Biden’s foolish rush to rejoin UNESCO has nothing to do with China

June 20, 2023
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This article was first published in The New York Post on June 20, 2023.  Click Here to read the original article.

Demonstrating yet again that it’s little more than Barack Obama’s third term, the Biden White House is once more pressing to rejoin the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

This ill-advised gambit will cost about $600 million, apparently just a rounding error for the administration’s budgeteers.

Ronald Reagan rightly withdrew the United States in 1983, citing UNESCO’s highly politicized hostility to freedom of the press and general anti-Americanism; pervasive antisemitism and anti-Israel biases; and utter lack of program and budget discipline.

UNESCO’s US supporters, almost all on the political left, launched a series of unsuccessful efforts to rejoin, repeatedly seeking a new pretext to end the horror of being outside a multilateral organization, no matter how failed and irreparable.

Unfortunately, they persuaded President George W. Bush to return, ostensibly to mitigate the bad press he received for conducting a “unilateralist” foreign policy. Of course, nothing of the sort happened.

With the unwitting Americans seduced back in, UNESCO’s true political agenda emerged under the Obama administration’s welcoming gaze.

In 2011, continuing its decades-long campaign to demonstrate international “statehood” by obtaining membership in UN bodies, the Palestinian Authority, heir to the Palestine Liberation Organization, applied to join UNESCO.

Obama’s support for Palestinian causes so weakened the US position that the PA/PLO’s illegitimate campaign succeeded.

At that point, however, Congress rigorously adhered to a statute (originating as an appropriations rider from then-Sen. Bob Kasten in 1990) prohibiting contributions to UN bodies that admit or increase the status of the PA/PLO, meaning that US “arrearages” began to accrue immediately.

Biden’s excuse for rejoining UNESCO is to counter rising Chinese influence.

The State Department argues, for example, that “we can’t afford to be absent any longer from one of the key fora in which standards around education for science and technology are set.”
This claim is entirely specious. There is little to no need for America to rejoin UNESCO to prevent harmful Chinese influence.

UNESCO “standards” for any sort of education are irrelevant, if not harmful to real education, as we’ve learned over many painful decades.

Even on accords in which UNESCO acts as depositary or assists in administrating a treaty, like the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, America is typically a party to the agreement. So Washington can’t be excluded from any aspect of treaty affairs, whether or not America is inside UNESCO.

The broader issue of Chinese influence in the UN system turns on just how valuable that system is.

Chinese and Russian vetoes block effective action by the Security Council, as during the Cold War.

The UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council have also become essentially irrelevant, leaving only the question of which UN specialized and technical agencies are still worth protecting.

Some certainly are, such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and the International Maritime Organization.

But UNESCO, which never had a clearly defined mission, fails under any sensible cost-benefit analysis.

Biden is making precisely the same mistake as Obama, and, if Biden proceeds further, Congress should firmly block any UNESCO funding, as it has consistently done.
Although the administration obtained authority to waive the Kasten amendment in December 2022 (probably in the dark of night), appropriators can correct the mistake in the coming months.

House Appropriations Committee Republicans should lead the effort to defend taxpayer dollars by repealing this waiver. After all, it was passed in Nancy Pelosi’s waning days as speaker.

Not only that, House appropriators should make clear they will be scrutinizing Biden administration dealings with UNESCO and the UN system more broadly.

With the 2024 presidential campaign underway, moreover, none of the declared Republican candidates appears to support rejoining UNESCO.
Biden’s obsession with returning conveniently highlights several of his vulnerabilities, since basically only liberal Democratic elites care about rejoining. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not.

Make no mistake, UNESCO sees Washington as a spigot from which assessed contributions would flow regularly into its coffers and which Biden’s White House would turn to fully open.

Arguing that it’s trying to counter rising Chinese influence reveals the administration’s double standard on Beijing, given its craven efforts to “improve” relations with Beijing on climate-change issues and many others.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping only underlines the need for real, not illusory, measures to counter Beijing.

Returning to UNESCO is a waste of time and money, not an effective riposte to China.

America’s one-nation military

June 19, 2023
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This article was first published in The Washington Examiner on June 19, 2023.  Click Here to read the original article.

On June 15, 1775, at the insistence of both John and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, the Continental Congress approved George Washington to command the still-inchoate American military. Washington was well-prepared for the job, but the worrying lack of qualified competitors emphasized the enormous challenges facing the incipient Continental Army.

Beyond ability, Washington’s elevation rested on hard political logic. Arduously and carefully, New Englanders had been striving to forge a unified, national consciousness for independence. They recognized that many who shared their grievances against London were not yet ready for independence, and that time was not necessarily on their side.

Accordingly, to prepare to confront Great Britain’s world-class military, independence advocates wanted to ensure support throughout the colonies. With the Declaration then still a year away, they saw correctly that fashioning a “one nation” army (to paraphrase Benjamin Disraeli) was critical. Virginia’s Washington took command of New England troops surrounding Boston and spent the entire Revolution fashioning a national military. One profound success was ordering the inoculation of all soldiers who had never had smallpox, without exception.

The Constitution’s Framers, many having served in the Continental Army, well remembered the Revolution’s travails, with a barely working Continental Congress and recalcitrant state governors and militias. They cemented the concept of a national military, vesting commander in chief authority in the president, the first of whom they fully expected to be Washington. His 1796 Farewell Address summarized his strong dedication to a common identity: “The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”

Building a “one nation” military was a significant piece of the larger effort to keep the United States united, hopefully immunizing it from persistent foreign efforts to weaken and split it. Riven, however, by the intractable dispute over slavery, the project failed spectacularly, and the Civil War resulted. Almost all senior Confederate officers were formerly in the U.S. military, a disheartening, nearly fatal collapse in the national-unity effort. To see so many violate their oath of allegiance to the Constitution was searing proof of how badly divided the country was.

Since the Civil War, the United States has faced no political question so existential as slavery. The military has, with notable exceptions, tried to remain nonpolitical, so much so, for example, that General George C. Marshall never registered to vote. Today, however, the Pentagon is a battlefield in the ongoing cultural wars, every minute of which is detrimental not just to our military capabilities, but to the national unity that we have sought since the outset to embed in the uniformed services. Our contemporary concerns have little to do with explicit regional divisions, but with other differences equally dangerous to a “one nation” military.

“Wokeness” covers a broad category of bad ideas, but the most pernicious, in my view, is the deindividuation of America’s citizenry, identifying them not as themselves but as members of groups based on race, ethnicity, and gender. This self-described “identity politics” is fundamentally contrary to the concept of individual liberty, which rests on the proposition that every American citizen is unique.

