerous power grab that should be resisted, critics told The New American.
Policy Proposals
I wonder how many people were aware of this.I came across this 30 minute video that was recorded at the Family Leadership Summitin August, 2013, two years before he announced he was running for the presidency.Trump’s message six years ago remains the same today….C-SPAN VIDEOSpeech: Donald Trump Delivers a Speech in Ames, IA – August 10, 2013
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WASHINGTON—The Navy and its industry partners are “under cyber siege” by Chinese hackers and others who have stolen tranches of national security secrets in recent years, exploiting critical weaknesses that threaten the U.S.’s standing as the world’s top military power, an internal Navy review has concluded.
The assessment, delivered to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer last week and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, depicts a branch of the armed forces under relentless cyberattack by foreign adversaries and struggling in its response to the scale and sophistication of the problem.
Drawing from extensive research and interviews with senior officials across the Trump administration, the tone of the review is urgent and at times dire, offering a rare, unfiltered look at the military’s cybersecurity liabilities.
The Navy report’s authors conducted 31 site visits and interviewed 85 current senior military officers and civilians across both the Navy and wider Defense Department, as well as senior officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Homeland Security and White House National Security Council, among others. Here are their main conclusions:
The 57-page document is especially scathing in its assessment of how the Navy has addressed cybersecurity challenges facing its contractors and subcontractors, faulting naval officials for not anticipating that adversaries would attack the defense industrial base and for not adequately informing those partners of the cyber threat. It also acknowledges a lack of full understanding about the extent of the damage.
Nov. 15, 2018 12:55 p.m. ET
Three decades before President Trump’s trade agenda jolted the world, he laid out his vision in full-page newspaper advertisements foreshadowing what was to come.
“Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States” for years, wrote the New York real-estate developer, in the typewritten letter addressed “To The American People,” his signature affixed to the bottom.
“ ‘Tax’ these wealthy nations, not America. End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes…” the September 1987 ads demanded. “Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.”
Trade has been a defining issue for the Trump administration during its turbulent first two years, providing the basis for an economic and diplomatic approach that has shaken up the post-World War II global order. The administration has imposed tariffs on half the $500 billion in Chinese goods imported annually, and on steel and aluminum from around the world, while threatening to do the same on cars. Mr. Trump has strong-armed Japan, Europe, Canada and Mexico to the negotiating table.