It’s great to have an AMERICAN President, again.
The Washington Post reports that
Before lunchtime Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump said he would expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal, upending a reduction course set by presidents of both parties over the past four decades, and called for the United States to veto a pending U.N. resolution that criticized Israel’s settlements policy.
The policy prescriptions, communicated in morning tweets, followed calls since last month’s election to reconsider the arms-length U.S. relationship with Taiwan and to let China keep an underwater U.S. vessel seized by its navy. Trump declared within hours of this week’s Berlin terrorist attack that it was part of a global Islamic State campaign to “slaughter Christians” and later said it reaffirmed the wisdom of his plans to bar Muslim immigrants.
Late Thursday, Trump suggested in another tweet that the U.S. military’s years-in-the-making plans for a new stealth fighter, Lockheed Martin’s F-35, might be reconsidered, saying he had “asked Boeing to price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet!”
With weeks to go before he becomes president, Trump has not hesitated to voice his opinions on national security issues of the day and to publicly advise the current president on what to do about them.
Ultimately, the nuclear statement was tempered by a Trump spokesman. And the likely fallout from a tentative decision by the Obama administration to break years of precedent and abstain on the Israel resolution was avoided when Egypt, its sponsor, abruptly postponed it just hours before a scheduled Security Council vote.
But the president-elect’s pronouncements have privately riled a White House that has repeatedly insisted in public that the transition has been smooth sailing.
Asked last week whether he was trying to help Trump, a professed admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, understand Russia’s responsibility for the civil-war carnage in Aleppo, Syria, President Obama said he would “help President-elect Trump with any advice, counsel, information that we can provide so that he, once he’s sworn in, can make a decision.”
“Between now and then,” Obama said firmly, it was up to him to decide what to do. “These are decisions that I have to make based on the consultations that I have with our military and the people who have been working this every day.”
Even as the White House has held its tongue, however, others have not.
Trump provided no details in his tweet calling for the United States to “greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability.” But “if he means what he says,” said Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a Washington-based security foundation, “this could be the end of the arms-control process that reduced 80 percent of our Cold War arsenal.”
Former congressman John Tierney (D-Mass.), executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, said in a statement, “It is dangerous for the President-elect to use just 140 characters and announce a major change in U.S. nuclear weapons policy, which is nuanced, complex, and affects every single person on this planet.”
Under New START, the treaty negotiated by Obama with Russia and ratified by the Senate in 2010, the United States and Russia by February 2018 must have no more than 1,550 strategic weapons deployed. While there is widespread agreement that the U.S. deterrent must be modernized, little enthusiasm has been expressed elsewhere for increasing the number of nuclear warheads.
Trump spokesman Jason Miller later said that was not precisely what Trump meant. Rather than calling for more nuclear weapons, Miller told Yahoo News, he was referring to “the threat of nuclear proliferation” and “the need to improve and modernize our deterrent capability.”
The president-elect’s U.N. tweet was more explicit and more immediate. “The resolution being considered . . . should be vetoed,” he said in a pre-dawn tweet referring to the Egyptian measure. The resolution condemned “the construction and expansion of settlements” in the West Bank and mostly Palestinian East Jerusalem, along with “the transfer of Israeli settlers, confiscation of land, demolition of homes and displacement of Palestinian civilians.”
Saying the settlements have “no legal validity,” it demanded that Israel “immediately cease all settlement activities.”
Although consideration of such a measure has been circulated at the United Nations for weeks — and similar measures have for years brought a consistent U.S. veto — it was not until Wednesday night that word began to circulate that the United States might abstain and allow it to pass.
While successive administrations have considered the settlements an impediment to an Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Obama administration has grown increasingly irate over what it feels is Israel’s flouting of its concerns.
Over the past six months, Israel has announced plans to add hundreds of units to existing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. A July announcement that 770 new homes were to be built in the East Jerusalem settlement of Gilo drew particularly sharp U.S. criticism.
At the same time, right-wing voices in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are pushing for legislation that would legalize settlements built on privately owned Palestinian land. The “legalization bill” stems from a court-ordered demolition of the Amona settlement, which sits on land owned by a Palestinian farmer.
Amona was meant to be demolished next week, but on Thursday it received an additional month of reprieve from the court. Residents brokered a deal with the government to move their homes to a nearby location, essentially creating a new settlement.
During the campaign, Trump frequently criticized what he described as the administration’s failure to fully support Israel. Last week, he named David Friedman — a New York bankruptcy lawyer who has given strong financial support and other backing to the Israeli settlement movement and has said Trump supports Israeli annexation of Palestinian territory — as his ambassador to Israel.
During the campaign, Trump also charged that Obama had helped promote terrorism by supporting “the ouster of a friendly regime in Egypt” — that of long-standing autocrat Hosni Mubarak — and more recently by failing to fully back the military government that overthrew Mubarak’s elected replacement.
In an interview last weekend with a Portuguese news agency, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi said that Trump “has shown deep and great understanding of what is taking place in the region as a whole and Egypt in particular. I am looking forward and expecting more support and reinforcement of our bilateral relations.”
Once it became clear late Wednesday that the settlements vote was scheduled for Thursday afternoon, Trump officials said the transition gave the administration a “heads-up” that the president-elect was going to publicly call for a U.S. veto.