Critically, however, the proper refutation to racial or other classifications should not itself increase the pressures toward more disunity. It is stunning that a Republican House member, who took an oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” could say, “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states.” Of course, one could easily imagine a similar statement from an equally unlettered counterpart on the other side of the aisle.

As profoundly discordant as wokeness is in civil society, it is far worse in the military, spreading dysfunction and disharmony among servicemembers whose duty is to defend the country, not to be laboratory specimens for social experimentation. To be sure, the military reflects society’s flaws in discrimination based on race and sex, but it had made enormous progress not by exacerbating differences, but by treating them as irrelevant and, indeed, potentially dangerous to its mission if mishandled.

Fortunately, we do not have to look far for a summary of what should comprise a “one nation” military. In a military recruiting pitch some years ago, President Joe Biden’s nominee as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, said:

“When I’m flying, I put my helmet on, my visor down, my mask up. You don’t know who I am — whether I’m African American, Asian American, Hispanic, White, male, or female. You just know I’m an American Airman, kicking your butt.”

If Brown is confirmed as chairman and adheres to that unmistakably “one nation” message, we may be on the road to recovery. If not, our adversaries will simply see a more-distracted and potentially divisible U.S. military.

Iran Exploits Biden’s Fecklessness

June 06, 2023
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Neglecting Gulf allies while trying to revive the nuclear deal is a recipe for regional instability.

This article was first published in The Wall Street Journal on June 6, 2023.  Click Here to read the original article.

Iran is steadily eviscerating the political and economic constraints the U.S. has marshalled against it. Tehran’s unprecedented coordination with the Beijing-Moscow axis has converged with President Biden’s apparent disdain for key Middle East allies, his obsession with reviving the 2015 nuclear deal and his lax sanctions enforcement. We now face geostrategic realignment and instability in the region as well as more terrorism and nuclear proliferation around the world.

Absent visible American resolve against Tehran’s nuclear program, the odds are increasing that, as Benjamin Netanyahu has always reserved as a last resort, Israel will act on its own. The White House response—suggesting closer U.S.-Israeli military cooperation—induces the queasy feeling that Mr. Biden is simply trying to get inside Israel’s decision-making loop to prevent an attack on Iran, not to aid it.

The alternative to force remains overthrowing the ayatollahs. Since Mahsa Amini’s murder in September 2022, opposition protests and renewed economic discontent have risen to potentially regime-threatening levels. Mr. Biden’s administration, however, has supported the dissidents with little but rhetoric. At a minimum, Washington must focus on the internal instability likely to unfold in Iran when Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is 84, dies. The moment could arrive unexpectedly, providing Iran’s citizens an opportunity to topple the regime and end its international barbarity.

During Mr. Biden’s term, America’s resistance to Iran’s proliferation and terrorism has become ineffective. The president couldn’t have more thoroughly alarmed and alienated the Gulf Arab states and Israel if he had planned it. The White House convinced regional allies that Mr. Biden was effectively abandoning them and empowering their enemies by ignoring concerns about the failed nuclear deal and the effect of ending sanctions. He also crusaded against hydrocarbon fuels—the heart of Gulf Arab economies—and denounced Saudi Arabia as a pariah for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Continue reading on WSJ.com.

The G-7 Shows It Still Doesn’t Understand The China Threat

May 25, 2023
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The global West’s disarray only encourages Xi Jinping’s belligerent tendencies.

This article was first published in 1945 on May 25, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

By John Bolton

Last Saturday, leaders of the G-7 nations meeting in Hiroshima issued a 40-page communique addressing, most importantly, their relations with China.

The communique was touted as demonstrating G-7 unity and strength against Beijing’s economic warfare, but the China language instead reflects disarray and incoherence.

Embarrassingly weak, for example, is the Taiwan passage.

It is essentially unchanged from recent G-7 statements, ignoring China’s rapidly rising menace during the same period. Similarly, the G-7 urged China to speak directly to Ukraine, but referred only to a peace “based on territorial integrity,” not on the full restoration of Ukraine’s sovereignty as well as its territorial integrity — a restoration all NATO members profess to support.

By resorting to bromides regarding both Taiwan and Ukraine, the leaders of the global West do precisely the opposite of what they intend: They reveal weakness rather than unity and strength. 

An Empty Slogan

The communique is weakest and least coherent on the G-7’s economic relationship with China, the very front where current Chinese efforts at regional and global hegemony are playing out. Instead of forthrightly confronting Beijing’s economic aggression, the Hiroshima document relies on a slogan, a sure signal of inadequate strategic substance. The communique adopts the mantra first unfurled by the European Union and quickly adopted by the Biden White House.

The slogan holds that the G-7 nations favor “derisking, not decoupling” their economies from China. This is a bumper sticker in search of a meaning, masking both the European Union’s flat unwillingness to acknowledge the Chinese threat, and significant policy disagreements and inadequacies within the G-7. It reflects not so much a failure of leadership in bringing along the lagging Europeans, but a collapse of U.S. resolve at the very outset.

The G-7 communique is quick to say, “we are not decoupling or turning inwards.” In fact, the concept of “decoupling” was always a straw man, an exaggeration implying near-cessation of business between China and the West. Deployed in America by those who overprize economic relations with Beijing — placing their importance above American national security — the term aimed to panic businesses and policymakers who were beginning to awaken to the re-emergence of significant international political risk. This “project fear” meaning of decoupling was never accurate.

Nor was “decoupling” ever seriously suggested in the sense of a government-mandated, latter-day industrial policy. Such an approach was no more likely to succeed than other industrial policies, which all rest on the assumption that politicians and government bureaucrats are better at making economic choices than markets. Existing levels of trade and investment between the global West and China are, for well or ill, too complex to believe that top-down government decision-making would lead to anything other than confusion and disorder.

Where government-directed decoupling is necessary, and should be expedited, is where it can eliminate dependency on goods and services that significantly impact U.S. national security. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have imposed significant sanctions on China in the high-tech field.

Europe trails far behind. France and Germany still see China almost exclusively through an economic prism, as repeatedly confirmed by statements from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron.

Even the United Kingdom is torn, with significant debate between the hawkish Conservative parliamentary party and a China-friendly Ten Downing Street.

China Decouples

The hollowness of the “derisking, not decoupling” mantra is most evident at the level of individual firms, which have no practical way to derisk without decoupling. They must either reduce capital investment, or at least not increase it; withhold intellectual property (at risk from decades of Chinese piracy); reduce supply-chain reliance; find other markets; or take other defensive measures, depending on the circumstances of the particular firm. Many companies are already deeply engaged in reducing or hedging their risks, but others are not. These latter may ultimately pay the greatest economic price for their lack of diligence.

In due time, the sum of national security prudence and businesses’ political-risk decisions will determine the extent of decoupling, not the G-7’s false dichotomy. 

Tellingly, China is already far along in decoupling from the West, preparing for future military conflict by reducing its dependence. In what should have been required reading for G-7 leaders at Hiroshima, Ross Babbage’s The Next Major War demonstrates what Beijing was doing while we slept. Babbage explains four decades of China’s policy of so-called dual circulation, or “two markets, two resources.” Beijing’s “domestic market [was] a resource to protect and insulate, while foreign markets were to be penetrated and exploited.” He quotes McKinsey’s conclusion that “‘China has been reducing its exposure to the world, while the world’s exposure to China has risen.’”

Poor Signals From the G-7

However, China was far from successful in insulating itself. Its dependence on massive energy imports and other raw materials remains a critical weakness — one very difficult for China to correct in the foreseeable future, given its lack of domestic mineral and hydrocarbon resources.

The global West is only belatedly grasping the extent of China’s theft of intellectual property, massive protectionism, and governmental subsidies. As the gauzy era of globalization dissipates, political risk has re-emerged as a central factor in international business, especially with China. Political risk is not and never was confined to the world’s economic fringes. Under Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “hide your capabilities and bide your time,” Beijing convinced too many Western politicians and businesses of the fantasy that China was little more than a pure economic play. This holiday from history is over, and China’s misdeeds and threats, politically, economically, and militarily, are increasingly evident.

G-7 meetings come and go, and their leaders’ statements fade quickly. The impression that will not fade after the Hiroshima summit, certainly not from the minds of policymakers in Beijing, is that the great industrial democracies are still divided and unsure about how to oppose China’s economic warfare against them. The global West’s disarray only encourages Xi Jinping’s belligerent tendencies.

Germany must step up to help Ukraine

May 22, 2023
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This article was first published in The Washington Examiner on May 22, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

By John Bolton

Germany’s very public agonizing over whether to provide its Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, or allow other states that had purchased Leopard 2s to send theirs, graphically exposed Berlin’s continued confusion about its status as a NATO member. While there is momentary relief that, at last, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government committed to providing the armor Ukraine requested, it did so only after President Joe Biden also agreed to send roughly a battalion of America’s Abrams tanks. While Biden’s decision was correct on its own merits, it was hardly a matter of strategy and more a matter of horse-trading to persuade Berlin’s decidedly reluctant leadership.

Amid the illusory self-congratulation following the tank decision, a pattern that has characterized much of NATO’s response to Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, a much larger problem lurks, one that only Germany’s citizens can resolve. Their reluctance to support a military capability appropriate to their country’s economic weight is uniformly expressed through the prism of the Nazi horror and the death and destruction wreaked upon Europe and the world until Adolf Hitler’s monstrous tyranny was crushed in 1945.

Shame and penance are appropriate and necessary reactions for any country electing leaders as Germany did. But there also comes a time when outsiders can legitimately ask that Germany behave as a responsible military ally while continuing to carry those burdens. The real question is whether Germany wants to be a full NATO ally or a doughnut hole in an otherwise strong alliance. Ukraine is as good an issue as any to leverage this decision.

Germany’s general unhelpfulness on Ukraine, often allied with France, which lacks Germany’s excuse, surfaced almost 15 years ago with Germany’s rejection of former President George W. Bush’s suggestion at the April 2008 NATO summit to put Ukraine and Georgia on a fast track to join the alliance. Unfortunately, Bush’s key insight — NATO membership was the most effective deterrent to Russia — was ignored, even derided.

By torpedoing Bush’s proposal, Berlin and Paris almost certainly contributed to Moscow’s decision to invade Georgia four months later and proclaim two provinces as “independent” countries, a classic manifestation of Moscow’s stratagem of creating “frozen conflicts” in former Soviet republics. When Russia then committed aggression against Ukraine in February 2014, annexing Crimea and seizing the Donbas, NATO collectively responded with pathetic weakness, undoubtedly contributing to the Kremlin’s assessment that a second invasion in 2022 would evoke an equally limp NATO response.

The importance of NATO membership as a deterrent has now been graphically proven by the Swedish and Finnish decisions to join the alliance after Russia’s second Ukraine invasion. Abandoning the foundational neutrality premise of their post-1945 foreign policies, Stockholm and Helsinki concluded that the only guarantee of impunity against Kremlin aggression was to put a sheltering NATO border around their countries. Undoubtedly, what was happening in Ukraine reminded them of the consequences of NATO rejecting Bush’s 2008 initiative.

Since Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, invasion, there has been one disagreement after another within NATO on what weapons systems to provide Ukraine, with Germany almost always on the reluctant side, fearful of provoking a larger war, so its officials said. So doing, however, demonstrated that the Kremlin was effectively deterring NATO and underlined NATO’s failure to deter Russia’s initial aggression. Germany’s first assistance to Ukraine was 5,000 military helmets. Then-Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said, “The German government is agreed that we do not send lethal weapons to crisis areas because we don’t want to fuel the situation. We want to contribute in other ways.” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko called the offer a “joke,” and it remains a paradigm of the doughnut hole approach. Moreover, Germany’s 2022 defense spending was 1.44% of GDP, still well below NATO’s target.

Berlin has a new defense minister, and Leopard 2 tanks are a step up. But Germany needs to make a broader conceptual decision. Japan shows a way forward. From the 1990s, there was a quiet but profound debate among the Japanese on the question, “Is Japan a normal nation?” That debate’s outcome was reflected in now-deceased Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s effort to amend Japan’s post-1945 pacifist constitution, imposed by Washington, and his successor Fumio Kishida’s recent announcement that Tokyo would double defense spending from 1% to 2% of GDP over five years, giving Japan the world’s third-largest military, after America and China. Japan has clearly decided it is, indeed, a normal nation.

Germany should have the same debate. In 1961, Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.” Totalitarianism isn’t transmitted through the bloodstream any more than freedom. Nobody should forget Germany’s past, certainly not its own citizens, but neither is it ruled by that past. Germany must decide whether it is “a normal nation” and, if so, act like one.

How Lies became Facts: The Tantura “Massacre” is back in the Spotlight 

May 16, 2023
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By Meyrav Wurmser, Ph.D.

In the democratic West, dates have become cultural battlegrounds.  The debate over whether the true founding of the United States was in 1776, as we have been taught for centuries, or 1619, as is the current revisionist vogue, betrays a deeper political message.  The date sets the purpose of the United States either as the beginning of the modern free world (1776) or as a system which’s very essence was the hidden perpetuation of slavery and oppression (1619). The advocates of focusing on the latter date have one purpose in mind: the delegitimization of the United States and its system of free enterprise. A similar debate has also emerged over Israel’s creation and is symbolized best by the current controversy surrounding the “massacre of Tantura” in1948 by Israeli forces. 