At the end of the day Thursday, it was not entirely clear what led Egypt to withdraw the resolution. At the State Department, spokesman John Kirby said that Egypt had pulled it back in order to have “discussions with its Arab League partners” over the wording of the text.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry, who supported an abstention and was clearly expecting to deliver a pre-vote speech announcing it, along with an outline of future prospects for Middle East peace, canceled his plans. Elsewhere within the administration, officials said Israel had twisted Egypt’s arm and threatened to work against its interests in Congress.
Several Arab officials said they were convinced that the United States had pressured Egypt to postpone the vote.
In Israel, where a late-night cabinet meeting was convened Wednesday to consider the possibility of a U.S. abstention, Netanyahu sent out a dead-of-night tweet calling for a U.S. veto. It was quickly followed by Trump’s own, near-identical tweet.
Deriding “the imposition of terms set by the United Nations,” Trump said in a later statement that passage of the resolution would put Israel “in a very poor negotiating position and is extremely unfair to all Israelis.”
After initial hesitation on whether Trump should weigh in, the statement was written late Wednesday by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and an influential adviser to the president-elect, and Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, according to two people briefed on the deliberation who were not authorized to speak publicly. They said that Kushner and Bannon consulted with several allies in Israel and the United States but declined to name them.
The effort represented perhaps Kushner’s most significant foray to date into foreign policy and the Middle East, where Trump has said he would welcome his son-in-law’s involvement.
After the statement was issued Thursday, a transition official told the Reuters news agency, Trump spoke by telephone with Sissi.
As I have written before, a strong American President is essential to retaining the sovereignty of our country.
As a 22-year old College Senior, I was privileged to cast my first-ever vote in a National Election. That vote took place in November of 1980, and it was for the greatest American President in my lifetime, Ronald Wilson Reagan.
The popularity of President Reagan was not just limited to the boundaries of our nation. He was admired the world over. The things that he accomplished, along with his friends, Prime Minister of Britain Margaret Thatcher, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and Pope John Paul II, have caused the decade of the 1980s to be recorded as a seminal moment in world history.
I remember watching President Reagan speak at the Berlin Wall. When he said, “Mr Gorbachev tear down this wall!”, I was never prouder to be an American and of an American president, than at that moment.
Liberals, around the world, lost their collective minds.
For you see, Liberal Leaders, just as they do now, hate it when Marxism gives way to Freedom.
Nothing bothers them more than when a strong American President is at the forefront of a conquering moment, when a strong foreign policy is based on the reality that negotiating from a position of strength is always more effective than negotiating from a position of weakness.
Fast forward to the present, where an ineffective President Barack Hussein Obama was already looking like a fool, before Donald J. Trump was even elected as his successor, to a world who used to look to America as a bastion of strength and freedom, not weakness and political expediencies.
President Barack Hussein Obama has placed us in untenable position with his weak and vacillating Smart Power Foreign Policy.
Those who used to cringe in their desert tents, while calling us the Great Satan, now laugh in our faces as they walk across our southern borders with the rest of the illegal immigrants.
That is, if Obama simply does not invite them to the White House and meet with them, as he has the Muslim Brotherhood.
America must have a president who will man up and negotiate from a position of strength with both our friends and our enemies.
It appears that we have found him in President-elect Trump.
Unfortunately for our present safety as nation, Obama’s Fantasyland view of the world, which is not unlike the old Coca Cola Advertisement where everyone had a Coke and a smile, set him up to be a disastrous failure at Foreign Policy.
A failure, which finds our enemies in Iran still working on a nuclear bomb and Russian Leader Vladimir Putin beginning the process of annexing surrounding countries and rebuilding the old Soviet Union, which was dissolved, thanks to the efforts of a real leader and American President, Ronald Reagan.
The popular defense, currently being thrown against the wall to see if it sticks by Liberals on behalf of their fallen messiah’s failed Foreign Policy, is to attack those who are critical of it, by claiming that we are all of bunch of “Christianist Raaaciiist Hate Mongers”.
Obama’s Foreign Policy Failure explains the resistance of foreign leaders to the possible Presidency of Donald J. Trump before his election.
It also explains all of their donations to the Clinton Foundation.
But, I digress…
Ronald Reagan, when he was “out on the stump” for Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater, in October of 1964, delivered a powerful speech titled, “A Time for Choosing”. At one point in that now-classic speech, he spoke about America’s role in the world, stating that
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace — and you can have it in the next second — surrender.
…You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin — just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this — this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits — not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
Foreign Leaders, who like the advantage that they have gained, under the weak and vacillating Foreign Policy of Barack Hussein Obama, do not want the United States to regain our position as the Leader of the Free World.
And, they certainly do not want a President who will honor our friendship with our ally, Israel.
That is why they fear a Trump Presidency.
It was far more lucrative for them, when the United States “negotiated from a position of weakness”, when we had a vacillating dhimmi in the White House.
Now, they have to negotiate with an American President who has mastered “The Art of the Deal”.
…one who will place America and her best interests, first.
Isn’t that refreshing?
Until He Comes,
KJ
Kingsjester's Blog 