Background

Legally, the historical attachment of the Jewish people to the land of Israel — a preexisting, indeed more ancient claim than any other modern nation — and their resurrection in that land as a modern nation is the foundation for Israel’s legitimacy as enshrined in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1920 San Remo Conference and the 1922 League of nations Mandate for Palestine. The Jewish right to the land was thus not granted by the nations in the Mandate for Palestine – which still governs all legal aspects of the disposition of the land — but recognized as never having been broken for thousands of years.  The focus of this series of events, and the larger effort surrounding them, thus manifests the Zionist enterprise as an act of liberation and freedom. As such, nothing that transpired during Israel’s creation in 1948-9 during its War of Independence negates those legal aspects and changes Israel’s status from ancient nation resurrected to artificial nation built through colonialism.

And yet, there is a revisionist attempt to define Israel’s resurrection not as the return of an ancient nation, but a deliberate European colonial effort to disempower Arabs to establish a European bridgehead in the Middle East. The events of 1948 thus define a narrative of Israel’s illegitimacy. Revisionists provide an alternative recollection of events of 1948-9 – replete with such a level of mass expulsions, massacres, that they rise incontrovertibly to the level of a deliberate, ethnic cleansing campaign launched one-sidedly by European invaders (Jews). These vents, they argue, are in fact the more genuine expression of the character of the Zionist enterprise. The essence of Zionism is not liberation, but rather a genocidal and illegitimate effort focused on oppressing a native population. The original sins of Israel’s creation, thus, are not an aberration, but an inherent necessity in order to establish the primacy and victory of the colonial presence. This, 1948, not 1922, become the final word on its legitimacy and belie the modest and defensive claim of Zionism that it is just the return of a battered, massacred, and harassed indigenous people returning home to their only small corner on earth to live under their own sovereignty. 

Simply put, the battle of narratives over 1922 versus 1948 was symbolic of the larger debate over whether Israel’s creation is about oppressing Palestinians or liberating Jews.

Such an alternative narrative, of course, will need a historical narrative based exclusively on the sins of Israel’s creation in 1948 as a deliberate colonial venture focused on oppression rather than a narrative based on the foundations of Jewish history and the Zionist effort at nation building which culminating in the international decisions regulating the dissolution of the Ottoman empire which had controlled the area for a half-millennium and the liberation of the Jewish people. In the new narrative, 1948 was primarily, if not exclusively, about displacing and ethnically cleansing Arabs.

It is in this context – namely the effort to establish that the evils associated with Israel’s birth are so extensive that it proves the primary aim of Israel’s creation was primarily a colonial effort to disempower and displace Arabs, and not an act of resurrecting an ancient indigenous nation (Jews) — that the story of the “massacre of Tantura” emerges.

The “massacre of Tantura”

In 2022 the movie Tantura participated in the Utah Sundance Film Festival where it received high praises from both critics and audiences. The movie told the story of the battle of Tantura (today the area of Kibbutz Nachsholim and the ascended Dor beach) during Israel’s 1948 war of independence. According to the film, after conquering the village, the IDF’s Alexandroni Brigade soldiers massacred at least 40 (some argue 250) unarmed Arab civilians residing in Tantura.[1] Moreover, since this massacre was covered up, it invites suspicion that other similar incidents had also occurred in various other locations.  Indeed, these allegations darken Israel’s very creation and cover it a shroud of original sin.

The movie was produced by Adam Raz, a researcher at Akevot. According to NGO Monitor, Akevot, which is largely funded by the Swiss government, is dedicated to “breaking Israel’s founding narrative.”[2]  Fulfilling his institute’s mission, Raz described the film in an article by stating that “under the parking lot of one of the most familiar and beloved Israeli resort sites on the Mediterranean, lie the remains of the victims of one of the glaring massacres of the War of Independence.”[3]

Reviews of the movie praised it for unmasking the truth behind Israel’s so-called policy of “ethnic cleansing” at the time of its creation.[4]  These reviewers believed that this policy followed direct orders from Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, who developed in 1948 a plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Arab population from Israel known in Hebrew as “Tochnit Dalet” (plan D). In other words, it is all part of a colonial master plan whose primary aim was oppression and displacement of the Arabs.

It is an intriguing story, and makes dramatic film, but was there, in fact, such a massacre?  Apart from staying true to historical accuracy and setting the record straight, such a question also has a larger policy aim: if Israel is covering up this massacre, how many others did it cover up?

Critics of the film argue that no massacre at all took place in Tantura. A leading voice among those was historian Benny Morris who wrote about it in an article published in Ha’aretz.[5]  Morris was himself identified as a leader of the school of history that tried to write more critically of Israel’s founding, a pioneer among the revisionist “new historians.” And yet, in this article Morris called the Tantura massacre a “fraudulent myth.” He argued that it was a fabrication created by Palestinian and pro-Palestinian historians in order to tarnish Israel’s image both internally and internationally. It made no sense, he wrote, that no Palestinian villager ever mentioned the massacre or reported rape. He compared the Tantura movie to nother modern movie, Mohammed Bakri’s film “Jenin, Jenin.” Bakri’s film was about the city of Jenin in northern Samaria (West Bank), in which an ostensible massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in Jenin during the Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 was executed by the Israeli army as it entered the Palestinian Authority in major anti-terror operation after the Park Hotel massacre in Netanya by Palestinian terrorists. The problem with the Jenin, Jenin story was that the massacre of Jenin, in which ostensibly over 200 hundred Palestinians were killed, was spun of whole cloth; there was no massacre. The movie about the alleged Tantura massacre was likewise no more than a sophisticated act of “historical distortion,” claimed Morris.

In a lengthy interview with the Times of Israel the film’s director, Alon Schwartz, insisted that the criticism of his film resulted not from the evidence that it was based on a historic fabrication, but rather because it unmasked the ugly truth behind the creation of the state of Israel. The Israeli people, he argued, were taught to believe in a lie: that the establishment of their country was not at the expense of the Arab population. They were told that the territory of present-day Israel was almost completely desolate. That it was a land without a people that was suitable for a people without land. According to Schwarz, “it is time to bring the difficult history relating to Israel’s creation to light; to bust the country’s founding myths, as painful as it might be.”[6]

The origins of the Tantura story

To get to the bottom of the matter, one must journey back in time to the origin of the story — to the first study or report that supposedly established dispassionately and precisely examined the existence of the hitherto unknown massacre. Although the events (not always the backstory or reasons, but certainly the actual facts) in the 1948-9 War of Independence was well documented, including the massacre of Deir Yassin, there is no reference to a massacre in Tantura, the later reported magnitude of which surpasses even the most famous “massacre” of Deir Yassin – which has never been denied by the Israelis. There were no contemporary reports – Israeli or Arab or third party – about any such a massacre in Tantura in 1948. 

The story of Tantura first gained prominence in 2000, after a Masters’ degree candidate at the University of Haifa, Teddy (Theodore) Katz, whose research was awarded the high grade of 97, told a reporter about his main findings. Katz’s thesis asserted that on May 22-23, during the 1948 war of independence, the Israeli Defense Forces had killed between 200-250 unarmed inhabitants of the Arab fishing village of Tantura. According to the thesis, this killing was in cold blood and occurred after the village surrendered. The findings were astonishing. No massacre had previously been recorded in Tantura; indeed, no massacre of such magnitude had been recorded in all of Israel’s history. 

The reporter published an account of the Tantura massacre in the leading Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv on January 21, 2000. Appalled veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade, the unit that had taken the village, sued Katz for libel, denying his account and asserting he had fabricated evidence. In contrast, leading figures in the Israeli peace camp made Katz’s defense their fund-raising cause du jour. The trial took place in Tel Aviv in December 2000. After two days’ cross-examination in court, Katz admitted he had fabricated the evidence of his thesis, and that the interviews upon which he claimed to base his findings never in fact happened, He agreed to sign a statement that nullified his research. In the statement, Katz admitted that “after checking and re-checking the evidence it is clear to me now, beyond any doubt, that there is no basis whatsoever for the allegation that the Alexandroni Brigade, or any other fighting unit of the Jewish forces, committed killing of people in Tantura after the village surrendered.” 

Katz had to sign this statement after the trial abundantly exposing the flimsiness or nonexistence of his evidence. To cite just a few examples, Katz quoted a surviving Arab villager, Abu Fahmi ‘Ali Daqnash, as saying that: “While this was happening soldiers with Bren machine guns walked on both sides and occasionally fired, therein killing and wounding [captured] adult males.” According to Katz, Abu Fahmi also said “they gathered all the inhabitants in the square, lined them up facing the wall and murdered them in cold blood. Some 95 persons were murdered. I wrote down their names.” But, as Benny Morris pointed out in his review of the case, none of this appears in the recording.[7]  Furthermore, even when Katz reportedly pressed the witness by saying in the recording, “clearly people were shot after they surrendered,” Abu Fahmi said “we did not see them killing after we raised our hands.”  Katz quoted another villager, Abu Riyaj Muhammad Hatzadiyah, as saying, “I know that they shot young people after the fighting and that there was a big slaughter in the village, even after everyone surrendered and stopped fighting.” No such statement appeared in either Katz’s recordings or his notes. Katz claimed that the witnesses made these statements after the batteries of his recording device ran out.

In the wake of this case, and after Katz’ admitted he had fabricated evidence, the University of Haifa suspended Katz’s degree, inviting him to revise his thesis.

Katz’s academic adviser was Dr. Ilan Pappé, one of the leading voices in a group of extreme far-left Israeli scholars who rose to prominence in the 1990’s and become known as post-Zionist. This group produced scholarly works that were critical of Israel and meant to delegitimize Zionism. The problem they faced was the lack of raw evidence from which to make the case that Zionism was an illegitimate political cause. For them Teddy Katz’s thesis provided the missing proof. 

Despite signing the statement in court, twelve hours later Katz formally retracted it and sought to continue the trial. When the judge refused, he appealed to the district’s high court, but the appeal was dismissed without a hearing. The prosecutor proceeded to urge Haifa University to strip Katz of his degree, whereupon the university set up two committees, one to check the accuracy of Katz’s research and the other to investigate whether his work had been properly supervised.

The first committee found that Katz had “gravely and severely” falsified testimony in 14 different places in his thesis. Nevertheless, Katz’s mentor and close associate, leading post-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe, continued to defend him. In an article in the Spring 2001 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies, Pappe insisted that Katz’s conclusions were correct, even if his facts may not have been. Katz’s research was valuable regardless, Pappe wrote, since historical research need not be based on facts. In other words, the idea of “an approximate truth” of a narrative – a “truth” admittedly based not on facts but fiction – trumps the actual historical record based on facts. Katz, Pappe argued, had understood the “murkiness” of the memories of participants many years after traumatic events, but he “was not interested in fine details.” Pappe insisted that Katz simply wished to see the overall picture, “leaving behind, perhaps forever, certainties about exact chronology and names and precise numbers.” The real story, Pappe contended, was that Israeli forces had indeed massacred a large number of Arab civilians in Tantura—as was typical of the Israeli policy of “ethnic cleansing” in Palestine in 1948. Katz, according to Pappé, only wished to uncover the “pain and suffering” experienced by people in the midst of war. Pappe compared Katz’s work to the recording of the testimony of Jewish Holocaust survivors. Just as researchers used personal narratives to document the traumas of the Holocaust, so too Katz use testimony from Palestinians to reconstruct the “horrors” of the 1948 Nakba, or “disaster,” as Palestinians call it. The jist of the story was correct, even though the individual tales might not have been true. Pappe construes the uproar over the Tantura case as a byproduct of the failure of the peace process: hardening attitudes in Israel have silenced the nation’s conscience. Pappe maintains that “poor” Katz’s problem was simply his timing. Had his work been completed in the optimistic days of the Oslo process, public and academic reactions would have been entirely different. 

Far from being a mere accident of timing, the Tantura affair exposed a problem of genuine gravity in Israeli historiography: Post-Zionist historians willingly accepted admitted falsehoods as historical evidence. Not only in political discussion but even in scholarship, truth has become relative. Everyone has his own “narrative.” The line between subjective and objective, between fact and fiction, has been blurred, if not obliterated all together.

Overtime, the story of Tantura, which was once a matter of academic debate, has acquired a life of its own.  As it turned into an inseparable part of the Palestinian national story it’s murky – or even clearly fabricated — origins have been overlooked and turned into ironclad facts. A massacre that until recently the Palestinians were unaware of is now a core element of their national narrative. Israel has to face the “evidence” that challenges the morality of its cause. Being made into a movie could carry that basic falsification a step further into the consciousness of the world. 

 Conclusions: What is going on?

The battle over Israel’s legitimacy, of which this story of the great “massacre of Tantura” is a chapter, is part of the overall war in the West waged by the progressive camp to impugn the moral foundations of the west as a civilization advancing freedom.  

These revisionist arguments echo the ideas of the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, and his concept of “cultural hegemony.” Progressive thought holds that Western narratives are deliberately constructed around so encompassing a body of myths and so pervasive a structure of institutions that they become the received wisdom and obscure an underlying condition of perpetuated oppression. Gramsci argued that codes of morality are constructed by dictatorial elites in order to create norms that uphold, validate and deepen the systemic oppression inherent to the capitalist system. Even the concepts of logic, truth and facts – the foundations of Western rational debate – are dismissed as forms of such hidden systems of oppression designed to contain debate into a repressive and misleading straitjacket. As such, the idea of “approximate truth” – where narratives trump factual records of history – become valid to legitimize a cause or perspective even when the facts would suggest otherwise because facts are themselves forms of repression.

The story of Tantura – or rather the myth of Tantura – is thus part of this larger assault on Western foundations. It is neither a historical work, a documentary, or even a docu-drama that took some license. It is the intentional obfuscation of fact and fiction in an attempt to use the device of the “approximate truth” – something factually wrong but nonetheless representing some sort of truth — to actually undermine truth and rewrite the historical narrative of Israel.  It is an attempt through fiction cropped as fact to paint Israel’s creation in such a dark palette that it is exposed as a historic evil born of colonial desire to suppress the Arab and Muslim people rather than as an attempt to correct the historical wrong of the exile of the Jewish people and instead to deliver them finally their liberation and sovereignty after two millennia.

[1] For the various estimates of the number of the victims see: the correspondence between Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, John Kimchi and Erskine Barton Childers published in the Spectator between May and August 1961 and reprinted by the Journal of Palestine Studies  in 1988.

[2] Jewish News Syndicate, November 25, 2022.

[3] Ha’aretz, January 22, 2022

[4] See, for example, Los Angeles Times, December 1, 2022; Variety Magazine, January 31, 2022 and Jewish Currents, November 3, 2022.)

[5] Ha’aretz on October 7, 2022.

[6] “Tantura Director: Israelis have been lied to for years about alleged 1948 massacre,”Times of Israel, January 27, 2022.

[7] Benny Morris, “The Tantura ‘Massacre’ Affair, The Jerusalem Report, February 4, 2004.

Biden’s half-hearted nuclear deterrence plan

May 05, 2023
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This article was first published in The Hill on May 5, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

Last week’s summit between President Biden and President Yoon Suk-yeol of the Republic of Korea (“ROK”) had a full agenda, but there is little doubt that Yoon’s top priority was the omnipresent, growing North Korean nuclear threat.

Unfortunately, the celebration of the ROK-U.S. alliance’s 70th anniversary produced a joint statement, the Washington Declaration, that fell far short of what was necessary.

The Declaration’s modest measures will not slow Pyongyang’s efforts to reunite the Peninsula under its control, so tensions in Northeast Asia will almost certainly continue rising.

Reflecting a growing fear that America’s nuclear “extended deterrence” is no longer reliable, either against the North or, importantly, China, South Korean public opinion has increasingly supported an independent nuclear program.

Biden’s response to Beijing’s and Pyongyang’s growing nuclear and ballistic-missile threats, embodied in the Declaration, will do little to alleviate these ROK concerns.

The most palpable new U.S. commitment to opposing North Korean belligerence is that our nuclear ballistic-missile submarines will, for the first time in 40 years, resume docking, occasionally, in South Korea. Anonymous U.S. officials also predicted there would be a “regular cadence” of visits by aircraft carriers, bombers and more.

Did the White House really believe Pyongyang’s leadership thought America’s nuclear arsenal was imaginary? Perhaps. It’s a strange leadership, with strange ideas, so parading the cold steel from time to time might have an effect, if not on China’s Xi Jinping, perhaps on North Korea’s Kim Jung Un.

Far more likely, however, is that neither Kim nor Xi doubt Washington has massive nuclear assets. Instead, ironically but tellingly, they, like South Korea’s citizens, think very little of today’s U.S. leadership, Republican or Democratic.

China and both Koreas perceive a lack of American resolve and willpower to act decisively when ROK and U.S. national interests are threatened. If so, the Washington Declaration’s rhetoric about the U.S. commitment to extended deterrence and strengthening bilateral military ties will be seen as words, and words alone. We are kidding ourselves to believe that having “boomers” pitch up in South Korean waters sporadically will have any deterrent effect.

By contrast, redeploying U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, effectively indefinitely, is several orders of magnitude more serious. First, these weapons would remain under sole American control, and immediately available to assist in defending deployed U.S. forces, and their Republic of Korea cohorts. “We go together” (or “katchi kapshida” in Korean) becomes much more than the combined forces’ long-standing slogan when backed by battlefield nuclear capabilities. That is far more palpable than submarine port calls.

Second, tactical nuclear deployments would give heft to the Washington Declaration’s creation of the Nuclear Coordination Group (“NCG”), charged with strengthening extended deterrence, discussing nuclear planning and managing North Korea’s proliferation threat. The new NCG would be far more than just another bureaucratic prop if it had real-world questions like optimizing the deterrent and defensive value of tangible nuclear assets. Lacking concrete responsibilities, how will the new NCG differ from the existing Extended Deterrence Strategy and Consultation Group, and others, which the Declaration says will be “strengthened”?

Third, while the issue of an independent ROK nuclear capability is politically and militarily separate from returning American tactical nuclear weapons to the Peninsula, renewed deployment would nonetheless buy valuable time for Seoul and Washington to evaluate fully the implications of South Korea becoming a nuclear-weapons state. The presence of American nuclear assets on the Peninsula neither precludes nor renders inevitable a separate ROK program, which has the further advantage of keeping Beijing and Pyongyang guessing.

Moreover, the implicit message weakening the Washington Declaration is that America’s antiproliferation efforts to stop Pyongyang from becoming a nuclear power have failed. Consider the proliferation aspect of the NCG’s mandate: it is to “manage” the North Korean threat. Not “defeat” that threat, not “eliminate” or “end” that threat, but merely “manage” it.

This is the language of bureaucrats, not statesmen, and it sounds suspiciously like giving up on working to prevent North Korea from becoming able to deliver nuclear payloads.

It is therefore appropriate to emphasize that those who opposed taking decisive steps against nuclear proliferators like North Korea and Iran long argued that we had ample time for negotiations. Accordingly, they said, efforts at regime change or pre-emptive military action were over-wrought, premature and unnecessary. Now that Pyongyang has detonated six nuclear devices, and Iran continues to progress toward its first, these same people say the rogue states are already nuclear powers, and we must hereafter rely on arms control and deterrence.

In other words, first it was too soon to take decisive action, and now it is too late. One might almost conclude that for all the posturing over the years that North Korean (or Iranian) nuclear weapons were “unacceptable,” that’s not really what many U.S. politicians and policymakers actually believed. They were prepared to accept American failure, but they knew it was impolitic to say it out loud in public. We are all now at greater risk because of this hypocrisy.

In the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East, where the menace of nuclear proliferation is all too real, others have refused to give up. In his first year in office, for example, Yoon has made improving ROK-Japan relations, badly damaged by his predecessor, a top priority. Better Tokyo-Seoul cooperation is critical to enhanced three-way efforts with Washington, and Yoon’s diplomacy with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is paying dividends. Kishida will visit South Korea, the first such visit in five years, just before the Hiroshima G-7 meeting, to which Yoon is invited.

It’s obviously easier for Kishida to sell U.S. deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the South than an independent ROK nuclear force, which would instantly raise in Tokyo the complex question of a comparable Japanese capability.

Biden’s half-hearted efforts to enhance U.S. national security should be a significant political vulnerability in the 2024 presidential campaign. It remains to be seen whether Republicans have the wit to make it an issue.

Voters should blame Biden AND Trump for new Afghan terror risks

April 28, 2023
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This article was first published in the New York Post on April 29, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

President Joe Biden’s announcement that he will seek a second term combined with Donald Trump’s surging effort to secure his third consecutive Republican nomination guarantee one thing for sure.

Their combined failures in Afghanistan, both the catastrophic strategic consequences of US and NATO withdrawal and the humiliating operational mishandling of the departure itself, should be key issues for their opponents in 2024’s campaign.

Trump’s view of his abilities as a great dealmaker is central to his case for being president.

He repeatedly emphasizes this inflated view of himself — and thereby his blindness to international realities — most recently by asserting he could resolve Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 24 hours if he could just get Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a room together. Trump’s acolytes unfortunately accept his boasting at face value.

More knowledgeable observers understand that Trump’s views are fantasy.

They simply ignore what he says as “Trump being Trump,” missing, however, that the former president’s rhetoric is not just hot air.

His 24-hour mantra about Ukraine, for example, in fact shows he doesn’t grasp the complexities of that or almost any other national-security issue.
Trump proceeds on his often-stated belief that facts and subject-matter knowledge generally are unimportant compared to the personal relationships he can establish with foreign leaders, especially those who are America’s adversaries.

With Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, Trump claims that his interpersonal skills are such that he can separate these hard-headed authoritarians from their own national interests and achieve outcomes favorable to the United States.

Of course, the former president has little to no understanding of what America’s national interests are, basing his judgments instead on what is best for Donald J. Trump.

His unilateral diplomacy with the Taliban excluded the legitimate Afghan government Washington spent 20 years trying to nurture.
The widespread knowledge inside Afghanistan that Trump was negotiating solely with the terrorists convinced people that he was determined to withdraw no matter what the Taliban actually agreed to — he was merely seeking cover for departing unilaterally.

Biden is equally culpable. As newly inaugurated president, Biden had every right to reject Trump’s fatally flawed agreement, which the Taliban had already violated even before the ink was dry.

At a minimum, Biden could have taken more time to evaluate the deal and its implementation.

Indeed, Biden did order a short extension of the withdrawal of US and NATO forces and could have done much more.
The widespread perception that Biden agreed with Trump on exiting, heedless of the risks and costs not just to Afghanistan but to America, discredited and demoralized both Kabul’s civilian government and the Afghan National Army.

It was no surprise when both the government and its military collapsed so quickly. They knew they had no chance of survival over the long term, especially since neither US president thought seriously of holding the Taliban to its commitments and reversing the withdrawal in the absence of scrupulous Taliban compliance.

It was therefore entirely predictable that the Taliban’s return to power would produce a flood of foreign terrorist fighters back to Afghanistan’s remote and inhospitable territory, establishing bases from which they could plot new terrorist attacks worldwide.

Among the classified documents compromised in the still-growing “Discord” intelligence scandal are Pentagon analyses of ISIS-Khorasan activities in-country and evidence of the scope of, and preparations for, their possible global threats.

This is not the first time Biden administration officials have concluded terrorists were returning to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in significant numbers.

In public congressional testimony just months after the withdrawal (and subsequently), the Defense Department conceded that both al Qaeda and ISIS were rapidly recreating the capability to launch terrorist attacks from Afghanistan against America.

While the Taliban has now reportedly killed the ISIS leader responsible for the murderous attacks at Kabul’s airport during the chaotic withdrawal effort, ISIS remains formidable, as does al Qaeda, still closely linked to the Taliban.

In the potentially tragic case of a terrorist attack against the United States in the 18 months until the 2024 elections, Americans will know who to blame if Trump, Biden or both receive their respective parties’ nominations.

They have fully proven their incompetence in dealing with the Taliban.

We can only hope to avoid further proof in the form of additional US casualties. But if we don’t, our fellow citizens’ verdict will not be hard to predict.

To Help Ukraine, Japan Must Stand against Iran

April 21, 2023
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This article was first published in the National Review on April 21, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has forced hard choices on the U.S. and its allies in determining how to respond to such unprovoked and unwarranted aggression. The U.S. is doing its part, but Japan, a member of the G-7 and the third-largest economy in the world, has dragged its feet and stopped at mere rhetoric. A more robust Japanese response is necessary to support Ukraine, beginning with cutting off trade with Russia’s staunch ally, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iran is one of the few countries helping the Russian military kill innocent Ukrainian civilians and continue its invasion. For months now, the Russian military has used Iranian drones, and it is also seeking to acquire Iranian missiles, according to the Biden administration. And Japan appears to recognize the importance of Iranian weaponry to Russian forces: Earlier this month, Deputy Foreign Minister Shigeo Yamada reportedly asked Tehran “to stop supplying weapons to Russia.”

This was a ridiculous request. Iran has no intention of voluntarily slowing its cooperation with Moscow; it must be compelled to do so. Unfortunately, Japan has shown no appetite for concrete steps to punish Iran. It is the only member of the G-7 that has failed to apply any sanctions whatsoever on Iranian officials or entities since September, and both money and commercial products are flowing from Tokyo to Tehran — helping to prolong the war and encourage Iran’s malign behavior.

In 2022, Japanese general trading company Sojitz was fined more than $5 million by the U.S. Treasury Department for purchasing 64,000 tons of Iranian high-density polyethylene resin, which the Biden administration said “conferred significant economic benefits to Iran and undermined broad U.S. sanctions specifically targeting Iran’s petrochemical sector, a major source of revenue generation for the Government of Iran.” Later in the year, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) published evidence that Iran-backed Hezbollah is using communications equipment manufactured by Japan’s Icom Inc., which has another firm acting as its “official representative in Iran.”

More recently, UANI uncovered evidence that Japanese defense firm Fujikura — which has contracts to support the Japanese Self-Defense Forces — is simultaneously engaged in the Iranian market as an approved vendor of several sanction-designated and state-owned entities, including some linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Japanese businesses also appear to be selling commercial products to companies in China that source components and software found in Iranian drones.

These commercial ties should be as unacceptable to the U.S. as the purchase of Iranian oil, which Japan has done without since May 2019. Japan should suspend its trade relationship with Tehran and, like the United States, force businesses worldwide to choose between doing business in Iran or Japan. After all, trade between Japan and Iran, directly and indirectly, supports Vladimir Putin’s war machine.

Suspending trade with Iran, as Japan’s allies and partners have already done, is the least that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida can do to support Ukraine given his country’s continued reliance on Russian energy.

If Japan does so, Prime Minister Kishida will demonstrate that he is taking Japan into a new era of global leadership. He has already signaled a willingness to take political risks in ways that his predecessors did not by becoming the first prime minister to attend a NATO summit, doubling Japan’s military budget, and agreeing to “take on new roles” in the Indo-Pacific, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Prime Minister Kishida will also demonstrate that Japan is unafraid of using its substantial economic leverage to further international peace and security, drawing it closer to the U.S. and Europe and creating a stark contrast with malign states like China and Russia. Japan should adopt a version of the Magnitsky Act to more easily impose economic sanctions on individuals and entities suspected of human-rights violations.

Japan must recognize that it can have a tremendous impact on the war by targeting Iran for its role in supplying weaponry to Russia, and it need not wait until it hosts the next G-7 meeting in May to do so. If Japan addresses its ties with Tehran in the right way, it will create opportunities for a more confident and assertive nation to lead on the world stage. But if it addresses them in the wrong way, it will show that for all its economic strength, it is not yet confident enough to help direct world affairs.

It Is Not Too Late To Stop North Korea’s Rogue Nuclear March

April 18, 2023
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North Korea’s recent launch of a solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is another dangerous step toward Pyongyang acquiring the capability to target nuclear warheads worldwide.

This article was first published on 19fortyfive.com on April 18, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

North Korea’s recent launch of a solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is another dangerous step toward Pyongyang acquiring the capability to target nuclear warheads worldwide. More disturbing, however, is the tacit assumption that underlies most reactions to news of the launch: that it represents another inevitable step for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to achieve an objective that American presidents said for decades was unacceptable.

It now seems that we are prepared to accept this outcome, but we’re just not very happy about it. The Biden administration, more concerned with their leader’s valedictory Ireland visit, managed a response only from a National Security Council deputy press officer. Likely setting a record for most cliches in a one-paragraph statement, the text condemned the launch as “a brazen violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions” and asked North Korea “to come to the table for serious negotiations.” Just so Pyongyang didn’t miss the point, the statement added “[t]he door has not closed on diplomacy,” and the North should “choose diplomatic engagement.”

No wonder the Kim family’s hereditary Communist dictatorship dismisses Washington’s formulaic criticisms. These contain little more than bluster in answer to the DPRK’s continued march toward becoming a nuclear-weapons state. Is this what “unacceptable” means? History will record that repeated, unsuccessful American calls for negotiations have empowered nearly three decades of North Korean advances in nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile technology. No one in Pyongyang fears that any dispositive action will be taken to thwart their efforts.

Indeed, the very people who most vociferously advocated a diplomatic resolution of rogue-state nuclear proliferation programs now argue just as vociferously that it is too late to take serious action, and that we must accept the DPRK — and soon enough, Iran — as nuclear powers. First, it was too soon to consider the use of military force or regime change, and now it’s too late. Pyongyang and other nuclear aspirants benefit from this muddled thinking, knowing what they want even if we don’t, and single-mindedly pursuing their objectives while we worry about those poor, brazenly violated Security Council resolutions.

Fortunately, it is not yet too late. It remains highly likely that the North still cannot mate a nuclear device to one of its ICBMs, nor is there physical proof that a missile and weapons payload can reach this country. We do not know if Pyongyang has successfully developed re-entry vehicles that can sustain warhead integrity and reliability when their trajectories bring them back into Earth’s atmosphere, nor do we know whether the DPRK has sufficient targeting capabilities to actually hit what it is aiming for.

As Donald Rumsfeld frequently warned, “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and our level of uncertainty is high. But knowing, as we do, the complexity of the science and technology needed to fabricate deliverable nuclear weapons, we can have some confidence that North Korea’s threat is not yet fully realized. Of course, we cannot exclude that Pyongyang would simply place a nuclear device into one of its tramp steamers, sail to a U.S. port, and detonate it to considerable effect. Time is, as always, definitely not on our side.

But neither should we overestimate the strength of Kim Jong Un’s regime, economically or politically. Just weeks before last week’s Hwasong-18 launch, we saw new indications of the North’s efforts to assist Russia in its war against Ukraine. Incredibly, according to declassified intelligence, Moscow is offering to barter food with Pyongyang in exchange for artillery shells, showing how weakened both regimes are. Indeed, the DPRK’s food shortages are worsening, with unconfirmed reports of starvation and perhaps the worst levels of deprivation during Kim’s entire tenure.

Accordingly, when South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol meets with Biden next week, the top agenda item should be to develop new and improved means of facilitating regime change in Pyongyang. That is one sure way to eliminate its nuclear program, not to mention liberating its oppressed citizens. Reinvigorating and stiffening the enforcement of existing sanctions and expanding the range of economic and political pressure directed toward toppling the regime will be key. There is no denying the difficulties involved in pursuing regime change, but they pale before the potentially devastating consequences of the DPRK using its nuclear weapons, or threatening and intimidating weak American presidents away from our historic commitment to defend the South. Given the current White House occupant, Yoon’s leadership will be key to developing any effective new policy. Clearly, if Seoul is not actively concerned about the human rights and long-term prospects of its fellow Koreans above the DMZ, it will be difficult to inspire others.

South Korea is demonstrating an increased awareness that Beijing’s growing threat to Taiwan, and more broadly in the Indo-Pacific, directly affects the peninsula. This will contribute to rising Asian support for a vigorous counter-DPRK policy, which Japan will certainly welcome. Therefore, increasing trilateral Tokyo-Seoul-Washington cooperation against the menace of China and North Korea must also be a top agenda item for the Biden-Yoon summit. The historical obstacles to closer South Korean-Japanese cooperation are well-known, but Yoon’s recent efforts with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida are promising, and they deserve full U.S. support.

One particularly important area is ongoing trilateral cooperation on missile defense, which recently resumed after a three-year break due to unrelated Tokyo-Seoul disagreements. America itself urgently needs to increase emphasis on national missile defense, further development of which would reduce, even if not completely eliminate, rogue-state threats of nuclear attack. Enhanced theater missile defense in East Asia, which amounts to national defense for South Korea and Japan, could pressure Pyongyang’s fragile economy just as Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative did to the collapsing Soviet economy, leading to its demise.

No one, least of all Kim’s regime, should harbor the misapprehension that America and its allies have grown indifferent to whether North Korea achieves deliverable nuclear weapons. Notwithstanding our manifest policy failures over the last 15 years, it is and always will be unacceptable for the DPRK to reach that goal.